Rose Red Review

I'm a little confused about the plot of "Rose Red." These people get invited to a haunted house famous for killing and vanishing the people who go inside. They go "oh, okay," and when there are actual ghosts inside and plenty of evidence that at least one person is already dead, they don't really freak out that much.

Two people dead and the house is starting to mindfuck us all? Meh, no big deal, let's ignore the psychic rumblings and make pancakes.

Three people dead? Fingers getting cut off willy-nilly? OK, now it's time to be shocked, just shocked by what's going on, and get pissy at the crazy parapsychologist who hired us all to come because for some reason it's her fault we all left our senses of self-preservation at the door and that everything we were told would happen and knew would happen is actually happening. Sure it's been going on nonstop right under our noses since the first two minutes inside the house, but now we're surprised and terrified because the plot needs us to be.

Yeah the characters were pretty goddamned dumb, but that dumb? C'mon. Lazy writing treats the characters like generic game pieces who only exist when they're being observed and directed, and only move as far as the writer pushes them. Boring.

Emery gets points for being a genuinely believable and complex character, rather unpleasant but still sympathetic, but the rest of them are two-dimensional puppets who merely drag the haunted house story along its well-worn track.

Also, I object to every person of nonwhite heritage in the story being some form of subservient cleaning staff. Black spooky voodoo maid in a do-rag, black sad-faced maid in a do-rag, black janitor... but no black main character. No black extras, either. Couldn't the first victim of the haunted house be a minority, like in the other shitty horror movies? Was there really no room for one of King's stock mysterious magical black folks in a film about a group of mysterious psychic people?

Come to think of it, maybe Rose Red is sort of scary after all. ;)

Two Adaptations

I watched Mazes and Monsters, hoping it would be as funny and stupid as the book. It ended up being just stupid, for the most part. It was about on par with Reefer Madness, which I didn't enjoy at all. I was able to fast forward through the boring shit in order to find out if the main character would be sucking any dick like he did in the book, but they cut that part out. That was the best part, too! (He flips out and thinks he's in a D&D game and gives a blowjob to a 'paladin' he meets in the streets of NYC, convinced it's part of his quest.)

That aside, they made a movie out of The Mist, and I'm totally looking forward to it. It's one of Stephen King's better stories, especially if you get the campy surround-sound radio-play audio version and listen to it in a dark room. Just the other day I was wishing they would, and now suddenly it's about to be in theatres. Heh.

Left wrist has deteriorated and is constantly braced. Typing is a real pain in the ass. On the bright side, I have hazelnuts and a nutcracker, and life is good.

On Bad Writing

OMG spoilers ahead for Lost and the Dark Tower!

The producers of Lost recently went on record to explain how they listen to fan complaints and have altered the show according to viewer wishes, and this is why much of the last season has sucked.

Well, duh. At least they finally admit to it. But do the producers place the blame on themselves for being so bad at planning and telling a story that they actually have wiggle room to allow the audience control over their brainchild?

No, they blame the fans... for having bad ideas!

This weak shit really reminds me of that time when Stephen King stopped the final Dark Tower novel cold in the middle of the climax to bitch out the readers at extreme length because he imagined we might want to find out what happens next in the story.

We were the worst sort of people, he chastised, unimaginative human potatoes who would gleefully deny Frodo his nice peaceful retirement and probably caused the Holocaust too. Wah.

After a buildup of three decades and seven books, you're goddamn skippy we want to find out how it ends. If you didn't want anyone to know what Roland discovers waiting at the top of the Tower, you could have, oh... never published the book.

Me? I'm reading to the end of what you wrote, and screw the fourth-wall-breaking lack of writer's craft that led you to shame me for it.

There's a difference between asking a writer to add pointless sequels to a finished story a la FF7: Advent Bad Movie, and wanting to know how the book ends in the first place. Similarly, there's a difference between criticizing a story element and demanding to be given control over it.

In neither case is "Fine, I'll give you greedy little shits what you want, and I hope you choke on it!" an appropriate answer.

And so, Dear Lost producers/writers/dogfood, I know how heavily you rely on fan input, so I hope this is useful for you:

Your audience complained that the supporting cast is populated with unimportant, pointless warm bodies. To address this, you abruptly thrust two boring extras into the spotlight out of nowhere. You did this without any lead-in, and without showing us why we should even care about these two people in the first place.

It was obvious from the start you were merely fulfilling an obligation. Yet you promoted this development as a major leap forward in the story. Extras will now be people! Woo! Only, not really. Everyone else on the island was still nothing more than a blurry background motion--exactly what people were annoyed about in the first place.

Several episodes later, you decided that the fans weren't warming to these suddenly overexposed characters quickly enough for you. The audience wasn't buying it, and so you decided to spin this into proof that you had been right all along. See, you still weren't getting it.

And so you wasted a full episode saying "I Told You So!" by killing off these two pointless new main characters in a manner I can only describe as 'nakedly retaliatory.' And now, the failure of Nikki and Paolo has given you a perfect excuse to never try anything new or take risks with side characters ever again.

Sweet deal, we could always use more scenes of Kate weeping with indecision over the unwashed penis buffet God has seen fit (in His inscrutable way) to serve her.

And now you're in an interview, gleefully rubbing the fans' faces in the whole debacle as proof that they had no idea how to tell a story.

Guess it takes one to know one.