DR. SLEEP, HORACE & PETE, and a DISNEY + first reaction - Friday Reviews by Mike N.

    Friday again!
    This past weekend saw the latest Stephen King adaptation hit theaters: Dr. Sleep. I'm counting on more people these days holding off on seeing new movies during their opening weekend. Besides, with a Friday slot here on the blog I'd have to catch a Thursday night showing to stay right on top of it, and I generally don't do that. Regardless, the film's opening weekend box office was disappointing, and I'm hoping they see ticket sales pick up.
   A sequel to The Shining - the 1980 Kubric film rather than the novel, though fans of the novel should appreciate a tip of the hat given to it in this film's concluding gambit - it's mainly set 40 years after Danny Torrance and his mom survived the nightmare experience at The Overlook Hotel that consumed Jack Torrance. We see where the intervening years have led the now adult Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor), and we're introduced to an array of others, each (presumably) with their own, unique, "shine."

  One minor criticism on that last point: We're presented with a gypsyesqe rogues gallery of supernatually-amped characters, The True Knot. However, most of them remain cyphers, the significant actions really only coming from three of them - Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon) and Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind). Currently, my biggest incentive for reading the novel is to see if they're fleshed out there. Whether or not I do that anytime soon is its own matter, as I have a huge backlog of books, physical and virtual, already calling out for attention.

    An anomaly for me as a movie-goer, this was the first time (at least that I can recall) where I saw a King adaptation without having read the source novel or novella. Not a major issue, that - in some ways it's freeing, and makes it easier to watch the film as its own thing - but it left me with little to no expectations.
   Snappily-paced, especially for a film running 2 hours 31 minutes (so, hit the bathroom before it starts, and don't chug your drink), with good performances, and generally intelligent moves, even if for a few minutes here and there it seems there's been a lapse in judgement. I was struck by only one attempt at a jump-scare, and that is fairly late in the film.

   Related watch note, both because of source material and plot elements: The first season of the AMC horror fantasy adventure series N0S4A2, based on story of the same name by Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, will land on Hulu November 26th. The odd mechanics and dark possibilities open for supernaturally-empowered people in that series and Dr. Sleep are ultimately very similar.
  Very much a Stephen King affair, the universe is governed by harsh, unforgiving rules - whether or not it's personified as God's will. Duty and obligation - fulfilling one's Purpose - is paramount. Deriving happiness from this is pretty much all the presumably rather Old Testament God overseeing King's universe doles out for his most faithful creations, leaving any notion of an Eternal Reward out of sight and any clear evidence. Given what his heroes have to endure it's just as easy to imagine that the only eternal bliss proffered will be that that parentless Sonofabitch decides he's finally and truly done with them and allows them the rest of true oblivion. If one's still lingering around it seems to only be because there's more work to do - sacrifices to make, or to appear to as an apparition and spur someone else on to make.
   To belabor some of this, we find out over the course of the film that much of Dan's adult life was lost in a haze of alcohol and drugs. By the denouement we get a fairly clear view that this was an important factor in the celestial plan, which I suppose one could take as either God taking Dan a little off the hook for it, or just another sign that one wouldn't sanely want to exist in King's universe.   While the film certainly leaves matters hypothetically open for yet another visit down the line,  centering on Abra Stone (snappily played in the bulk of this film by the young Kyliegh Curran), we get a complete and resolved story by the time the credits roll. Oh, and no worries about missing anything -- there are no mid- nor post-credits scenes to wait for. When I checked the run time before we headed to the theater, my second check was to make sure there weren't any additional scenes. After over 2 hours 31 minutes, plus whatever time for trailers, I figured the call of nature would be pretty insistent.

   I'm also going to mention a 10-episode series originally produced as web content back in 2016: Horace and Pete. It's now among the offerings on Hulu.
  Written by, and starring Louis C.K., it co-stars Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco, and Alan Alda, with supporting roles by Steven Wright, and Jessica Lange. The feel is somewhere between Playhouse 90 and something that Norman Lear might have done had he landed a PBS series where he didn't have to curry favor with advertisers, deal with censors, or produce a fixed number of minutes per episode.
    Set in a run-down Brooklyn bar, the titular Horace & Pete's, in 2016, the centennial year for this multi-generational family business. Over the course of the series we delve into the characters and their histories, and deal with an array of contemporary social and political issues. It has funny moments, but mostly very human ones, as imperfect people in often shaky circumstances try to deal with the world, each other, and themselves. The first impulse is to think of it as a sitcom, and it often is, but it's so laced with tragedies that that would be an unfair tag to hang on it. Mercifully, it's not burdened by a laugh track nor a live audience, so one's free to take it as its own thing.
    There's a scene ending late in the final episode that'll likely stick with me forever. Events suddenly build, then the stage goes dark, leaving the last image like a flash residue in the mind's eye.
    Louis C.K. sprung the first episode on the public, online, back in 2016, adopting a pay model wherein people would pay $5 for the first episode, $2 for the next, then $3 for each of the rest. He reportedly sunk $2 million into the production, and at least at the point a couple weeks after the last episode appeared, he was still well on the losing side of things financially. More recent statements, though, he makes the claim that he at least ultimately didn't lose money on it.

   The Disney + streaming service launched this past Tuesday, November 12th, and aside from some glitchiness (predominantly on the East Coast) early in the day, and some issues with how one can and can't connect to it depending on the device, it was a smooth roll-out.
  I opted to get on board with it for a full year, which brought unit monthly cost down from the $6.99 + tax it would have been to go with it month-to-month. As one can create up to seven sub-accounts, install it on up to ten devices, and be able to stream on four of them at a time, I made this the first of the early Christmas presents for myself and the family.
  Between the inventory of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and Fox movies, shows and specials, it's an impressive sweep, and even just checking it out a little each day since the launch has shown that they're constantly updating and refining it. Making use of the search function on the site reveals even more content than one sees from looking at the main menus. Seeing what's available in as few glances as possible is something that all of the streaming services I've tried (Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, and now Disney +) share.
   It's gotten a great deal of coverage, including many who have tried to enumerate what the streaming platform has to offer, so I'm not going to spend time trying to do that here. By the day after launch they reported over 10 million people had signed up, so, yeah, there are a lot of people talking about it. So far it's been a good experience on the whole. If this weekend's plans to get it onto my smart tv via a firestick pan out, I'll likely be even more positive about it.
    Here's one article, for instance, that scratches at the interesting volume of material from various eras that's available on the new platform.
    That's it for new content this week. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that two weeks from now it'll be Black Friday.
   For anyone looking to visit the run of pieces each of the seven of us have done on this blog, Garbo's just done another update of the C7 posts By Author page. That link opens as a new page.                                                                                             -Mike N.

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