first, did the proposed Anne Rice “haunted hospital” program ever get made or aired?
Now to the topic, I saw most of the first The Kingdom on IFC &, I think, Cinemax or HBO also aired it. I haven’t seen the second except for a little of the first episode. Anyway, I did enjoy it, finding it alternately spooky & funny & touching- and I am expecting to be pulled in even more by the Stephen King adaptation.
I notice the book tie-in- THE JOURNALS OF ELEANOR DRUSE is on the racks now. Anyone know if King wrote that or just authorized it? Also, what our your expectations for it?
oh yes- "exorcism sticks’?!?
I haven’t seen the show yet, but I saw the book in the store.
I’m a bit suspicious. It sounds like an interesting story, but so did Rose Red. Is his name actually on the book? I won a copy of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer and knew early in the book that it wasn’t his writing. It didn’t surprise me at all to find out that it really wasn’t his work.
I really love King’s books, but I was really disappointed by Rose Red. It was such a promising idea and they completely blew it, and there wasn’t even a decent King book to redeem it.
Well, Astra, if it’s any consolation, Rose Red wasn’t Stephen King’s idea anyway: he stole it whole cloth from Shirley Jackson.
I dread King’s destruction of “The Kingdom” like I have dreaded few things in my life. A great, multilayered piece of work by arguably the most important and revolutionary feature filmmaker working today, it can only be dulled and dimmed by King’s literal mind and his tiny universe. If I had a rocket launcher . . .
Meh. I love The Kingdom, and anything else that Lars Von Trier is remotely connected to.
I don’t expect to even bother looking at a made-for-American TV interpretation. If it were being developed for theatrical release, I’d consider it, but I’d still have serious reservations.
The original is just too perfect. Why mess with it? Who could you possibly get to play a character like Helmer? I have doubts that the project will attract an actor of Ernst-Hugo Järegård’s calibre, and profound doubts that the character could even be transliterated with any degree of success. I’m assuming that King’s hospital will be in Maine-- so we’ll have an arrogant but incompetent specialist from Wisconsin, up on the rooftop screaming to the heavens about his anticipation of the glorious day when the Badgers nuke the the Pelicans?
What about the psychically-attuned kitchen help? How will that be approached? My intuition is that casting actors who actually have Down’s syndrome is still too edgy for American television, and that they’ll shy away from it out of fear of being accused of being exploitive. Maybe we’re beyond that by now, after the compelling performances in I Am Sam, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that they’ll either leave them out altogether or stick us with an embarasssing and insulting pantomime of the sort they settled for in the interpretation of Tom Cullen’s character in the TV version of The Stand. Bleah.
Okay, I’ll probably peek at it, if only out of morbid curiosity. I expect something about as solid as The Langoliers – but who knows? Maybe it will only suck as much as the made-for-tv version of Carrie.
Thanks, John-- I’m always glad to have my pessimistic assumptions challenged. (I see he worked on another TV series and a couple of made-for-TV movies, too.)
Seriously, though, those sombre, matter-of-fact observations, from folks hidden away in the bowels of the hospital, are some of my favourite moments in the series. I imagine that they will resonate with King pretty well, too. (I’m thinking of “Dudits” in Dreamcatcher, which, now that I think of it, worked pretty well on the page but was less-than-satisfying as interpreted by Donnie Wahlberg.)
God, I’ve got to sit down with The Kingdom again soon-- the memory is fading. I’ve got it on VHS, but it’s been four or five years since I screened it. There’s one dimly-remembered part where the dishwasher guy says something along the lines of “When people cry, ???, but what do ??? when buildings cry?” which struck me as particularly effective. Can’t believe I can’t remember it now. Argh.
Okay, who am I kidding? Of course I’ll look at this interpretation. Sure, it might end up being similar to my experience of the remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which I found too inept to get all the way through, but I’m going to have to at least look.
Another thing I’m curious about is how they will handle the climax of the first series. [Treading carefullly here to avoid spoilers] I’m thinking about how the taboo against all things gynecological spoilt one of the most powerful scenes in Carrie, in the TV version. (Changing “Plug it up! Plug it up!” to the pointlessly genteel “Period! Period!” and putting all those feral girls at a “safe” distance outside the shower stall.) How will they portray that jaw-dropping final scene in The Kingdom without sanitizing it to death? That scene is probably the most starkly terrifying thing I’ve ever seen on television. The combination of the believable documentary-style presentation and the impossible absurdity of the supernatural embellishment of something that’s already tense as hell-- :shudder:
Spoiler for anyone who wants one:A woman’s freakishly accelerated pregnancy ends with her being rushed into the delivery room just in time for a full grown man to claw his way out of the birth canal. AAAAAAAAAGH!
I went ahead and ordered myself a copy, even though 1) I don’t have a region free DVD player, and 2) I don’t have a PAL DVD player OR TV set. I figure I ought to be able to figure out some way around that; getting a region free player (or converting my current player) doesn’t seem like it should be a problem, but I’m not sure about the PAL. Maybe I ought to start a new thread on this, but I figure I’ll ask here first anyway. I hear some of the newer DVD players (some Apex and SMC) can convert PAL to NTSC. A few questions, if anyone can help me out: Can these players do the conversion on the fly? If so, are they automatically adjusted for speed problems as well (is the playback during conversion too fast)? And does anyone know of any specific models that can do the conversion? If the PAL conversion doesn’t pan out as well as I hoped for, in general, are the newer American 16:9 HDTVs PAL compatible? I’d really appreciate if anyone can help me out here, or offer any other suggestions that’ll let me watch these movies again!
As for the King remake, yeah, I’ll probably check out the first two hour episode (at least the start, we’ll see if I feel like sitting through the whole two hours). If it’s any good, I may continue to watch the series, but I really can’t imagine it coming anywhere close to the originals; along with Pulp Fiction, these are my favorite movies from the 90’s. As someone else mentioned on IMDB, the only good I can possibly see coming from this is if King follows the original von Trier storyline; at least that way I can finally see how it’s supposed to end (as it doesn’t look like the original series will ever be finished).
I loves me some Von Trier Kingdom epic. Seen all eight hours on the big screen. Talk about having your brain pulled out your ear and gleefully fellated by a Cthonian hooker.
There is no Stephen King television adaptation. Repeat after me. There is no…
The first time I saw it I was literally on the edge of my seat, my eyes and my jaw wide open. I wish he had made Kingdom III and tied everything up. Kingdom II really left me wanting more.
You do know that the reason it was never made was the sad fact that Ernst-Hugo Järegård (Helmer) and Kirsten Rolffes (Drusse) both died before they could make the third series, right?
At the time I thought it appropriate for The Kingdom to be left unresolved like that, but knowing Trier it would probably have been worthwhile. Certainly more so than Stephen King’s version. I, for one, won’t be watching.
Yup, that’s right. He and King are in the not-so-hot rock band The Rock Bottom Remainders together; for those who may not know, this is a rock band composed solely of authors, who have little or no claim to musical talent. The band also features Dave Barry and Amy Tan. (Sorry. I went into Who Wants To Be a Millionaire mode there for a moment.
I’d heard that one of the kitchen staff had died. I didn’t hear about Ernst-Hugo Järegård (Helmer) and Kirsten Rolffes (Drusse). I’d also heard that von Trier got involved in other projects and just didn’t get around to The Kingdom III, and the death of (as I heard) one of the actors made it unlikely that it would be revisited.
Still, I think that audiences would accept replacement actors; understanding that dead people tend to be unavailable for roles. And the cliffhanger at the end of The Kingdom II really begs for one more series. It’s as if Peter Jackson had made Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, and then never made The Return of the King.
I am really looking forward to Kingdom Hospital coming out. I think it’s genius that King wrote himself and his terrible accident into the first show. Ideas like this will hopefully makes this show a big time winner.
Does anyone know why it’s not starting until the first week of March, now? First it was going to be in November of 2003 (when it was announced over a year ago) then next month, now March…
I’m looking forward to this a lot. I’ve been told that the orginal is really great, but I’ve only seen a few minutes of it because a. I realized it was on, the one time it aired on a channel I get, half way through it. b. even tuning in anyway I had trouble keeping track of the action and the subtitled dialogue at the same time, so I gave up. However, I’m prepared to find it disappointing, since the people claiming it’s really “scary” said the same thing about The Ring. (ha!)
<minor hijack>
Has anyone else checked out Stephen King’s imdb page lately? Bag of Bones and The Talisman are both on there, one as announced, one as pre-production. Given they’re two of my favorites, I’m worried. They’ll either be really good, or terrible. It’s hard to be hopeful after some of the adaptations of his works…
</minor hijack>
Speilberg is producing The Talisman, so I think that oughtta be pretty good. I never heard of Hospital coming out in Nov. Check this link out: Clips. There is some great footage on the fifth floor. It looks really cool.
It’s not really scary, per se; I’d say a better adjective is that it’s unnerving. Over the course of the four hours each half lasts, the story stays just off-center enough to be interesting, but just normal enough (like a warped episode of E/R) to lull you into a false sense of security. Occasionally there’s a little zapper (e.g., a reveal of a young girl in an unexpected location) that makes your hair stand up, but that’s about it. However, in the last twenty minutes of the four hours, things build to a rather spooky climax, with a slam-bang finale, that leaves you not scared but unsettled. It’s very effective at getting under your skin and making you feel that Not All is Right with the World.
Take with a huge grain of salt any IMDb entry for a film listed as being in pre-production. Their database is user-driven, i.e. their staff approves submissions from ordinary people based on personal knowledge or limited vetting, which means it’s rife with errors and improperly-leaped-to conclusions. Films that are in active production or that have been released tend to have fairly accurate entries, because the prodcos have a vested interest in correct information, but the data for movies that are supposedly in some early stage of development tend to reflect fan speculation and media rumor as much as solid fact. Re Talisman, I understand that Vadim Perelman (who made his debut with House of Sand and Fog) has been tapped as director, but to my knowledge there’s neither a cast nor a finished script, which means it’s just as likely the project will go back on the shelf as move forward.
It looks like the article mentioning Nov has been updated off of Stephen King.com but here are press releases about it from back in 2001 (bottom of the page) and 2002 mentioning it was supposed to have been out last fall. http://www.liljas-library.com/kingdom.html
Thanks for the Nov. info. I guess I didn’t realize that. I am reading the journals right now that King"wrote" and I can see how this show is going to be formulated. I think it’s gonna be real different than most shows, which in my opinion is a good thing. Ain’t nothing like adding a little spice to the network programming.
