Dr Sleep - Sequel to Kings Shining and set to be film (1 Viewer)

[zeetes]

Yes you do.

only because i have exquisite taste which absolutely, positively, and ultimately proves that i only judge by not how hot they are, but only by how horny they make me.

 

[Zack Lee]

So I finally saw this. I forgot to bring it back up but right after I started this thread, I read the book. I read it in about 4 days; the quickest I have read a book in a long time. Because it was the best King story I read in a really long time.

Much like the Shinning, the book version and movie version took different paths. This time the movie was actually darker.
It was fun to stay at the Overlook again. Both ways. Highly recommend

 

[Saint Jack]

So I finally saw this. I forgot to bring it back up but right after I started this thread, I read the book. I read it in about 4 days; the quickest I have read a book in a long time. Because it was the best King story I read in a really long time.

Much like the Shinning, the book version and movie version took different paths. This time the movie was actually darker.
It was fun to stay at the Overlook again. Both ways. Highly recommend

I just rewatched it the other day. I still like The Shining better, but for a sequel made four decades after the original, it isn’t bad.

 

[Saintman2884]

I watched Doctor Sleep and the biggest, overriding impression it left on me was: Was Danny's father Jack really that bad of a guy? It seems like his son took up a lot of his father's bad habits, if not some worser ones, for most of his adult life until he finally hit rock bottom in 2011 and decided to move to New England, get an AA sponsor, clean up and get off booze and drugs and stay that way until sinister, supernatural outside forces made him confront many of the same demons his father faced working over the winter as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel trying to write a novel before he gradually lost his mind, sanity, his family and then his life.

When Danny gets a medal celebrating 8 years of sobriety, he talks about his father in a very unexpected, positive light as a man who was an accomplished academic, intelligent, smart, tried to be a good husband and father but had a terrible weakness for alcohol that led him down a dark, evil road that even he couldn't imagined how it ended up.

Was Jack Torrance really a bad, evil person or just a frustrated academic, bothered by a lack of apparent success and social mobility, allowed his weaknesses for alcohol allow him to be ultimately corrupted by an unimaginable, malignant, ghostly presence in the one place he never should have stepped into, much less gotten a job there as a caretaker?

His problems, initially, if you read the Shining or watch the movie versions, weren't as extreme or out-of-control as his son Danny's were throughout first part of Doctor Sleep. I suppose Danny's Shining telepathic skills and his wanting to avoid them made his behavior sort of understandable.

In a way, Jack Torrance reminds me a little of Pop Terrell, one of King's other literary characters and featured prominently by Tim Robbins in Season 2 of Castle Rock on Hulu. Their complex, multi-faceted personalities who make their money or reputations in organized crime or in the grey area of business. Pop Terrell served in Somalia, as shown in flashbacks of Castle Rock Season 2, and he made a terribly tragic judgement call killing two Somali suspected militants and felt awful about it afterwards but tried to make it right in his own way by adopting a large group of Somali war-torn refugees into his Maine hometown and adopting the two children of the Somali militants he killed, raising them as his own. It's just whatever good they tried to achieve always got blown up in their faces by the particular circumstances they lived or worked around, like running a local organized crime outfit or in Jack Torrances case, having a weakness for alcohol.

But they weren't inherently evil, despicable psychopath King villains like Pennywise, Randall Flagg, or greedy, hypocritical butt crevasses like Warden Norton in Shawshank Redemption.

 

[Zack Lee]

I watched Doctor Sleep and the biggest, overriding impression it left on me was: Was Danny's father Jack really that bad of a guy? It seems like his son took up a lot of his father's bad habits, if not some worser ones, for most of his adult life until he finally hit rock bottom in 2011 and decided to move to New England, get an AA sponsor, clean up and get off booze and drugs and stay that way until sinister, supernatural outside forces made him confront many of the same demons his father faced working over the winter as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel trying to write a novel before he gradually lost his mind, sanity, his family and then his life.

When Danny gets a medal celebrating 8 years of sobriety, he talks about his father in a very unexpected, positive light as a man who was an accomplished academic, intelligent, smart, tried to be a good husband and father but had a terrible weakness for alcohol that led him down a dark, evil road that even he couldn't imagined how it ended up.

Was Jack Torrance really a bad, evil person or just a frustrated academic, bothered by a lack of apparent success and social mobility, allowed his weaknesses for alcohol allow him to be ultimately corrupted by an unimaginable, malignant, ghostly presence in the one place he never should have stepped into, much less gotten a job there as a caretaker?

His problems, initially, if you read the Shining or watch the movie versions, weren't as extreme or out-of-control as his son Danny's were throughout first part of Doctor Sleep. I suppose Danny's Shining telepathic skills and his wanting to avoid them made his behavior sort of understandable.

In a way, Jack Torrance reminds me a little of Pop Terrell, one of King's other literary characters and featured prominently by Tim Robbins in Season 2 of Castle Rock on Hulu. Their complex, multi-faceted personalities who make their money or reputations in organized crime or in the grey area of business. Pop Terrell served in Somalia, as shown in flashbacks of Castle Rock Season 2, and he made a terribly tragic judgement call killing two Somali suspected militants and felt awful about it afterwards but tried to make it right in his own way by adopting a large group of Somali war-torn refugees into his Maine hometown and adopting the two children of the Somali militants he killed, raising them as his own. It's just whatever good they tried to achieve always got blown up in their faces by the particular circumstances they lived or worked around, like running a local organized crime outfit or in Jack Torrances case, having a weakness for alcohol.

But they weren't inherently evil, despicable psychopath King villains like Pennywise, Randall Flagg, or greedy, hypocritical butt crevasses like Warden Norton in Shawshank Redemption.

Spoilers


I don’t think Jack was a evil man but he certainly had the makings of not being a good man before they went to the Overlook. He had broken Danny’s arm after all in one of his drunken rages. But he didn’t shine like Danny and simply got swallowed up by the Overlook.


That is the main interesting difference between the book and the movie. In the book of course the Overlook is gone (although the spot still has an evil feel to it) And Danny just gets a glimpse of his father at the end. But he is waiving and is apparently the side of Jack that Danny has fond memories of.


In the movie, Jack has taken on the role of Lloyd and is apparently all Hotel version of Jack. The other main difference is that in the book most of the protagonists survive and the movie got more wow factor by killing them off. I understood them leaving out the grandmother and the fact that Abra and Danny were related because there simply wasn’t enough time to put it in the movie. But the other differences were striking.


King hated the changes in the Shinning movie but the most memorable thing from it to me was the picture at the end where it was clear that Jack had been swallowed by the hotel and showed up in the old picture from the 20s

 

[Zack Lee]

I love that picture. When I first started learning how to play around with photoshop and was trying to put some other King characters in it. I had Pennywise in one of the darkened recesses at the top but can't find the pic now.

here is an interesting question, why isn't Mrs. Massey in the picture? Or is she? Even if her time there was not in the 20s it seems like she should be at the Ball if Jack is.