Don't Always Disagree

              An adaptation of the 1988 Stephen King short story of the same name, ‘The Night Flier’ was originally shown on HBO in November of 1997 and received a short theatrical release through New Line Cinema the following year.   The timing was fortuitous as changes in communications technology and airline technology would have made the plot basically impossible even a handful of years later.   This is a vampire movie, yes, but really it’s a newspaper story, and the way reporters function in this narrative would be rendered obsolete very soon.               One of the reasons there are so many Stephen King film and tv adaptations is that the man knows stories in his bones.   He does have style, and subtext, and can juggle perspectives and unreliable narrators and all of that, he’s a bestseller for a reason, but he’s mastered the abilit...

I’m not going to lie, the first half hour of this movie was a fucking chore to sit through.   This is what Paul Morrissey’s approach to filmmaking looks like after twenty additional years of cynicism and a surgical extraction of any traces of camp.   The makers of this are in constant danger of coming off as too good for vampires and almost too good for movies in general.   Eventually, however, I began to understand that a lot of the goofiness was intentional, it did have a central theme, the artificiality was a deliberate stylistic choice, and despite my best efforts my innate Gen-X-ness rose up and I think I ended up kinda liking it?   I was able to detune myself from the last thirty years of cultural progress, devolve into my past flannel-wearing self, and enjoy it for what it was. The fact that it has a soundtrack that is inexplicably wall-to-wall classics helps, even if they’re used as bluntly as possible. Background imagery is, like, so banal. This movie co...