This was probably my first time reading the full novella of The Mist as opposed to whatever hack job was published in Skeleton Crew. I say "hack job" in that it was certainly edited for space so it was "hacked" up and not "hack job" as in it was done carelessly. Maybe it was but I'm not the one to judge because I didn't make a careful comparison of the two. All I know is that I liked it a lot when I first read it and I liked it a lot now in its original form. It's possible, based on how much I liked it divided by word count, that it's mathematically my favorite Stephen King story. Sure, I've probably gotten more joy out of "Library Policeman" but I've only ever expressed that around my closest friends who don't judge me when I find immense pleasure in the idea that King wrote a story where a little kid fears being raped because his library books are overdue. "Thteady! Thteady!" But you, not being one of my closest friends, didn't read that here! Plus the last time I had a really good laugh about that "Thteady! Thteady!" line was when I was still hanging out with my friend Soy Rakelson, Catholic Conservative Frat Boy who once worried about whether he should use a condom if he had the opportunity to have sex in college because he didn't want to make the Pope sad without once being worried that the pre-marital sex might make the Pope sad. I know! I know! Conservatives only care about hypocrisy when they can try to prove one of their nemeses is being hypocritical, and usually they can only marginally do that through semantics and false representations of actual facts.
Look, this review isn't about Soy Rakelson! It's also really not about Stephen King's novella The Mist either because I've pretty much finished with that. Loved it! Good job! Although just like It, the story is almost ruined by the unneeded sex scene. In It, the tween gang bang in the sewers, as terrible as it fucking is, was meant to express how the children had to grow up to escape the clutches of Pennywise. But why did David Drayton, in The Mist, have to commit adultery with the hottest woman in the supermarket? Oh, because it was an embracing of life at one of the darkest, most depressing, horrifically terrifying moments of their lives? It was to show how hard they were clinging to survival? Expressing their passion and their need to live no matter the cost? Maybe you should have expressed that point a little better than just having the two hottest people in the supermarket fuck so that Frank Darabont wouldn't have made a film that just flushed the entire idea of mankind's ability to keep up hope and survive against the most insurmountable odds! I guess the ending of Darabont's film adaptation of The Mist was also seeded by the moment when King has Drayton compare the amount of bullets in the gun with the number of people in his escaping truck as well. King's story doesn't end with everybody escaping into an unmisted world but it does end by hitting you in the face with a lead pipe with the word "HOPE" written on it. Maybe Darabont's first language isn't English so he sort of missed that hope bit.
I understand why people like Darabont's film's ending. Hell, even Stephen King expresses his love for it in his 2010 "Forenote" to Danse Macabre. But I've got to tell you, as the biggest cynic in any room but one that appreciates and values when people can be absolutely, bloody awfully, embarrassingly earnest, Darabont's The Mist has the most nihilistic and cynical ending of any film I've ever seen. And that's not a fucking compliment. It's the kind of ending a 7th Grader would have tacked onto a story he was writing just for the shocking twist. And I'm not talking about David killing everybody with the final bullets in the gun and then walking out into the mist to die by giant spider. That would have been a better ending! They tried but they failed and the world has gone to shit and that's that. But Darabont was all, "Hee hee! Haw haw haw! What if I get the main guy to blast his son in the face with a bullet from his gun only to immediately walk out of his car and be surrounded by the military saving the world? OH MY GOD! Ha ha ha! How funny would that be? I mean tragic! I meant it to be tragic! OH NO! So tragic! HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!" Fuck Darabont! Darabont's little trick at the end makes Mrs. Carmody more heroic than David Drayton! Oh, sure, maybe she sacrificed a few people back in the old Megalo Mart. But she was fucking right that it was death to leave and they should stay in the supermarket because guess what? Except for the few unfortunate souls her group sacrificed (which, I mean, maybe they're what convinced God to let the military save the day after all? Who am I to say being that Mrs. Carmody was absolutely fucking right in the end?!), those who stayed in the supermarket were eventually rescued.
Hey Franky? Read my blog name out loud. That's for you, buckaroo!
The other thing I wanted to discuss was the Interactive Fiction game based on The Mist by Mindscape. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for actually feeling like I was in the story, and extending the story in various ways that King only hinted at. It was, as a story, fun. But as a text adventure game? Holy shit did it suck. I remember way back in the mid-80s playing this thing and realizing at some point that I can't get any further because there were monsters everywhere. Sure, you could kill the slug thing with salt. Easy! But the other things couldn't be killed. So I thought, "There's a gun in the story? Maybe if I ask everybody for a gun, I'll have a gun to shoot everything!" And guess what? Yeah, one of the characters has a gun. You also need to ask the characters for a key to the hardware store and a key to the truck. The main puzzles in the game are asking people for things that you can't find (one of them being a gun which is never, ever mentioned, as far as I know. You just have to assume somebody has a gun! You're in Maine, for Christ's sake!). After that, the final puzzles are mostly shooting everything. By the time I worked my way to my son Billy (yeah, in the text adventure, Billy isn't with you. He's staying with a family friend), I still had one bullet left in my gun and, like Frank Darabont, I was all, "Fuck this shit!", and shot Billy in the head. It was the only humane thing to do!
Anyway, great story minus the sex scene especially when David thinks how massive his erection is. Gross. Stupid first person perspective!
Look, this review isn't about Soy Rakelson! It's also really not about Stephen King's novella The Mist either because I've pretty much finished with that. Loved it! Good job! Although just like It, the story is almost ruined by the unneeded sex scene. In It, the tween gang bang in the sewers, as terrible as it fucking is, was meant to express how the children had to grow up to escape the clutches of Pennywise. But why did David Drayton, in The Mist, have to commit adultery with the hottest woman in the supermarket? Oh, because it was an embracing of life at one of the darkest, most depressing, horrifically terrifying moments of their lives? It was to show how hard they were clinging to survival? Expressing their passion and their need to live no matter the cost? Maybe you should have expressed that point a little better than just having the two hottest people in the supermarket fuck so that Frank Darabont wouldn't have made a film that just flushed the entire idea of mankind's ability to keep up hope and survive against the most insurmountable odds! I guess the ending of Darabont's film adaptation of The Mist was also seeded by the moment when King has Drayton compare the amount of bullets in the gun with the number of people in his escaping truck as well. King's story doesn't end with everybody escaping into an unmisted world but it does end by hitting you in the face with a lead pipe with the word "HOPE" written on it. Maybe Darabont's first language isn't English so he sort of missed that hope bit.
I understand why people like Darabont's film's ending. Hell, even Stephen King expresses his love for it in his 2010 "Forenote" to Danse Macabre. But I've got to tell you, as the biggest cynic in any room but one that appreciates and values when people can be absolutely, bloody awfully, embarrassingly earnest, Darabont's The Mist has the most nihilistic and cynical ending of any film I've ever seen. And that's not a fucking compliment. It's the kind of ending a 7th Grader would have tacked onto a story he was writing just for the shocking twist. And I'm not talking about David killing everybody with the final bullets in the gun and then walking out into the mist to die by giant spider. That would have been a better ending! They tried but they failed and the world has gone to shit and that's that. But Darabont was all, "Hee hee! Haw haw haw! What if I get the main guy to blast his son in the face with a bullet from his gun only to immediately walk out of his car and be surrounded by the military saving the world? OH MY GOD! Ha ha ha! How funny would that be? I mean tragic! I meant it to be tragic! OH NO! So tragic! HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!" Fuck Darabont! Darabont's little trick at the end makes Mrs. Carmody more heroic than David Drayton! Oh, sure, maybe she sacrificed a few people back in the old Megalo Mart. But she was fucking right that it was death to leave and they should stay in the supermarket because guess what? Except for the few unfortunate souls her group sacrificed (which, I mean, maybe they're what convinced God to let the military save the day after all? Who am I to say being that Mrs. Carmody was absolutely fucking right in the end?!), those who stayed in the supermarket were eventually rescued.
Hey Franky? Read my blog name out loud. That's for you, buckaroo!
The other thing I wanted to discuss was the Interactive Fiction game based on The Mist by Mindscape. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for actually feeling like I was in the story, and extending the story in various ways that King only hinted at. It was, as a story, fun. But as a text adventure game? Holy shit did it suck. I remember way back in the mid-80s playing this thing and realizing at some point that I can't get any further because there were monsters everywhere. Sure, you could kill the slug thing with salt. Easy! But the other things couldn't be killed. So I thought, "There's a gun in the story? Maybe if I ask everybody for a gun, I'll have a gun to shoot everything!" And guess what? Yeah, one of the characters has a gun. You also need to ask the characters for a key to the hardware store and a key to the truck. The main puzzles in the game are asking people for things that you can't find (one of them being a gun which is never, ever mentioned, as far as I know. You just have to assume somebody has a gun! You're in Maine, for Christ's sake!). After that, the final puzzles are mostly shooting everything. By the time I worked my way to my son Billy (yeah, in the text adventure, Billy isn't with you. He's staying with a family friend), I still had one bullet left in my gun and, like Frank Darabont, I was all, "Fuck this shit!", and shot Billy in the head. It was the only humane thing to do!
Anyway, great story minus the sex scene especially when David thinks how massive his erection is. Gross. Stupid first person perspective!
No comments:
Post a Comment