On the bookshelf: The Stand, by Stephen King

I know some people who insist that Stephen King is a poor writer. I've often heard his work talked about as being the literary equivalent of a meal from McDonald's. It's a description the disarming author would probably not mind, indeed it's possible he may have used it himself in one of his hugely entertaining pieces of non-fiction. In many cases, these impressions have been based on the many cinematic adaptations of his work rather than from any first hand reading of the novels. Which is a shame, as the cinematic adaptations cross a wide spectrum, from low budget trash to glossy Oscar winners made by directors ranging from auteurs like Stanley Kubrick to journeyman-for-hire Lewis Teague.

But I think King has penned a few masterpieces in his time. For me, he even has a Holy Trinity of sorts in his work - 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), and The Stand (1978). The Stand was re-issued in 1990, this time with King being able to re-instate material that was edited out of the original publication to bring the hardcover price down to one the market could bear. It is this expanded edition that I recently finished reading. I had forgotten - until I came across the first one - that it had illustrations by long-time Stephen King collaborator Bernie Wrightson, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I love seeing how different film-makers have tackled the challenge of successfully translating a Stephen King novel to the screen. I've read a lot of the books and seen most of the adaptations, and it's fascinating to see the variations in fidelity to the source text, budget, director, and format - feature film or tv mini-series? - and how examples that have both worked and failed can be found across the whole spectrum of variables. And the fact that several novels have been adapted more than once, often in different formats, makes if even more informative.

I'm gonna digress for a moment here. I've just paused to wonder who would find this stuff informative, and why I find this stuff interesting. Which takes me to the purpose of this blog - an attempt to kickstart my own thought processes and get the rusty mental machinery of actually writing to work. So maybe it's the wanna-be-screenwriter like myself who could be interested. Or not, let's see where the hell I'm going with this...

Carrie was adapted into a feature film by director Brian DePalma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen in 1976. It was fairly faithful to the novel and captured the spirit of Stephen King's nasty schoolyard - if anything the film gave the material an even harsher edge. The film was a huge success, launching several careers - even Stephen King's, arguably - with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both receiving Oscar nominations for their performances, no mean feat for a cheap horror movie in one of Hollywood's best ever decades. The novel was adapted again in 2002, this time as a 132 minute telemovie. It has an interesting cast and hews much closer to the novel than the DePalma version, yet is much less effective.

And even bigger contrast is demonstrated by the two versions of The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's film absolutely guts the source text - the shell of the narrative remains, turning Stephen King's crazy spookshow into an intimate look at three people cracking up. And the film is an all-time great, undervalued at the time of release but now receiving due recognition. It's an unsettling film, right down to its very form, with the opening titles scrolling up the screen in a manner usually used for end credits - nothing has happened yet and we're already thrown, not quite knowing what to make of the film.

In 1997, The Shining was adapted again as a three part television mini-series directed by Mick Garris from a teleplay - Christ, how I hate that word, it's still a screen, why can't they use screenplay or just written by - a teleplay, I say, by Stephen King. This one was slavishly faithful to the novel and fumbled every ball on the way to the screen, not helped by silly things like rocking chairs gently rocking by themselves to lead into commercial breaks, as if to remind the audience - before the messages from the sponsors - that something spooky is going on in the Overlook Hotel. Big set pieces like little Danny Torrence being stalked by the hedge animals (a large lion, rabbit, and dog) - which Kubrick wisely avoided completely in 1980, but could have been realised wonderfully in 1997 - are ineffective and flat. Stephen King writes in vivid images and contrasts the total silence of the sunny late Autumn day with the soft clump of snow falling off the animals as they move, unseen. It's all there - the pictures (and even the soundtrack) are so clear, and work so wonderfully. Yet the mini-series smothers the whole scene with "hey guys, this is a spooky bit" music, and is too eager to get to the (not that great) CGI hedge animals, leeching everything effective from the scene. If the money to write and record the music had gone into a smaller number of CG shots (which would be more effective for the extra budget per shot), the scene would have been terrific. A similar "less is more" approach would have improved the entire mini-series, which has a good cast and is technically proficient but misses King's moods and tones completely.

'Salem's Lot became an effective television mini-series in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper from the teleplay - there's that word again - by Paul Monash. Monash, who had previously adapted Peyton Place (one of Stephen King's admitted influences on 'Salem's Lot) for television, plays fast and loose with King's narrative and characters, yet the end result is much more memorable than the more faithful 2004 mini-series.

The Stand made it to the screen as a four part mini-series for television in 1994, directed by Mick Garris from a script by King. It's a decent enough show, probably ranking as one of the better television adaptations of a Stephen King novel, and it had a sensational cast including Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Miguel Ferrer, Laura San Giacomo, and Rob Lowe, but it fails to capture the epic scope and sense of doom of the novel. Reading the novel again, it's so hard to decide which sort of adaptation I would like to see more - a HBO series running over three years to get every little detail in there, or a stripped-to-the-bone and bigger-than-life cinemascope spectacular, leanly racing through the narrative with vivid imagery? Not that it matters now that the ultimate adaptation of the novel has arrived.

Marvel Comics have embarked on a large scale comic book (or shall I say 'graphic novel'?) adaptation of King's novel. It comprises six books, each made up of five issues, and is everything a fan of the novel could want. One of King's goals when writing The Stand was to create an epic story that would play like a dark Americana version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. If there are other fans of The Stand like me out there - and I suspect there are many - King succeeded. The Stand is, for me, a beloved story that is always a joy to dive into, the beats of the story as familiar as the back of my hand and pleasurably anticipated whenever I read the book. And the Marvel Comics adaptation is - so far - absolutely nailing the story.

It was all leading up to this: 'No Country For Old Men'

No Country For Old Men (2007, Joel and Ethan Coen) is a brilliant film with one of those maddening non-endings that can go either way with me: when John Sayles abruptly cut to black in Limbo (1999) it took my breath away, but the final scene of No Country felt unsatisfying. Perhaps I just didn't "get it". No matter - I love the film to bits, it's not like the ending ruined it for me. What I adored so much about the film was that, for the first time in what seemed liked forever, I was sitting in the theatre excitedly wondering "what happens next?" - happily twisted around the Coens' little fingers. After years of "plot developments" eliciting bored moans it was delightful to feel like I was really being told a story. The other thing I loved about the film was that it seemed the perfect distillation of everything that was once great about the Coen brothers before they really went Hollywood and started making films like Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004). Truth be told, I think the rot was setting in before these sell-out low points - I enjoy The Big Lebowski (1998) enough but certainly not as much as its fans do, and found the highly acclaimed The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) to be an empty experience.

No for me, the Coens are all about their first six films, each one perfect in its own way: Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and Fargo (1996). I know I am a rare Coens fan who will put Hudsucker on the good list over Lebowski, but so be it. I've just always really dug The Hudsucker Proxy.

And so No Country For Old Men really felt like a return to form for me. It was like they'd made a new Blood Simple, only this time with the best technical team given enough money and a dream cast. Like Blood Simple, No Country For Old Men is a twisty thriller set in the wastelands of Texas, and the films have almost identical openings, with a world weary voice over (M. Emmet Walsh in Blood Simple, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country) speaking over desolate shots of Texan plains. The critical difference - one which is not immediately apparent to the viewer - is who is behind the laconic voice over. Walsh is a sleazy private investigator out to double cross his employer, Jones is a morally upstanding lawman who looks on with increasing disbelief at the violent crime scenes he is faced with. Both films concern bungled crimes, red herrings, and vital clues hidden away in cheap motel rooms. But where Blood Simple is an intricate clockwork mechanism that invites the audience to watch the characters scurry around like rats in a maze, No Country eschews explanations and takes the senseless violence of its world as a given. A deputy examining the aftermath of a drug deal turned shootout remarks "they even shot the dog!" and then a few scenes later we are shown Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) - at that stage the main audience identification figure - put into a situation where he has to do exactly that, in a climax of a terrific chase sequence which begins with him being pursued across the plains in the dead of night by two armed men in a truck and ends with the wounded Moss desperately swimming down a swiftly running stream by the pre-dawn light, the soon to be dead hound in hot pursuit.

No Country even manages to recall Raising Arizona - the famous scene where the murderous Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) challenges a gas station proprietor to a high stakes coin toss resembles the black flip side of the scene in Arizona where two bumbling prison escapees turned kidnappers hold up a small grocery store, with the classic dialogue exchange:

 EVELLE

(re: balloons) 

These blow up into funny shapes at all?

CASHIER

Well no. Unless round is funny.

But if No Country For Old Men has a true sibling in the Coens' body of work, it must surely be Fargo. Both films feature a canny, moral law enforcement officer tracking criminals across desolate landscapes by the frequently bloody aftermath of their crimes. The snowbound Minnesota of Fargo is as harsh and unforgiving as the dusty plains of No Country - Fargo discovers a beautiful contrast between the vast landscape and the warm places humans huddle inside, as well as making maximum usage of the clue concealing properties of snow. But the real connection between the films are the police officers played by Frances McDormand (Fargo's Marge Gunderson) and Tommy Lee Jones (No Country's Sheriff Bell). Marge and Sherrif Bell are not the focus at the beginning of the films, which both set up other protagonists and conflicts, allowing McDormand and Jones to slowly creep into the story (Marge Gunderson doesn't appear until about half an hour into Fargo) before they eventually become the emotional core of their respective films. The characters are also an interesting study in contrasts, from the most obvious difference (that of gender) to the fact that Marge eventually finds and overcomes her quarry, whereas Bell never comes face to face with Chigurh, and the film makes it pretty clear that he would be unlikely to emerge the victor from such a confrontation: Chigurh is as unknowable and implacable a force of evil as Michael Myers in Halloween (1978, John Carpenter).  Marge Gunderson also has a more optimistic outlook than Sheriff Bell - No Country ends with Bell looking forward (at least subconsciously) to being released from this world, where the heavily pregnant Marge is in the process of creating a new life herself.

The remarkable thing about how heavily No Country For Old Men draws from the Coens' earlier work is that it is adapted with extraordinary fidelity (to a fault - the last page of the novel is a great ending to a book, but I'd argue it doesn't work as the final scene to a film) from Cormac McCarthy's novel. All the elements discussed above come directly - and in many cases, just about word-for-word - from the novel. Was McCarthy watching Blood Simple and Raising Arizona when outlining his story, perhaps?

No Country For Old Men, I believe, marks the beginning of a true second wind for the Coens. They're no longer trying to fit in to Hollywood, rather Hollywood is giving them the resources to make films exactly how they want to, only now with the very best actors (and stars, even) and the sort of marketing campaigns which films like Miller's Crossing (still their most perfect film as far as I'm concerned) never got to benefit by. If No Country For Old Men is Blood Simple 2.0, I found that watching their next film, Burn After Reading (2008) expecting Raising Arizona 2.0 is a very good way to have expectations confounded. Which of course is what the Coens like to do best - confound expectations. I need to see Burn After Reading again, this time without looking for the patterns I saw in No Country For Old Men, to fully appreciate it, I think. And how heartening that the boys are still making films that are worth going back to see a second time - very rare these days.

On the sequels to 'The Exorcist'

The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) was a huge sensation when released - it was banned in places, discussed in talk shows and the media, and walked out on. It came along at a time when big theological questions were in the public eye, and as such almost inadvertently became a sensationalist phenomenon that was concerned with Big Issues. It is of course an entirely fabulous film, still riveting after all this time. Hollywood wasn't as prone to sequels back then, but the huge success, both artistically and commercially, of The Godfather II in 1974 had proved that a sequel needn't mean cheapening the storyline. And so in due course along came Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977, John Boorman) with Linda Blair joined by great actor/ham combos such as Richard Burton and Louise Fletcher. It was a troubled production that was fitfully released, hauled back to the edit suite, and finally abandoned by both Warner Bros and the director and dumped into theatres to the jeering of the crowds. The Razzies hadn't been invented then but you can be sure Exorcist II would have been a contender.

1983 saw the publication of William Peter Blatty's follow up to his original novel, Legion. It's weighty, meditative, and theological, and when production company Morgan Creek allowed Blatty to write and direct an adaptation for them, it should have come as no surprise that he delivered a weighty, meditative, and theological film. Shocked to discover - after the film was completed - that Legion did not contain any sequences of exorcism, Morgan Creek insisted on having one shot for the film. Although Blatty disagreed, he was a good enough sport to shoot the new sequences, hoping to still do the best job possible. The film, The Exorcist III: Legion (1990) is creepy and well made and leaves an impression despite the completely visible join between Blatty's story and the studio imposed exorcism. And it has one of the best shock scare moments of the last couple of decades.

The final sequel to date had the most torturous post production of all - fearing Paul Schrader's film Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist would be unsuccessful, Morgan Creek hired director Renny Harlin to completely reshoot the film. Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning was released to poor box office and negative reviews in 2004, and Schrader's film was eventually released as well in 2005, to a slightly better reaction.

Has there ever been a cinematic franchise with such a troubled production history? The fourth film especially being completely reshot, never mind Paul Schrader - a promising match for the material - being dumped in favour of Renny Harlin, of all people. A clear sign that the studio really had no idea what sort of film they really wanted.

Of course, the original film has not been without after the fact tinkering either. In this case, a long standing dispute between author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin was re-ignited when the film was re-released for a short theatrical run and then on DVD for its 25th anniversary. At that time Friedkin stood his ground, but a couple of years later he relented and the ridiculously yclept The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen was released in 2000. The new version re-instates some character material which Blatty had always missed, as well as the infamous "spider walk" scene which doesn't really fit - coming before the film has taken its shocks to that kind of level, it both steals the thunder from later scenes and disrupts the slow build of tension. Freidkin also adds a couple of ill-advised new visual effects, particularly an image of the demon's face appearing in the range-hood which is completely meaningless within the story. It ultimately doesn't matter, it's still pretty much the same film, and some of the extended sequences help what seem like big narrative leaps in the shorter version. My preference, however, is definitely for the original version, although truth be told, you can't even get that these days: the closest being the first (now out of circulation) DVD release, which replaces the startling and effective jump cut from Jason Miller playing Father Karras to the same actor in demon makeup with a more subtle digital morph, but is otherwise the same as the 1973 release.

An obsessive phase...

I think I'm having one at the moment. They are periods in my life where I focus my viewing and reading on one particular thing. They vary from a more casual three or four week kind of thing before I move on (which is what the current one is) to a complete obsession that I spend months on. Previous subjects have included spending all my spare time re-reading my favourite Clive Barker novels (which means pretty much all of them), or re-watching my favourite Brian DePalma films one after the other. Yes, I'm a big re-watcher of films - I've seen a lot of my favourites dozens of times. Anyway, currently I'm going through a vampire phase. Sparked of course, by my re-reading of Dracula. Since picking that book up again, I've watched the 1979 film, the 1977 mini-series, and many clips from both 1922 and 1979 versions of Nosferatu as well as Francis Coppola's 1992 film on YouTube. I've also watched bits of Interview With the Vampire.

My reading was sent in a different direction - after Dracula, I've had a hankering for Victorian gothic, which had me re-reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and now H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Reading these could send me back to the early films of Angela Lansbury, 1930s Universal horror films, or Paul Verhoeven's film Hollow Man. Which will in turn, send my reading in another direction, and the circle of life keeps turning.

Anyway, my vampire phase intersected with my brief interest in James Mason and I inevitably ended up pulling out the DVD of Tobe Hooper's 1979 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot. A theatrical cut down of the film was distributed to international territories in 1979, and I loved the look of it and wanted to go see it. Of course, I was nine years old and it would have scared the crap out of me and scarred me for life, so my mother quite sensibly did not allow me to go see it. I was, however, allowed to read the book. I remember finishing reading it and immediately turning back to page one and starting again. I devoured that book. It was funny, I gave it to mum to read when I was done and then my teacher at school, and no one really said anything about my tender brain being exposed to Stephen King at his very best.

I had two years of recurring vampire nightmares from reading 'Salem's Lot, but I was kind of hooked on the primal thrill of a really good scare by then. When the mini-series in it's complete form aired on Australian television in (I think) 1983, I loved it. It had all the kids at school talking about it - lots of "did you see?" and "what about..." 

It was a big ratings hit in Australia - the network broadcasting it ran a repeat screening the following year, and again the year after that. It was a period of two years where I was pleading with my parents to buy a VCR, as I wanted to start taping stuff. When our first VCR finally arrived (it's funny, I remember that VCR as clearly as if I'd seen it this morning) we were too late to miss the repeats of Salem's Lot. I had to wait until it became available to buy from Warner Home Video on VHS, which was sometime in the 1990s, before I got to see it again. I remember the first time I saw this film as an adult, I found it cheesy and dated. I never really watched it again until the price of the DVD dropped enough for to finally say "oh, alright". I blame the highbrow and dismissive company I was in when I first re-watched it for my former judgement, as this time I found Salem's Lot to be extremely effective. I used to dislike the lack of fidelity to the novel, but now I enjoy the way the screenplay by Paul Monash plays fast and loose with the novel, conflating characters and re-ordering events in a similar fashion to many of the various stage and screen adaptations of Dracula.

I won't go into comparing the mini-series and the novel even though I've done a bit of that sort of thing on this blog. I actually do believe a film should stand apart from any source text, and be judged on it's own merits. That said, this small town of 'Salem's Lot, with petty, grasping characters played by the likes of Kenneth McMillan, Fred Willard, and George Dzundza, is recognisably the world Stephen King created. I fell in love with Bonnie Bedelia, girl-next-door pretty until the final scene, where she is transformed into a vision of Gothic seduction. James Mason's sneering and disdainful Richard K. Straker and Reggie Nalder's growling Nosferatu faced monster leave strong impressions. And the sequences with the boy vampires floating outside the window, scratching at the glass and pleading to be let in, are unforgettable. It's strong stuff - I can't imagine anything being scarier than this for a 1979 television production. Special shoutouts to contact lens specialist Dr. Morton Greenspoon, Harry Sukman for his scary Emmy nominated score, and production designer Mort Rabinowitz for the Marsten house, represented by a Psycho inspired facade on location and a sensational interior set which easily gets my vote as the best ever decrepit old house of evil.

On the bookshelf: Dracula, by Bram Stoker

I'm re-reading Bram Stoker's classic Dracula for the umpteenth time - I read it at least once every few years, and it never fails to captivate me. I wouldn't have thought it possible - I've killed the impact of many of my favourite books through excessive re-reading (I have to rest 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and the Dune series for a goodly number of years before I pick them up again) - but I'm enjoying the Stoker novel more than ever. I own the hardcover edition of the book illustrated with the wonderful paintings of Greg Hildebrandt (see above) - and although on this reading I'm encountering an irritating number of editorial errors ('from' is frequently typed as 'form'), it's not detracting from my enjoyment. I love the contrast of the highly literary device of telling the story through journals and diary entries (a device which was old-hat even when Dracula was first published in 1897) with the almost hysterical alarm at wanton female sensuality. Of course, cinematic adaptations and derivations of Dracula are legion, and enjoying the book as much as I am prompts me to recall my favourites and thoughts on other major adaptations.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F. W. Murnau, 1922) can seem badly dated - certainly it has no-hope of frightening a contemporary audience. But it's imagery, once seen, is indelible, especially the grotesque Count Orlok (the legendary Max Schreck), and many of the special camera effects are still arresting. All the characters in the film were given new names in the flimsiest of attempts to disguise the unlicensed adaptation, which didn't pull the wool over the widow Stoker's eyes. She was very nearly successful in having every print and negative of the film destroyed. I've never owned the DVD, due to the bewildering array of versions of this public domain film on the market, some of them lacking the colour tinting, some looking like the print was found in a trashcan, some with poorly translated intertitles, some with horrendous new scores... the list goes on. Rumours of a forthcoming Blu-ray release excite me - surely whoever is taking the trouble to create a High Definition disc will be trying to get it right. It's been some years since I last saw this film so I'm sure to enjoy it even more for the wait.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) is not a particular favourite of mine, despite Bela Lugosi's cold, commanding Count. Like Nosferatu I haven't seen it in a while, but it always seemed stiff and stagey to me - perhaps the result of it being more directly adapted from the hit play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than the novel. I'm probably due for another look at this one - Philip Glass wrote a score for it in 1999 which is available as an alterate audio track on the DVD, and that at least is worth checking out.

The 1958 Terence Fisher Dracula is another one which is a little lost on me. Hammer Films, the UK studio responsible for this, the 50s Frankenstein films, and scores of other horrors to keep Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price in work for years, brought brilliant Technicolor design, dollops of gore, and busty vampire brides the like of which would never have been allowed in the 1930s, but the waste of Christopher Lee's mellifluous voice - Stoker's verbose Count is given only a handful of lines in this film, and a couple of the later films give him no dialogue at all - is a major liability to me.

One of my favourite versions was made for British television by the BBC in 1977. The two part Count Dracula was the first time I'd seen Stoker's story accurately conveyed on screen. It's a strange beast, part po-faced BBC period drama (the props, locations, and costumes were no doubt staples of many a Jane Austin adaptation), part Doctor Who (the use of video-tape for interiors and what would have been at the time cutting edge video effects but are now quaint oddities). But for once, most of Stoker's vision hits the screen intact, and the cast is brilliant, particularly Jack Shepard's Renfield and Frank Finlay in the definitive interpretation of Van Helsing - so good he would play the role again as Dr. Hans Fallada in Tobe Hooper's terrible but highly entertaining 1985 sci-fi/zombie apocalypse fiasco Lifeforce.

John Badham's 1979 Dracula was based on a hugely successful revival of the Deane/Balderston play, and like the 1931 version the role of the Count was played by the same actor who had played him on stage. This time Frank Langella dons the cape, and it is one of my favourite versions, trumping the 1977 BBC version through lavish big budget production values. It's generally not as highly regarded as the Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee adaptations, although I don't understand why. Langella's magnetic Count is given terrific support by the likes of Donald Pleasance and Laurence Olivier (the latter positively hamming it up as Van Helsing), with Kate Nelligan a standout as the progressive Victorian Miss who comes under the vampire's spell. The photography and production design are gorgeous and the whole package is wrapped up in a lush score by John Williams which is equal parts horror, romance, and action - a score that would surely be as highly regarded as his work for films such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) but for the fact that this version of Dracula remains a barely remembered box office failure.

There's one last important adaptation of Stoker's novel which I'm going to discuss here, and of course it is Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Coppola, 1992). My excitement grew in the months leading up to the release of this film - were we to finally see a good version of the story that remained faithful to Stoker? It certainly seemed so - from his name in the title to the inclusion of all the main characters (most other adaptations usually collapse Lucy's three suitors into two characters, if not one, and Lucy and Mina swap names randomly at the whim of the screenwriters) it looked like Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart (riding high on Steven Speilberg's filming of his screenplay Hook, in that period of grace where no one had yet seen the film) were determined to bring Stoker's novel to the screen. And the cast was a terrific line-up, never mind the dubious casting of Keanu Reeves. The lurid mess which ended up on the screen saw an attempt at a faithful re-telling crowded out by an invented romance between Dracula and Mina, here depicted as the re-incarnation of his centuries dead sweetheart. The way James Hart crowed about this plot addition, you'd think he'd written Hamlet - no matter that exactly the same ploy was used by a 1973 television version starring Jack Palance as the Count. What is the point in trying to include all of Stoker's story and then having to rush through it to make room for a Count with a bleeding heart? Stoker's eroticism is as cold as the grave - Dracula refers to Mina as his "wine press" - but Gary Oldman's Count can hardly bear to bring himself to inflict the fatal bite upon Winona Ryder's Mina, so rent is he from his love for her. If you didn't need a sick bucket for the gore, you'd still want one handy for the romance. The performances from the aforementioned stellar line-up seem to come from ten different films, every actor encouraged by their indulgent Uncle Francis to find the histrionic madness in their character, with the result that Tom Waits as Renfield - the one bona fide madman of the text - seems sane beside the shrilling of everyone from Reeves and Ryder to Anthony Hopkins and Richard E. Grant. And the crying shame of it all is that so many good, even great, qualities are in this film, from Eiko Ishioka's stunning costumes and Greg Cannom's exceptional make up work to Sadie Frost's vampish (I'm sorry, there's no other word for it) Lucy and the darkness and power of Wojciech Kilar's score, by turns lyrical and brooding. With so much that is so right, it's amazing that the film as a whole is so wrong.

Diminishing returns and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy

Damn, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is a fine film. A careful, respectful film. The pressure was on: generations of Tolkien fans were anxious to see if co-writer/director Peter Jackson could pull it off. Rumour has it almost the entire budget for the planned trilogy was spent getting the first film finished, and that the additional funding to complete the next two films would be dependent on box office takings.

Even in a three hour film, Peter Jackson had to race through Tolkien's narrative, honing in on following the journey of Frodo (Elijah Wood) and the Ring. The most sorely felt loss for many Tolkien readers was the omission of Tom Bombadil, but for the most part the narrative compression was done with great care and skill, imbuing the story with a terrific sense of urgency.

The finished result won critical raves, played to huge - and adoring - audiences, and delighted all but the most hardcore of Tolkien's fanbase. Those that went looking for things to quibble about could find them, but they were more likely to be disputes about Elvish dialects rather than genuine problems with the adaptation. Some purists protested elements such as the involvement of Arwen (Liv Tyler) in events her character wasn't part of in the book, as in when Frodo journeys to Rivendell. Others found the use of Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) as comic relief ("no-one tosses the Dwarf!") objectionable. And for the most literary minded, no film could capture the beauty of Tolkien's prose. Of course, these people made up the tiniest proportion of the cinema going audience, who largely had the time of their lives - the aforementioned line from Gimli never failed to get a huge laugh whenever I saw the film at the theatre, which was probably five or six times.

It's a genuinely thrilling and moving film, sure footed from the first moments to the last. One walked out of the cinema already anticipating the next film, and knowing that there was a genuine Christmas present coming for audiences for the next two years. Peter Jackson showed a gift for maximising the drama of the story - the encounter with the Balrog being the best example, a sequence deliciously drawn out as the Fellowship descends gigantic crumbling stairways in flight from the as yet unseen fire demon. The excitement is cranked up to a pants-wetting level before the reveal of the magnificent CG creation, until now only glimpsed in a brief shot in the trailers. The tactic worked again for the following films - the Ents in The Two Towers (2002) and giant spider Shelob in The Return of the King (2003) were also cleverly withheld from being overexposed in promotional material. The only way to really see these beauties in action was to buy a ticket.

The production was unique - the three films were shot over an extended period of many, many months, a time frame which encompassed the release of the first two films. After the box office success of the first film demonstrated what a gold mine the trilogy would be, the only limitations on the resources allocated to Peter Jackson were those of completing the films in time for the release dates. Scenes were shot, reworked, and shot again, sometimes in a genuine two way dialogue between film makers and audience. When Tolkien fans responded negatively to news that sequences featuring Arwen at the battle of Helm's Deep had been shot, the relevant material was reshot without her. Enthusiastic response to the Dwarf tossing gag meant that the humorous aspect to the Gimli character was emphasised in the subsequent films.

The release of the extended version of Fellowship on DVD was a new revelation, the already great film enriched by the additional material, the narrative more fully rounded, although such was the cleverness of John Gilbert's outstanding editing work we never saw the rough edges in the shorter version.

The Two Towers was released the following year to an even more enthusiastic response than the first film, with the remarkable creation of Gollum - an unprecedented fusion of performance and character animation - a particular favourite. I enjoyed the film enough, but felt something was amiss. It wasn't until after a couple of days thinking about it that I came around to the conclusion that I loved it. My friend Kate remarked that it was a common response to the film among people she knew, with her take being that it took a couple of days for people to put a positive spin on the film. I disagreed at the time, but I now think Kate's comment was pretty astute. The screenwriters have again grafted new elements onto Tolkien's story, but unlike the first film, some new story threads seemed out of place here. The warg attack which leads to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) being separated from his fellows on the way to Helm's Deep is the best/worst example. In a film which already had a few too many fake-out character deaths (did anyone really think that Billy Boyd's Pippin was trampled to death by that horse?), trying to wring emotion from the notion that Aragorn falls from a cliff and out of the story was a bit much.

This fight sequence provided an action beat on the long trek to Helm's Deep, but the main raison d'etre for the narrative detour was to rope Liv Tyler's Arwen back into the story. She appears to the wounded Aragorn in a vision, spurring him to fight for life and resolving his feelings in the romantic triangle with Arwen and Eowyn (Miranda Otto). Tolkien's famously laddish adventure has no time for love triangles - Eowyn pines for Aragorn but there is never even a hint that he would reciprocate - and I can't help feeling that there's an element of cynicism here, a conscious attempt to make sure that the female half of the audience remains engaged amongst all the Orcs and battle cries. Viggo Mortensen seemingly concurs with Tolkien, as his Aragorn never offers more than undying friendship and respect to Eowyn, and as a result the whole sequence feels more like screenwriting than an organic progression of the drama. The net result of the plot detour is essentially nil - Aragorn ends up making his way to Helm's Deep after all, giving Peter Jackson an excuse to indulge in another lugubrious reunion scene, with the Elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) behaving more like a wife to Aragorn than Arwen ever did.

Elsewhere, Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens include character and plot points at 180 degree reversals from Tolkien: in the novel, the Ents decide to take war to Isengard, yet in the film the Ents decide that the matter is not their concern, with Treebeard (voiced by John Rhys-Davies) only changing his mind when witnessing first hand the devastation wrought upon the forests by Saruman (Christopher Lee). And Faramir (David Wenham) proves resistant to the temptation of the One Ring in the novel, but here takes Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) along with him to the besieged city of Osgiliath with the intention of turning the Ring over to his father Denethor (John Noble). In a difficult middle act film with no real beginning or ending, this allows Jackson an excuse for further action near the climax, as well as the opportunity for an encounter with the flying Nazgul which is frankly too close to believe.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - fourth edition, film critic David Thomson - writing in 2002, when only the first film in the trilogy had been seen - wonders 'whether the frighteners in the Rings might not get out of hand before the series ends'. His writing was prescient - look at the sequence where Frodo, Sam, and Gollum (Andy Serkis) cross the Dead Marshes. What is haunting and poetic in the novel is here reduced to the stuff of a ghost ride, green ghouls leering out at the audience, in a sign of Peter Jackson's propensity to crank everything up to eleven.

However, I judge the extended edition of The Two Towers to be the most improved from the theatrical cut. The cross cutting between the three major story strands is better handled here, somehow more balanced. And the battle at Helm's Deep does not dominate the final half of the film as much as it does in the shorter version.

The Return of the King has a lot to get through, even with major sequences (such as the Scouring of the Shire) omitted. There's some set up here, but the film is mainly comprised of big climaxes and extended farewells. In the rush to get to the action, the wrap up of Saruman - a role which had been played up in the first two films - was reduced to a single line referencing the unseen character, to the vocal displeasure of Christopher Lee. This film has - for me at least - the most damaging deviation from the novel, when Frodo - swayed by Gollum's treachery - sends Sam away on the climb up to Shelob's lair. In a Screenwriting 101/Robert McKee sense the writers have upped the ante here, turning the screws on character conflicts present in the novel to maximise the conflict. In story and character terms, it's a betrayal of Sam's character - the finale of the first film was predicated on the notion that Sam's loyalty to Frodo and determination to stay with him know no bounds. And it robs the characters of one of their great moments in the novel - facing the horror of giant spider Shelob together. Sam ends up a johnny-come-lately to his biggest moment of heroism in the entire story, getting his moment in the spotlight in the superbly realised fight with the monster, but leaving at least this Tolkien reader wondering if an important beat with the two characters had been skipped or short-changed.

Of course, by now I probably sound to you like one of those Tolkien fans quibbling over Elvish dialects. Or maybe I passed that point three or five paragraphs ago. Far be it from me to argue with a bazillion dollars at the box office and a record number of Oscars - the three films comprising The Lord of the Rings are all wonderfully made, acted with heart, gripping, and exciting. There were maybe turns taken that I would have preferred taken another way, but the crank-it-up story sensibility that I bemoan when it takes the story on certain paths is the same sensibility that made many sequences so wonderful. So the good definitely comes with the bad.

The extended DVD version of The Return of the King is a strange thing. The expansions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were both improvements on the shorter edits, especially with the second film which saw some rushed storytelling clarified. The longer version of The Return of the King seems to me to be on exactly the same level as the shorter edit, with no overall improvement to the film as a whole. A lot of good - and necessary - material has been restored, such as the final confrontation with Saruman. Other additions which might have been expected to smooth out some trouble spots are less effective. Take the restored scenes at the Houses of Healing, for example. The theatrical edit of the film has a moment in the first of its many endings where we see Eowyn standing beside Faramir, indicating a healing of her unrequited love for Aragorn as well as a redirection of those feelings to Faramir. The reinsertion of the Houses of Healing scene - wherein Eowyn, recuperating from battle, begins to notice Faramir noticing her - should have provided the linking material in the relationship, but somehow it fails to gel. This perhaps highlights an inherent problem in trying to construct a contemporary style cinematic narrative from Tolkien's novel - this beginning of a romance becomes lost amidst the culmination of so many other story threads.

Elsewhere, and for the first time in the extended versions, The Return of the King contains redundancy, most notably in the new sequence at the start of disc 2 where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas conquer the Corsair ships with the aid of the Army of Dead. Maybe it's churlish to deny Peter Jackson and his department heads their additional cameos as the crew of the ship, but the use here of the visual gag of the Army of Dead materialising behind the sword-wielding Aragorn diminishes the impact of the same image later in the film when the ships arrive at Gondor. Can I reiterate here my complaint about haunting prose becoming an fx spookshow in the Army of the Dead - more glowing green ghouls, Peter?

I may be giving the impression here I don't like the films, which is far from the case. The collective trilogy makes great viewing as a six part mini-series - one disc a night. It's easy to talk about the greatness of the enterprise and the excellence in every aspect of the productions. Not many people talk about alterations to the narrative which may be less, rather than more effective. What's interesting here is not so much passing judgement on decisions made by Peter Jackson and his team as seeing how they reflect changes in storytelling and audience expectations. Is Aragorn a more interesting character with a more compelling arc because the films have given him a measure of self doubt to overcome before he fulfills his destiny? Do we find the Hobbits more relatable because they've been transformed from the overgrown garden gnomes that Tolkien artists have been depicting for half a century into a quartet of hot young men? I'm not convinced myself. I think the perfect adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is yet to be made, and it's more likely to come in the form of three seasons of episodic television, taking the time to enjoy the journey as the novel does instead of rushing from one event to the next.

Now, a little aside about sexy Hobbits. I like my men - as Hannibal Lecter would say - 'roomy', although hotness does come in all shapes and sizes. Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee became my definition of 'sexy' for a couple of years after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring. This probably lasted until I saw Aaron Eckhart carrying an extra 30 lbs. and a 70s porno moustache in Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998) - va va voom! Anyway, meandering back to the point - the casting of the Hobbits did have the side effect of making Tolkien's strong bonds of friendship and love look totally gay, and the fodder for an astonishing amount of slash fiction. Now look, my mind is as filthy as the most ardent writer of slash (usually women, the heterosexual male fantasy geek is alienated enough without authoring homoerotica - and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the level of alienation the homosexual male fantasy geek experiences) - in my mind, of course those randy hobbits are buggering each other in the bushes whenever Gandalf isn't looking. And I'm pretty sure Merry (Dominic Monaghan) tried it on with Boromir (Sean Bean) at least once before the Orcs came along and ruined it for everyone. But I'm gay - I'm allowed to think dirty thoughts when Sean Astin and Elijah Wood look deeply into each other's eyes. It's unfortunate that everyone who saw the films thought 'gay' whenever the Hobbits got too lovey-dovey. Perhaps if they weren't pretty boys? Or maybe what we're seeing is an indicator of our society's inability to look unembarrassed at deeply felt male friendship without resorting to the protective ironic distance of sniggering at innuendo? But hey, this post is long enough without opening that can of worms...