Reeling Backward: "The Stand" (1994)

How can a screen adaptation be so faithful to one of my favorite books, and yet I borderline can't stand it?

That's what I, and I believe many other fans of Stephen King's "The Stand," thought when the ABC miniseries came out in 1994. Although it got generally good reviews and audience numbers at the time, I speak for a lot of people who were put off by the cheap television production values and a few spots of crucial miscasting.

Now the story is being made again as a miniseries for CBS' premier channel coming out next month. Obviously, a story about a mysterious plague that kills 99% of the human population has a lot of topical weight at the moment, though I'm sure the producers couldn't have known that when they were shooting it. The timing seems perfect for our age of anxiety and rage.

The high anticipation for the new adaptation made me want to revisit the original to see if my opinion has changed significantly.

Short version: not really.

If you're not familiar with the book or show, I'll give a very stripped-down summary: a bio-weapon  escapes from an American military facility and quickly kills most of humanity. A tiny percentage prove to be immune to this "Superflu," and those who survive begin to experience psychic dreams that draw them toward one of two loci of power: the evil Randall Flagg in Las Vegas and the saintly Mother Abigail in Nebraska (later relocating to Boulder, Colo.) for an apocalyptic showdown for the soul of humanity. The story tracks about two dozen characters as they join the fray.

It's not surprising the miniseries, which played as four two-hour episodes (totaling six hours once you remove commercial breaks), hews closely to the book since King wrote the script himself. He hated what Stanley Kubrick did with "The Shining" and, along with a few other miscues with other adaptations in the 1980s, led the author to have more direct control. So he was both teleplay writer and executive producer of the miniseries, along with having a small role as an actor.

Director Mick Garris had previously helmed the King-sourced "Sleepwalkers," and King liked it well enough to tap him for "The Stand." Garris has mostly worked in television and seems captured by the limitations of the medium, or at least those that existed at the time. There's a very crabbed view of the world, as if Garris is afraid to point the camera at anything outside of his limited set dressings.

For example, we don't get to see all of the garish majesty of Las Vegas, only a few signs and a few other visual slices.

It's amazing how old-fashioned the more squarish 1.33 aspect ratio of television looks to my eyes now; even "regular" TV has used the wider ratio of feature films for about 15 years. It adds to the effect of tunnel vision watching the miniseries. To save money they also shot it on 16mm film instead of 35mm, giving everything a slightly hazy indistinctness.

From a story perspective, "The Stand" sticks to the book pretty faithfully, at least the original version published in 1978 that was somewhere in the 700s in pages. I only ever encountered it when the extended version was published in the early '90s, coming in around 1,200 pages. That's an absolute gob of source material, and if you were to try to include absolutely everything you'd be looking at a 20- to 30-hour run time, not six.

The new version will reportedly be nine, presumably one-hour episodes. So it sounds like my desire to have every little subplot and minor character included is never going to happen. Though I hope someday someone does a mini-show that just chronicles the Trashcan Man's chilling, unforgettable encounter with singular malevolence of The Kid.

Aside from that, one thing I find lacking in the miniseries is backstory. Most every major character was given a pretty flesh-out persona and history to help you understand or even empathize with them. For example, Trash was a childhood firebug spurred on by the constant bullying he received, and ancient Mother Abigail overcame racism around the turn of the century -- the last one, which is I guess a qualification we'll increasingly have to start using.

Stu Redman gave up his college sports dreams to work and support his family; Nick Andros was an isolated orphan until another deaf-mute took him under his wing; Larry Underwood was a self-destructive jerk who was just on the verge of making it big in the music industry, and so on.

For me one of the most emotionally affecting was Frannie Goldsmith. Her fractured relationship with her mother was the key underpinning for her character's mix of resolve and self-doubt. I still remember distinctly the scene in the book where a child-age Fran hurts herself and bursts into her mother's social gathering, seeking reassurance and instead getting screamed at for spilling blood on her mother's favorite rug. That'll stick with you.

The miniseries doesn't have any of that, not even relying on flashbacks to inform each character's motivation. Everyone exists exactly in the moment they are in, and no more.

A few of the things cut from the adaptation also turn out to be key. The most notable is Larry, whose interactions with women leave something to be desired. He dallies with a young tart and then blows her off, leading her to utter a line -- "You ain't no nice guy, Larry!" -- that becomes his haunting mantra as his journey, both geographically and spiritually, progresses.

Later, while trying to get out of New York City, Larry hooks up with an older woman, Rita, who has mental health and substance use problems. Larry uses her for sex and emotional support, then pushes her too far until she commits suicide. So it seems for a very long time we're not sure if Larry will wind up in Mother Abigail's camp or Flagg's.

The miniseries swaps out Rita with Nadine, the woman who is destined to become Flagg's bride and bearer of his child, cementing the reign of evil over the land. In the book, Larry doesn't meet her until later on when she is acting as guardian for Joe, a 10-year-old boy traumatized by the epidemic, not speaking and threatening Larry with a knife.

Larry's growing friendship with the boy marks his first steps toward becoming a more outer-directed person, so having Joe relegated to a virtual walk-on really saps the strength of his transformation. Instead, Lucy Swann is introduced at that point and becomes Larry's lover.

Later, when Nadine turns up in Boulder about a month later, throwing herself at him in a bid to foil Flagg's plans for her, Larry bizarrely refers to Lucy as "my wife."

A lot of philosophical musings and shadings in the book are lost as well. I was really intrigued by King's suggestion that certain personality traits generally seen as positive -- analytical minds, those who crave structure, defenders of rules and laws -- tend to migrate toward Flagg's camp. So he gets the bulk of the scientists and soldiers. Whereas the artists and freethinkers go to Mother Abigail.

Even though the fight against evil is often framed in fiction as holding off chaos, in these terms Flagg uses very rigid, hierarchical systems to maintain control -- executing all the drug addicts being a prime example -- whereas Abigail essentially thrives on a cult of personality built upon her station as a figure analogous to a second Christ.

Both systems are prone to threats their leaders couldn't see: hers from without, his from within.

Finally, let's get to the casting. It ranges from pretty spot-on to gag-inducingly awful. Seeing it again, I feel like most of the actresses are good fits while the male lineup is where things go terribly wrong.

Molly Ringwald as Fran, Ruby Dee as Abigail and Laura San Giacomo all do fine or better. I'll also put Miguel Ferrer as Flagg right-hand man Lloyd Henreid, Ossie David as Judge Farris, Ray Walston as Glen Bateman and Matt Frewer as Trashcan Man in that category.

From there, things quickly get dicey. I like Gary Sinise but he just can't sell calling people "hoss" or doing the taciturn Texas thing. Stu Redman is the sort of role Gary Cooper was built for -- in fact, I think in the book one of the scientists studying Stu for clues to his immunity refers to him as a Gary Cooper type.

I've often said that Scott Glenn would be my dream pick for Stu, but even in 1994 he was long in the tooth to play the character, who's about 30. Curiously, Glenn would've made a great choice to play Randall Flagg, who's supposed to be ageless and charming, with a dead-eye stare.

Speaking of, that brings us to Jamey Sheridan as Flagg. He's not bad, but he's not good, either. He gets the general mood right, which is twinkly charisma with a belt of rage right underneath it. But I dunno, I never really felt scared of the guy. Certainly not during his transformations to a demon-like figure, which won an Emmy for makeup but looked pretty chintzy even in 1994.

All of Flagg's inner thoughts are hidden, so he's just an existential threat and that's it. Within the book Flagg himself doesn't know his own origins, other than at some point he simply became... and also has the understanding that he will go on after corporeal death. An epilogue added with the expanded novel has him reincarnating in prehistoric times, and indeed King has gone on to use him in other books including as the principle antagonist in the sprawling "Dark Tower" series.

Adam Storke is more puckish than self-loathing as Larry, and I laughed at his very-90s wind-blown hairstyle and vest-over-T fashions. (Hilariously, other members of the Boulder community come to adopt this look.) Bill Fagerbakke has the height and hue for boy-man Tom Cullen, though I was put off by his using the exact same voice delivery that he did for his two other notable roles, Dauber from the TV show "Coach" and Patrick from "SpongeBob SquarePants."

(His hairstyle is even more distracting than Storke's, with long pale blond locks that hang like a curtain over the side of his head. His odd balding pattern with a large carve-outs on the sides result in a weird-looking back-to-forward combover that I doubt someone of Tom's limited mental capacity would trouble himself with.)

Harold Lauder is a terrific anti-hero in the book, a teenage genius with an obsessive fixation for Frannie. Like Trash, he's been bullied and isolated his whole life and it's led him down a dark path. Initially part of the Boulder group, he is enlisted by Nadine at Flagg's behest -- offering her body as payment -- and tries to assassinate Mother Abigail's hand-picked leadership group.

No doubt King saw Lauder as a stand-in for himself, since the character is a wannabe writer. He's also an awkward 16-year-old, described as quite fat, with bad acne and greasy hair. There's not a lot of young actors in Hollywood who look like that, and Corin Nemec certainly does not. He's lean as an icepick with a sharp jawline.

In the story, Harold loses weight and cleans himself up as he travels west and undergoes challenges. He actually becomes well-liked in Boulder for his intelligence and hard work -- even garnering the nickname "Hawk" -- and has a break point where he realizes this could be his actual life going forward.

Ideally, the actor playing Harold would lose weight as the story goes on, but that's a pretty hard feat to pull off logistically, especially given as most productions are shot out of order. It might be easier now than in 1994, what with the rise of CGI and better practical makeup effects.

Last, and least, let's get to Nick Andros.

He was my favorite character in the book, a young man cut off from everyone else by his disability who finds genuine friendship with Tom and a community that values him in Boulder. One of the things that define him is his physicality. He's supposed to be 22, small and skinny, probably with jug ears and freckles, and is not the sort of person who makes a strong first impression.

Moreover, as the result of an assault at the beginning of the story, Nick is supposed to have several of his front teeth broken and nearly has one of his eyes gouged out, so he wears an eyepatch thereafter. It adds to his sense of ugliness, not to mention his terror and anger at the prospect of becoming blind as well as deaf.

And here is pretty boy Rob Lowe.

With his feathered hair and soft blue eyes. No eyepatch, of course, though he gets some makeup bruises that soon go away. In a word, a dreamboat. And a lightweight.

Now, I think Lowe has grown a lot as an actor in the years since. He found his niche in deadpan comedy and seems like a delightful, self-aware person in the recent interviews I've seen him in. Ironically, I think he could pull off Nick Andros quite well now, though he's too old.

But this was such a fundamentally wrong piece of casting, I'm surprised King or somebody didn't step forward and say, "He can't be Nick." Or at least try to ugly him up with some makeup or a bad haircut.

Looking back I can understand why Lowe was cast. His feature film career had softened but he was still a big "get" for a television miniseries. And Hollywood understands that audiences like to look at pretty people. Still, it's eternally grating to have a fixed vision of a character you identify so strongly with and see it trammeled upon.

So, my takeaway after a second view of "The Stand," the first in a quarter-century, is that it's well intentioned but poorly executed. It looks just plain bad, with its poor, cheap camera work and limitations of the television format of the time. It serves to be instructive just how much shooting for "small screens" has improved since.

Will the new version be any better? I'm excited for it, but in truth some of the same fears persist. They've hired another beauty as Nick and another skinnyboy for Harold, so mistakes of the past and all that. Though I will say Amber Heard as Nadine seems like a home run.

Sometimes great works of art are only great in their original medium. Call it a premonition if you will, but I think "The Stand" is destined to remain one of those.

Review: "Honey Boy"

Maybe you, like me, have been scratching your head over the antics of Shia LaBeouf the past few years. The arrests, the publicity stunts-slash-performance art, the public drunkenness, the lawsuit alleging plagiarism, the questionable choices of roles. For the rare child actor who successfully transitioned to adult movie stardom, he seemed to be taking great pains to screw it all up.

I’d noticed he was doing more interesting work more recently with nicely layered performances in small indies like “American Honey” and “The Peanut Butter Falcon” -- in supporting parts, no less.

His comeback, if you want to call it that, reaches a higher plane with “Honey Boy,” which LaBeouf again stars in as a supporting role, but for which he also wrote the screenplay. With parallel storylines set in 1995 and 20005, it’s about a 12-year-old actor breaking into Hollywood on a kiddie TV show and then breaking down in alcoholism and arrests as young star on the verge of flaming out.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is indeed an autobiographical tale about LaBeouf’s own youth, particularly his troubled relationship with his father. The names and some details are switched around, but it’s indisputably LaBeouf casting a critical lens at his own life and mistakes.

Rather than feeling like another cloying act of narcissism -- like when LaBeouf attended one of his premieres wearing paper bag that said “I’m not famous anymore” -- “Honey Boy” has the flavor of an authentic self-exploration that’s also artistically vibrant and alive. It would make for an interesting story even if it were invented out of whole cloth.

In a daring act, LaBeouf -- even though he’s youthful-looking enough to play himself in the adult section -- casts himself as his father, here called James. This is not a “Mommie Dearest” sort of takedown of a parental figure, though the film does not try to obviate James’ failings as a parent, which range from emotional domineering to criminal neglect and occasional physical abuse.

Instead, it shows a willingness to embrace his father in all his fractured complexity. A war veteran and itinerant rodeo clown whose blackout drinking binges led to hard time in prison, James is now a lonely, somewhat pathetic figure whose “job” is to act as chaperone and acting coach to his son, who is a featured player on a Disney-esque TV show.

Despite the glamor of working on a studio lot every day, Otis (Noah Jupe) and James have anything but a hifalutin home life. They tool around on an old motorcycle to a dilapidated motel populated by people living on the trashier edge of Tinseltown.

James brusquely slaps away Otis’ attempts at holding hands or leaning a head on a shoulder while riding the motorcycle. With thinning long hair and owl-like glasses, LaBeouf as James resembles a hippie-turned-hardcase, who sprinkles his exhortations liberally with f-words and put-downs, like making disparaging comparisons about the size of their genitalia.

In the adult sequences, Lucas Hedges takes over the role of Otis. We first meet him dangling from some stunt ropes after a movie set filled with explosions in a very “Transformers” sort of way. He quickly gets drunk and crashes his car, leading to court-ordered rehab.

A solid supporting cast includes Laura San Giacomo as Otis’ therapist; Byron Bowers as his rehab roommate; and Martin Starr as one of the counselors. In the boyhood storyline FKA Twigs plays a shy older girl who lives in the motel room across the way. As James’ abuse reaches its zenith, Otis seeks out a mostly unspoken romance with her. Clifton Collins Jr. has a nice, small part as Otis’ ultra-cool Big Brother, Tom.

“Honey Boy” is directed by Alma Har’el, who’s made some notable documentaries (“Bombay Beach”) and makes her feature film debut here, as does LaBeouf as a screenwriter. It’s a fruitful partnership with a compelling narrative that sometimes wanders into and out of Otis’ dreams, or wishes.

People, including me, tend to mock millionaire showbiz types who seem incapable of dealing with lifestyles most of us would regard as a cakewalk. I don’t think LaBeouf made this movie to explain or justify his behavior, but simply to relate his own truth in an honest, empathetic way. This he does.

Reeling Backward: "Quigley Down Under" (1990)

"Quigley Down Under" is the classic example of a terrific concept for a film, horribly executed. The end result is a complete garbage movie, a neo-Western that takes its hero so far out west, he gets turned around to the east.

It's a terrible-looking movie shot without subtlety or style, featuring awful costumes, atrocious acting, an insipid musical score (courtesy of Basil Poledouris) that feels compelled to squawk into every scene with its syrupy strings, stiff dialogue and no coherent directorial aesthetic other than "let's shoot stuff up."

Really the only redeeming thing about it is Alan Rickman as the sniveling bad guy, a bridge villain for the vivacious actor to chew on between Hans Gruber of "Die Hard" and the sheriff in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" the following year.

The project was initially launched in the 1970s based on a script by John Hill, and actually went into production in 1980 with Steve McQueen starring as Matthew Quigley. He's an American sharpshooter who heads to Australia in the 1860s in answer to an advertisement, and ends up in a war with the rancher who wants him to kill Aborigines. But McQueen fell ill on the way to an early demise, and production shut down.

The concept languished until it was revived a decade later with Tom Selleck in the lead, with Simon Wincer directing fresh off the success of "Lonesome Dove" the previous year. Though the script went through many revisions with other writers, Hill retains sole credit.

Both Selleck and Wincer are/were very successful men in the medium of television, which is where they should have stuck. Other than the wide-screen aspect ratio, everything about the look and feel of "Quigley" screams "TV." The characters do not seem to exist outside of their time on the screen, and events roll forward with the sort of fungible logic necessary to point the story in the direction desired.

Example: Quigley undertakes a three-month journey from Wyoming to southwestern Australia based simply on a newspaper ad for the world's best marksman and the promise of $50 in gold upon arrival, without every learning what the actual job entails. When he finds out it's to kill Aborigiones, he promptly punches out the murderous rancher, Elliott Marston (Rickman), and initiates a conflict that will surely end with a heaping helping o' death.

First of all: I bet it cost him more than $50 just to make the trip. Who the hell undertakes such a mammoth voyage on spec, without even bothering to investigate the particulars of the job? We never learn anything about Quigley's life prior to coming to Australia, so he remains an amiable enigma. Any competent screenplay would give him something to run away from.

Second: If you're selling your skills as the world's best long-range rifleman, what exactly do you think is the market for those talents? People don't pay top dollar to shoot coyotes. Assassination seems pretty much the only viable high-return vocation available to him.

Things go along a predictable path, as Quigley tangles with Marston's henchmen right off the boat, and bumps into Crazy Cora (Laura San Giacomo), an unstable Texas woman being coerced into prostitution. She seems deliberately addled for most of the movie, insistently referring to Quigley as "Roy," which we subsequently find out is the name of her husband.

Cora is gifted with a tragic backstory, in which she smothered her own baby in fear of marauding (or not) Indians. But despite Giacomo's talents, the character is presented as more daffy than pitiable. She's the comic relief, instead of the emotional backbone of the piece.

The movie never gets anywhere near the bullseye of Cora's center.

The Aborigines lend them help at various times, and have it returned, but they're never presented as anything more than sanctified noble savages. And silent ones, too: none is given so much as a single line of dialogue.

Marston is a big believer in the quick-draw game, waxing poetic about the new Colt six-shooter, with which he practices daily. Take a wild guess what the final showdown entails.

Quigley, on the other hand, eschews sidearms in favor of a single weapon: the legendary Sharps, a breech-loading single-shot rifle first introduced in 1848, capable of accurate fire up to 1,000 yards in an era when most firefights happened at 50 feet or less. When offered a revolver on several occasion, Quigley refuses, saying he doesn't have much use for them, preferring to swing his Sharps as a cudgel for close combat.

(This is the same arm used by Burt Lancaster in "Valdez Is Coming," which was my entrée into this movie.)

Given Selleck's real-life association with the NRA, the scenes where he coos lovingly about his rifle take on a sinister air. His Sharps is modified to take .45-110 ammo -- which Quigley reloads personally, of course -- with four extra inches of barrel and a Vernier gunsite that allows him to adjust for the wind and such. It also has a double trigger, with the heavier touch setting the lighter one, for minimal movement when firing.

As a single shot weapon, the Sharps represents a bit of a logistical knot when it comes to cinematic storytelling. Because Quigley has to literally open the breech, manually insert a round and cock the lever each time to fire one bullet, that means he can't quickly down multiple targets. So director Wincer has to come up with some pretty cockamamie scenarios to justify his screwy tactics.

When opposed by a knot of men on several occasions, I kept waiting for one of them to shout, "He can only fire one bullet at a time. Rush him!!" But it never happens.

Again, with no backstory provided for Quigley, it's never explained why has this totemic fetish for only using the Sharps. A true weapons master would keep something else handy for close-up work. He's like a knight-errant who thinks he can fight an entire war employing only his lance.

Though, as we will see, when circumstances are forced upon him he's capable (if not enthusiastically willing) of making the swap.

Not surprisingly, "Quigley Down Under" has become a favorite amongst military personnel and long-range gun enthusiasts. Supposedly, the act of lining up two enemies so they can be taken out with a single bullet is colloquially known to U.S. military snipers as "a Quigley." There's even an annual shooting competition held in Montana that bears Quigley's name.

That's more of a legacy than other, better Westerns can boast.