Rapid Review: Carrie (2013)

“Carrie had some sort of power. But she was just like me… like any of you. She had hopes, she had fears, but we pushed her. And you can only push someone so far before they break.”
– Sue Snell

SYNOPSIS: A reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White, a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother, who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom. – via IMDB

It is common knowledge that I am not the biggest fan of the original. I really think it is overhyped. It let me down, and most of the acting was embarrassing. I remember I was rather indifferent to seeing that Carrie was being remade, but I sort of had a corner in me hoping for something better. Maybe one day we will luck out and get a version of Carrie that has the documentary style woven in between the story itself, sticking more to the book than anything. Hey, we can all dream! Anyway, I started this movie knowing that it got slammed by a whole bunch of die hard fans of the original and some other people, and I must admit that I thought this was highly uncalled for. The 2013 Carrie remake turned out to be a pretty decent watch. However, whoever the hell did the makeup for this movie was awful – everyone looked much older than they were and orange and silly. The performances were all satisfactory, and Julianne Moore was fantastic as Margaret White. Chloë Grace Moretz was a little pretty in my opinion to play Carrie, but she did a great job regardless. I loved Ansel Elgort as Tommy Ross, he was much better in this movie, and he is cute as hell. Chris was a real mean bitch, and Alex Russell as Billy was also very well done, considering how much I liked him in Chronicle. I must say that this movie was decent, it was entertaining and it was shot well, and I liked it more than I expected to. I think the film did a really good job when it got to showing how things happened at the prom and thereafter, they got that down. It is not amazing, and it is still not the perfect version of Carrie, but worth checking out whether you are a fan of the original or not.

Review: Carrie (1976)

“It has nothing to do with Satan, Mama. It’s me. Me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can move things.”
– Carrie White

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is just your typical girl at school – the one way at the bottom of the food chain, the lowest in the pecking order. After a physical education class, Carrie begins her first menstruation cycle ever. While the other girls rapidly jump onto the bandwagon of mocking her and teasing her, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) puts an end to it and helps Carrie. Sent home, Carrie confronts her mother, Margaret (Piper Laurie), about not having told her it was coming, and her mother reacts in anger and locks her in her prayer closet.

“We’ll pray. We’ll pray. We’ll pray for the last time. We’ll pray.” – Margaret White

Carrie is dealing with difficult things at home. The rest of the girls are informed by Miss Collins that they are to sit detention for a week for what they did to Carrie if they still wish to attend Prom. Naturally, Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen) refuses point blank, which leads to terrible arguments between herself and Miss Collins. Sue Snell (Amy Irving) is being eaten by guilt over what they did to Carrie, and asks her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to ask Carrie to the Prom as some form of penance. Initially he refuses, but later he relents. She relinquishes and finally agrees to go, allowing herself to get a little excited.

Miss Collins is worried that Tommy is taking her as some part of a degrading joke. Chris enlists the help of her delinquent boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta) to belittle Carrie with a truly awful prank. What they don’t know, however, is that Carrie White is telekinetic, and has been practising the skill to master it some way or the other. Carrie is tired of being the butt of all jokes; she is exhausted from the constant mockery. She is intent on having a night of normality, something to look forward to and remember forevermore when it is over.

“It was bad, Mama. They laughed at me.” – Carrie White

Will the dream night go according to plan for Carrie? Will Chris go through with her truly awful stunt to embarrass and ridicule Carrie publicly for the last time? If Chris manages to trick Carrie, what will the repercussions be for taunting a telekinetic and unstable young teenage girl?

Carrie receives a 5/10. While I am not completely sure why so much had to be altered from the book (seeing as it was so damn short), it was not a great film, it was definitely not worth the praise that it received. I was impressed in places and then others I was horrified by the blatant changes. I enjoyed John Travolta in his role as the horrible Billy Nolan, he seemed to be alright. I was not impressed with how Tommy Ross was portrayed as some popular jock that had no understanding with what happened with Carrie and upset of being asked to go with her in a sense. In the books he was far more socially conscious of other people than the movie shows. It was like they fluctuated between him being nice and the other side not, though they got him down pat at the prom. I am not sure why so much was changed at the end, and it took the whole “horror” aspect out of it a bit for me, to be honest. It was rushed. The whole story built up for terror, and it was altered and ended far too quickly, which was very much a let-down for me. Sissy Spacek was fantastically cast as Carrie, and managed to bring her character through so vividly. I felt for her, truly I did. What a sad, sweet girl. It isn’t dreadful; it is just that they seemed to miss the core point of Carrie’s story here.

Review: Carrie – Stephen King

Carrie White is a seventeen-year-old girl living with her religiously fanatical mother Margaret White. She is the loser at school, the odd one out, the one that just never seems to fit in. An incident in the girls’ locker room one day changes Carrie irrevocably when her menstruation cycle begins and she is mocked and teased. Carrie’s latent telekinesis comes back to her, and before she knows it the memories pour in with it, and it shocks her that it was forgotten.

Some of the students feel bad for what they put Carrie White for, and pity the cruelty that Carrie has suffered. The most notable student in this regard was Sue Snell, who decides that she needs to atone for the things that she has done. She arranges with her boyfriend, Tommy Ross , to take Carrie as his date to the Prom. He goes along with it, neither having any ill-intent at hear. However, there are other students that resent Carrie for what went down in the locker rooms, most notorious of the lot is Christine Hargensen, who is very popular and has many followers who will do her bidding gladly, including her new dodgy boyfriend, Billy Nolan.

Carrie is astounded and excited for the Prom, and even endures the terrible fights with her mother over the fact that she has decided to go. Carrie has been practising her telekinetic abilities, and is getting much more efficient about controlling them. Some of the teachers are worried that something may happen at the Prom seeing as the incident in the locker rooms with Carrie concluded with Chris being restricted from going, and her very influential lawyer father did nothing more to get her to go after a showdown between the man and Mr Grayle, the principal. Prom Night is almost upon them, and her excitement is almost palpable. It is Carrie’s one night of normality, of not being the odd one out.

Will Carrie have her glorious night out, or will something happen at the Prom as some of the teachers are dreading? If something happens, will Carrie be able to handle the final humiliation, or will she splinter and crack? What will happen at the Prom on this evening where everything is only just hanging in the balance?

The book was a fantastic read, and for a first book to be published for an author it was amazing. Knowing that this is what Stephen King started with it is little wonder that he progressed as he did, he has a brilliant mind. I really enjoyed the style of writing and layout for this book, what with the story interwoven between the “accounts” of what went down on Prom Night, the research that went into the telekinetic phenomenon, the court transcripts as well as Carrie White herself. I thought the tale that King told was an incredibly sad one, and executed brilliantly. The story is not a long one, and can be read reasonably quickly. If you are not familiar with King’s work, this is a decent place to start and decide. I thought it was very good, and it is not the first time that I am reading the story,

A few excellent authors

Authors… you get excellent ones, and you get disappointing ones, and you get mediocre ones. Here are some authors that I enjoyed reading, and will not turn down the opportunity to read.

Karin Slaughter… wow. That is all I can say. And so few people here where I am actually knows who she is, so I don’t really have anyone to discuss the books with. I accidentally found Blindsighted in the back of a closet, gearing up to be chucked out. The book was old and tatty, but its sequel, Kisscut, was also there, and I had nothing else to read. It was crime thriller fiction something or other, that is all I recall thinking when I picked it up and read that she was compared to Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, both who write decently, although not too consistently, for my taste.

So I bagged them, saving them from certainly being thrown out with the dusty stacks of newspapers piled everywhere. The books could not go, they are not in the same category as the shabby newspapers were. I had no other books to occupy me, and I started with Karin Slaughter’s debut novel. I have one word for her writing style: respect. By the end of the Grant County series I had forgotten they were fictitious characters, and lived on a steady diet of chocolate when I had finished with Skin Privilege.

I have been inexorably drawn to her work since Blindsighted, experienced a spectrum f emotions throughout Kisscut, and that was only the beginning for me. After that there was the Atlanta series, and the two merged together for the Georgia series. I was skeptical about how she would bring two totally different story lines together, yet she does so effortlessly. She is one of my top favourite writers, hands down.

Then there is Stephen King. I will not hear a bad word about him! I know that there are so many that dislike his movies (even though it is apparently forgotten that the Green Mile and the Shawshank Redemption are both King creations), and I know that he writes with excruciating detail, and that some might find this to be a bit of a cliché, but Stephen King is a master. I love him!

I cannot remember precisely what my first taste was, but I think it was either Dreamcatcher or Carrie. Either way, I was in love with how this man brought horror and life to the pages of his book. I have read so many of his works and they are rich in detail, description, action, thoughts, everything. You can follow what is happening, the feelings and everything is brought into stark light within the covers of his stories. When you pick up a book by Stephen King, even if the cover was missing, you would know it to be his work!

I started reading his books when I was about eleven years old. I had already whipped through everything in the children’s section and dominated the young adult’s section. The library was nice enough to allow me a card and permission into the adult section. I was stunned. There were gigantic tomes of books with their faraway stories waiting to unfold. I had to know more, and there were horrors, bona fide, true horror books, not the childish ones I had become accustomed to. Naturally, the King shelves dominated the horror section, the closest secondary rival by for space being Dean Koontz. I have started building on my Stephen King collection, but I have a suspicion that it will take a long time to get where I want it to, seeing as it is such a vast compilation.

I spoke of Stieg Larsson in a previous blog that I wrote, and explained my deep seated infatuation with the man and his genius. I maintain that everyone should read his Millennium Trilogy. The story unfurls effortlessly, it keeps you hooked, and nothing can waver your anticipation. You experience the journey as though a part of it. The writing style is smooth and neat, and very well structured. I have been looking for a nice box set, and have as of yet not found anything in my region, which is rather daunting, as I believe these books belong on anyone’s shelf, and I would love to have it as a collected works.

J.K. Rowling is another classic to this list. I wrote a blog on Harry Potter, here, too. But about the author, and how I stumbled upon her books? Wow. Really. I think it one of the best things that I had ever had the fortune of coming across (not that it would have been easy to miss a few years later when it got super popular). I was reading them pretty much since release. My aunt loaned me The Philosopher’s Stone when she heard that I couldn’t get to the library until the weekend. I read the book 4 times before I returned it to her. I was in love. There was this beautiful world, with great people, with crazy adventures, and real lessons. It was amazing.

Obviously, as a child, you read it and you know it is fiction. That did not prevent me from waiting for my very own letter from Hogwarts for years. Alas, it never came, and I was sorely disappointed. I think the Potter series was also great because it gave children something to believe in, to hope for. He had it tough, and he survived it. Things are not always what they seem, and anything can be overcome, and evil does not triumph against those who will fight for the greater good.

I truly enjoy Anne Rice. I loved her Vampire Chronicles, and painstakingly and extremely expensively built that entire collection up from scratch. I love her writing style, but her work is very deep, dark and thought evoking, not light reading to just pass time. The way the characters are introduced and their development is amazing, but I really wish she would have focused a bit more on Armand. He was my favourite character of anyone she had ever written about. He was the strangest one, the most demented, dark and tortured soul ever.

I obviously watched the movies, (Interview With A Vampire and Queen Of The Damned)  but they really are nothing compared to the books. Sad, because if done right the movies could bear so much potential. The first book that I ever read from Anne Rice was The Vampire Armand. I was totally drawn in and besotted with his character. He was perfect… perfectly broken, that is. She really is the Queen of dark, romantic and gothic writing. One thing that she nailed perfectly is realism for vampires, not this twinkly rubbish that we have been submitted to recently. I hope to start on the Lives of the Mayfair Witches soon, as they were rather intriguing to me when they come up in the later novels in the Vampire Chronicles.

This calls for the Distance Book Club again! I would love any author/book suggestions, so throw them along!

Who are some of your favourite authors, and what drew you to them?