{"id":258467,"date":"2021-05-25T17:00:59","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T14:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/this-stephen-king-series-misses-the-mark-film\/"},"modified":"2021-05-25T17:00:59","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T14:00:59","slug":"this-stephen-king-series-misses-the-mark-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/this-stephen-king-series-misses-the-mark-film\/","title":{"rendered":"#This Stephen King Series Misses the Mark \u2013 \/Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#This Stephen King Series<\/a> Misses the Mark \u2013 \/Film<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

\"lisey's<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBehind every great man is a great woman,\u201d as the saying goes, and when he wrote\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em><\/strong>, Stephen King<\/strong> wanted to pay tribute to his wife, Tabitha. While King claims the book isn\u2019t a replica of his own personal life, he\u2019s also made it clear that\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> was also, in some ways, Tabitha King\u2019s story. On top of that, the prolific writer has said for years that he wanted to turn Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> into a TV series.<\/p>\n

King finally gets his wish with the App<\/a>le TV+ series\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em>, a maddeningly muddled saga that starts off remarkably strong before going completely downhill. King is on hand to write all the scripts, something he\u2019s never really done before for a TV series, and it shows. There\u2019s nothing episodic here. It\u2019s one sprawling story; a novel uncomfortably stretched across eight episodes.<\/p>\n

When we meet Lisey (pronounced Lee-See<\/em>) Landon (Julianne Moore<\/strong>), she\u2019s been mourning her dead husband Scott (Clive Owen<\/strong>) for two years. Scott was a wildly popular and wildly successful novelist, and Lisey has spent most of her life living in his extra-large shadow. Now, Scott is gone, and Lisey seems to be adrift. She has no real daily routine \u2013 she simply putters around her sprawling estate, or checks in with her sisters, the sassy, no bullshit Darla (Jennifer Jason Leigh<\/strong>, so damn good here with so little to do) and the mentally unstable Amanda (Joan Allen<\/strong>). (Lisey has\u00a0three<\/em> sisters in the novel, but King wisely cuts that down here, proving he\u00a0can<\/em> edit himself, despite what some detractors may claim.)<\/p>\n

When Scott died unexpectedly (how<\/em> he died remains a mystery for most of the series), he left behind a trove of unpublished work. A college professor named\u00a0Dashmiel (Ron Cephas Jones<\/strong>) wants to get his hands on those writings, but Lisey has no interest in giving them to him. Desperate, Dashmiel calls in the wildly unstable ultra Scott Landon fanboy Jim Dooley (Dane DeHaan<\/strong>) to help persuade Lisey to change her mind. The series tries to let Dashmiel off the hook a bit by suggesting he doesn\u2019t fully grasp how dangerous Dooley is when he sends him Lisey\u2019s way, but that\u2019s a crock \u2013 anyone with eyes can see Dooley is bonkers, primarily because DeHaan\u2019s performance is\u00a0extremely<\/em> unhinged. It\u2019s a series of weird tics and odd speech, and while it\u2019s plenty effective \u2013 he\u2019s creepy! \u2013 Dooley also starts to come across as an inhuman caricature rather than a fully-formed person.<\/p>\n

In the midst of all this, Lisey\u2019s sister Amanda has a nervous breakdown and ends up in a mental hospital, catatonic. These events begin to trigger memories in Lisey \u2013 memories she buried so deep that it\u2019s almost like she has amnesia. This process of remembering allows director\u00a0Pablo Larra\u00edn<\/strong> and his team of editors to continuously jump back and forth in time. Larra\u00edn\u2019s visual approach to this is fascinating, in the sense that the filmmaker trusts us to understand what\u2019s happening, and when it\u2019s happening. There\u2019s no trickery; no dissolves or sound effects to signal the shift. Instead, the past and present roll into each other like waves coming in and out. This approach initially tricks the viewer into thinking\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> is better than it is.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big Stephen King fan, and I\u2019ve seen every Stephen King adaptation under the sun, so it was a wonderful treat to watch the first two episodes of\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> absolutely convinced I was watching, if not the\u00a0best<\/em> King adaptation ever, at least one of the most interesting. These first two episodes strongly resemble\u00a0Larra\u00edn\u2019s excellent film\u00a0Jackie<\/em>, another story about a widow reckoning with the loss and legacy of her famous husband.<\/p>\n

But then the cracks began to show, and it became very clear that a TV series was probably not the best approach to\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em>. King and\u00a0Larra\u00edn would\u2019ve been better off cutting this down to maybe four parts, or even just a movie, rather than an eight-episode saga that\u2019s so poorly paced it starts to border on unwatchable. Part of watching\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> involves getting sucked into the story\u2019s mythology, which means there\u2019s a\u00a0lot<\/em> of exposition going on here. Too much of it, in fact. And it starts to get repetitive.
\nHere\u2019s the catch: Amanda isn\u2019t just catatonic. She\u2019s actually lost in a magical land known as Boo\u2019ya Moon \u2013 yes, that\u2019s really the name, and it\u2019s one of several annoyingly cutesy phrases that King throws out here. Scott always calls Lisey \u201cBabyluv.\u201d Scott designs a scavenger hunt for Lisey, but he calls it a \u201cBool Hunt,\u201d which results in the word \u201cBool\u201d being said, or written, over and over again. And the land of Boo\u2019ya Moon is haunted by a towering monster known as a Long Boy. The design of this creature \u2013 a behemoth with a body comprised entirely of writhing, screaming human beings \u2013 is admittedly scary, but every time you get close to being frightened you remember this thing is called a Long Boy<\/em>, and all effectiveness goes out the damn window.<\/p>\n

Lisey knows about\u00a0Boo\u2019ya Moon, but she claims she believed it was a made-up place \u2013 somewhere that Scott and his older brother Paul would pretend to escape to in order to get away from their crazy, abusive father. But no, it turns out Boo\u2019ya Moon is real, and you can get there with the help of running water. The water angle is actually established pretty quickly \u2013 we see flashbacks where Lisey walks into a room where Scott is supposed to be, only to find water running and Scott missing. The minute Lisey turns off the water, Scott appears, as if by magic. So far, so good. It doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense, but it doesn\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, King\u2019s scripts are working\u00a0really<\/em> hard to hammer this home, to the point where we actually get an entire episode where Lisey has a series of flashbacks that teach her a lesson. That lesson: use water to get to Boo\u2019ya Moon. But again: we (and Lisey) already knew that! It\u2019s been established! We do not need a full episode explaining it further. Moments like this underline that\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> isn\u2019t meant to be binge-watched \u2013 it\u2019s unfolding weekly. And yet, King and\u00a0Larra\u00edn haven\u2019t made an episodic series. They\u2019ve just told one big story broken across eight parts, so much so that some episodes don\u2019t even have real endings \u2013 they just cut to black and then the next episode picks right back up where we left off. This leads to serious pacing problems, and\u00a0Larra\u00edn attempts to compensate with flashbacks upon flashbacks upon flashbacks, like a labyrinthine puzzle box. The monotony is occasionally broken by bursts of graphic violence, like when Dooley tortures Lisey with a pizza cutter of all things (that may sound a tad silly, but it\u2019s genuinely unnerving to watch).<\/p>\n

While the constant blend of past and present seems neat and even fascinating it first, it begins to bog the series down. By constantly moving back in time,\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em> begins to lose momentum. And there are long,\u00a0looooong<\/em> stretches devoted to revealing Scott\u2019s incredibly traumatic childhood that suck all the life out of the show.<\/p>\n

As you might notice, we\u2019re talking a lot about Scott here, and that\u2019s another problem. This might be called\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story<\/em>, but nearly every moment of the show is devoted to Scott. When we spend time with Lisey after Scott\u2019s death, pretty much the only thing she talks about is Scott. The mysteries she\u2019s trying to unlock aren\u2019t her mysteries \u2013 they\u2019re Scott\u2019s. A case could be made that Lisey hasn\u2019t learned to let Scott go yet, and that\u2019s why he occupies so much of this narrative. But while that may work on the printed page, where we can really get into Lisey\u2019s head, it doesn\u2019t work in live-action. Lisey feels like a supporting player at every turn.
\nMoore, one of our finest actors, is oddly lukewarm here. She nails the raw emotion, and her interactions with Leigh are fun in a bickering sibling way. But there are also times when Moore seems like she can\u2019t fully commit herself to this material \u2013 there\u2019s a moment where she\u2019s meant to scream in rage and pain, and it comes across as half-hearted. Perhaps a bad take mistakenly found its way into the final cut. Perhaps this entire adaptation was a mistake. Oh well, we\u2019ll always have\u00a0Boo\u2019ya Moon, Babyluv.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Lisey\u2019s Story will debut\u00a0globally with the first two episodes on Friday, June 4, 2021<\/strong>, followed by one new episode weekly, every Friday, exclusively on Apple TV+.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#This Stephen King Series Misses the Mark \u2013 \/Film” \u201cBehind every great man is a great woman,\u201d as the saying goes, and when he wrote\u00a0Lisey\u2019s Story, Stephen King wanted to pay tribute to his wife, Tabitha. While King claims the book isn\u2019t a replica of his own personal life, he\u2019s also made it clear that\u00a0Lisey\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":258468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/d13ezvd6yrslxm.cloudfront.net\/wp\/wp-content\/images\/liseys-story-review.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1568,1522,16211,82975,1570,26017,105410,20973,24783,25709],"class_list":["post-258467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-featured-stories-sidebar","tag-adaptation","tag-appletv","tag-clive-owen","tag-features","tag-julianne-moore","tag-liseys-story","tag-pablo-larrain","tag-stephen-king","tag-tv-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}