“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”
“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”
“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”
“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?
“Yep…”
“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”
“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”
“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”
“Oh yeah. That was good.”
“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”
“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”
“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”
“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”
“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”
“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …
“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”
“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”
“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”
“It doesn’t hold up well.”
“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”
“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”
“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”
“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”
“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”
“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”
“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”
“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”
“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”
“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”
“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”
“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”
“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”
“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”
“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”
“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”
“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”
“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?
“Yep…”
“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”
“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”
“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”
“Oh yeah. That was good.”
“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”
“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”
“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”
“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”
“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”
“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …
“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”
“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”
“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”
“It doesn’t hold up well.”
“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”
“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”
“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”
“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”
“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”
“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”
“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”
“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”
“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”
“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”
“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”
“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”
“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”
“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”
“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”
RSS Feed
