I'm about halfway through and it reads like some crappy roman a clef about Blatty's snotty elite friends. It's obvious he's just literarily jerking himself off. It's boring as hell, pardon the expression. Nothing happens except a bunch of snobs blabbing. I can't see myself wading through this crap to get to the possession scenes.
shareI thought the same thing when I first read The Exorcist. Also, the beginning of The Exorcist(the movie version) is boring as hell too, especially when the mom is filming her movie. But MY GOD does the rest of the book pay off, one of the best EVER!
shareWell, on the basis of your endorsement, I will try to continue my slog.
shareThe early parts of the movie are what make the rest of it fly.
The docu-realist filming style and the great acting by Burstyn and Blair set up the pieces - establishing credible characters with a meaningful mother-daughter relationship - so that Friedkin can knock them all down later.
The most effective part is when Reagan goes for a brain scan, everything is so real, from the medical procedure to the raw emotion of Chris watching her daughter undergo a hideous ordeal with needles, blood, tubes, and that monstrously loud x-ray machine.
The horrors to come would be worthless without all this setup.
It's sad that rotted attention spans have left younger generations incapable of enjoying quality films. A shallow psyche is limited to a shallow experience.
Hold your horses, Chester. It's more that I hate the type of people that are depicted in the early scenes of The Exorcist than finding it slow. If the opening chapters were about real people with real lives rather than shallow elitists, their dialogues wouldn't be nearly as insufferable. So kindly spare me your sanctimonious "It's sad that rotted attention spans have left younger generations incapable of enjoying quality films" tsk-tsking.
The onyl reason Blatty made the Ellyn Burstyn character an actress is because he was brown-nosing his cocktail party pal Shirley MacLaine by basing the character on her and hoping she would take the role and ensure a movie out of the book. It would have been a far better and more interesting film if she was an every-day single mother.
No way. Having Chris be a celeb with a reputation to protect and lots of people around her makes her dark secret even more pronounced. The Exorcist is as close as you can get to a perfect film.
And attention spans are rotted, that’s why Hollywood doesn’t even try to make good films anymore, just vapid trash for kids and morons. They even cram obnoxious political messaging into movies - they actively despise the audience (except in rare cases like Top Gun: Maverick).
Bravo!
shareYes, sometimes it happens that the movie is much better than the novel it is based on. Happened to each of Ian Fleming's Bond novels, happened to Ben Hur, happened to Silence of the Lambs...
shareIt's a slow build but please stick with it. It gets much better and is worth it.
share