Hell no! Kids lighting farts would be a much needed bit of levity, before Patrick goes to open his fridge :shudder:
Curious to know how they deal with “that” scene. Didn’t bother me too much in the book but doubt that it’ll transfer very comfortably to film.
To be honest, I think a passionate and meaningful kiss would work just as well.
Huh? You mean apart from the second half movie that was planned from the start? Like a sequel beyond that?
Not in the film.
He made them take his name off of The Lawnmower Man. Rightly, because that movie had nothing to do with Stephen King’s short story about a creepy guy who eats grass.
It bothered me in the sense that it completely pulled me out of the narrative because it made no sense with respect to character development or plot. I have no idea WTF his editor was thinking leaving that in. I’m glad they ditched it because it would not go over well in this era.
Even with that WTFness I still say it’s one of King’s best books. I never saw the original movie or series, so I’m going in with new eyes. Really looking forward to it. I’m not into horror but I’m into King, and this one looks creepy as all hell.
Just saw It. Loved it.
It is my all-time favorite King novel. I was very pleased. Not enough one liners from Pennywise, not enough parental or Derry background, maybe too much CGI, but story-wise, excellent.
“Beep-beep, Ritchie.”
Going tonight. Really looking forward to it.
Glad to hear it’s worthwhile.
I think Kubrick’s Shining was unappealing to King because Nicholson’s character was actually too close to the “I-guy” he would naturally want to distance himself from. However, if you read the novel, there was an early scene in which Jack (and a co-worker) drunkenly hit some guy on a bike and it was kind of waved away. That, and the casual familial abuse not shown in the film, is much more terrifying than any Kubrick interpretation. IOW, Kubrick made no apologies for the main character, whereas King’s novel was filled with justifications for his character’s flaws.
I’m not sure they were justifications. Jack Torrance was a monster, but he wasn’t born a monster. King tried to show us how he became a monster.
Torrance and many of the abusive adults in It make me wonder what Kings’ own father might have been like.
Perhaps. I’ve thought that “The Shining” was about how anyone could become a monster despite their best intentions. And that was, perhaps, rather more biographic than King originally intended.
Does anyone have a problem with the way the film diminishes the role of Mike and of Derrys racism in general?
I really wish that they had kept Mike as the historian; kept the novels portrayal of Mikes parents.
And I wish they had stayed truer to the Patrick Hostetler character. I understand it might not be possible to portray most of it and keep an R rating But they could have hinted at it.
I agree re: the editor. It was a definite misfire of a scene and should have been handled some other way. The ickiness was enough to pull me a little out of the story as well.
That said I disagree it made no sense. Thematically and plot-wise it made perfect sense, both as necessary bonding to reconnect and as the transition from child to adult. I could see why a drug-addled King might make that choice. It might have even seemed boldly transgressive to him, in a 1970’s New Wave sf sort of way. But tweener orgy is not gonna work with 90+% of your audience because ewww. Which is why an editor should have slapped him upside the head and persuaded him to use a more reasonable way to get to the same place.
You’d win that bet. New Line is already working on the sequel. It was clear, given the bipartite nature of the book, that Hollywood would make two movies from it thus doubling the profits.
It’s bad news for real clowns though. They were already losing business because of the spate of scary clowns last year appearing by roadsides and freaking people out (also blamed on Stephen King’s book and the first movie.) Now they figure things will just get worse.
Aww. That’s sad. Sad clown.
Absent. Left when he was 2.
Not to mention the dying out of circuses.
It just didn’t seem realistic to me that a young girl rumored to be the town slut and sexually terrorized by her own father would find any sense of safety, security or connection in having sex with every one of her male friends in the middle of a sewer. There was no sense of her as an overtly sexual being throughout the novel or any indication that she was considering banging all of her friends. I do understand what King was trying to do in his drug-induced stupor and I don’t really hold it against him or think badly of him because of it (some people see it as indicative of misogyny, but I think overall he’s great with telling women’s stories) but from a pure storytelling perspective I saw no narrative justification for it. His job, as a writer, was to make us believe that moment needed to happen. If it was so important thematically, it needed to feel “inevitable but surprising” as the Story Grid guy would say. For me, he failed to do that. My immediate reaction was “where the fuck did that come from?” I wasn’t disgusted or shocked, I was confused. In a well crafted novel, that shouldn’t happen. And as I have a pretty big writer-crush on Stephen King, it was a disappointing moment in an otherwise beautiful novel.
I don’t recall any hint of Beverly being “the town slut” in the novel other than her father’s projections (is this something from the new film?). However, while I completely understand why the scene in question would be left out of a film, I’m going to go ahead and support it in the book. It made a weird sort of sense to me (as to the motivation of the characters) when I first read It–and I was roughly the same age as the characters, 11 or 12–and when I reread it a year or so ago. As a corollary example, the book was roughly contemporary with the novel “Flowers in the Attic,” which had some similar objectionable content (I won’t comment on the awful film version), but made sense and was fairly tasteful within its own context, to me. However, I couldn’t get through even half of “Lolita” and I refuse to even consider the film version. It’s all a matter of context. Was King being deliberately edgy? Hell, yes. But in a way that made sense to his novel, and certainly no weirder than some other writers of the era (cough Anne Rice, Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony).