stephen king c/d?

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

suprisingly graphically

shutupandtakemymoney.jpg

so sick of hollywood thinking they understand story better than stephen king

Sewer orgy is basically the Tom Bombadil of It: the first thing any reasonable human would cut from an adaptation.

I did miss the cosmic mystical weirdness from the book. We don't even get to see It's "true" spider-like form but I assume they're saving that for the sequel. I did like Pennywise's glowing vagina dentata throat though. A suitable hint of the Lovecraftian.

Biggest sins of the movie IMO were shortchanging Mike Hanlon (the decision to give Ben all of Mike's Derry history stuff is baffling) and making the climax about rescuing Bev. That felt awfully forced.

Most of the other adaptation choices I could at least see the logic behind.

i've read the book so i'm not worried about spoilers, but i always felt like the best part of the novel was the hidden/not-so-hidden dark, murderous history of Derry that these kids are a bit aware of and then start to uncover more and see the pattern, King really deployed that to chilling effect in the book. it sounds like maybe that's not the case here so much?

It's not totally baffling. Ben is the first person we encounter in the library in the book as well - dashing in to hide from Bowers and where he pens the haiku, I think. It makes a certain kind of sense why they consolidated all the library stuff into one character. I just wish it wasn't a choice they'd made.

xp: they briefly gloss over stuff like the ironworks and the black spot. There is a mural of the Bradley Gang shootout on a wall in the town, which goes unmentioned. I think that's all.

***SPOILER***
Am I remembering it right that they basically beat It by hitting it with sticks
***END SPOILER***

no they beat It by fucking

i've read the book so i'm not worried about spoilers, but i always felt like the best part of the novel was the hidden/not-so-hidden dark, murderous history of Derry that these kids are a bit aware of and then start to uncover more and see the pattern, King really deployed that to chilling effect in the book. it sounds like maybe that's not the case here so much?

― nomar, Monday, September 11, 2017 12:36 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes this was my biggest disappointment. Derry isn't as much of a presence. the adults we do see are def fucked up & gross & creepy, but without digressions into history AND jumping back & forth in time & highlighting how the town goes through collective amnesia every 27 years, the depth of the evil of It pretty much vanishes.

Ah so that's why it's called the lovers club xp

There is like one line where Ben Hanscomb says something like 'this place is different than any town I've ever lived in' and something about the murder rate in derry being whatever number of times the national average.

there was a p good kid malapropism gag in this

do fuckfests really bring unity to teams?

ask the 2005 minnesota vikings

Sewer orgy is basically the Tom Bombadil of It: the first thing any reasonable human would cut from an adaptation.

― The Marmadook (latebloomer), Monday, 11 September 2017 17:28

I haven't read Tolkien but pictures of Bombadil make me wish he was in the films.

I am not completing that analogy

hahaeurrrgh

:D

The Ritual of Hahaeürrrgh

Hey dol! Merry dol! Tom Bombadildo!

I am not completing that analogy

― this iphone speaks many languages (DJP), Monday, 11 September 2017 19:59

Please do, I'm not getting the joke.

Love this picture
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Tom_Bombadil_2.jpg

Funny website name too.

Thought this was mostly just mediocre, occasionally veering towards outright bad due to some really weird stylistic choices e.g. cheerful gore clean-up montage soundtracked by The Cure, slow-mo bully shouting "fuuuuuck yooooou", couple of others that don't spring to mind just now.

oh yeah, Pennywise did the futterwacken too. That kind of took me out of it

cheerful gore clean-up montage soundtracked by The Cure

oh yeah i forgot about this!