I recently watched the mini-series Carrie, which is a re-make of the classic film by Brian DePalma, and - in case I have to state the obvious - based on a book by Stephen King. I was curious as to why anyone would want to re-make the story again, as the DePalma film is a little masterpiece, and works well to this day. Film adaptations always mean that some of the original material is excised, but screenwriter Lawrence Cohen did a bang-up job of depicting the essential scenes in the novel. The story follows what happens to High School pariah, and social misfit, Carrie White when she realises she has telekinetic powers.
The mini-series appears to have had the aim of being more faithful to the original material, such as including the scene where Carrie is three and she brings a hail of stones upon the house. The acting is generally solid, and Angela Bettis who plays Carrie does a respectable job with what is a hard role. Carrie's holy-roller mother (Patricia Clarkson) is believable, but does not depict the scary lunacy that is evident in the original novel, and is acted with such magnificent aplomb by Piper Laurie in the movie. The mini-series also tries to recreate the feel of the novel by telling the story in a piece-meal way via flashbacks from interviews conducted by the police. I'm not sure this helped their version, because most people know what's going to happen, and who does what to whom. You're just interested in what new perspective the mini-series is going to bring to the novel. Carrie, after all, was Stephen King's first novel and weighs in at a paltry 222 pages in paperback (if only Mr. King would return to writing novels in such a concise manner), and the movie is a perfect 1 hour and 34 minutes in length. The mini-series is really working hard to get enough for what is a three-house show, and so the action is prolonged, and the effects mavens have a field day towards the end. The events have been brought up to date so the action occurs in the present, with references to email, web searches, etc.
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