Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

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DarkImbecile
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Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#1 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu Jun 13, 2019 12:37 pm


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mfunk9786
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Re: Trailers for Upcoming Films

#2 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Jun 13, 2019 2:13 pm

Can this guy make a movie without completely dousing it in blue?

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Persona
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Re: Trailers for Upcoming Films

#3 Post by Persona » Thu Jun 13, 2019 4:31 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:
Thu Jun 13, 2019 2:13 pm
Can this guy make a movie without completely dousing it in blue?
Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: the Ouija prequel wasn't doused in blue at all. Blue wasn't dominant in Before I Wake, either. The color red was more predominant in Gerald's Game. Hush and Oculus did have a fair amount of blue, yes.

The Haunting of Hill House did have some blue filter for the night scenes but the color palette was varied depending on location and drastically different for the daytime scenes. This trailer seems to indicate a similar approach but not as gauzy as Hill House.

I think it looks beautiful.

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Re: Stephen King on Film

#4 Post by Lost Highway » Thu Jun 13, 2019 5:28 pm

Looks like Dr Sleep is as much of a sequel to Kubrick‘s The Shining as it is an adaptations of the novel.

Apparently the only thing which has been re-used from The Shining is the famous elevator/blood shot, the rest of the flashbacks to the Kubrick movie have been recreated.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#5 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Jun 13, 2019 5:33 pm

You can definitely tell, because the shots that look good are from the Kubrick (or recreations of them), and the ones that look like they've been doused in some kind of a deep blue chemical dust are from the sequel

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Big Ben
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#6 Post by Big Ben » Thu Jun 13, 2019 7:51 pm

It'll be interesting to see how much of this is inspired by King's book version, which is very much a sequel to the book version of The Shining and how much of it will ape nostalgia for the film. Seeing the trailer I'm wondering more and more about the latter.

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Finch
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#7 Post by Finch » Thu Jun 13, 2019 8:42 pm

The US cut of The Shining is one of my favourite horror films but Mike Flanagan is one of the best genre directors working today and Ewan McGregor looks well cast. I'm in, and I think anyone not expecting an aesthetic and stylistic carbon copy of Kubrick's film is far more likely to have their expectations met.

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Finch
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#8 Post by Finch » Thu Jun 13, 2019 8:49 pm

Flanagan speaks to Indiewire.
these are all recreations and not just a redux of footage form Kubrick’s film. The only image taken directly from Kubrick’s work is the shot of the bloody elevators.

“Everything else is us,” Flanagan said. “Everything else is our recreation. So I don’t want to spoil to what extent and what specific, outside of what you already got to see, what we have kind of been able to revisit form Kubrick’s world. But I can say that everything that we decided to use, our intention was always to detail and reverence, and making sure that we were doing it properly, with the hope that even the most rabid cinephiles might not be able to tell the difference with some of our frames and some of his.”

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#9 Post by Monterey Jack » Thu Jun 13, 2019 9:33 pm

Finch wrote:
Thu Jun 13, 2019 8:42 pm
The US cut of The Shining is one of my favourite horror films but Mike Flanagan is one of the best genre directors working today and Ewan McGregor looks well cast.
Totally agreed. It's amazing how good his run of films has been in the last decade. Absentia, Oculus, Ouija: Origin Of Evil, Hush, Before I Wake, Gerald's Game and The Haunting Of Hill House...there's not a dud in the bunch. It's an exceptional run of classy horror cinema/TV to rival John Carpenter's 1976-86 heyday. Anything Flanagan makes, I'm there, and to dovetail with the recent resurgence of Stephen King adaptations is doubly exciting.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#10 Post by Robespierre » Thu Jun 13, 2019 10:05 pm

Oh God, they're going to CGI a de-aged version of Jack Nicholson into this movie, aren't they?

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#11 Post by starmanof51 » Thu Jun 13, 2019 10:56 pm

Unless they’re changing the book. You probably at least need his voice

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#12 Post by Monterey Jack » Thu Jun 13, 2019 11:13 pm

They got around showing Nicholson in Ready Player One, so I suspect they'll play peek-a-boo with his likeness here.

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Lost Highway
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#13 Post by Lost Highway » Fri Jun 14, 2019 4:00 am

Like in the novel, the movie of Dr Sleep appears to pick up not long after The Shining because Wendy Torrance and Dick Halloran have been recast with Alex Essoe and Carl Lumbly. Halloran doesn’t die in the novel of The Shining, he saves Wendy and Danny, so there is one point of departure from the Kubrick movie already. If Jack Torrance appears in the movie I’d assume that he too will have been recast, Jack Nicholson is unlikely to come out of retirement for this anyway.

Jacob Tremblay has been cast in an undisclosed role and it’s safe to assume that he will play young Danny. Henry Thomas has been rumoured to appear in the film and in interviews he said he can’t talk about it. He has already played a father troubled by ghosts for Flanagan in The Haunting of Hill House, which in some ways was thematically closer to King’s The Shining than to the Shirley Jackson novel. In addition, we’ll then have another link between Spielberg and The Shining.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#14 Post by Monterey Jack » Fri Jun 14, 2019 8:56 am

Plus, Thomas is a Flanagan favorite.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#15 Post by Persona » Fri Jun 14, 2019 12:59 pm

Lost Highway wrote:
Fri Jun 14, 2019 4:00 am
Like in the novel, the movie of Dr Sleep appears to pick up not long after The Shining because Wendy Torrance and Dick Halloran have been recast with Alex Essoe and Carl Lumbly. Halloran doesn’t die in the novel of The Shining, he saves Wendy and Danny, so there is one point of departure from the Kubrick movie already. If Jack Torrance appears in the movie I’d assume that he too will have been recast, Jack Nicholson is unlikely to come out of retirement for this anyway.

Jacob Tremblay has been cast in an undisclosed role and it’s safe to assume that he will play young Danny. Henry Thomas has been rumoured to appear in the film and in interviews he said he can’t talk about it. He has already played a father troubled by ghosts for Flanagan in The Haunting of Hill House, which in some ways was thematically closer to King’s The Shining than to the Shirley Jackson novel. In addition, we’ll then have another link between Spielberg and The Shining.
Actually Tremblay is playing the baseball boy in the book. You see a glimpse from a distance in the trailer of him getting into the bus, but this is what sources have confirmed, he's that kid.
SpoilerShow
And, man, oof--not exactly looking forward to that storyline, though it does result in the book's most impactful passage.
On IMDB they actually show who is cast as young Danny, can't remember the kid's name.

As far as the scene with young Danny and Dick Halloran in the book's opening, I don't know which way Flanagan went with it bu--depending on how they handle Wendy's involvement in the prologue--there's definitely room for Flanagan to make it ambiguous about whether Danny is communicating with a living, breathing Dick Halloran or Dick Halloran's spirit.
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Can confirm that Henry Thomas will be playing Jack. Jack Torrance, not Jack Nicholson, heh.

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Finch
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#16 Post by Finch » Fri Nov 01, 2019 5:39 pm

Reviews starting to come out, with two C+ grades from Dowd at the AV Club and Ehrlich at Indiewire, and two stars at Slant.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#17 Post by Big Ben » Fri Nov 01, 2019 6:24 pm

Reviews have been out for about a week actually and while it's certainly not glowing it's not outright hostile either. Just okay perhaps? Flanagan's (And King's) heterodoxical approach to a pop culture milestone might been seen by some as inappropriate despite the fact that Kubrick's film is, in fact, the original deviation and I concede that the latter point irks me far more than anything else because quite a few people don't seem to be aware of this. This is the price Flanagan pays I suppose, for even attempting to walk where Kubrick did.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#18 Post by JamesF » Tue Nov 05, 2019 12:03 pm

This was released in time for Halloween in the UK last week, and I saw it last night. At the risk of stating the obvious, one's own allegiance to the book of The Shining versus the film, and Stephen King versus Stanley Kubrick in general (and your opinion of Mike Flanagan for that matter), is inevitably going to colour one's response to this film. Speaking personally, I read The Shining as an impressionable young teenager before I saw the film, and King's response to Kubrick's changes coloured my own in the way that often happens when you're young and taking a formative influence's words to heart. In the years since, I've watched Kubrick's film at least once a year, and liked it a little more on its own terms each time - but I'm still far from declaring it the greatest horror film ever made, by any metric. I haven't seen the 1997 miniseries in 15-20 years and don't remember it well enough to comment on it, though I enjoyed it as a kid and am not as allergic to Mick Garris as some posters here. (Time to revisit it!) I've enjoyed much of Flanagan's output and think his Netflix work has been pretty terrific, except for the last episode of The Haunting of Hill House which squandered all the goodwill it had built up in spectacularly mawkish fashion. Last year I speculated here that his adaptation of Doctor Sleep might be a stealth sequel to the Garris miniseries; many will be relieved to hear I was wrong!

That said, Doctor Sleep the film is very clearly not a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining in any but the most superficial, cursory ways. The Kubrick allusions - which, after the first five minutes, only take prominence again in the last half hour - are sadly distracting baggage that the film would be better off without, and unfortunately inspired audible snorts of derision from some less generous audience members. The uncanny tonal dissonance between Kubrick's film and what Flanagan is aiming for is especially jarring in that third act, with tension-diffusing one-liners and a precocious teen proving an uneasy fit with the surrounding mileau. It's a shame that this film had to be hitched to Kubrick's wagon, not only probably to get made (Warner has been developing a Shining sequel or prequel for years), but because the audience probably needs to "return" to the Overlook as envisioned by Kubrick in just the same way as Danny for its allusions to King's The Shining (King's book) to work as cinema. (Since it's very unlikely audiences might get the same chills if it were filmed at the Stanley Hotel, where King got the idea for the book and where the 1997 version was filmed.)

Major spoilers for that third act below:
SpoilerShow
Henry Thomas does indeed appear as Jack Torrance - his first scene, shot mostly in profile, is quite haunting and effective, but subsequent flashes of him re-enacting Nicholson in full make-up and hair are decidedly less so.

Interestingly, Flanagan changes the ending of King's book to something much closer to the one in the 1997 miniseries, in which Danny fights off the demons possessing him in order to let the hotel boiler explode in front of him, and subsequently returns in the final scene as a ghost. I told you there was a Garris influence! :D
For better or for worse, it's arguably one of the Stephen King film adaptations that best replicates the sensation of reading one of his books - Flanagan has totally nailed the tone and pacing in this respect, especially the more variable later-period King works where some silly plots/dialogue (in particular any time one of the villains says the word "steamy") and King's own set of recurring cliches (gifted kids, shootouts, entering the monster's lair for the final battle) and in-jokes (the number 19) are compensated for by his effortlessly engrossing prose. A solid, fairly engaging three-star fantasy film that will hopefully help Flanagan get a better, high-profile gig, though it seems that Netflix has generally been a pretty good match for his sensibilities up to now.
Last edited by JamesF on Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#19 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Nov 05, 2019 12:54 pm

I think you mean Jack instead of Danny in your spoiler section on the changes from the film (or else this is an even bigger departure from the novels than I had imagined)!

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#20 Post by JamesF » Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:14 pm

You'll just have to wait and see! :wink:

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Finch
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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#21 Post by Finch » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:07 pm

Thanks for that post, JamesF (I resisted clicking on the spoiler as I may still go see the film to support Flanagan). The book of Doctor Sleep seems to have gotten mixed reviews compared to some other recent King novels. I'd be interested to hear from those who've seen the film and read the book how much the book itself refers to its predecessor (Shining the book that is, given how much King dislikes the film) and whether Doctor Sleep the film piles on more references than the book itself does, in which case Flanagan may have had to bow to studio pressure. I wholeheartedly second the notion that he gets support from a studio to make an original film. Blumhouse might be right up his alley.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#22 Post by PfR73 » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:15 pm

He's already made 3 films for Blumhouse (Oculus, Hush, & Ouija: Origin Of Evil), with 2 of those being original films.

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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#23 Post by Finch » Tue Nov 05, 2019 4:17 pm

Good catch! I'd completely forgotten these were all done with Blumhouse already.


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Re: Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

#25 Post by Brian C » Mon Nov 11, 2019 12:09 am

That AV Club article is very insightful, and I agree that the film is a thoughtful attempt to reconcile the visions of King and Kubrick.
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To be honest, for all the fretting about the Kubrick callbacks in this film, I think the ending is much stronger than King's. King had a very big problem in writing the book in the story obviously had to go back to the Overlook, but he had destroyed the Overlook at the end of The Shining. Since Kubrick's film did not, however, Flanagan was free to set the adaptation there, and it's a much more satisfying from a storytelling standpoint than running around on a bunch of rocks where the hotel used to be, and much more fitting to Danny's story as well.
Overall, I think the film is about as strong of an adaptation as could be hoped for, piggybacking on the legacy of Kubrick's film to deliver what is much more distinctly a King adaptation. JamesF mentioned above that this replicates the experience of reading a King novel, and I think that's spot-on.

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