Doctor Sleep

Year 12, Day 291 - 10/17/20 - Movie #3,677

BEFORE: Well, it's time that I faced facts, "Black Widow" is just not coming out this year, and that means I don't have a way to link to "Hellboy".  I've known this for some time, but I still have a document open on my computer that shows the path from "Hellboy" to Christmas movies - why?  It's not going to happen that way.  Time to scrap Plan "A". 

In the next column is Plan "B", which picks up right before where "Black Widow" would have been, and details a path to another set of Christmas movies.  So that's the way to go, right?  Well, who says that's the only one?  I can still find another way to get from Halloween to the end of the year if I try, right?  And what if I can find one that's, you know, better?  

I'm motivated by a comedy that was just added to Netflix, and the cast clearly links to the end of my October chain, and probably nothing else.  I can see quite clearly how I can slip this film RIGHT in between my last October film and my planned first November film, but that's going to throw off the count, isn't it?  My October chain is set, as I've mentioned before, it's like a delicate Jenga pile, and if I pull just one block out, the whole thing's liable to come crashing down.  BUT November and December aren't set in stone, there's just a rough plan to fill the 12 remaining 2020 slots.  So it's time to take a hard look at the last two months of the year and see if I want to stick with the rough plan or find something better.  Just give me a second to sketch a path out on some paper with some circles and arrows...

Yep, I see it now - I can add this new comedy (if I don't do it now, it won't connect to anything next year, I can just FEEL that...) and then there's a way to keep what I liked most about the original plan, like "Jojo Rabbit" and "Bad Santa 2", and remove the films that I'm not crazy about, like the "Dumbo" remake and "Love the Coopers".  Four films are out, four new films are in, the chain integrity is maintained, and I'm a linking genius.  Plus a couple of unlinkable orphans are being brought back into the fold, instead of left behind - and as a bonus, one film that I was going to have to pay for is now on HBO Max, so it's not going to cost me anything more above my premium cable subscription.  Now I'm ready for Halloween and the end of 2020!  

Oh, and, um, Ewan McGregor carries over tonight from "Birds of Prey..." for the second of three films this month based on the books of Stephen King.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Shining" (Movie #640)

THE PLOT: Years following the events of "The Shining", an adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers in order to remain immortal.  

AFTER: Standard SPOILER ALERT, this film's under a year old, so if you didn't catch it in theaters last year (back when there WERE movies in theaters) please skip tonight's review, because to speak on the technical aspects of this film, it's necessary to divulge some plot details.  Or go check it out now on HBO or HBO Max, which also connects to Hulu and Amazon Prime if you've enrolled in the program that way.  I recorded this in July on my DVR, but that recording was rather jumpy, so I went with HBO on Demand. Just be aware that the short version runs about two and a half hours, and there's also a 3-hour Director's Cut available. 

It's the 10-year anniversary of my first deep dive into the works of Stephen King, as I spent half of October back in 2010 watching the films "Firestarter", "The Dead Zone", "Thinner", "Christine", "Maximum Overdrive", "Misery", "It", "The Dark Half" and "Secret Window".  Since then, I've returned to films based on his books again and again - seriously, there are so many that they become hard to avoid at some point, and last year I found myself down to the lesser works like "Gerald's Game" and "1922".  I think I'm at the point where I seriously need to figure out if there are any films based on his novels that I haven't seen, like "A Good Marriage" is one, but the very fact that I've got a list of what's left that's probably in the single digits is something of an accomplishment.  

Back then, I wasn't so hard-core about the linking, I linked where I could but I didn't yet have the vision of 300 or 365 films linked together, it seemed impossible - but if I had been using the resources of the IMDB and been willing to spend countless hours putting together cast lists, my world might have been different.  Then again, I could have ended up feeding my OCD demons to the point where they devoured me from within, so there's that.  I did also watch "The Shining" ten years ago, it turns out, but I had separated it from the other Stephen King movies because Jack Nicholson was my lead-in to October that year, and that meant following it up with "The Witches of Eastwick" and "Wolf", which led me into a whole werewolf chain before I could circle back to movies based on King's novels.  C'est la vie.  But it took me thirty years to watch "The Shining", and here I am, ten years later, watching its sequel - which was released in 2019, so it only took me ONE year to watch this, so my response time is clearly improving.  

From time to time, I watch a short film before the main feature, it's my way of paying tribute to the Golden Age of Cinema, where you'd physically go to the theater (remember that?) and pay for the feature, but also get a couple shorts and maybe a newsreel thrown in.  So today's short film preceding the feature is called "Scaredy Cat", which just premiered this week.  (Really, it's a 4-minute commercial for Temptations cat treats, but work with me here, would you?). It's the story of a cat following a ball of yarn through a (presumably) haunted house, where he encounters the ultimate horror.  (Surprisingly, that horror is NOT running out of Temptations cat treats, which would have been a way to go...).  This ties in very neatly with "Doctor Sleep", which at one point features a cat who lives in a hospice and can somehow sense when a patient is going to die, so it visits that room and spends time with that patient.  I surmise, however, that perhaps the leading cause of death in that hospice is patients having heart attacks when they realize that the death-sensing cat has come to visit them - it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you ask me.  

It's in this hospice that we find Dan Torrance working - OK, so the film really starts with a couple of re-created clips set in the Overlook Hotel, duplicated from "The Shining", only different actors are playing the young Danny and his mother (more about this later on...).  We learn a bit about Danny's life after being chased through the hedge maze by his axe-wielding father, and it turns out that he spent years fighting the ghosts (literally...) from that time in this life.  But there are helpful ghosts, too - one of them, Dick Halloran (played by Scatman Crothers in "The Shining") visits him and teaches him how to build boxes in his mind, as a place to store away his personal demons, some of which are actual demons.  Fast-forward to adult Dan Torrance, who's spent two decades drinking and drifting around, making his way to a fresh start in New Hampshire, where a helpful townsperson recognizes a fellow alcoholic, and gets him an apartment and a job and takes him to AA meetings.  Dan sees the world as one big hospice, anyway, just one with fresh air, because we all spend every day dying anyway.  But he follows that cat and ends up spending time with the patients that he knows are about to die, which earns him the nickname "Doctor Sleep".  

There are other people out there who also have "The Shine", though, and once he stops drinking, Dan finds that he can mentally tune some of them in like radio stations, and thanks to a convenient blackboard that someone painted in his attic apartment, he can communicate with one of them, who happens to be a "looker".  (This is someone with remote viewing powers, not a particularly attractive person.).  Abra is a teenage looker who, from 1500 miles away, can view the actions of The True Knot, a group of, well, psychic vampires, who also have "The Shine" or maybe just feed off those gifted people, as they torture or kill them their psychic power gets released as a sort of steam, and the cult members either breathe it in right away, or store it in metal containers and save it, then later they aerate it and create a foam to use as a delicious dessert topping.  

Not knowing where else to turn, Abra seeks out Dan in the real world, after eight years of only communicating with him psychically.  She finds him running tours of Tinytown, which is a smaller version of the main town in the town square for some reason.  (I didn't really follow this, the town's not that big to begin with, you can probably see it all in a couple hours, so why do we need a smaller version of the town that someone can walk through in five minutes?)  The cult members drove all the way from Florida (OF COURSE they live in Florida...) to Iowa just to find a psychic kid that was using his powers to steal signals in a Little League game, and bring him back to Florida to steal his essence.  Abra saw/felt all of it, so she enlists Dan's help to stop the cult.  Dan figures that they've been around for decades, they have connections, so the law will be no help, and there's only one way to take down a nest of vampires. 

(One of the cult members isn't a "looker" but a "pusher", this is someone who can use their power to compel others to follow an action, and I've seen several characters like this already this month, in "Horns", "The Woman in Black", "The Dark Tower" and a couple vampires in the "Twilight" series.  It's just great to have a name now for this type of character.)

The leader of the cult, Rose the Hat, is another matter.  She's so powerful that Dan figures that the only way to defeat her is to lure her to a place of even greater power, and that means driving with Abra all the way to Colorado, back to wake up whatever evil ran the show at the Overlook Hotel. I suspect this is rather faulty logic, because WHY would you do that?  Jesus, whatever's sleeping there, let it sleep!  This is a bit like realizing you're up against a tough opponent in a football game, and dropping a nuclear bomb on the stadium as the solution.  But I guess if it was a tough place for young psychic Danny to be when he was a kid, it will also be a tough place for the evil psychic?  Again, this plan might look good on paper, but there are so many ways it could go south...

Dan travels through the old hotel - same crappy wallpaper, same horrible carpeting that he rode his Big Wheel over...and the lights come on as he walks through the halls.  Creepy...  Then he visits the famous hotel bar and has a conversation with the bartender, who resembles and may or may not be his father.  (Remember, he's ALWAYS been the caretaker there...). Other visions and apparations from "The Shining" make their appearances here, from the elevator full of blood to the creepy twin girls in the hallway - so I guess the more things change, the more they remain the same.  Nobody's re-decorated the hotel or improved any of the services since the 1980's, so feel free to give them a bad review.

Going back to a forty-year old film, re-creating sets (either physically or digitally) and deciding whether to re-cast roles, that's a very tricky business.  Collectively, we have the digital technology now to fully re-create the environment of the Overlook Hotel, using CGI.  Somebody has the technical and artistic ability to de-age Jack Nicholson, or put Shelley Duvall's face on the body of another actor - but does that make it a good idea?  Or a filmmaker could use the exact old footage from "The Shining", and after adjusting the screen ratio, frame rates and resolution, they could insert or remove an actor or element, change the wallpaper in the scene, make the whole shot lighter, or darker, essentially change the past to accommodate the new story.  Again, first make sure that this is both a good idea and comes from a place with good intentions.  Now, Jack Nicholson is retired, therefore not available, so bringing him in for a cameo wasn't an option.  The kid who played Danny as a kid grew up (duh), so re-casting and re-shooting those scenes turned out to be the best option - but these all feel like "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choices for a filmmaker.  When re-casting someone to play Jack Torrance, even for a flashback, that actor better capture the essence of what it meant to BE Jack Nicholson in 1980, without going so far as to lapse into parody.  Very tricky, but I think they kind of pulled it off here.  

A couple of other casting notes - Cliff Curtis was my first acting link this year, he was in both "Whale Rider" and "Sunshine", so I kind of already feel like I've come full circle in 2020, even though there are still 23 films left to go.  Danny Lloyd, who played the young Danny Torrance in "The Shining", appears here as a spectator at a baseball game, and if that dying hospice patient looks a bit familiar, Nicholas Pryor played Tom Cruise's father in "Risky Business", among other roles.  And Bruce Greenwood, Henry Thomas and Carel Struycken were all in "Gerald's Game", another Stephen King-based film that I watched last year, which came from the same director. 

I'm going through all the little Easter eggs now, like the fact that at one point in the film, Dan is seen reading the same issue of Playgirl magazine that his father was seen reading in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's film.  And the office where Dan has his interview for the nursing home job is an exact re-creation of the one his father sat in when he accepted the caretaker job at the start of "The Shining".  I did recognize this, because I watched the documentary "Room 237" and it was detailed there how funky and impossibly constructed that room is.  Symbolically, this could mean, even on an unconscious level, that Dan finds himself in similar situations as his father, and is trying to make better choices, a theme that's also reflected in the hotel bar scene.  

The director probably hid a few dozen other homages and callbacks here, and I love all that stuff.  If I've got a free day this month, I should probably re-watch "The Shining", I mean it has been ten years.  Honestly, I don't know how other people get through life without being able to consult their blogs to figure out when, exactly, they watched a particular movie.  Just me?

Also starring Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Sunshine"), Carl Lumbly, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind (last seen in "Movie 43"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Jocelin Donahue, Robert Longstreet (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Carel Struycken (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Henry Thomas (ditto), James Flanagan (ditto), Alex Essoe, Zackary Momoh, Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "Wonder"), Catherine Parker, Met Clark, Selena Anduze (last seen in "Venom"), Violet McGraw, Bethany Anne Lind (last seen in "Flight"), Sadie Helm (last seen in "Carol"), KK Helm (ditto), Sallye Hooks (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Michael Monks (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Hugh Maguire (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Roger Dale Floyd, Dakota Hickman, George Mengert, Chelsea Talmadge, with cameos from Danny Lloyd (last seen in "Filmworker"), Nicholas Pryor (last seen in "The Bachelor") and archive footage of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Dooley Wilson. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of Jack Daniels