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As someone who has watched Lost avidly since it first arrived on our screens six years ago, the latest and final season has been a bit lacklustre to say the least. I still enjoy it and I would never miss an episode, but it's almost as if the unveiling of the answers fans have craved for so long has let too much air out of the balloon and now it's just a matter of just seeing it through to the end. I'm hoping I'm wrong and that the finale will be as brilliant and as shocking and unpredictable as the writers have been promising all these years. Anyway, the most interesting thing to come out of this season is the idea of the parallel reality seen in what the programme-makers are calling 'flash-sideways'. The detonation of the bomb back in 1977 created a different timeline for our main characters, an alternate reality running side by side with the events on the island. I'm not entirely sure where all that is going within the tv show but it got me thinking about...

I love Stephen King. I love his novels. I love his short stories. Hell, I love pretty much everything he's ever written. Of all the writers I've encountered, his his work has had the greatest influence on me. He's been called "a master storyteller", amongst many things, and I agree with this up to a point. I see him as the closest thing we have to a modern Mark Twain in his ability to capture the essence of small town America in populist fiction while spinning a great yarn. So why on earth do almost all movie adaptations of his work suck? Wait, let me just explain myself here. I'm not saying all , I'm saying "almost all". There are exceptions. I would say (and yes, this is just my humble opinion) that the better movie adaptations are, in no particular order, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Misery, Stand By Me, The Dead Zone and a few others. There are many other movies/tv mini-series such as the original Salem's Lot , which have be...