🎙️ **ArcherFilm** - Dive into the world of film! From film critique to my experiences making films and working in the biz in Los Angeles for the last 20 years. From horror films to foreign films and all genres in between. I'll even talk a little smack about A-list stars I've met or worked with who were sweethearts or just plain awful. Subscribe now to be part of the ArcherFilm community! 🌟
I always felt that this film was a bit overrated. Certainly some really great and classic scenes but the plot and the and the character development were thin, broken up and a bit disjointed. I also feel that Vera Farmiga was a terrible casting choice. She was a weakly written character.
I loved this movie specifically for the ending, ‘cause it was bittersweet. She dies, though she gets her revenge. So it is both depressing and satisfying.
I understand where you are coming from, but realistically, a woman in that situation would have been overpowered by all the men in the bachelor party. She knew she was gonna die and she planned the revenge in advance with the ONLY person (a man) who accepted his mistake.
that makes sense. I dont mind the plan part as much as it would have been devastating if all the witnesses at the bars came out of the woodwork blaming her still. but you make a good point.
I don`t quite get the point of the video. "Why Stephen King is mostly awful" isn`t really explained, you rather give a lot of examples of movies you like and don`t like and then add one or two points to each one. Doesn`t make it a bad video but it is more like "Here are my top ten best and worst SK movies". Maybe you could explain two examples (like the different IT versions) in greater detail and compare them to each other to get your point across. Good luck with your channel! You`re clearly passionate about the things you`re talking about
I thought this video would be you wanting the ending a lot of woman really wanted which was her living and getting away with all she did still getting the men arrested like if it was going to be this movie where a woman wins in the end she should’ve WON in the end and saw the work she did finally come through for her and her dead friend rlly didnt think i could not like an ending more than the one they gave but youre here proving that wrong Like i didnt like the actual ending either but i definitely dont like this one 💀
King's butthurtedness over Kubrick' s Shining is predicated over its treatment of Jack Torrance's descent, which he sees as the corruption of a decent family man. He sees Kubrick pegging Jack as a bad egg loony from the start. Torrance IS an evil irredeemable monster from the getgo, which KING is blinded to, probably because the character is so close to himself.
King's version of Jack still comes across as an actual person tho. Kubrick's version mostly just has Jack Nicholson's acting going for it. Also, Jack the the books is not an irredeemable person from the getgo. Irredeemable would be killing someone or sexually assaulting someone. All he does is break a kid's arm due to anger. That is horrible, no doubt, but irredeemable is too strong a word. If Derek from American History x can be redeemed, so can Jack, only, Jack didn't get an redemption arc. Kings Jack is a complex person with lots of issues, while Kubricks Jack is just bad. Kubrick's Wendy is better tho, imo.
They are still entitled to their opinions. It is just one of those things. I personally prefer King's short fiction, but I think he has made some pretty good novels. His bizarre enmity over Kubrick's The Shining still puzzles me to this day.
This honestly is more of a reflection on the public than the author. There is a reason that the best authors don’t get any credit while Stephen king can have 15 movies made of his work. People who read horror and want the intricate details and eloquent writing aren’t a big market, but people who want an easy slapstick movie with a book that they don’t have to put any effort into reading is a big one. In the end does that make him a good author who knew his audience so well that he could pump out books to make them happy and comment himself as one of the greatest of all time?
_Maximum Overdrive_ is one of my favorite movies, and I thought _Under the Dome_ was decent up until the third season (at which point it totally bombed), and _The Langoliers_ continues to haunt my brain since the first time I watched it on the Sci-Fi Channel all those years ago. However, I admit that all of them are bad from a cinematographic perspective. As for the other film adaptations of his work, I'm in the extremely tiny minority of people who see nothing worthwhile in _The Green Mile,_ _The Shawshank Redemption,_ _Stand by Me,_ and _The Shining._ I've given those movies numerous chances, but I just can't seem to like them. In my opinion, _The Shining_ is particularly overrated, and _Stand by Me_ elicited in me strong feelings of moral revulsion. I recognize the monumental impact that these films made on the world of cinema, but I personally don't like them at all. As for his novels and short stories, I can't provide commentary on those, as I've never read a single one of his works. I much prefer the horror and drama genres being played out on screen than in text form. Ultimately, what really gets my goat is King's penchant for running his mouth on Twitter. The man's unhinged, acerbic, profanity-laced political rants are rivaled in irascibility, delusion, and stupidity only by Ron Perlman. If there was a contest between Perlman and King to determine which unqualified, ignorant, histrionic mook would win a prize for being utterly deranged, I don't know who would win.
because awful people are not worth the time. sure the algorithm rewards useless regurgitation of these factoids about human suffering and particularly if it involves auto-cannibalism in the whole creator shitting on creator or presenter of video being self-righteous though they've contributed nothing transformative or anything close to an attempt at individual insight or a clear-cut sense of identity and comes off like the stuff you make catatonics sit in front of while you get their medication ready
To be completely honest, I feel the same way about Tolkien as I do King. Personally despise the writing style, it always goes on and on unnecessarily. However, the world building for Tolkien, and King’s ideas for stories, are undeniably wonderful. But seriously they read like a short story from a fifth grader who wants to over-describe everything.
Tolkien was a genuine literary scholar... He was more professed and practiced in literature than most modern authors. He intentionally wrote _The Hobbit_ as a kids book. How in the HELL are his works less than 5th grade short story purple prose???
His books hang out in the second act forever and rush through the 3rd act and fail delivering the full breadth of action/horror they could. He spends so much time in set up that payoff seems so little. The issue is there's definitely a good story there but I don't think it's worth our very limited time to read unless you love that genre.
Sometimes the true horror is seeing how easily you could lose something you take for granted, like the relatability to characters within a fictional narrative then feeling like the potential was squandered by shitty writing or by them being killed off, and therefore rendered as merely applied device… But there could always be a remote possibility that the characters in the world are more representational and symbolic than they are just immediately good because of presentation... But this could also just be chocked up to bad writing or bad reading
3 seconds in. I will not hear the name of MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE besmirched. Whichever King clone is responsible for it. That being said i will continue to watch
haha. look it has a place in my heart because I saw it young and it has some great gnarly moments and the clown truck is iconic. but watching it as an adult it's pretty bad.
He blinded a cinematographer and ended the man's career. Oh, also King never apologized over it. Dick move, King, dick move. So every time I hear about King getting struck by a van, I can only muster, "Well, at least the guy apologized."
I think King's taste in cheesey schlocky horror is perfectly fine. They're great inspiration, and he seems fairly capable of taking those crazed monsters that are just guys in goofy masks and makeup onscreen and turning them into real terrifying flesh and blood characters on the page. And until we get something as immersive as a star trek holodeck there's always going to be a problem getting the reverse, 1:1 fidelity from the page to the screen no matter what genre. And I think no matter what level of simulacra we manage to achieve in our realms of entertainment, some people (probably better people) will always keep a soft spot in their hearts for the ones that went out in those hokey masks, bad makeup, and rubber suits just to give us a bit of a thrill. Good vid, really got the noggin joggin! Also a good quick read from King would be The Reaper's Image. That definitely had to be an inspiration for Mike Flanagan's Oculus.👍👍
You know, I often hear people saying that they have to change a movie script that is based on a true story because if it played out exactly like it did in reality, the audience wouldn't buy it… But I actually believe what they're saying is they can't pull it off in a way that we could buy it… I think the only way you can gauge whether an adaptation is actually good from one medium to another is the consistency in the thematic scrutiny at play, how The presented to us and how effective the presentation feels. Even with something as immersive as a hollow deck, which could be argued already exists in the form of virtual productions being a thing (i.e. unreal engine running on giant enveloping panoramic LED screen that can replace whole sectors of practical production design or their limitations with ones of only a post-production nature), and I've still yet to see it implemented effectively for a film besides, I guess poor things? I don't know. I may be confusing the boat sequences in that film with some Netflix Norwegian, drama, or something that was filmed entirely on soundstage with this technology either way, I don't think decks are necessary, but I do think considerable care and passionate craftsmanship can act as a Doula to that special baby this was all put together for. I mean personally I think the David Fincher's girl with the Dragon tattoo was the closest we could get to perfect in terms of adaptation that is both respectively executed in terrms of the underlying spirit of the narrative as well as an accurate portrayal of the awe-inducing power it demonstrated within the theater of the readers mind. it's a real shame Sony didn't just take a chance and have them all finish the fucking trilogy.
Stephen King has his flaws, but this is not a great review of them. First of all you aren't very consistent or clear about what makes or breaks a Stephen King movie. You blame King, a writer, for the bad ones, but praise the directors for the good ones. Is it a Director or a Writer that deserves the credit for a good or bad film? Also you say he endings are bad, but by what metrics? I know that that has been a common complaint, but really there isn't anything wrong with his endings. Are they satisfying? No, often not; but they aren't supposed to be. They are often taking inspiration from old gothic horror, bad B movies from the 50's, and Lovecraft. Them being sudden, ambiguous and/or open ended is intentional. Just because people don't like that doesn't mean it's bad. Also the tropes are mostly only tropes because he made them that way. A lot of the stuff that feels so cliche about his work, and became tropes in the first place is stuff he popularized 50+ years ago. Even something subversive and new will feel old, tired and obvious when multiple other people have been borrowing it in their own work for decades. Especially if you aren't even the originator of them. And while King did make certain tropes and cliches popular, I don't think he actually invented any of them. Specifically you pointed out the magical negro trope. He may not have been the first to use it (Uncle Remus anyone?) in fact it's just another version of the "noble savage" trope, but he helped create what it became to modern audiences. And at the time it was actually kinda progressive. It's certainly not anymore, we have moved long passed that, but he also has moved away from using it in much of his newer material. Not all of it, (old habits die hard I guess and as you pointed out, while vague he definitely has his formulas) and there is certainly something to be criticized there, but Dick Halloran being something of a hero in the Shining, one of the few characters you really could call heroic in that book in fact, was pretty big at the time the novel came out. And while the role was changed quite a bit for the Kubric film and was not a first, it is still notable in the history of blacks in cinema. He is certainly a flawed novelist, you can't write THAT much material, (let alone as much of it as he did on more booze and cocaine than any single human should be able to consume and survive) without writing a lot of bad crap. He is also a TERRIBLE screenwriter. No denying that. He treats it way too much like writing novels. They are two entirely different mediums. It being cheaper for the studio is probably the only reason he is ever allowed to do that for his stuff adapted for the screen. It's why you only ever see that particular credit on cheap made for TV crap, not anything with a bigger budget and actual big names attached. Trying to compare the two is like comparing little Debbie's snack cakes to a souffle made by a professional chef. They are both technically cake, but they are made for very different reasons and with very different audience expectations in mind. And as stated before, I don't know how much of either of those things you can fully lay on Kings door anyway. It feels like hating on King is something that has been a given on the Internet for at least 10 years now, and it's become its own cliche. Yeah, he is a pulp novelist, who has a well known habit of recycling parts of he old works to re use in the new ones, but he also is an icon who has produced a mind boggling amount of material. He changed the face of writing and publishing and ultimately shaped how we adapt novels, novellas, and short stories to the screen both for better and worse. The only author that can be said to have had a similar effect on both these industries is J.K. Rowling, and I'd argue she would not have been able to do what she has with her various films and productions without Stephen King paving the way first.
While I understand your passion, you are writing to an individual who started his video off claiming film is "the greatest artisitic medium ever known". This tells you everything.
@@Archer_Film Curious, do you think Lord of the Rings is a better book or movie? Did you like any King movies more than the book? Have you ever seen an actual good Lovecraft movie and I don't mean just ok? My point being, if film the the greatest artistic medium why do they almost always pale in comparison to the book? I mean I love movies more than most people I know personally but in my 40 years I just can't think of a single film that I enjoyed as much as the book it was based on. Funny enough the movie I would say gets closest to meeting the story as far as enjoyment is the Shawshank Redemption, maybe Of Mice and Men with Gary Sinise as well. Just my 2 cents, cheers.
I actually (now I think of it, like most authors that I read) often tend to like King's short stories better than his novels. Strawberry Spring, One For the Road, he's got maybe a couple dozen really solid ones. My favorite King novels that I read were Joyland, Revival, and maybe Under the Dome. 'Salem's Lot and Shining are solid. Duma Key and Hearts in Atlantis are pretty mid. The Stand I quit after about 500 pages. I just couldn't take the insurmountable boredom any more. And The Body is his best novella.
The Jaunt is one of, if not the best horror short story out there. It's actually true horror though, the kind whose terrible implications remain with you for years after reading it. So he gets points for that, at least.
@@jadedandbitter I agree with your assessment. While no where near one of my favorites, it is the only one that actually disturbed me the more I thought about it.
Apt Pupil was also crap (both book and movie I only read/watched some of, because that's about all I could take.) Shawshank is one of the most overrated things ever. Green Mile was a cheap Melodrama. Stand by Me is by far my favorite adaptation of his (and easily his best novella that I read). At least we agree on movies like Dead Zone (beyond me how anyone can like it).
to not like Shawshank feels like you just need a little more life experience and emotional sophistication. Although I can agree on Green Mile and Stand By Me.
🙄 the theatrical, colored version of the Mist was terrible. ...But the black and white version that Darabont originally intended, though - that actually works pretty decently (the idiot execs at the studio forced him to colorize it because they thought people wouldn't watch a black n white movie).
3:51 though not an adaptation, he wrote an original screenplay called Storm of the Century which was made into a 3-part mini-series in 1999. Though repetitive and needlessly drawn out, an with that semi-cheap 90's TV production feel, I actually like a lot of aspects of it. Storm of the Century is one of his best efforts at wrtiting for the screen (maybe because it was an original screenplay?)
Honestly this just popped up on my RU-vid recommended and this is well made for a smaller channel. I’ve got to go to bed or I would leave a longer comment, I wanted to ask if you have seen There Will be Blood? One of my favorite movies and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts!
Stop sucking Stephen King off he's was popular because moms had time to watch movies....read yeah maybe but mom's in th 90s and early 00s love the movie versions.
Mostly? Have you ever read one of his books? Its like a 6th grader wrote it. If you write ten thousand books one of them is bound to make it to a book store.
Dude, I dislike Stephen King for his obnoxious political posturing but to say that he's a poor writer is just ludicrous. As someone who has tried his hand at writing himself I can say that it's extremely difficult to tell a compelling story with characters that resonate with the reader. Good dialog, managing pacing, carefully building tension, paying off the the reader with satisfying reveals/twists...it is _hard_ to be a good writer. King is one of the most popular novelists in history precisely because he's really, _really_ good at doing these things. I'll cop to the fact that he hasn't written a massive success in decades. But King in his prime during the 70's and 80's was a masterful storyteller in the written word medium. However, I heartily agree with the video above that his instincts for the visual medium are aggressively awful.
Worth checking out Billy Summers. It’s significantly less corny and more thoughtful than alot of his other work. It also helps that there isn’t a film version to compare it to. In a way, King’s vision is alot clearer and is more concise because of it. I 100% see what you mean about the bloated “middle parts” of his novels (and the untidy endings), but Billy Summers avoids these tropes and is worth checking out.
2:23 I would also like to point out that Stephen King _loved and approved of_ the stage musical version of "Carrie," even though "Carrie: The Musical" was universally panned by critics and did so poorly in ticket sales that its producers pulled the plug on its Broadway run after only five performances. So you're right. Between that and 'The Shining,' it's clear that King's tastes come straight out of Bizarro World. He loves rubbish and he hates gold.
That's because King was more directly involved in the 90's version and himself wrote the teleplay so it was, plot-wise, a closer adaptation. Whereas the 80's movie, Kubrick took out of King's hands and drastically changed it from the book. Duh.
@@nl3064 Do you feel like a bigger man just because you say "Duh" to people you're trying to one-up or people you disagree with? Do your smugness and condescending truly give you the high ground? 🙄 And sure, King was directly involved in the made-for-TV trash version, which is *_even more_* damning proof that his tastes are garbage. So that was a very awkward way for you to back Archer Film and me up. Thanks, I guess.
@@gilraybaker826 Well, I found this one. It's not the Broadway version, though. All the same, prepare yourself for cringe! 😁 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xEYjZB0K5sI.html
I enjoyed reading his books when I was a teenager. I think the first time I ever stayed up all night was when I was reading The Stand, Even though he's a horror writer I think his audience is very much young adults, once you've read around a little you realise there's plenty of authors who do the horror/thriller thing better. The Shawshank Redemption is an absolute classic though, but I think that has a lot more to do with Frank Darabont being a fantastic film maker than Stephen King being a good writer.
I clicked on this video expecting to hear an argument as to why the main character being murdered was a bad choise. But instead the argument went into a whole different direction, to say that the end was too optimistic. That the misogyny should have ruined the womans reputation as well as cause the men to not suffer any consequences. Becuause that's what happens in real life constantly. I think there is a few reasons why there are so many of us women in the comments disagreeing with your take. It isn't because your view isn't realistic. If we were to consider what might likely happen in reality in this case, she might have gotten murdered even sooner as she was in those dangerous situations many times. However, we might not want to see our darkest reality mirrored back to us. We want to see the exceptions, some form of justice, and live that through at least fiction. If all that women, poc and queer people see on screen is our tragedies and destruction, that is deeply damaging. In Get Out, you expect in the ending for the white woman to survive as a the cops come. The main character puts his hands up, preparing to be shot or going to jail. In Promising You Woman you expect the main character to either be a Mary Sue (that the audience isn't able to relate to) or fail in a horrific way in getting justice. But the thing is that we already know what happens in reality - So for us it isn't some intriguing story. For you, it might be exciting or interesting to get to witness this in film format. But the rest of us, who are all too tiringly familiar with the reality of it, we crave catharsis, hope, revenge and something exceptional.
Very good points. Thanks for the comment. But catharsis I believe comes in the form of confrontation with trauma. Not in happy feel good endings that seem a little bit unbelievable. Either an artist makes a point about a meaningful subject or entertainment or not. For me I want to be upset when I leave the theatre so I can reflect on the issue at hand. Take any of Lars Von Triers female tragedies like Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. They impact you like nothing else. Or Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee's masterpiece. The world is a scary place. I get what you're saying about what women see on screen but the exception is that in the case of Get Out and PYW these are genre films. And deeply damaging is an opinion. In both these movies subverting expectations is not a virtue. There are thousands of revenge stories and those are incredibly boring. They are the cliche. It still would have been a more powerful ending. It's not interesting or exciting to me, it's called meaningful and cathartic. The best way to affect your audience that may not know what it feels like to feel powerless is to make them feel it. Not end with a happy ending. Thanks for the comment. Appreciate your thoughts on this.
@@Archer_Film I can appreciate your take on this! I do still think that there are many valid reasons, why there is multiple women in the comments voicing their disagreement. First off, I want to note that violent and tragic representations in the media can in fact be deeply damaging to many groups of people. This isn’t matter of opinion, and this is coming from a researcher of media. Secondly, I think a lot of the disagreement stems from what you stated in your comment with ”I want to be upset when I leave the theater so I can reflect on the issue at hand”. Sometimes the people who these issues concern, do not want to leave the theather upset. They want to leave it having lived through an alternative ending to their own tragedies. Many of us already are upset and reflecting on the daily, because we don’t have the option not to. My third point and my own opinion is that Promising Young Woman doesn’t have a happy uplifting ending. The only way the main character (who you likely relate to as a woman watching the film) is able to get her revenge, is by being murdered. The world is portrayed accurately to have predatory men all around, who constantly get away with rape and harassment. Cassie dies a horrific, violent death and nothing is done to fix a larger issue at hand. When I finished the movie, I felt the weight off the world on my shoulders. I felt that I had seen on screen depicted how scary and awful the world can be to us women. The viewer is reminded of how impossible it can be to get any form of justice for rape. That for me, was the takeaway of the movie - which I already was all too familiar with from my own life.
@@Archer_Film "For me I want to be unhappy when I leave the theatre" that's like a "you" problem, not the movie's problem... As a doctor myself, it's disturbing how you don't see the damage a pessimistic ending has on the minds of marginalised communities/women... You clearly lack empathy for people with mental health issues, that's why you want the movies to end on a depressing note and not showcase something uplifting... What's even more disturbing, is how you continue to be condescending and mansplain every constructive criticism that comes your way...
as soon as someone gives me an analytical explanation as to why I'm wrong-- I'll gladly listen. Otherwise it's just morons giving opinions. It's okay to like something that is bad or flawed. Are we so sensitive that constructive criticism hurts us so bad?
@@Archer_Film Okay, so for me, the ending was perfect. Throughout the movie, our protagonist always places herself in the passive position, and lets the men reveal their own character by making herself appear vulnerable to them. She isn't doing anything to them, she is merely letting their actions take place, until the moment she decides to reveal that she is not as vulnerable as she appeared to be, which then places the men in the position of looking at their own behaviour. At this moment, they have no choice but to see what they are doing, in the moment they are doing it - this is key. There is no time for looking back for excuses, and there is no room for denial. This passive, vulnerable position the protagonist puts herself in is basically the base position for women under men in our patriarchal society. Further to this, these same women are made responsible for the actions that men take against them. The movie is about calling out the actions of men, not those of the protagonist, because she is largely passive throughout most of the film. When she does take actual action (violent action), she is killed, because it is the men that have the monopoly here. It is the men that take action, and the women that receive both the consequences, and the blame. Our protagonist goes into this knowing this may happen to her, and so prepares the reveal of evidence ahead of time to be distributed to the police. I would even argue that she sort of counted on the men harming her - again, revealing themselves in their own actions. This is the only move she had, and like she has done throughout the movie, she uses her words in retaliation, but this time, she will actually be heard, and only because she is dead. This is something that happens to women all the time. We can speak of the violence we receive, but go unbelieved until we actually get murdered. This is a revenge story. It is, as others have said, written for women. It perfectly encapsulates female rage in the face of a patriarchal society that does not listen to, nor believe women. An ending where the protagonist comes off as the bad guy to an unforgiving society, and the men keep on keeping on, would just be another crude representation of what actually happens to women all the time in real life. We know this. We live this. We want an ending where the men that do this shit get what's coming to them. This is our revenge story, from the perspective of the people who have infinitely less power in the situations this movie is exploring. It is where we find power in our passivity, by merely shedding light on the actions of men while they hold us down with a pillow and snuff the life out of our bodies at the mere suggestion (or violent name carving) of men taking responsibility for their own actions. It is for us, and perhaps that's why it didn't work for you, but that is actually the point.
