I must be some sort of idiot; I never cared much for Stephen King. Not as a person, mind you - I'm sure he's nice, even though he's got that creepy, "guess what I've got buried behind the shed" vibe to him. But as a writer, he leaves much to be desired. Yeah, I realize the guy's made more money than several countries put together, and his novels have razed enough forests to put them just behind cars as the most dangerous threat to the environment. That doesn't mean that he should clear a space on a shelf for any major literary awards; he has made a lucrative career out of pandering to the lowest denominations of readers, and then selling his repetitive, hack-stained plots to Hollywood. The reason for my rant on Stephen King arises from the top 10 movies of the year he posted on
Entertainment Weekly. There, at number 6, is "The Illusionist." I wasn't too kind to the Edward Norton magician drama
in my review. But that's not the problem. The thing that spins my canteloupe is how King states that he was "compelled ... back into the theater at once to see how (he) had been tricked." Huh???? Folks, "The Illusionist" contains a "twist" so absolutely cliched and obvious that the film could have starred Lillian Gish and Buster Keaton, silent without subtitles, and it could have been deciphered. By a fetus. Why this shocks me is the real mystery. The entire catalogue of King novels can be broken down into two basic formulas: (Writer) + (lives in Massacheusetts) + (attack by non-living object) = BLOCKBUSTER - or - (Writer or writer as kid) + (strange power) + (a past experience) = BLOCKBUSTER King cranks out about 20 of these babies every year to keep the ol' factories a-hummin'. Perhaps the guy is so immersed in his slop-tossin' schlockfests that he rarely sees movies, which might explain how he missed the blatant, simple-minded machinations of "The Illusionist." Maybe he fell asleep, missing the vital clues which underlined the single and only "twist" of the film. Or maybe he had a disastrously-timed mini-stroke as a result of the crash a few years ago, rendering him unable to grasp simple logic for the running time of the film. All good possibilities. Me? I simply think he's just as dumb as his readers.