Pop Culture Quickie: If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star?

-

On Quora, an anonymous member asks:

If '11.22.63' was a movie, do you think it deserves more than 1 star?


From what I understand, 11.22.63 was going to be a feature film (aka “theatrically-released movie”), but the people involved (the late Jonathan Demme had optioned it) had an incredibly hard time adapting it into a viable screenplay. 11/22/63 (the novel) is a long and exquisitely detailed book, so the film version was abandoned.
Fortunately, J.J. Abrams is a huge fan of the book, and when he emailed Stephen King to say how much he’d loved it, he also mentioned that it should be made into a miniseries.
© 2011 Scribner
(I love that book cover!)
So…J.J. Abrams, James Franco, Stephen King, and Bridgette Carpenter teamed up and produced 11.22.63 for the Hulu streaming network. Not as a movie, but as a nine-part series.
© 2016 Hulu 
(This guy doesn’t look like Lee Harvey Oswald as much as Gary Oldman did in JFK, but he did a great job.)
But that’s not the question being asked, is it? No. The question is “do you think it deserves more than one star?”
Without writing a full review, I will say this. 11.22.63 is one of the best adaptations of a Stephen King novel. Even taking into account the necessary changes from page to screen, it captures the essence of 11/22/63 extremely well.
Four out of five stars from this reviewer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more