It has a very interesting story that all started with a crime of passion. Andy Dufresne, the calm soft-spoken banker (played by Tim Robbins) was convicted of killing his wife and her extra-marital lover. His life in prison was far from good. It’s a good thing that I’ve seen this movie when I was a little older. Had I seen this movie when I was still a little younger, I could’ve been one jaded cynical person. Life in prison was no joke, and this movie clearly depicts the scenario (solitary confinement/ violence/sex), although the sex wasn’t capitalized in this movie.

I don’t watch prison movies, but I don’t know why I was led to watch this movie (including THE GREEN MILE…but that’s a different story). I did not regret watching this film at all. In fact, I have watched this movie over 10 times (several times on VHS, on cable, on DVD) at different stages of my life. I’ve watched it as a budding adult and I’ve seen it as an adult. It just gets better each time. The older I get, the more I appreciate it. It is one great piece of Stephen King work. Inspite the prison scenario, it’s a story of hope, patience, endurance, and friendship. Perhaps what Stephen King wanted to convey is the message that, in every trial and suffering in life, the Heavens will never abandon as long as we hold on to our hope. As the movie’s tagline suggests, hope can set you free.

Carrie is a 98-minute coming-of-age horror story, pretty much a fusion of the minds of writer Stephen King and director Brian de Palma. Sissy Spacek played the role of Carrie White, and she did her job well. This role earned her an Oscar nomination (a first-time Best Actress nomination for a horror film).

This movie is more than just the story of a girl who is experiencing the fits of adolescence for the first time while her classmates make it even harder by always mocking her. Carrie is a reclusive girl, all the more isolated, as a result of being raised by her ultra-conservative dysfunctional mom. What the girls didn’t know though is that Carrie also has telekinetic powers and the horror started when the girls slowly die one by one. I can say that the cinematography was exceptional, ahead of its time (1976). The horror scenes were somewhat satisfactory, the technical stuff were okay. (Did Sissy Spacek have a full frontal nudity in this movie?? See the film to answer this question).

The Shining is titled as such for it is what the characters (Jack and Danny Torrance) dubbed their supernatural visions of past and future horrific events. The movie revolves around a regular person named Jack Torrance who has evolved into a madman (ably played by Jack Nicholson). The movie was directed (and written for movies) by the late great Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick is really a perfect director, I should say. He made the 70-year-old Scatman Crothers shoot one scene for a whopping 120 times. And he also demanded the same number of shots on Shelley Duvall (who played Wendy Torrannce) in a particular scene.

One funny trivia from IMDB:

Stephen King tried to talk Stanley Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead suggesting, instead, either ‘Michael Moriarty’ or Jon Voight. King had felt that watching either of these normal-looking men gradually descend into madness, would have immensely improved the dramatic thrust of the storyline. Indeed, many fans of the book agreed with King, adding that Nicholson appeared fairly crazy from the very start, thus there was little or no surprise when Jack ultimately went totally overboard.

This story resembles Stephen King’s other work, The Shawshank Redemption, on two points: first, the movie is about a person suffering from a lingering bad situation i.e. she is incarcerated; and second, despite that odd, the person finds a way to squirm herself out of the situation. Well, not literally, because Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates’s character) in this movie was not exonerated of her crime. We tend to believe that she really killed the maid in the movie. But the positivity that came from that situation was it cemented Dolores Claiborne’s relationship with her daughter, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, another beautiful actress who can do strong straight drama. After all, this is one of Kathy’s finest performances in her sterling career.

Trivia:

Stephen King earned US$ 1.5 million when CASTLE ROCK bought the rights to this novel.

Stephen King

Watching James Caan in a seemingly invincible role in Las Vegas transforming into an invalid in this movie seems so breathtaking and pitiful to watch. Here, we see James Caan at the mercy of a woman (played by Kathy Bates who will later win an Oscar for her role here). Misery is actually used as a metaphor here – misery representing James Caan’s character Paul Sheldon’s disbelief in his situation; and Misery being the name of a character that Paul Sheldon has written off. Kathy is a psychotic fan of Misery and to watch her being killed by Paul Sheldon seems unbearable for her. Thus, she desperately forces Paul Sheldon to resurrect her character and Paul Sheldon’s misery begins.

TRIVIA:

Jack Nicholson was offered the role of Paul Sheldon but passed because he wasn’t sure he wanted to do another movie based on one of Stephen King’s novels after what he had experienced with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining (1980)

The Running Man is a premonition of two things. First, it is about a reality show, long before reality shows were a fad. The movie is all about a game show called The Running Man where convicts get a chance to regain their freedom if they outwit their pursuing killers in the TV show. That may sound barbaric enough but this is how Stephen King pictures the futuristic society as it is in his book which is the adapted basis of the movie. The other premonition the movie has pointed out to us? There was a line in which star Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered in the movie and it went like this – “I’m not into politics. I’m into survival.” Look at where he is now.

TRIVIA:

This film is loosely based on a novel written by Stephen King that he penned under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. He wrote the story in 72 hours.

The Green Mile is excruciatingly more than three hours long. It is intentionally made that way by the director not to bore us but so we can relate how excruciatingly long the characters are in walking through the green mile. The Green Mile mentioned in the movie is actually the path where a death row inmate must walk from his cell to the execution chamber (which is colored green.) It also represents “the long green mile of life” that Tom Hanks’s character must undergo as a punishment for executing a wrongly convicted man. (Tom Hanks’s character is already 104 years old in the last scenes of the movie; he has witnessed the deaths of so many loved ones and has longed wishing for his own to come.)

Hearts in Atlantis is one of the more popular drama-driven movies penned by Stephen King. As we all know, Stephen is a master of the horror genre, thanks to a gory childhood experience when he witnessed his best friend sucked by a train. But not everybody knows that Stephen King is also a master of drama vehicles like this one. One thing I love in Stephen King movies is that they are all starred by very capable actors. In this instance, it is starred by the legendary Sir Anthony Hopkins. This is actually a coming-of-age movie about a boy who will encounter life’s greatest challenges for the first time with the aid of Anthony Hopkins’s character. It does have a horror connotation to it since the boy will experience sad instances at the ending of the movie. It’s called Hearts in Atlantis for Anthony Hopkins’s character has the delusion that his neighborhood is utopian.