stephen king c/d?

My experience with both films was kinda similar actually! it is way better but like I saw it for free and saw the dark tower with my mum on a bank holiday, expected it to be really decent and dark tower to be a hilarious stinker and... both just washed over me.

The lack of enthusiasm is kind of a bummer. What was the last legitimately good King adaptation? The Mist? Can't even remember how far back you have to go from there to find another classic.

rly an impressive industry accomplishment if this 2017 film adaptation of a terrible but image-rich social horror novel about the childhood roots and adult legacy of american hatred has managed to make itself uninteresting

Ah don't take my word for it, I've got a bit of post-twin peaks anhedonia going on

xp yeah it really isn't as interesting as all that - I think Simon nails it with "safe"

I've got a bit of post-twin peaks anhedonia going on

there's no going back

:-( honestly the only thing that's felt worth bothering with has been the fassbinder retrospective they've had on here

I'm sure it'll wear off I like any old shite normally

I love The Mist so much

The new movie could have been improved so easily by cutting out at least 2 of the kids and emphasizing the coming-of-age aspect a little more instead of the CGI-heavy horror sequences. Skarsgard is admittedly quite good.

Perhaps they should have gone this route.

Pennywise in drag! 🎈🤡 #pennywise #dragcon #rupaulsdragcon pic.twitter.com/g3UZsUTLLb

— Kate (@librarian_kate) September 9, 2017

once i was walking down the street wearing a shirt that said "get it together", with an image of a cow scrambled up like puzzle pieces. A clown walked past me and taunted me saying, "get it together!!". pretty surreal

For macro reasons that I guess make legitimate sense, IT is the movie America seems to deeply need right now. It's mediocre and enjoyable, and nothing more than that. shrug.gif

yeah that's about right. it was passably enjoyable but I'll forget all about it by this time next week

FRIDAY ESTIMATES

1. It $51,000,000
2. Home Again $3,079,203
3. The Hitman's Bodyguard $1,380,000

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD was #1 three weeks in a row. that movie should have starred Chris O'Donnell and, well, Samuel L. Jackson and been a flop in 1997.

I enjoyed It a lot *shrug*

For this to be as phenomenally successful as it is clearly isn't just a function of a lack of inventory at multiplexes, though that undoubtedly plays some part here.

In a time of anxiety and unrest a murdering clown movie is just what our nation needs.

Let America heal!

http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/it-movie-pennywise.jpg

There's nothing too dumb to be true for this country rn.

For macro reasons that I guess make legitimate sense, IT is the movie America seems to deeply need right now.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Saturday, 9 September 2017 23:40

What macro reasons?

If I wanted to pay to see clowns wreaking havoc I'd buy a plane ticket to Washington D.C.!

Wakka wakka

In a nutshell, that. Plus "send me back to the '80s."

hey guys I haven't read this thread in a while but I'm excited to see It tonite!!!!

moving the story to the 80s was irksome cause that shit is goddamn everywhere lately, though blessedly they at least went light on the period music cues

Pennywise? More like thirteen bucks plus seven for a drink wise!

(In all seriousness I mostly liked the movie.)

xp: Light quantity-wise, but corny-as-fuck in every instance. Only things that worked for me were the NKOTB references. I physically shrank into my seat when I realized they were going to soundtrack the rock fight with Antisocial.

Still processing the movie. My initial thought is that it was not a vast improvement in quality over the miniseries. The kids being able to cuss was the biggest thing the movie brought to the table and the kids did it well. Give them an Oscar for Best Cussing.

Biggest gripe: Mike Hanlon not being the history buff. He really got sidelined.

As a 2+ hour movie, this movie could have used an extra hour for pacing issues and to build up some of the storylines and characters.

Yeah it was weird how underdeveloped a lot of it seemed for quite a long film. From the way it began I was hoping mike would actually be more of a character this time round but it didn't go that way.

i thought "it" was pretty bad. i liked the kid who played ben and i liked the design and performance of pennywise, when he had a chance to do something besides lurch around. the kid who played bev was working hard and was a better actor than most of the other kids but couldn't really get past what they were asking her to do.

but overall it wasn't scary and the kids were too child-actory. i had problems with pretty much all the big changes they made from the book (not that the book is perfect or anything). they shafted mike by giving his intelligence/curiosity about history to ben instead, and then they made him bigger and bulkier than the other kids and put him in more physical danger, which felt ... questionable. he had like two lines, one when he suddenly decides to tell the kids he just met about how his parents died, and then when he randomly says he has to stay an outsider in reference to nothing (presumably a cut scene). i really hated how they made bev being taken by it the impetus for the kids to go hunt after him, instead of keeping her part of the team. they started the bill/ben/bev love triangle but then at the end ben just kind of ... gives up i guess? and bev doesn't care that he's the one who wrote the poem? the end doesn't make any sense - after they scare it away, the missing kids float down from the wellhouse, but are they dead? are they alive? what happened to them?

eddie doesn't have his signature asthma inhaler until halfway through the movie and then he suddenly needs it all the time
they didn't really explain the concept of it changing into their greatest fears and then they change all the kids' fears from the book into new worse ones for the movie. the modigliani painting lady was particularly dumb.

not sure the exact year this was set, but it'd cool if mike was still terrified of michael landon as the teenage werewolf, specifically after staying up too late to watch it on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I enjoyed watching this movie, it looked great in a big theater, sick crowd, but a day later it feels like such a letdown. I read the book for the first time 6 months ago, only thing they nailed was the build-up in opening scene with Georgie. Crying like a baby looking at him and Bill knowing what was about to happen. Then his arm being bitten off just looked like shit - choppy & low rent. wtf

Glad they at least suggested the creepiness and simplicity of the adults & made them all disgusting. but there's no way you can do this book in a two hour movie unless you've got another one or two ready to go in six months. also, the structure is fucked. the middle is just going through his kid and their personal experience with It. the whole movie feels so assembly line and shallow. I thought it was dope coming out of the theater, because it was a mostly younger crowd late on a Saturday night and everyone was engaged, the scares were working, and I didn't see any phones. lots of murmuring about the movie. it was great. but it was a total gutting of the book.

biggest disappointment was so little focus on Derry as the locus of evil & the history stuff being passed from Mike to Ben. best image was Beverly covered in blood her father can't see.
when i was watching it i could've sworn the Stranger Things kid was doing the bulk of the swearing.
violence was tight. psyched that Henry actually carved an "H" into Ben's belly.
but by altering the structure, it loses so much depth. very happy it's doing so well because the sequel could be really interesting and a change of pace & tone, with a whole new adult cast. they'll have a bigger budget (keep in mind this was only $35 million), it'll probably be longer, i hope for the best.

but yeah, loved seeing it, but i agree with almost everything NA said. the ending made NO sense

best image was Beverly covered in blood her father can't see.

tbf there's nothing better than this in the book either.

but taking history away from mike is unconscionable, wow.

(above and beyond its being cruel to deprive any character of a feature in a story where everyone gets exactly one)

meant to say *complicity in that second paragraph

xxp true. everything with Beverly is so harrowing- you know that's another thing lost here, cutting back and forth between childhood and adulthood in the book showed how little had changed, how much their adult lives mirrored their childhood dynamics. that deep rooted evil of It isn't here- besides almost all the history stuff being cut out, we don't get to really spend time in Derry & what a fucked up place it is & the damage that It has done over time in the past & in the 27 years since the kids first fought It.

the other image that sticks with me from the book is Stan slitting his wrists in the bathtub

yeah stan's death is heavy and also because it comes at the beginning you have just this mark of death on that kid for the entire rest of the book. iirc he doesn't really get all that much page time but it still casts a total shadow over everything even beyond the sick gray hollowness of even a pleasant day of kid activities in derry.

that is crazy taking history away from mike. and from the story overall. even if i thought king could have cut back SOME of that stuff, the background stuff on derry's long history with horrors does a lot to elevate the book imo.

they coulda condensed that angle somehow... a lone balloon rises from the storm drain. on it, the calumet logo

Things I liked about this:

- The location was perfect, it looks exactly as King described Derry in the books, from the standpipe to the river to the Barrens.
- The kids were for the most part good actors; frankly if there was someone not pulling his weight it was the kid playing Bill.
- Updating the hand reaching out of the photo album to Pennywise jumping out of the slide presentation was a hell of a jump scare.
- It was set in the late 80s but not overburdened with "80s signifiers" -- there was a Gremlins poster on Bill's wall, the NKOTB joke and Richie in the video arcade. That's about it. As far as t-shirts, the kids wore either Maine-specific or King-specific logo shirts like Freese's Dept. Store and Tracker Brothers.
- That, aside from the missing kids "all floating down here," the filmmakers resisted the temptation to literalize the metaphorical and externalize the internal, which a lot of King adaptations suffer from, including the miniseries of IT. (Cf. Beverly seeing Pennywise's maw open with the lights at the bottom, and later saying "It felt like being dead," to Tim Curry's "GAZE into my DEAD LIGHTS.")
- One moment played perfectly in pointing out Stan's character trait of being neat and fastidious all the time: The other kids all dump their bikes in the middle of the street and he takes a second to put down his kickstand.

Otherwise, I think it was a real missed opportunity -- without the familiarity that comes with having read the book, and without having the adult versions of the characters in the same movie, you get no sense of who these kids are. They're just a bunch of kids that this happens to. It's already been pointed out how Mike was given short shrift, but without his carrying the little diorama of the standpipe, would you know Ben wants to be an architect? That Bill wants to be a writer? And that they already display skills that will manifest in their adult lives?

Then there's nitpicky stuff: Why would Eddie believe the mean girl at the drugstore instead of hearing about the placebos from his pharmacist? Why did they not include the fact that Pennywise was setting up Henry to take the fall, and that in fact he's arrested and sent to the loony bin for the deaths of the missing children? This fact is CRUCIAL to the adult half of the story. The adults ignoring all the bad things that happen is barely alluded to -- we see the couple passing Ben by when Henry is assaulting him, but not Beverly getting attacked and the man across the street going into his house.

It just ultimately seemed more like an outline than a movie, but compared to the trailers I saw for JIGSAW and HAPPY DEATH DAY, it's probably LES DIABOLIQUES in comparison.

It was set in the late 80s but not overburdened with "80s signifiers"

This I was definitely grateful over.

We got a trailer for the new Darren Aronofsky film 'Mother!' in addition to Jigsaw.

"Mother!" just reminds me of "Faaaaather!" from It Crowd.

i just remembered how much they focused on the cast with LOSER changed to LOVER in the final scene. subtle.

they don't even really deal with richie's voices either. he does it maybe once, the rest of the time it's just bad 'your mother' jokes.

I guess I'll just tamp down my expectations when I finally get around to seeing this.

In other 'news': after finding some list online where several horror writers sang its praises and recalling that it had good word of mouth 'round these parts, Revival might wind up being my first 21st Century King book.

I guess they'll throw out all that cosmic turtle stuff too?

i was wondering about that because of the lego turtle in that one scene but yeah, seems like it. can't really blame them for that one though, it would be pretty bizarre/hard to show on screen.

Hard to understand why King thought it was a good idea.

Never really liked how the turtle and It spoke like a jokey kooky uncle. Is that what eons old entities speak like?

i just remembered how much they focused on the cast with LOSER changed to LOVER in the final scene. subtle.

― na (NA), Monday, September 11, 2017 10:21 AM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It wasn't just in the final scene though. I think Eddie's already done that by the time he joins back up with them.

yeah they showed it earlier but they held the camera on it for a while in the hand-holding scene, like HEY DO YOU GET IT THEY AREN'T LOSERS ANY MORE THROUGH THE POWER OF LOVE

gotcha.

so how do they handle the underage sewer fuckfest in this movie