Tag Archives: The Dark Tower

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A review of the “Westworld” pilot (2016)

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Blog Correspondent Pete Harrison suggested I give the Westworld” series (2016) a try, and I’m damn glad he did.  The first episode was superb, and it’s safe to say it’s reeled me in.  I’d give the pilot a 9 out of 10; this seems like it could be the best science fiction television show I’ve seen in a long time.

I still think the premise is just slightly cheesy — grown men and women spending a fortune to visit a western-themed amusement park with interactive android cowboys.  (I think maybe westerns were a more mainstream genre in 1973, when Michael Crichton’s original film was in theaters.)  And there are times when the show’s central western-themed motifs are a little annoying to me … even though I know the park is supposed to appear superficial and cliche.

But “Westworld” is a highly intelligent thriller — it looks like a hell of a lot of thought went into the script.  Just about every aspect of the show seems like it was well developed — everything from the actors’ performances to the set design.  And don’t let the gorgeous, idyllic, sunny landscapes fool you — there is no shortage of pathos here.  It’s brutally dark in its storytelling.  (By the way, if you happen to be a fan of this show, I must recommend 2014’s “Ex Machina” film — it is similarly cerebral and dark in its outlook.)

Anthony Hopkins is fantastic, as usual; Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton are all very good.  They’re all overshadowed here, though, by two stellar performances.

The first is Ed Harris as a black-clad psychopathic visitor to the park — I had no idea he could be so frightening.  Dear God.  Has he played bad guys before?  I’ve always associated him with nice-guy roles — even his antagonist in 1996’s “The Rock” was misguided and sympathetic.  I’d love to see him get a role in an upcoming “The Dark Tower” film, maybe as one of the Big Coffin Hunters, if they are ever featured.

The second is Louis Herthum, the ostensible “father” of Wood’s heroine.  (They are both androids within the park — I don’t think that’s much of a spoiler, as it’s all over the show’s advertising.)  Herthum may be a lesser known actor, but he stole the show in a tour-de-force performance, in my opinion.  And that’s no small feat in a cast including Hopkins and this surprisingly vicious Harris.  I haven’t seen a performance that good on television since NBC’s “Hannibal” went off the air.

Anyway, I noticed something funny here.  Steven Ogg plays a bandit who invades people’s homes and murders them … this is basically the same role he plays as Negan’s chief henchman on “The Walking Dead.”  It must be weird to be typecast like that.

Hey … it is only just now that I realized the logo below is a riff on Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man.”

 

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“Say thank ya.”

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Two really good buddies of mine brainstormed with me today in New York about our plans for an eventual road trip to Maine.  I’m posting this as a little incentive for us to firm up our plans in the coming months.

Our “Three Musketeers” thing worked out quite awesomely when we last headed north together, on a trip to Rhode Island maybe … 12 years ago?  Tempus fugit.  We’re long overdue for another adventure.

I’m not clear about whether “Say thank ya” is actually said in Maine.  It is the vernacular for much of “Mid-World,” one of the many parallel universes depicted in Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” novels.  And it is correctly quoted — it’s separate from the  “Thankee, Sai” formal expression that we more often hear in the world of Roland Deschain.

 

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West 34th Street today and views of the NYC skyline.

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I never claimed to be a famous photographer.  (Okay, once I actually did claim to be a famous photographer, but I was twentysomething and hitting on an amazing girl in one of Long Island’s tawdrier bars “out east.”  Was it … Bawdy Barn?)

If my inelegant eye doesn’t put you off too much, then enjoy these shots of West 34th Street today and the NYC skyline.  (I regret not getting a shot of the Freedom Tower.)

A quick thanks to the U. S. Army for making me feel safer in Penn Station, really.  Those guys look tough as nails, and just as sharp.  They were visibly scanning every passerby right in the middle of the station, a task I can’t imagine is easy.  But they were at the top of their game.

Hey Stephen King fans — you see that poorly taken snaphot that is second to last?  That’s none other than the NYC entrance to The Lincoln Tunnel.  Our good friend Larry Underwood had a particularly hard time entering and traversing that tunnel, didn’t he?  (It was much easier for me, as I inhabit a different level of The Tower.)

“Baby, can you dig your man?”

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RUSSIA.

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You know a country is badass when its poets look like goddam gunfighters.

Below is Vladimir Mayakovsky at age 20.

My first thought when I turned this up (strangely enough, on an unrelated Google search) was “Roland of Gilead.” Mayakovsky actually was an actor.  If he were alive today, maybe he could be cast in the upcoming “Dark Tower” movie adaptation.

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A review of “Parallels” (2015)

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First, a clarification — “Parallels” (2015) is absolutely not a feature film; it’s an undisguised attempt at a pilot for an ongoing web-based series.  I think it’s pretty cruddy of Netflix to market it as a standalone film, as viewers expecting a conclusive story will doubtless be disappointed.  Its parallel universe-hopping premise also seems so similar to “Sliders” (1995-1999) that it just might approach the boundary between inspiration and ripoff.

With that said, however … dear LORD!!!  “Parallels” was frikkin’ FANTASTIC.  What we’ve got here is a far edgier, grownup version of “Sliders,” with a first episode introducing the same type of show-spanning mysteries as “Lost.”  But where “Sliders” was milquetoast primetime family fare, this looks like an excellent serialized thriller with plenty of pathos.

What a shame this thoughtful series never reached fruition.  I was hooked.  It’s smartly written by Christopher Leone; he’s visibly well acquainted with string theory, and has a hell of a lot of clever fun with it.  “Parallels” is a face-paced 80 minutes that follows a tragic, dysfunctional modern family embroiled in the mystery of the plot-driving “Building.”  The Building appears to be the nexus of countless parallel universes, a bit like the “The Dark Tower” links them in Stephen King’s multiverse.  The cast is uniformly good; the standouts were Eric Jungmann as the comic relief and Michael Monks as an understated but terrific bad guy.

I had only a few tiny quibbles.  Some of the family melodrama and the mysteries were a little forced and heavy-handed.  The ending (?) here, while really intriguing, also borrows a page or two from “Cube” (1997) and one particularly good episode of Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica” (2004-2009).

I’m not sure how to rate this.  It fails as a standalone film, I think, because it simply doesn’t have an ending.  I suppose I’d give it … a 4 out of 10?  If you can forgive that fatal flaw, however, and want to enjoy some top-shelf science fiction, then I’d easily give it a 9 out of 10.

Dammit.  Why wasn’t this show made?

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That wicked cool moment when “The Gunslinger” reminds you of W. H. Auden.

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The following is from Auden’s “The Third Temptation,” part of “The Quest.”

He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say,
Re-opened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey,

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:
“All the arm-chair philosophies are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;
The song of mercy is the Devil’s Waltz.”

And the quote below is from Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger.”

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“The Quest” actually contains a bunch of key images reminiscent of King’s series.  We can easily conclude that these are coincidental, as they serve different thematic purposes.  But it’s still fun to spot the common images.

You can find the entirety of “The Quest” right here:

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/wh-auden/the-quest-5/

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The Dude would not abide …

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So an old college pal wrote to me the other day to ask for advice on which recent Stephen King novel he might check out.  He told me that he was interested in something more mainstream horror.  He said he enjoyed King more before the author “got into all the dark tower stuff and a wondering dude.”  I steered my friend away from “Joyland” and toward “Mr. Mercedes.”

But I love that typo.  A “wondering dude” immediately makes me think “The Dude” from “The Big Lebowski” wandering around Mid-world, befuddled, after accidentally stepping through an inter-dimensional door.  He’d have a “beverage” in one hand and a WTF expression on his face.

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“My first thought was, he lied in every word …”

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“My first thought was, he lied in every word,
“That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
“Askance to watch the workings of his lie
“On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
“Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
“Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.”

—  From Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

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Did NBC’s “Hannibal” reference Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series?!

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[WARNING — THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASONS 2 AND 3 OF “HANNIBAL,” AS WELL AS STEPHEN KING’S “THE DARK TOWER” SERIES.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]

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This could be overeager nerd eisigesis, but something jumped out at me immediately in the second episode of this summer’s “Hannibal.”

When Will Graham greets Abigail Hobbes at the beginning, he wonders about “some other world.”

The doomed young Abigail responds:  “I’m having a hard enough time dealing with this world.  I hope some of the other worlds are easier.”

That’s “worlds,” plural — not “another world” or “the next world.”  It sounds a hell of a lot like the doomed Jake Chambers’ famous line towards the end of “The Gunslinger,” before he falls to his fate:  “Go then.  There are other worlds than these.”

Graham goes on the discuss string theory: “Everything that can happen, happens.”  This dovetails perfectly with the idea of the nearly infinite parallel universes that comprise different levels of “The Tower.”

Then other story parallels occurred to me:

1)  Both Abigail and Jake are children of surrogate fathers who are on a crusade (Graham’s pursuit of Hannibal Lecter, the Gunslinger’s quest for The Tower).

2)  Both are specialized, cold-blooded killers by training (Abigail’s bizarre tutelage by her serial killer biological father, Jake’s training by the Gunslinger).

3)  Both are willingly sacrificed by their surrogate fathers.  (NBC’s show makes it clear that Hannibal is also a father figure to Abigail.)

4)  Both characters were sacrificed by the show’s/book’s title character.

5)  The memories of both haunt the stories’ protagonists as a recurring motif.  Both appear to drive the heroes insane.

6)  Both characters are ostensibly dead at some point, and then are quasi-resurrected by a surprise plot device.  (Abigail has been secreted away by Hannibal; Jake is returned from a parallel universe to which he was consigned.)

7)  The loss of both characters are tied to themes of forgiveness.  (Jake forgives the Gunslinger for letting him fall; Graham explicitly forgives Hannibal for Abigail’s loss as part of the show’s overarching theme.)

It would be fun and perfectly viable to imagine that the show’s events transpire on a “level” of The Tower.  The differing continuities of the original books and feature films could even comprise other levels.  King makes it clear that “twinners” are character analogs living in different universes.

But I am probably just imagining things.  I also thought that Hannibal’s reference to his “person suit” in this season’s first episode was a reference to “Donnie Darko” (2001): “Why do you wear that silly man suit?”  And, in retrospect, that seems like a coincidence.

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I want this framed.

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I am not so intense a fan that I need to pursue the first editions, but I would eventually love to have certain artwork in my home.

“The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.”

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