DOCTOR SLEEP NEEDS YOUR LOVE–I really loved this movie, but it’s not doing well at the box office, so I feel the need to jump up on a soap box for it. I don’t wanna overclock your expectations here, it’s not a masterpiece, but it is really really SOLID, well-made, better-than-it-had-to-be genre entertainment for adults. It’s dark, spooky, cool and fun. It’s a great time at the movies.
I’m reminded of another time that a Kubrick classic got the sequel treatment from a different filmmaker: “2010: The Year We Make Contact,” sequel to the legendary “2001.” Like that film, “Doctor Sleep” is not “The Shining,” nor does it try to be. It’s a continuation of the story into a completely different genre, and that’s to its benefit; no point trying to bottle lightning twice. Also like “2010,” “Sleep” is a more conventional film, but a devilishly effective one, and it does a good job of tying up the threads that its predecessor left dangling. Writer/director Mike Flanagan takes a promising but inconsistent Stephen King book, smooths it out, and makes it hum.
There are great performances everywhere. Ewan McGreggor has never been bad in anything, and that continues here. Is any actor more reliably excellent? Newcomer Kyliegh Curran is a coup for the casting team, she’s got a bright future. But the breakout performance is Rebecca Ferguson as the truly sinister Rose the Hat, one of the better Stephen King villains every put to celluloid. In the book, she was creepy enough; in Rebecca’s hands, she is a walking nightmare, repulsively evil yet impossible to look away from. There’s a swagger to her take on the character that reminded me of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Every little glance, every movement, is delicious. Rebecca’s always been good but she puts on a clinic here. Oh, and Jacob Tremblay shows up for a cameo in one of the most genuinely difficult scenes I’ve ever watched in a movie. I plan to own “Doctor Sleep” but I will never watch his scene again. It was well done, and I get why they needed it, but some things are better off not rattling around in your brain.
(SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILER) People will tell you the movie goes off the rails in its third act, where they return to the Overlook Hotel. That’s… kinda true. “Doctor Sleep” was such a good movie on its own terms that it’s a bit of a letdown to watch it slip into “Jurassic World”-style hero worship. Then again, I got the absolute chills wandering the halls of the Overlook. I’m not gonna sit here acting too cool for school when I ate it up with a spoon. It gets a bit hokey but I can live with that.
All in all, “Doctor Sleep” is in the top-tier of Stephen King adaptations, a baby step behind “It” but miles ahead of the sequel. It’s a good time to be a fan of the King.
CASTLE ROCK IS CRUSHING IT– I guess we’re on a Stephen King thing today. The first season of “Castle Rock” was really good but for some reason lots of people didn’t think so and were wrong. I blame it on expectations: King fans didn’t get the adaptation they wanted, and non-King fans were paranoid that they were missing something. The reality is, “Castle Rock” is a totally original anthology horror series that winks at Stephen King in ways that really do not matter. It was a dumb idea, they didn’t think it all the way through, but stop wringing your hands about it because they’re making great television and you’re missing it.
Season Two is an upgrade from Season One in every way. One was good, this is better. Lizzy (I’ve been spelling it “Lizzie” like an IDIOT) Caplan is the lead, and I do not have words for her performance. It is an Emmy home run if there’s any justice in the world. I can’t believe how great, how ferociously committed and idiosyncratic it is. I know enough about writing and shooting television to tell you that a lot of what she’s doing here was not on the page. It can’t be chalked up to good writing alone. Lizzy is making it happen.
I CAN’T FIGURE WATCHMEN OUT— HBO’s new show that functions as a sequel to the seminal “Watchmen” comic is an exciting watch, but feels nothing like “Watchmen.” It has maybe one superhero in it, maybe, and even that’s a stretch. I’d almost have preferred them to call it something else, or reveal the connection as a “Split”-style twist. Damon Lindelof’s voice, well honed at this point, is the dominant influence here, not Alan Moore. I don’t mind taking the venerable franchise for a ride, but when SO much of what you’re doing is whole cloth, it feels strange. Imagine writing a “Moby Dick” sequel where they’re hunting a fearsome lion in the jungle. That’s exactly what this is. I get the connection, but the vibe is still night and day.
“Watchmen” the comic was about superheroes and “Watchmen” the TV show is about the police, although to my (pleasant) surprise, it’s not a particularly negative assessment of them, on the whole. Actually, I’m not positive what exactly this show is saying about anything. Everything it does feels super meaningful in the moment, but later on I struggle to articulate what the point was. The police all wear masks because years ago they were massacred by a gang of white supremacists… Okay. Robert Redford is President… All right. A guy in a wheelchair somehow killed the chief of police… Uh, Fine. What’s your point? Sometimes it feels like the show is just saying stuff to see if it’ll provoke a reaction.
What I think I’m missing in the sense of a direct target of attack. Alan Moore wrote “Watchmen” to dismantle the American dream via superheroes; by exposing the nasty underbelly of the latter, he felt he was doing the same to the former. That target, that specific focus of ire, animates the story. This show lacks that. It constantly acts like it’s getting at something but I have no clue what. It’s wonderfully acted (Regina King is boss), looks great, sounds amazing (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross see to that), and is a blast to engage with, but no matter how much I try, I can’t put it in the filing cabinet in my brain that reads “Watchmen.” They should’ve made up a new thing.
LUIGI’S MANSION 3 IS NOT THAT GOOD– When I first started writing this, the post was me wondering aloud why I didn’t enjoy this game that was clearly a masterpiece. I actually begged you, the reader, to help me figure out what I was missing. But the longer I worked on it, the more concrete my problems with the game became. Now I’m pivoting in a new direction: “Luigi’s Mansion 3” is overrated. Fight me.
This is not a hot take for its own sake. I didn’t spend sixty bucks just to say “nuh-uuuuuhhh;” I’m not that petty. This is the final, exhausted wail of a man who has tried to love something and keeps coming up short. Here are the reasons why…
1. It’s Too Linear. Most Mario/Luigi games are linear and that’s fine, but like, there’s normally a sense of imprinting yourself onto the experience, bringing a style or way of handling problems to the game. You can get really good at jumping, or complete a level without killing a single enemy, or find a secret path, or just get it done super fast. There’s space to leave your mark. “Luigi’s Mansion” has none of that. It’s a clockwork machine, there is one right way to do things in one right order that takes one discrete amount of time, and that’s it.
There’s “good linear” and “bad linear.” The former is a highly controlled experience that makes your choices flow naturally into a structured experience. The latter turns into a guessing game of “what did the developer want me to do at this exact moment?” And that’s what LM3 is. If you dare to deviate even an iota from LM3’s plan for you, you get buzzed endlessly by the game, telling you “hey you’re supposed to be doing x!” And this is bitterly ironic, too, because one time I actually couldn’t remember what I needed to be doing, so I eagerly awaited the hint, only to discover it was totally useless in helping me get oriented.
Linearity is not an excuse for no meaningful gameplay. Gameplay is choices. LM3 has no choices. You’re an actor in a play but you can’t read the script, so you just have to bounce around in the dark until you figure out what your lines are.
2. Fighting Ghosts Isn’t Fun. My memory is foggy, but my recollection of the original is that a fair amount of the challenge was in finding the ghosts; sucking them up was the victory dance. In this game, you usually don’t have to find them, they’re just standing there, so that leaves capturing them. And capturing them is boring, full stop. Good game design is based in giving a player the opportunity to make interesting decisions, and there are zero decisions here. Every capture of every ghost (who isn’t a boss) plays out identically to every other one. There are no wrinkles.
Which is crazy, because the process is incredibly complicated. First you have to flash them with a bright light to freeze them, which is already hit or miss because moving and aiming at the same time feels clunky with the Switch controller and the storybook perspective makes depth perception spotty. Once you do that, you need to run over and start sucking up the ghost. Now the ghost starts flying around and you have to pull the control stick in the opposite direction they’re moving. Fine. Once that’s done, you press the A button and start slamming them into things over and over until their health hits zero.
That’s a three step process with four different button/stick inputs, and NOWHERE in there does fun happen, because there is no art, no style, no panache to any of it. You can do it the one right way or you can fail. There’s a little wrinkle that happens with multiple ghosts, since you can slam them into each other and knock out multiples at a time, but that’s not really enough. For all that song and dance, Mario achieves ten times the fun with a single jump button.
3. Money Is Useless. I also don’t like that the game has you spend so much time sucking up money that you can’t use for much of anything, outside of a few token items that are cheap and uninteresting. Of course, Mario collects coins, but two things: one, Mario games are platformers, so the coins are as much about guidance and flow as acquiring wealth. Two, at 100 coins you get an extra life, and that’s a real goal you can work towards. Also, coins, while technically money, are really more akin to trinkets, like Sonic’s rings. They don’t feel like they need to accumulate into anything.
“Luigi’s Mansion” has you sucking up gold bricks and dollar bills, it feels monetary. It feels like it should add up to something, but it doesn’t. I was having a ton of fun gobbling up gold bricks until I suddenly realized that outside of being a completionist, I wasn’t achieving anything. So then I just got annoyed and started ignoring them. But then I got annoyed that they were all sitting there, so I started hoovering them up so they’d go away. And then I was annoyed at how much time I was wasting.
I could keep going. LM3 isn’t bad, but it isn’t good either. It’s handsome and empty. If you get into the spirit of it, I can see you enjoying it, but every time I play it, I get less joy out of it than the time before. There’s great artistry and craft on display here, and I think the team behind the game gave a thousand percent to make something special. I don’t feel ripped off or lied to. Game design is very hard, and sometimes you don’t get there.