The Prison Of Storytelling

Rating: 3/10 (26 June 2006)

A fair number of the movies that rank high on this site's top 250 all time list also share a parallel 'life' as literature, so let's start there.
The book "Rita Hayworth, etc..." is the best of the 'Different Seasons' tetralogy. King adhered to the first person perspective, which is a challenge: the narrator can only know what comes into his range of perception. You as the reader have to decide if you trust him, and so on. King wrote this in the early hand-to-mouth period of his existence -- and what do we have? A prisoner who persistently writes to his benefactors for 'more funding'.
Darabont didn't have the skill necessary to really offer anything of artistic value here. We're stuck with borrowings: parts of "Convict 99", "Gilda", "Brubaker", "Birdman of Alcatraz"; musically, the "Marriage of Figaro" aria -- it's actually not a bad bit of self-reference. It's the only good visual part here, and even that is smothered by the narration; literarily, Dumas' "...Monte Cristo"...
The book does a good job of playing with the readers' expectations and using irony. There's no preaching. And it ends far more intelligently than this does; the denouement here seems to belong in a different movie altogether.
This isn't a bad movie; considering the obscene amount of money invested in these things, it's hard to find a truly bad movie any more -- one with no cinematic value at all -- that wasn't the case 20 - 30 years ago.
But there's no way I can love it. It just isn't the sort of movie that resonates with *me*, because the story is just 'there' with no life of its own.