Young Sheldon TV Review - Common Sense Media

What's your most and least favorite King adaptation? Please see the linked article for the 30+ also-rans. https://www.vulture.com/2017/09/every-stephen-king-movie-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html
10. The Running Man (1987). Adapted from one of King’s Richard Bachman books — save for Thinner, the only one of the official Bachman Books canon to be made into a movie — The Running Man has almost no similarity to the novel at all. And thank goodness for that! Arnold Schwarzenegger is in full on ‘80s mode, to glorious effect, happily merging the silly and the grotesque — and it’s a blast. The movie has some real-life reality-show resonance today, but even if you ignore that, it’s just so much over-the-top fun that you won’t care either way. The real thrill comes from Richard Dawson, playing a nightmarish version of himself. It’s one of the greatest over-the-top villain performances of the ‘80s. Who loves you, and who do you love?
9. 1408 (2007). The plot of 1408 is the simplest thing: John Cusack is a writer who specializes in the paranormal and insists on staying in a hotel room that has driven everyone who has ever stayed in it suicidally insane. And that’s all the movie is: Cusack sitting in that room, as reality slowly dissolves around him, going nuts in a way that only Cusack can. This makes for a genuinely unsettling thriller, directed with inventive weirdness by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström. The movie has four different endings, but none of them are that satisfying; it’s the journey into madness that sells this one.
8. It (2017). The 1990 mini-series had the space to encompass both halves of King’s epic tale of a group of friends in Derry, Maine, who do battle with the menacing Pennywise. But the Warner Bros. film sticks to the characters as outcast teens, whereas the planned sequel will flash-forward to when they’re adults once again confronting this spooky specter. Remarkably, though, director Andy Muschietti’s thriller doesn’t feel incomplete without the second segment, more than capably delivering enough scares and emotional resonance — not to mention an ending that leaves the door open for the next installment but also closes this chapter with real power. Jaeden Lieberher (so good in Midnight Special, and so much better than The Book of Henry deserved) is superb as Bill, who falls for the tomboy Beverly (a believably troubled Sophia Lillis), right as their small town starts being plagued by strange disappearances. Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise was so iconic it was always going to be hard to top, but Bill Skarsgård’s performance is perhaps even more inhuman — and, therefore, even creepier. As an exploration and deft manipulation of the fears that adolescents face from a frightening, uncaring world, Ithas a fantastic psychological undercurrent to its horror scenes. (In this movie, your darkest anxieties are coming to kill you.) And anyone still on the fence about how goddamn unsettling clowns are will finally understand why the rest of us get the willies around them.
7. Stand by Me (1986). The first non-horror King adaptation is one of the quintessential 1980s hangout movies about guys being guys, working through their male bonding rituals. It’s also the only one with a dead body. Director Rob Reiner took his first step away from comedy to more dramatic fare with Stand by Me, and got remarkably lucky by casting young actors Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell as best buds who go in search of a corpse in the woods during the summer of 1959. Terror doesn’t await them — unless you count universal anxieties, such as puberty — and while the film is undeniably nostalgic for the unhurried drift of youth, it’s also pretty smart about how seemingly minor adventures become, in hindsight, defining moments in a life. For all its modest pleasures, Stand by Mejustifies its inclusion of the classic Ben E. King title song: They’re both comforting declarations about the warm, unbreakable bonds of friendship. And, for what it’s worth, it’s the adaptation that Stephen King likes the most.
6. Creepshow (1982). George Romero and King joined forces on the original horror anthology, a genuinely creepy, pulpy, and occasionally hilarious ode to old horror comics such as Tales From the Crypt and House of Mystery. One of these is dopey (“Father’s Day”); one of these is terrible but features an incredibly strange and oddly entertaining performance from King himself (“The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”); one is good old monster-movie scary (“The Crate”); one is a true ‘80s relic (“Something to Tide You Over,” which features the amazing spectacle of Leslie Nielsen trying to kill Ted Danson); and one is still fantastic and skin-crawling today (“They’re Creeping Up on You,” with E. G. Marshall as a rich germophobe who will remind you quite a bit of our current president). It’s inconsistent, but still a load of fun.
5. Misery (1990). Nearly 30 years after Kathy Bates won the Oscar for her performance in Misery, it remains as surprising an occurrence as it did when the respected stage actress took to the podium to accept her prize, declaring, “I’d like to thank the Academy — I’ve been waiting a long time to say that.” That’s no knock on her remarkable portrayal — a perfect blend of menace and dark humor — but rather an acknowledgment that this isn’t the kind of role that usually gets accolades. Misery, a horror movie with a satiric streak, launched Bates’s film stardom. She’s fantastic as Annie Wilkes, the obsessive fan of Paul Sheldon (James Caan), a popular romance author who she holds prisoner in her home until he agrees to abandon his new manuscript — which she hates — and write something more to her liking. Annie could have been an easy, misogynistic monster, but in Bates’s hands, the character is turned into a complicated portrait of obsession, revealing the dangers of losing oneself in the work of others. Bates is frightening in her stillness, which makes Annie’s sudden bursts of violence all the more horrifying. But sneaky dark humor comes from the actress’s malicious glee at landing such a rich role. Annie may be a lunatic, but she’s also Paul’s comeuppance — a clever reminder that vain artists can be held captive by their need for stardom, sometimes literally.
4. The Shawshank Redemption (1994). King has such a low opinion of so many of the bad movies made from his work, one assumes he’d be fond of Frank Darabont’s Best Picture–nominated version of the early-1980s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. But King had his concerns about Darabont’s screenplay: “Oh, man, no chance they’re going to make a movie out of this puppy,” the author told the Huffington Post he remembered thinking. “It’s too talky. It’s great, but it’s too much talking.” King wasn’t wrong: The film is too talky. But guided by its deeply likable leads, The Shawshank Redemption warmly and (relatively) understatedly walks us through its Big Themes: friendship, empathy, and that moment when a man decides whether to get busy living or get busy dying. Darabont’s thoughtful character study sees incarceration as a metaphorical purgatory in which people find their true selves — a notion that has helped make The Shawshank Redemption a now-permanent fixture at the top of IMDb’s user-voted best films of all time. Not surprisingly, the movie’s rhapsodic online devotion has provoked an equally passionate backlash. Neither reaction does justice to this modest tearjerker, which, ironically, works best when it’s muted and contemplative. Hardly a masterpiece and certainly not a sappy, populist embarrassment, The Shawshank Redemption is simply a solid, good movie — an assessment that will probably annoy people in both camps.
3. The Dead Zone (1983). Perhaps the most underrated Stephen King movie and the most underrated David Cronenberg movie, this haunted thriller is basically the “would you go back in time to kill Hitler if you could?” premise, put on film. Christopher Walken is the doomed Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher who gains the ability to touch someone and see their future after a car-accident-induced coma. This uncanny ability leads him to a senatorial candidate (Martin Sheen — inspired casting), who Johnny learns will someday become president and blow up the world. Cronenberg gives the whole movie a funereal pall: a sense that sad things are going to happen to good people, but there’ll be a sad honor to it all. Real-world parallels between Sheen’s Greg Stillson (who hires goons and thugs to push an authoritarian regime) and current presidents aside, the movie holds up splendidly today, not least of all thanks to Walken, who is as likable and leading-man-handsome as he would ever be. It’s one of his best performances. Seek it out — it’s still great.
2. Carrie (1976). King’s breakthrough as an author famously almost didn’t happen. While working on Carrie, the struggling writer tossed his initial few pages into the trash, ready to abandon the idea of a telekinetic teen, until his wife pulled them out of the garbage and insisted he keep going. Director Brian De Palma turned that book into one of the singular teen dramas — which just so happens to also be one of the great horror films. Sissy Spacek is superb as Carrie, a small-town gal as terrified about her budding womanhood as she is of her shaming, religious-zealot mother (Piper Laurie, practically demonic). People think of Carrie as being frightening but, until its murderous finale at the high-school dance, the movie’s dread has little to do with gore or body count. Rather, De Palma puts us into the paranoid mind of a young person, showing how her daily life is a waking nightmare that a lot of high-schoolers can recognize as their own: the pain of first love, the awkwardness of feeling like a weirdo, the strange changes in your body, the anxiety of figuring out popularity. Above all, Carrie is a beautifully calibrated, slowly escalating symphony of tension. By the time prom comes and Carrie sets her classmates aflame, it’s both a relief and a shock. In the wake of Columbine, films such as Elephant and We Need to Talk About Kevin wrestled with the reasons why kids take up arms to express their misery. But Carrieremains the most disturbing and sympathetic film about the hell inside so many teens.
1. The Shining (1980). Perversely, one of the reasons that The Shining is such a beloved horror film is that Stephen King hates it so. “I don’t get it,” he said in 2014 about the movie’s passionate fans. “But there are a lot of things that I don’t get. But obviously people absolutely love it, and they don’t understand why I don’t. The book is hot, and the movie is cold; the book ends in fire, and the movie in ice.” This is a large chunk of the movie’s appeal: Director Stanley Kubrick took the basic idea of King’s acclaimed novel and distorted it. Instead of a tragedy about a decent, flawed man who goes insane, we get Jack Nicholson’s pathetic Jack Torrance, a grandiose, pompous ass who dreams of literary glory, dragging his unhappy family to a remote ski lodge, resulting in bloodshed and agony. Kubrick’s film is a hell of a black comedy that satirizes the mediocrity of middle-class life: In the director’s world, fathers are pitiful providers, mothers are blandly cheerful (while quietly suffering enormously), and the kids see far more than their parents do. But by stripping the story down to its core elements — supernatural powers, madness, claustrophobia — Kubrick opened viewers’ minds to a treasure trove of possible interpretations, many of which were compiled in the wonderfully labyrinthine documentary Room 237. (Not surprisingly, King hates that movie, too.) But if Kubrick’s Shining is so cold, why, then, do we keep revisiting it and devouring its details, enraptured over and over again by its meticulous construction and elegant horror? Is it, just maybe, that it’s the only King adaptation that actually improves on the source material — giving us not just one way to look at the author’s masterful work, but two?