Carrie

I have been a huge fan of Stephen King for nearly thirty years. In fact I have enjoyed some of his novels so much I have read a few of them (Including the novel that is the basis for this movie.) more than once. The film adaptations of his work range from excellent (The Green Mile, The Stand.) to downright awful (Graveyard Shift, The Lawnmower Man.). This, the second of three film adaptations of King's classic novel, is one of the excellent ones.I have been a fan of this made for television version since the first time I saw it when it premiered in 2002. There are many reasons why this movie works so well. The main reason is Angela Bettis. She is perfectly cast as the title character. Despite the fact that she was 29 years old when the movie was filmed she is very believable as the long suffering girl who faces both terrible abuse by her peers at school and her borderline insane fundamentalist mother (Played by Patricia Clarkson.). The supporting cast is terrific as well. Rena Sofer is very good as Carrie's phys ed teacher Rita Desjardin, one of the very few friends that Carrie has in life. Kandyse McClure is also quite good as Sue Snell. Veteran actor David Kieth is also very good as the police detective investigating the tragic events caused by Carrie's wrath.Bryan Fuller has in my opinion done a very good job with the teleplay. It is very faithful to the novel. As is usually the case there have been some changes from the novel. Some are not so bad, but there are a few that I did not care for. One change that I did like I will admit is the ending. I like the fact that Carrie survived in this version because despite all that she did I did not think she deserved to die. The reason for this change was for this movie to serve as a pilot for a television series that ultimately never came to fruition, but I still liked this change because I sympathized with Carrie and felt she did not deserve to be treated the way she was by her peers or her mother.There was one change from King's novel that I did not care for. In the novel, after Carrie is humiliated at the prom she decided to exact revenge by use of her telekinetic powers. She does so voluntarily and is fully aware of the the death and destruction she is causing. In this adaptation her powers take over her mind and body after she is humiliated. She goes into some kind of trance and her powers act on their own. When she finally snaps out of her trance after she returns home, she has no knowledge of what she has done. That is not a change I would have made because Carrie having full knowledge of her actions adds to the horror of the events and makes them even more frightening in my opinion.Still despite this criticism I very much enjoyed this version of "Carrie" and I think you will as well. I highly recommend you make time to see it. Also, if you have not already, read Stephen King's classic novel that is the basis for this movie. It is well worth it.

This Carrie is better than the first. The first Carrie made starred Sissy Spacek and she did an excellent job playing the role of Carrie and I often wish she could have been in this one! However the newer actress(Angela Bettis) does do a remarkable job. It is nice to see that the woman playing Carries mother in the remake was not as crazy as the one in the first. In the first Carrie, Carries mother (played by actress Piper Laurie) kinda went overboard with the whole dying thing. She looked more like she was doing something else but I decline to actually write what that looked like in a review. Lets just say, it didn't look right with the rest of the movie in the first movie. In the second movie that scene wasn't even in it and it is a lot more tasteful and somewhat closer to the book. In the remake, Carries mother dies of a heart attack rather than a stabbing, a better touch I thought. The new actresses are really good! It has a nice touch adding the police investigation to it I thought and this is just overall a better version of the movie. There are some scenes to the movie that make this a much better film. The first movie was classic 1970's style horror. The remake is more modern and much better.

Like "Dawn of the Dead", the original "Carrie" story is so good that generally faithful remakes like this are still entertaining even if they are not equal to the original De Palma film. And "film" is an important word in this particular case because this Canadian remake was shot on digital video instead of film. Each year video technology gets closer to reproducing the look of film but in 2002 it still had a long way to go. Video has a sharper more realistic look than film and a much lower contrast ratio, making it appropriate for documentary and historical films but not so good for expressionistic stuff or stylistic horror films in the Hitchcock and Argento tradition. This could have been a fatal flaw had the remake of "Carrie" been a theatrical release or even if it had been introduced to a world of high definition big screen televisions. But most 2002 viewers watched this thing on 19-inch standard definition televisions where these differences are barely detectable.Both the original and the remake stay "generally" faithful to the Stephen King novel so long-time fans will have little to cringe about. On the plus side, the remake does a good job of creating some destruction in the town, something that De Palma could not do for budgetary reasons. On the minus side, the original ending is altered (extended) in a totally contrived way to keep things open for a future television series (maybe Carrie finds her "Tru Calling") for which the producers ultimately could not find adequate financing.Angela Bettis' "Carrie" is virtually identical to the Sissy Spacek version. Her performance is at least as good and probably better but the entire supporting cast is so much weaker that it is hard to judge. Bettis is clearly too old for the role but so is everyone playing her high school classmates so it is not a glaring problem. As Carrie's mother, Patricia Clarkson is a poor substitute for Piper Laurie. This is no surprise since Laurie's performance was the best thing about the original but Clarkson's repressed version of the character takes away from the sympathy factor Bettis is going for. The two of them, however, are responsible for the remake's best moment as Carrie mentally slides her mother out of the bedroom and slams the door after her, but not before she warns her to be careful about keeping her fingers away from the slamming the door.It is a matter of personal choice about whether it is best to watch Bettis' incredible performance in "May" before or after viewing "Carrie". She plays a similar character in "May" (including the sewing skills) but the supporting cast and the directing is so much better, making May a more believable, sympathetic, and terrifying character. But Bettis has one truly extraordinary scene in "Carrie", watch for the cosmetics scene in the drug store midway into the film. The camera stays tight on her face for several minutes and the emotional range she cycles through renders any dialogue unnecessary. She turns a very ordinary sequence into something truly special.The DVD release of the Carrie remake would have benefited from some serious trimming. They needed a lot of padding to get up to a 2 Hour 12 Minute running length (for a three hour television broadcast) and the DVD authors did not even bother to edit out the fades in and out for the many commercials. There are several useless sequences like ten minutes at the local pig farm. Better to have used the time to put some dimensionality into the main villains; the really popular kids do not have the time or the interest to harass classmates at the absolute bottom of the pecking order. King's weakness has traditionally been a failure to adequately explain the motivations driving his villains and the remake had time to address this issue.The main device for upping the running time was the addition of a post-prom police investigation headed by David Keith in a rather nothing performance. This serves to introduce the real story in a series of linearly told flashbacks and therefore could not be carved out of a re-cut version.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.