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Picked up issue #1 of The Stand: Captain Trips today, along with issue # 1 of The Dark Tower: Treachery.

"The only thing that matters is the ending. It's the most important part of the story. And this one, is very good. This one is perfect."

-Mort Rainey

In Secret Window, the movie based on Stephen King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is in the middle of a messy divorce. His rotten, cheating whore of a wife (Maria Bello) has for some reason gotten to keep their large, expensive house, while Mort is living in a cabin in the woods. Doesn't quite seem fair to me, but maybe that was his choice, I can't remember. So anyway, the filthy hag is now shacking up in said house with her new boyfriend. The new boyfriend, by the way, just happens to be the same asshole with whom she cheated on her husband. How's that for a slap in the face? There is a word to describe this kind of woman. It starts with a "c" and ends with "unt."

But I digress. On to why this movie is great.

Warning! Here there be spoilers.

I'll spare the plot details and get to the important part: the end of the movie. At the end, Mort kills his estranged bitch-wife and buries her in the garden outside of the cabin. Do you know what I call that, dear friends and neighbors? Justice. I call it justice.

Most movies would not have the balls to follow through and actually let the maligned man kill his traitorous ex. She would somehow save herself at the last minute. That is why Secret Window is a great movie. It doesn't cop out, and it allows us, vicariously, to have the justice we crave, without any of the negative consequences.

God bless Stephen King for writing this gem, and God bless David Koepp for being true to King's vision.

Over two years after purchasing the DVD, I finally finished watching Stephen King's The Shining , and overall I found it quite enjoyable. Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining has never done much for me; I don't find it scary, and frankly Shelley Duvall's unattractiveness always distracts me.

When it comes to movie adaptations of books, I've always found it difficult to accept the movie as its own entity without comparing it to the source material; particularly if the book is one that I'm attached to.

One aspect of Kubrick's movie that has always bothered me is the lack of sympathy for the Jack Torrance character. In the book and the TV mini-series, Jack's decent nature manages to break through at the end for one final act of redemption. In Kubrick's movie, however, Jack Nicholson is a total bastard right from the start, and he only gets worse. This butchery of a vital character trait has never sat right with me.

So yes, one reason that I prefer the TV mini-series is that it remains faithful to the novel. Another advantage of the mini-seies format is that much more content can be packed into six hours than an hour and half to two hour movie. Thus we get to see more back story of the Torrance family before they become entangled with the Overlook, and a sense of how the happenings there relate to Jack's past.

Also, Rebecca De Mornay is a lot easier on the eyes.

I want this:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/modmacosx/