The Driver by Stephen King: Review

The film looks like it was made in Maine, small towns here and there. Very quaint. Maria Bello starts in a small town and travels on Highway 84 to another small town. There’ s no freeway connecting anything close, so I know it’s not California. Highway 84 is the road Maria Bello does not want to travel on again. The real Highway 84 goes from Colorado to Georgia. No one in the film has a Southern ascent; most of the actors look decrepit and uneducated: Pointy chins, bulging eyes, protruding foreheads and not many African-Americans. These actors look like they’ve stepped from Renaissance/Baroque paintings by Breughel or Valesquez. All of them sound like Yankees, alone, self-reliant, steadfast. My perception of Southerners is they chat more. The pace of life in the film seems slow. I’ve read enough EB White essays and stories to recognize Maine when I see it.

Preposterous describes this film well. After a book signing/reading/gathering at a faraway library, Mario Bello drives home using the shortcut, scenic route. A board lies flat on the road with nails sticking straight up. Mario Bello runs over the board and gets a flat. She stops. Being a woman, of course she doesn’t know how to change a flat tire, so she flags down the first passing motorist who is a serial killer. He rapes her and leaves her for dead. [This sort of thing doesn’t happen in California where pot growers use national parks, national forests, state protected forests and scenic areas for growing fields. Pot growing want traffic rolling safety and swiftly so no attention is drawn to them. Hence the roads are clean, clear and well-maintained. Caveat: Because of the truck traffic, be careful during the harvest season in autumn.]

Maria Bello crawls from a storm drain and gets back to civilization, a local bar/restaurant/gas station/what not. She calls and gets a ride home. She doesn’t call the cops. The film shows Maine cops as being in-your-face appearing spooky, and highly unreliable. The story becomes one of retribution, from a woman who can’t change a flat tire. She’s is going to drive hundreds of miles from home to kill the bad people and get away.

How does the crime writing lady succeed? Mario Bello has a Global Positioning Satellite unit in her car that does not just give directions. [I’m suspicious of persons who use GPS devices. If a driver can’t look at a map, put it into the brain and follow it, that driver has obviously lost 20 IQ points somewhere on the road of life.] However, Maria’s GPS device has added features – asking questions and poising facts.

Next, Maria Bello relies on her Knitting Circle Crime Fighting Quartet, characters she has created in her novels, and especially the lead woman. How are you going to do it? Maria must be ruthless. Reference to the KCCFQ serves as Maria reaching into her imagination and determining how to get the best retribution. The plotting in the mind is elementary, and sometimes completely lame. At minute 85 is a mind brew which makes no sense. Next on the broadcast program are minutes of ads. The viewer is diverted and loses attention. I never knew or appreciated how valuable ads were in telling the story to keep the viewer from realizing there are huge gaps in the tale.

The upshot of the plotting is Maria Bello kills the mother, and the next night kills the brother and an hour later the rapist. She uses the same gun plus killings in the same family equals serial killer. I’ve watched a number of cop shows on TV, and in the lamest, the cops would arrest Maria. I know the local cops and the FBI ought to be looking. Where to start? When a cop makes a traffic stop or a query (vehicle to vehicle), cops now-a-days usually record the license plate number of the target car. Maine Cop goes to Maria Bello’s car and asks, what were you doing around the truck (driven by brother and at other times by rapist). I can only guess Maine cops don’t follow up-to-date procedures.

Overall, having the scope of the writer’s imagination presented, I have to agree with the mother’s assessment: The writer does crappy work. The story and characters prove it.

P.S. None of the faults are the responsibility of Maria Bello.

Edmund Wilson rounded criticized Hollywood as “an intractable magnetic mountain which twists American fiction askew.” Wilson further complained about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West: “Their failure to get the best out of their years may certainly be laid partly on Hollywood with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted.”

What is a screenplay? It is a play shot on film. It runs about 15,000 – 20,000 words which makes it the length of a short story. Indeed, a movie script generally has a protagonist who meets other humans (antagonists, supporting characters, dead people). It has the same limits as a short story. A single theme, a straightforward point of view. Done well a screenplay is an excellent piece of literature, and is sometimes better than its literary genesis.

Entertainment has its rules. There are rules for writing screenplays (more than using Movie-Writer Pro, or some other application). When Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler collaborated on Double Indemnity, novelist Raymond Chandler did not like all the rules. In a later interview Wilder was complimentary about Chandler although he did not understand the rules.

There is considerable money to be made by anyone who can write short stories and also can write a screenplay. That money dwarfs money derives from books, essays, magazine articles and the world influenced by Edmund Wilson. Perhaps Wilson was feeling poor in his medium.

Is it necessary for a writer to live a “depraved and wasted” life in Hollywood? Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood depraved and wasted. He had started those ways at Princeton. Nathanael West, being in California and good friend of Fitzgerald, wrote novels, but as his literary competitors demonstrated (Chandler and Hammett), drinking one’s self to death was not required. The movies did not drive anyone to die drunk anymore than the movies drove Eager Allen Poe to die a drunk’s death.

The scorn of Edmund Wilson that screenwriters have nothing to add to society and are overpaid comes from ignorance from someone who wrote no fiction of note and was deeply embedded in the New York literary club and the East Coast Establishment. Not every movie shows excellence, but used correctly movies can compete completely with books and periodic literature.

I was in Berkeley when used bookstores were closing. It was sad. A used bookstore reflects the background and general capacity of a community. For instance if one frequently finds popular modern bestseller fiction in a bookstore, it is easy to conclude the dumbness of the place: Big name authors selling glossy titles. The best place to find that crap is at bag sales – the last day of a library sale. Twenty books for a dollar, a nickel a piece.

Next comes series of books: Will Durant, Time-Life Books, captions next to pictures with a few pages of text. These books are found too often in used bookstores where they are overpriced. Like bestseller fiction they can also be found at the local library during bag sales at a nickel a piece.

Next comes books by journalists, writers, writers acting as scholars and politicians who churn out histories, commentaries and discussion of politics books without poor or incomplete analysis fueled by conventional wisdoms, commitment to the popular and publisher’s polls and filled with expressions of non-conviction. Hilary Clinton’s current book reveals it is written by a lawyer (not a compliment). It evades any strong sentiments, statements or decisions, except as a starting point: The author can flit from that point and fly. Books described in this category are nickel books.

In other areas – art, nature, environment, religion, sociology, sports, food, etc., are books similarly written books and each is filled with a nickel’s worth of words.

The death of a used bookstore is like the bag sale at the library. There is an overall poor quality of books and a great oversupply nickel books: For readers here who have never attended a library bag sale, a nickel book is one that might be read and get it out of the house. Nobody wants a library of Brian Williams, Bill O’Reilly, Al Sharpton and Chris Matthews. A library of books written by William L Shirer, Ernie Pyle and H.L. Mencken sounds much better, and also says something about the librarian or the homeowner.

Berkeley’s bookstores closed despite having books beyond the nickel parameters. There is no doubt that the community there has dumbed down. Maybe one-time readers would rather watch cartoons (animation), or play computer games. Reading anything challenging outside a field of expertise is less prized. The idea that any human being should have a core of knowledge and intellectual activities apart from day to day life, to use as a comfort or a resource during life, is coming foreign, unneeded, unusable clutter of the brain. The only existence human beings are expected to have is spontaneous, intuitive, reactive and catastrophic: Don’t anticipate the next disaster. Survive it.

One solution countering this human narrowness was books. Closing a bookstore no longer lets a human being browse, consider and find the unexpected. The most oblivious human being recognizes that browsing books in a library or a bookstore is different from mastering the TV remote or surfing the Internet. The advantages of the used bookstore over a library are old, unexpected books derived from the community and assembled to reflect the perspective of the store owner. A library is limited by its goals: Supply books that will be read in the community. Of course, garage and rummage sales and charity stores have books, but hundreds of trips may provide an instance of serendipity. 

In Berkeley stores closed differently. One store was losing its long-term lease and sold off inventory over six months. I bought Notes from the Underground and rolls of clear packing tape for 75 cents. Other closings came quickly: Half off, 70 percent off, last day bag sales. Stores with special works sold the first: Pamphlets of left-wing writers. But the remainders on the last days were mostly nickel books. Quality books that cost little were gone: Clement Eaton’s history of the Old South has a text with $100 but is frequently sold for less than $2.00.

Now out of Berkeley, I’m watching a local used bookstore close. The owner is elderly and declining. He was slow getting on the Internet. As happens with many in the book business, his inventory was poorly organized. Many times shelves were partly filled. And there were plenty of nickel books. At one time before the rescission he would give cash for used books. He next went to trade credit only. For a year that has stopped. Two weeks ago all books were 70 percent off; I bought three. I learned another problem he had. He had marked books up 400 percent. I could buy the books as cheaply from Bookfinder as from him, at 70 percent off. 

But the absence of that store and its collection, as imperfect as it was, will deprive this community of a place and resource of endeavor, friendship and intellectual stirring.

I’m unhappy not only about the bookstore closing, but also the quality and communication of the ideas herein. I don’t know how to improve it yet. 

Sarah’s Key: A French production about the round-up of Jews in Paris in July 1942, and the death of a Jewish family who lived at an apartment newly occupied (circa 2000)  by a journalist (Kriston Scott Thomas) who is investigating and writing an article about the round-up. It is an excellent movie.

JACK REACHER: Tom Cruise, Rosemund Pike. Cruise plays unlikeable tough guy, loner and good investigator, and Cruise fits the role well. The story doesn’t strain credulity much. Cruise uncovers murders/fraud by the bad guys. Without kissing Rosemund good-bye, Cruise leaves town on a bus. Only complaint: Night time car chases are horrible. Nobody can see what’s going on. 

Echelon: Never rent, never buy.

It’s the Rage: Poor movie about use or misuse of guns by Americans in the home or elsewhere. The first shooting incident, man kills business partner while partner is sneaking about his house at 4:00 a.m. That’s what wife and partner call discretion. Partner and man’s wife have been having an affair. I’d shoot the partner too, but I wouldn’t write a movie about it and adultery and try to make it into an anti-gun movie.

Scarlett Pimpernel: Richard Grant, Elizabeth McGovern. An attempt to update the rescue methods of original character and story. The Pimpernel’s French wife (McGovern) helps him in France. Actually, McGovern’s character impedes the work of her husband. She adds nothing, story or character wise, to each loosely dramatic, poorly written tale.

Lady of Burlesque: Barbara Stanwyck reprising part of her early career in show business cannot save this poor written movie: Murders in a theater where burlesque, the seedy side of entertainment, is on stage daily. There’s not enough performance time, some of which ought to feed into the murders. Stanwyck and male-comic have no character development; their dialogue is stale and trite. It is a disappointing movie, although the subject matter (and Stanwyck) had great possibilities. The movie can be remade, presenting a demanding role for a talented actress.

An excellent movie which reminded me in many ways without the production dollars of the movie Barcelona. It is likely the most costly scene location was a press conference at the Pasadena City Hall.

The first rate script compels the movie forward with off-beat dialogue and an odd story. What saves the script and the movie are the characters are true to the roles they’re playing. So a comic scene occurs when the “film producer” and “the writer/director,” both fresh from film school, physically fight. Of course, nobody is hurt.

The producer and writer/director are making a documentary of police investigations of murders in Los Angeles. At the second murder scene they stay after the police leave. (Police and crime scene units are second-rate.) The film people talk to the crime scene clean-up guy who has discovered clues: First victim is killed with a switchblade, and a CD of a local band, Switch, is in the room. Second vicim is killed with a bug bomb, and the CD of the local band, Toxic Air, is in the room. There are other clues which will make the film people rich and famous if they solve the murders.

Director and producer bring Clean-up Guy into the production, and the pursuit of the serial killer is on. The film makers are helped by the serial killer sending them DVRs, which reveal pre-murder activities. The Scenesters uses cliches: A victim is dressed as a witch at a Halloween Party: Dialogue: “The Witch is dead.” Clean-up guy confides in former girlfriend, now TV journalist; she betrays his confidence. A black guy claims to be the serial killer and want wants to cooperate with the production. Clean-up guy unmasks him, right handed rather than left handed; 90 percent of serial killers are white males. Black guy is an actor who wants the work whether is pays or not.

The movie ends before cliche use becomes too burdensome, overwhelming, uninventive and unfresh.

Other than it’s intrinsic worth, The Scenesters shows that entertaining well-made movies can be made for little money, by competent people who are mostly unknown. If entertainment was not so enamored with animation and special effects, movie makers could learn from The Scenesters.

In high concept terms Sinister is a cross between The Exorcist and Freddy, who’s still out murdering human beings.
Ethan Hawke, a non-fiction writer has limited abilities and no imagination. He has to write his next book about murder. For (inspiration?) he moves with his family into a house where its residents, a family of four, was hung in the backyard. The house was a murder scene. Presumably the police searched inside and out, but not perfectly. Easily found in the basement is a box of home movies, serial killing murders families for 55 years.
After discovering the films Hawke doesn’t give them to the cops. He decides to watch to improve his ability to write about murder? To solve the murders himself? Watching movies allows him to drink during the day. That is the extent of the writer’s imagination (other than wearing a Bennington College T-shirt). Is it the booze or is it real? Writer hears weird sounds running around the attic of the house. The police investigate and attribute the noises to squirrels. The source of the noise is more likely caused by squirrels running around the writer’s head.
[The number of crimes the writer commits while alive, are innumerable, overlooked and never addressed. Writer himself is unaware he is committing crimes by withholding and destroying evidence.]
The writer consults an academic expert who identifies a symbol appearing in the films as representing a sect or cult of early Christianity. The regular Christians of the earlier times marginalized those people, but the symbol carries on and will release all the bad things the sect/cult once did: Murder of children except a chosen favorite who lives in another world with a demon, symbol perpetuator. As things carry on writer and his family are killed by their ten year-old daughter. At film’s end she joins the other world.
Who done it? Writer burned all the films of 55 years of serial killings, leaving no means to get the guilty, providing for a sequel and giving no legacy to the writer. He won’t make the footnotes of history.
NOTE that Hawke doesn’t play a writer. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t do much that a writer does. He is sultry,defiant and unfriendly to the local cops. He does write post-it notes to himself, as though that is the means to write a long book. These activities don’t make the role convincing.
Sinister is an excellent movie for all the horror movie cliches. Errant noises, creepy, mysterious music, dark places, walking the house during the day and never open the curtains so it is always dark, using a small flashlight, etc. Writer goes upstairs when he hears a noise. Nobody is supposed to be in the house. More sounds from the attic. Writer walks and hallucinates, seeing something odd. Are the images real, a result of booze or caused by roids?
Writer can’t see much in the attic with the little flashlight. Does he do anything reasonable like go the store and get a BIG FLASHLIGHT? NO. He is very energy conservation conscious. He never turns on the lights at any time during the movie. Writer is spooked. He gets a big knife from the holder in the kitchen. [You’ve seen that on TV hundreds of times.] During another visit to the attic, he finds drawings meant to be his family? As he walks along in the attic he falls through the attic floor. The cops come but writer doesn’t tell about the films or other spooky things. During one search the darkness is explained: The power went out. No time does writer open the curtains. Writers wife wants to leave. He argues this is the best place to write. Slow as he is, Writer finally determines someone is after his family, the serial killer’s next victims. He hears noises at night and is alarmed, but he doesn’t wake up the family to say: “Let’s leave!”

This uneven production reveals the misfits who are in charge of American Intelligence. RECOMMENDATION: Do not watch these episodes of fantasy and fancy glued together with cliches.

I approve of one event in Homeland. A tough looking Vice President of the United States with the qualities of Dick Chenny, on the cold side of Mercury.  and a blowhard, like Joe Biden, has a heart device. The Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist gets the serial number and sends a message: Shut Down. The Vice President is a goner. I’ve seen this method of death in another TV show. 

However, other story points are possible. Man has new knees and a hip replacements. Suddenly the host of that equipment is running down the freeway at 75 miles per hour. CHP can’t catch him. This character will be the basis of a new franchise, a plot for a new type of machine movie/TV show. I hereby claim all copyrights, all trademarks and all trade secrets. My chief character with serial number access is an eight year old kid and his babe girlfriend. He’s doing everything on a Commodore 64. I will sell this high concept platform so everyone in Hollywood can understand: War Games for a younger crowd.

In Homeland main character Claire Danes is a CIA field operative. CIA field operatives are educated and trained to a set of skills which are not turned off, ever. In essence CIA field operatives are survivalists in which ever environment they find themselves. Claire Danes character has all the espionage skills found in a fresh faced journalist combined with a super model.

Episode 10 where I stopped watching, Claire Danes is kidnapped by the Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist who just happens to be in the USA. He arrived unnoticed; bad things begin happening some of which have been interdicted; nobody can find the Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist in and around Washington DC. Claire is driving and gets off the phone with her lover/adulterer/traitor/Marine/Congressman/boyfriend (Damien Lewis). She loves to her his voice, but the sex between them is strictly routine. Swooning and yearning Claire hangs up, and decides to change the radio channel. WAMO! Her car is broadsided on the passenger side by a truck.

Before the accident what does CIA Field Operative Claire know? Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist is in Washington. Be on the look out.( BOLA) [Somebody may broadside my car and kidnap me because I’m in a TV show.]  How does Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist know which car to broadside, and how does he set it up? (Details, details.) If Claire isn’t tied up (a woman in jeopardy) and her mouth isn’t taped, we’ll never see her big blue eyes.

A real coincidence developed for viewers who like the expected. Because Claire is kidnapped, Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist threatens to kill her. If Lover/adulterer/traitor/Marine/Congressman/boyfriend does not supply him with the serial number of the device keeping the Vice President of the United States alive. He demands that Claire be released before he hands it over. She is released although any normal, well-balanced Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist would kill her, she being the driving force in one agency that is on his ass. But Claire can’t be kllled because it would end the series at Episode 10. The serial number is supplied and the world is rid of the Vice President, a position James Madison labelled, “An unprofitable dignity.”

I killed the Vice President of the United States because of my love for Claire. Claire looked terrified. She is happier now that she is free. All the characters in this show are acting according to cliches, not inventively ordered. 

I can only withstand so many cliches. I’ve stopped watching.

No character is acting according to the roles: CIA Field Operative, Ultimate Bad Guy Terrorist, Senior Desk Jockey in the CIA, Manny Patinkin. Manny best role was in Criminal Minds. In Homeland he’s taking it easy, a wuss and whipped by a wife from India. In Episode 10 F. Murray Abraham eats breakfast while Manny P. talks to him. F. Murray dresses Manny P. down, You’re in the wrong business.

Finally, a character said something significant and truthful about one of the leads. If in fact Homeland depicts American Intelligence accurately, America is in trouble. The previous president liked to watch ESPN and play golf. The current guy likes to watch ESPN, play golf and attend fund raisers. Who’s in charge?