A Stephen King adaptation with heart

          

    Hardly a fright fest, The Life of Chuck -- a big-screen adaptation of a Stephen King novella --tells three interrelated stories in reverse order, beginning with the final chapter and working its way back to the start. 

    Life of Chuck might be classed with such big-screen King adaptations such as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. The Life of Chuck isn't as memorable as either of those, but it makes room for scenes with heart, even if it tends to wear its sentiments on its sleeve.

    The stories are connected by a character named  Chuck Krantz, a fellow who appears on TV and billboards during the first segment. "39 Great Years ! Thanks Chuck!," the ads read. Sounds important, but no one knows who Chuck Krantz is. A politician? A salesman? A banker? 

    Director Mike Flanagan, who directed King's Doctor Sleep, reveals more about Krantz as the movie progresses, but The Life of Chuck is less a mystery than a collection of small moments played against a doom-laden backdrop.

     Life of Chuck rests on a thematic cushion that includes stuffing from Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar (an encapsulation of the history of the universe in a single year) and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.  The signature line from  Whitman's poem ("I contain multitudes") is introduced by a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the character who anchors the film's opening chapter.

    Like everyone else, Ejiofor's Marty Anderson is puzzled by the Krantz billboards. Marty also tries to cope with an escalating variety signals that suggest a possible end to ... well ... everything: the demise of the Internet, abandoned cars lining the streets of vacated cities, and massive power outages.

    Blame a mixture of man-made issues and cosmic comeuppance for the fraught condition that threatens humanity. But causes matter less than the way characters behave in the face of impending doom.

    Ejiofor and his estranged wife (Karen Gillan) eventually share a tender scene under a vast night sky, two lonely people facing a looming finality neither can comprehend. 

    The second story features a lively dance number (no, I'm not kidding) in which Tom Hiddleston, as the title character, sheds Chuck's buttoned-up  demeanor. Contrary to what the opening suggests, we learn that Chuck is no man of mystery: An otherwise anonymous accountant, he serves as the film's everyman.

     While attending a convention, Chuck passes a street drummer (Taylor Gordon), a Juilliard dropout who lays down some infectious beats. Chuck begins to dance. Annalise Basso plays a woman who joins the dance, a stranger Chuck pulls from the small crowd of gathered spectators. She becomes his partner in what might be the crowning moment of his life.

    The movie becomes more King-like in the first chapter, really its last. We meet Krantz as a boy, played at various ages by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak, and Jacob Tremblay. Chuck's parents died in an automobile accident, leaving him to live with his grandparents (Mia Sara and Mark Hamill). 

    Not long after arriving in Chuck's grandparents' home, the movie introduces a mystery centered on the cupola that Grandpa, otherwise genial but a bit too fond of alcohol,  keeps locked. The cupola opens the door to a bit of supernatural woo-woo.

     In keeping with the film's more grounded aspirations, Grandma teaches Chuck to dance; later, he must overcome his inhibitions to take the floor at a school dance, the kind of triumph that recalls too many other teen movies.

     I don't want to oversell the Life of Chuck. An over-explanatory narration delivered by Nick Offerman sometimes falls short of eloquence, and the movie loses steam during its coming-of-age conclusion.

     Moreover, The Life of Chuck can't quite bring off its ambitious juxtaposition of cosmic-scale extinction and personal mortality. But in the movie's best moments, Flanagan wisely encourages us to accept the inescapable while still mustering enough spirit to dance.

        

'Doctor Sleep:' a sequel we didn’t need

Ewan McGregor stars in a labored rendition of Stephen King’s follow-up to The Shining.

Perhaps as a way of establishing its bona fides, Doctor Sleep makes what struck me as strained references (I'll reveal no more) to The Shining, the movie it follows some 39 years after its release. I won't say more, but I begin this way because, for me, Doctor Sleep stands as an act of imposture, an attempt wring more from a story that already had been told. Of course, it's difficult to call the movie a ripoff: The movie stems from a 2013 sequel that Shining author Stephen King himself wrote.

In this overlong edition — the movie clocks in at 2 1/2 hours — Ewan McGregor plays a grown-up version of Danny Torrance, the kid from the original movie. Adrift in alcohol and dereliction, Danny winds up in a small New Hampshire town, where he joins AA and tries to make peace with the terrifying visions in his head. He receives help from an AA pal (Cliff Curtis) and from his mentor, played in the original by Scatman Crothers and in the sequel by Carl Lumbly.

To give the movie a plot, Danny hooks up with Abra Stone (Kyliegh Currran), a girl who has mighty shining powers; i.e., she can see things in other dimensions and project herself into distant places without leaving her bedroom. She also sees visions that scare her and are supposed to do the same to us.

The dread, in this case, stems from a traveling band of folks led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), a woman whose extra-long life is sustained by sucking the life out of those with the ability to shine. Zahn McClarnon plays Crow Daddy, Rose’s devoted number two.

Lest the supply of demonic fiends runs short, Rose recruits a young blond woman (Emily Alyn Lind to her evil cause. It doesn’t take long for Lind’s character, who's given the charming nickname of Snakebite Andi, to become as bad as the rest of the group.

What any of this has to do with Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 original seems marginal, although by the end, director Mike Flanagan transports the story to Colorado for a big showdown between Danny and Rose at the fabled Overlook Hotel, which like lots of ‘80s real estate, has become a mere shadow of itself. Danny must save Abra and rid the world of this pesky group of soul-sucking demons.

More muddled than the usual King offering, Doctor Sleep can at times seem ridiculous as it groans under the weight of having to connect with its predecessor. The movie's title, by the way, derives from Danny’s ability to help the aging slip gently into death after he lands a job at a hospice. Just like falling asleep he assures the dying.

Stuck playing a character battling his inner demons, McGregor doesn’t do much to fill the movie’s center. Ferguson, embodying a series of adjectives -- sexy, demonic, vicious and snide — deserves credit for hitting the right notes.

I’m not going to belabor this one. Shining fans seeking a second helping probably will give the movie an initial boost, but even diehards will have to admit that Flanagan (Oculus) doesn’t have Kubrick’s visual sense nor can he imbue his movie with the brooding grandiosity that made the original seem like a major movie.

I don’t know if The Shining should be called a classic, but it still has some sway. This one? Just another day at the multiplex — or maybe considering its length, a day and a half.

Avoiding the worst horror pitfalls

Oculus tries for more than jolts and gore

The idea is both creepy and familiar: A 300-year-old mirror might be the home of an evil spirit that destroys the lives of anyone who owns it.

Oculus -- a movie that director Mike Flanagan expanded from a 2006 short film -- revolves around just such an antique mirror. But Flanagan's movie has sense enough to create mild ambiguity about whether a brother and sister are encountering demonic evil or are simply out of their minds.

Happily, Flanagan avoids many of the worst genre traps, and if his movie doesn't quite scale the highest peaks of terror, it can be seen as a legitimate attempt to add heft to a genre in which the currency of imagination too often is squandered on special effects.

Early in the movie, Tim (Benton Thwaites) is released from a mental institution. He's a young man who experienced a terrible trauma when he was 10.

Upon re-entering the sane world, Tim reunites with his older sister Kaylie, played by Karen Gillan of Dr. Who fame.

Kaylie acquires the mirror that once belonged to her father, and brings Tim to the home where their parents (Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackoff) died. Better to discover the rest in a theater.

Tension arises because Tim, having been prepped by his psychiatrist, thinks everything has a rational explanation. Kaylie, on the other hand, is determined to prove that the mirror was responsible for the violence that became part of her family's increasingly twisted life.

To make her case, Kaylie sets up cameras in the home where the mayhem occurred. She hopes to capture the evil spirit on tape.

From that point on, Flanagan mixes scenes from the past and present. Vivid flashbacks spring to life as Tim and Kaylie remember their earlier lives.

Flanagan doesn't entirely eschew gore, but he earns props for leaving some of the horror to our imaginations and for gaining increasing command over the movie's flashbacks -- segments from the past in which Garrett Ryan and Annalise Basso play young Tim and Kaylie.

If you're bothered by seeing children in danger, Oculus may not be the horror movie for you.

The idea of using demonic forces to explain evil can be comforting. Demons put evil outside the human realm, creating an opportunity for supernatural rationalization: "The demon made me do it."

I'm not sure that Oculus moves far enough away from that sort of thing to make it truly distinctive, but much of the time, it's headed in the right direction.

A few words with Mike Flanagan


Q: Oculus represents your second horror movie after 2012's Absentia. What's the attraction of the genre?

Flanagan: For a movie to really connect with a wide audience, it has to tap into something universal. There's hardly an emotion that isn't present in horror.

Also, when we look at the world and experience evil, we have an intense need to try to explain it.
We mediate evil in our fictions. That's what appeals about horror. It's a safe laboratory in which to explore these kinds of issues. We need that space. At the end of the day, it's more about feeling safe than feeling scared.
Q: How difficult was it to expand a short into a full-length feature?
Flanagan: It was incredibly daunting. It took us seven years to get rolling on the feature.
Q: Can you say something about influences on your work?
Flanagan: For me, it was The Shining and The Ring. I'm a big fan of The Eye (a 2008 thriller about a woman who begins seeing supernatural phenomenon after an eye transplant.) That movie used sound to great effect.
Q: In this movie, the parents eventually pose a threat to their kids. I don't want to give away too much, but could you comment on what seems to be a total reversal of the current tendency to indulge children?
Flanagan: Inverting something that's so protective and safe (parenthood) creates a sense of discomfort that goes against our basic instincts. That's way more frightening than torture and gore.
Q: Did dealing with siblings -- both as kids and adults -- and with their parents make for difficult casting?
Flanagan: The first person we cast was Gillan and that made for a red-head requirement with the girl who would play her character in the flashbacks and with the mother. We wanted them to look like a plausible family, but that didn't take precedence over performance.
Q: Was working with kids difficult?
Flanagan: You hear people talking about the difficulty of working with child actors. I didn't have that experience at all. These kids blew me away in their auditions. Intuitively, they snap into a fearless commitment to make believe.
Q: Are you planning to make more horror movies?
Flanagan: I want to play around with other genres, but I think I'll always find my way back to horror.