TIS, did you get a chance to watch it? PB?

WHEN “The Shining” was released in 1980, many viewers, including the critic Pauline Kael, left theaters mystified by what they had just seen. Expecting a standard frightfest based on a Stephen King best seller, they got an unexplained river of blood surging out of hotel elevators, a vision of cobwebbed skeletons and a weird guy in a bear suit doing something untoward with a gentleman in a tuxedo.

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to.

The hotel’s hedge maze, many Kubrick authorities agree, is a reference to the myth of the Minotaur; others have drawn convincing connections between the Overlook’s well-stocked pantry and the confectionery cottage in Hansel and Gretel. The more one views the film — and many of these scholars admit to viewing it hundreds of times — the more symbols and connections appear.

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings...

Stephen King has explored many different time periods over the course of decades-long exploration of Americana’s underbelly. He’s very skilled at weaving genre elements together with a vivid sense of place and a powerful nostalgia for the way things were — or at least the way people remember it being. With his most recent novel, however, he set his sights on one of the defining moments in our nation’s history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Now, as is pretty much inevitable with King’s works, somebody is trying to bring it to the screen. That somebody is writer/director Jonathan Demme, who told MTV’s Movies Blog that he’s in the midst of writing the screenplay.

Demme is no stranger to horrific material, having directed The Silence of the Lambs back in 1991, but this King novel is unusually low in its things-going-bump-in-the-night quotient. Published last November, 11/22/63 is the story of a high school English teacher named Jake Epping who, through a series of strange events, travels back in time with the intention of preventing Kennedy’s murder. Once there, he finds things complicated when he falls for a librarian and realizes just how difficult it is to muck about in time and not destroy the time-space continuum.

It’s way too early for any casting news, but here’s what Demme had to say about the project:

It’s a time travel story. Somebody from the 20th century gets a window back to the past and they go back with the goal of trying to prevent the assassination of JFK. It’s an extraordinary thriller. It’s a great love story, also. It’s a fabulous book.

King’s work has a rocky history of silver-screen adaptation, and idea of trying to prevent the JFK assassination has been explored before, notably by Quantum Leap. As with most things, this one will come down the script, casting, and execution. It’s a long way down the pike at this point, so there’s plenty of time to speculate. Have you read the book? Are you excited about this adaptation? Sound off over on GFR’s Facebook page!

I just Googled it, Yogi, and it looks like it's true. However, Affleck just picked a screenwriter, so it looks like we're not going to see it for a long while.

I actually loved the original mini-series. It had a fine cast, with the exception of Moly Ringwald as Fran. SHE was supposed to be carrying the future of the world?? UGH! She "Sofia'd" the whole thing for me.

However, the rest of the cast was top notch: Rob Lowe, Gary Sinise, Bill Fagerbakke, Ruby Dee, and Jamey Sheridan as Flagg. It stuck fairly close to the book, too.

My brother was over on Saturday. He was on page 800 of the book, and he finished it on Sunday. Once he hit the last section of the book, you really just can't put it down, can you?

X, I finished it, then went right back and read it again. I had to, because there was just so MUCH. The visit back to Derry, seeing Bev and Richie again, Harry's family and his sister who was like Lucille Ball, the bookie in Florida, moving to Texas, meeting Sadie, the plays, just all of it, and then Oswald and Marina, the other Russians, I couldn't absorb it all in one read. I had to go back and look at it again. And of COURSE I cried at the end!

Chris Christie may be fat, but he ain’t Santa Claus. In fact, he seems unable to decide if he is New Jersey’s governor or its caporegime, and it may be a comment on the coarsening of American discourse that his brash rudeness is often taken for charm. In February, while discussing New Jersey’s newly amended income-tax law, which allows the rich to pay less (proportionally) than the middle class, Christie was asked about Warren Buffett’s observation that he paid less federal income taxes than his personal secretary, and that wasn’t fair. “He should just write a check and shut up,” Christie responded, with his typical verve. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check—go ahead and write it.”..

Stephen King's horror novel "It," which centers around a sadistic clown killer, is coming to the big screen.
Warner Bros. Pictures plans to release a two-part film that will be directed by Cary Fukunaga, The Hollywood Reporter said, adding that he will co-write the script with Chase Palmer. The cast has not been announced.

The 1986 novel is about seven young social outcasts in the town of Derry in Maine who are terrorized in the 1950s by an evil shape-shifting demon killer, dubbed "It," who appears in the form of "Pennywise, the Dancing Clown." He then resurfaces in the 1980s, when the children are adults...