Hacker Cinema
Thinner
1996 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Tom Holland
An obese lawyer finds himself growing "Thinner" when an old Romani man places a hex on him. Now the lawyer must call upon his friends in organized crime to help him persuade the old man to lift the curse. Time is running out for the desperate lawyer as he draws closer to his own death, and grows ever thinner.
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There are many ways of reading, the selection and the diversity (old and contemporary writers) of what you read helps you see how you could appreciate a more critical view of what you are reading. Reading a novel before watching someone's rendering of the same novel into, say Netflix, may expand your imagination and possibly show you how limited the director's version of the same story. I felt that with Stephen King's thrillers, Pet Sematary and Thinner, then watching them as movies.
When I heard they were making a movie of Doctor Sleep, knowing that the final 20% of the book is absolutely untranslatable to coherent movie content, I could not understand how they could close it. In the end, they more or less worked around the finale, which is basically a series of psychic battles fought remotely. It's a tolerable movie.
One example of a truly unfilmable King/Bachman novel is Thinner, though maybe it could now be done, at great expense, with AI (there was a ridiculous TV version, though).
I interviewed him, when I was aged 16, in 1983, and asked him about The Shining. He was in a conciliatory mood on the topic that day, but re-emphasized how little he thought of Kubrick's shot choices for the scene where Danny discovers Wendy reading his manuscript.
To that criticism, Kubrick responded over the years that if we had just been jump-scared by Jack suddenly appearing over Wendy's shoulder as she read, we would have felt relief and even started laughing to blow it off, which would have undermined the tension Kubrick was looking to build past this point in the scene.