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It: A Coisa (It, 2017)

Qual sua nota para o filme?


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Fëanor

Fnord
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O clássico de Stephen King de volta às telas, e pela primeira vez na grande tela.

O filme deve ser a primeira parte de uma duologia, e tem lançamento no Brasil previsto para 7 de setembro.

it_xxlg.jpg

O filme conta a história de sete crianças na cidade de Derry, Maine, que se deparam com uma entidade capaz de assumir diferentes formas, frequentemente aparecendo como um palhaço, que as aterroriza e as faz confrontar seus próprios pesadelos.


IMdB

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Até hoje eu nunca assisti a mini-série de 1990, talvez seja a hora de fazê-lo.
 
Quem já leu o livro do Stephen King? Li no começo do ano e, para mim, daqueles que eu li, é um dos melhores do autor.
 
Nunca li o livro, só tinha visto a mini-série e é interessante. Não sei se faz jus ao livro, o que normalmente é uma maldição das adaptações de Stephen King, com raras exceções.
 
Comentário meu lá no Facebook, respondendo se o filme foi bom ou não ( quem quiser me adiciona lá).

Eles melhoraram o livro em MUITA coisa. Praticamente monta uma ponte entre gerações de fãs de horror... A galera mais nova dos games, viciada em jump scares e os devotos de horror mais pausado, atmosférico e "silencioso"... Da pras duas tribos curtirem de boa sem decepcionar nenhuma delas. Prova que o jump scare PODE funcionar e entreter de verdade com um contexto e caracterizacao emocionais a altura. A performance dos atores mirins, como acontece em Stranger Things e no filme do Abrahms e que atualiza sombriamente ET (Super 8), é EXCEPCIONAL e mais imersiva e "empática" do que qualquer efeito especial. http://screenrant.com/it-movie-reviews-preview/ Completo com a sequencia, adaptando a segunda parte, periga MESMO ser "Uma Obra Prima do Medo". Vide o sumario de varias resenhas incluido ai.
 
Última edição:
Gostei do filme; talvez seja uma das melhores adaptações de livros do Stephen King para o cinema. Vamos agora aguardar a segunda parte da trama.
 
Meu resenhista FAVORITO de tudo que se conecta a Stephen King... o blog dele é entretenimento de PRIMEIRA QUALIDADE pra mim

Essa é a review dele pro filme dos irmãos argentinos


"Fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists." --from the dedication page to "It" (1986)















Tuesday, September 12, 2017
It Wants to Divide Us: A Review of "It" (2017)

I rarely -- if ever -- mention my job on my blogs. It's just not a good idea to mix business and pleasure in that way, because if I were to be noticed talking about my job online, then all of a sudden I'd be obliged to conduct myself in a manner 100% befitting my professional requirements. And, like, fuck that. I'm at work, that's work time; I'm away from work, that's ME time.

However, the odds of anybody noticing are rather minimal, and even if they did, I'm not likely to then also be recognized by a customer. I got better odds of getting struck by lightning than I do of being recognized for my blogs. What a silly thought!

Anyways, I figure it makes sense to err on the side of caution, so I just don't bring it up. This is not difficult to do; I have virtually no interest in talking about work when I'm not there.

This week, though, I'm going to break my rule and divulge to you that I am a manager of a movie theatre. Not the general manager, mind you; if my boss is Picard, I'm Riker, except with a lamer beard and even fatter. So, yeah, I'm the Riker of a movie theatre.

I bring that up because I simply can't restrain myself from talking about how utterly cool it has been to be a massive Stephen King fan and to go to work all weekend and see people lining up by the hundreds to see a movie based on a Stephen King novel. At my particular theatre, it did stronger business than most superhero movies; it did stronger business than Rogue One; it did stronger business than Pixar movies. Shows were selling out hours in advance, and by the end of the night on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday (the latter unprecedented during September) people were still showing up by the dozens at the very end of the night, once there were literally no seats left to be sold for that movie on any of its several screens.

I've seen that happen with Twilights and with Hunger Gameses and with Fifty Shades of Greys and with American Sniper and so forth, and until this weekend I never realized that in the back of my mind, the King fan in me was jealous of those other movies' successes. Don't misunderstand; given that this is my profession, I'm always hopeful that EVERY movie will be that big a hit. Few are, but trust me, I never mind when they are even if they are movies I personally would like to ignore.

This weekend, though, I realized that It was scratching an itch I'd not even realized I had: an urge to see my Stephen King fandom validated in my own workplace. No King film had been a hit during my management tenure since 1408, and that one was only a mild hit; people went to see it, but nobody cared about it, so far as I could tell. With It, you could sense immediately -- show began on Thursday night and were busy from jump -- that this was a movie people were excited to see. They weren't coming to the theatre out of a sense of obligation, or because it was the weekend and they had to go see something (those days appear to be over for 95% of the public, if not more). They were acting like ... like ...

Well, they were acting a bit like people in line for a roller coaster. This was an experience, not a mere movie. They came by the hundreds per hour, and they were of all colors, ages, sizes; they were evenly split in gender. There were an untold number of kids not old enough to vault over the R rating, and some of them got older people to buy 'em tickets, and some of them -- most of them (possibly numbering in the thousands, and no, I'm not exaggerating that) -- failed. They looked brokenhearted to be missing out on it; no, I'm not exaggerating that, either.

I have seen a weekend's worth of audiences that was both larger and more excited; but not many. This will rank as one of the most enthusiastic audiences I've personally ever been around in the movie business; they were laughing and excited on the way in, and they were laughing and excited on the way out.

It was really, really cool. It always is.

Add on top of that that they were there to see a movie based on one of my five favorite novels (one written by my absolute favorite author), and it translated to me having a much better weekend personally than I might otherwise have had. A weekend's business like that can sometimes be sort of oppressive, like a grim march to a too-distant finish line. Get me to Monday, get me to Monday, get me to Monday..., like that. This can especially be true if a movie is a smash hit and you weren't expecting it to be. Luckily, we were, so the effects we felt were minimal. I would all but guarantee you that many of the nation's theatres got caught flat-footed by it, especially after the past few weeks have been so dreadful at the box office.

But yeah, we saw it coming, and we were more or less prepared. Even so, it was a show of It basically ever 45 minutes, so the lines were nonstop, from Thursday at 7pm to Sunday at 11pm, with respites while we closed and for maybe the first half-dozen shows of the day. Otherwise? Non-fuckin'-stop.

Despite this, I was in a thoroughly cheerful mood. I was wearing this:





Nobody recognized it except one of my fellow managers, who just shook his head at me as if to indicate he was disappointed in what a nerd I was. I am guilty as charged, and the fact that I was in a good mood while all around me swirled a sea of people who wanted tickets and/or popcorn without further delay indicates to me that it was a pretty good weekend to be the type of nerd I am.

So yeah, that's where this review will be coming from. From the guy who was happy to be swamped at work not merely because it was good for business, but because the hordes of customers were there to see something I really cared about.

And let's go ahead and jump to the verdict: I loved it. That's a big part of why the spring got into the step; I saw the movie a night ahead of everyone else -- gotta make sure it plays correctly, you know -- and so I knew that not only was it going to be a smash hit, but that it was deserving of being one.

This is not to say it's a perfect movie. I've got a few little issues with it. Those issues are insignificant, though, at least for me; they might help to explain how the movie could have gotten from a 9.5/10 to a 10/10, thus making the movie I loved a movie I love even more. But do I have any actual complaints? Nope. I mean, I can't see Chapter Two right this very second; but even that isn't a complaint, just more of a why-can't-the-day-after-Christmas-also-be-Christmas kind of observation.

So let's dive into it. I feel certain there will be spoilers. But if you've read the book or seen the ABC miniseries from 1990, there's nothing to spoil except the specifics of the adaptation. (I could ruin the punchlines of some of the jokes, I guess, but I wouldn't dream of doing that, so rest easy.)





The first thing I'm going to talk about is the cast, beginning with Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise.





Skarsgård had a tough job in taking on this role. People adore Tim Curry's portrayal of Pennywise in the 1990 version, and it's no exaggeration to say that at least one entire generation seems to have been happily traumatized by his performance. I have known for years that the potential existed for a movie version of It to be a big success, because of the sheer number of co-workers who, upon finding out that I was a King fan, enthusiastically told me about how much Tim Curry has fucked them up when they were kids. The nature of the job means that I work with a large number of high-school and college students, and for about the last fifteen years, the roster of employees has changed, but the seemingly-omnipresent fear of Pennywise remained the same.

So I knew this shit was possible, guys. Nothing special about it; I was just listening to the people around me. I ain't Karnac or nothin', I just sometimes use my ears.

The trick was always going to be finding somebody who could make people forget Tim Curry, at least temporarily (there's no forgetting Tim Curry, and why would you want to?). That's a tall order.

Happily, the production decision was made early on to not go for a star. Oh, how tempting it must have been to want to get, like, Leonardo Di Caprio or Robert Downey Jr. or something like that. And let's be clear: I'd be interested in seeing what either of them would do with the role. But would America have? Would those years and years' worth of movie theatre employees I spoke to? I don't think so. They don't want to go see Johnny Depp or Seth Rogen as Pennywise.

They want to go see Pennywise. That was the only thing they were going to accept, and by gum if Bill Skarsgård didn't manage to pull it off.

He's got a few moments that are a bit wonky; a few line readings fail to land the way you'd like them to, and there are a few places where it seems as if maybe there were some looping sessions that didn't quite get the job done. Largely, though, he is fantastic. His best moments are probably during a scene in which he menaces Eddie, and another in which he menaces Beverly; in these scenes, his movements are both recognizable and otherworldly, which is an unsettling combination. His physical performance is close to perfection, and if I was carping about a few of his line readings, let me be careful to make it plain that he's also got some great ones.

Does he blow Tim Curry out of the water? Well, no. That's probably not doable. But I do think I prefer Skarsgård's take on the role, and that's a hell of an achievement. At a mere 27 years of age, he can look forward to dining out on this movie for the rest of his career. He'll be 80 years old and commanding lines around the block for his autograph at cons, if he's interested in going that route.

The next thing on our agenda has to be the Losers themselves. I'd like to start by saying that if Pennywise was the key to making people want to see the movie, the Losers are the key to making people love the movie. I can't remember where I first encountered the notion, but when I was a kid I read some piece of critical thinking about King's work (probably The Art of Darkness) that blew my mind by informing me that the secret to King's popularity was his ability to write characters that readers would empathize with. I was stunned by this, but immediately knew it to be true.

It's maybe never truer than in the novel It, which is basically a thousand pages of character-scene triumphs. The ABC miniseries didn't fare particularly well in replicating this, partially via mildly shoddy performances and questionable casting decisions. (It actually holds up a bit better in this regard than I'd previously thought; I watched it about a week before the new one was released, and had a good time with it.)

I'm happy to report that this new version is a near-total success in the casting, even apart from Pennywise. The kids who play the Losers are uniformly excellent, and several of them are flat-out great.



Jaeden Lieberher


Bill is played by Jaeden Leiberher, who you might have seen in St. Vincent or Midnight Special. He's confident, soft-spoken but decisive, wracked with guilt and grief and anger over what has happened to his brother but also determined to do something about it.



Sophia Lillis


Beverly is played by Sophia Lillis, who you've probably never seen in anything. That's okay; you're going to see her in plenty after this. I predict she has an Oscar by the time she's thirty; if not, she'll have been nominated. She's that good. She's tough as nails, she's funny, she's resilient, she's defiant. She owns damn near every scene she's in, with the exception of maybe one she shares with Skarsgård.



Jeremy Ray Taylor


You might know Jeremy Ray Taylor from his roles as "Boy" in 42, "Bully" in Ant-Man, or "Kid" in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. Not that last one, pray God.

Here, he plays Ben, and it's obviously his most substantial role to date. He knocks it out of the park. There's one scene in particular that I'm going to partially describe (leaving out the best jokes) in which he and Sophia Lillis briefly star in their own romantic comedy.

Bev has just been bullied by a pack of mean girls, and she's walking out of school. Ben has his Walkman headphones on, listening to a popular band of the era (1989); he's blocking her path, obliviously staring out into the distance while holding a scale model of the Derry Standpipe. Bev, somewhat exasperated, asks if he's going to move. He does, apologetically, and flustered by the sudden appearance of this tall redhead. He drops his model, which comes apart. Bev tells him that Henry Bowers in on the other side of the school, and Ben puts up an "I'm not afraid of THAT guy" front, not with any conviction. Bev introduces herself, already warming to this genial young fellow; Ben says he knows who she is, because they're in the same social-studies class. She seems inwardly sorry that she didn't recognize him, so she grabs his yearbook so she can sign it. When she flips it open, she sees there are no signatures inside the front cover; not a single one.

Here's where Lillis begins to truly shine. A look of hurt recognition comes over her face; she is both sorry that Ben has no friends AND sorry that she's inadvertently called attention to the fact. Taylor doesn't play embarrassment or hurt, though; he plays sheer lovestruck wonder. There's a great shot of Bev opening the yearbook to see the blank pages, and Ben's eyes being visible over the top of it. These are the most honest puppydog eyes you've ever seen in your life; if you don't respond to this, you have no heart. Bev responds, and signs her name along with a line of hearts. Ben is like a man -- well, a boy, anyways -- for whom time and the world have stopped.

It's an incredibly sweet set of moments, and immediately becomes one of the all-time great character scenes in a King movie.

Taylor is good elsewhere in the film, too; he plays Ben with a tenderness that never turns into sourness or glumness, which would have been natural to do. Instead, he shows Ben's inner resourcefulness, which makes it more plausible that this chubby fellow would be a key component in fighting a eons-old monster of near-godlike power.



Finn Wolfhard


The excellently-named Finn Wolfhard plays Richie, which, for my money, was maybe the most difficult role in the film to cast. The Richie of the novel is a love-him-or-hate-him kind of character, which is almost always the case when King writes a "funny" character. King and humor do not go together comfortably; they do go together, just ... awkwardly.

For me, the trick to reading a character like Richie is to basically just pretend that the character IS hilarious. He's not; but if I pretend he is, then he kind of becomes so, at least within the story.

I don't know if the screenwriters get the credit for this, or if director Andy Muschietti gets credit for it, or if Wolfhard gets the credit -- or if it's a combination of all of those options -- but somebody made a genius decision regarding Richie Tozier. They decided to make him be abso-fucking-lutely hilarious, BUT for none of his friends to think he's even slightly funny. At no point does anybody laugh at one of his jokes; he gets off a good one on several occasions and throws his hand up for a high-five, and whoever is closest to him literally pulls his hand down out of the air. The extent to which this makes Richie even funnier is genuinely impressive. This is a Jedi-mind-trick, man; this is Obi Wan telling Vader that if he strikes him down now, he will become more powerful than he can possibly imagine.

Wolfhard is probably the kid in the movie everyone is going to be talking about the most. He's fantastic; I thought he was great in Stranger Things, too, but he's doing something completely different here. Good luck finding an adult actor to play older Richie as well as Wolfhard does; that's going to be a tall order.



Jack Dylan Grzer


Eddie is played by Jack Dylan Grazer, who has done even less than Jeremy Ray Taylor. Grazer is just as funny as Wolfhard is, which is an aspect of the movie that surprised me. Eddie is not funny in the book, nor is there any attempt.

Here, I think it is almost entirely Grazer's own talent and personality shining through. Many of the yuks generated by Eddie come from responding to Richie, or by simply being the sort of neurotic worrywart an Eddie Kaspbrak would undoubtedly be. The key is that he's gotten mixed up with a group of friends whom he loves, and they are keeping him grounded. So he worries, he kvetches, he bitches, he moans ... but he goes along with it all, because that's what friends do.

I saw somebody on Twitter say that Grazer is this movie's secret weapon, and he may not be far off the mark. Grazer is going to be revered for his work here, for years to come, especially by anyone who is a kid and sees the movie.



Wyatt Oleff


Wyatt Oleff played young Peter Quill in both of the Guardians of the Galaxy films; he has little to do in the second, but is excellent in the first, and he's excellent here, too. He doesn't make as big an impression as most of his fellow Losers, because Stan's role isn't as showy.

Mark my words, though; his is one of the performances that will stick with you, especially if Chapter Two works well. I mean, I assume you all know where Stan's story goes, right? Razor blades in a bathtub for adult Stanley Uris.

Oleff makes it work, right here in this movie. He doesn't telegraph it; if you don't know the story, you will still be surprised by it when it happens in the second film, but then when you go back and watch the first, you'll absolutely see it in Oleff's performance. This kid is terrified of what is happening around him. He's keeping it together, but only barely. It won't last forever.

So yeah, sure, maybe Stan doesn't get as much to do here as some of the others; but what he gets is crucial, and it's also subtle, and Oleff does very well with all of it.



Chosen Jacobs


My biggest gripe with the movie is the way it handles Mike Hanlon. Don't misunderstand me; Chosen Jacobs does a fine job in the role. But it's not much of a role; he's really not in the movie very much, despite the fact that he's one of the first Losers we meet.

If you're surprised by that, well, trust me, I was surprised too. I was even more surprised when the movie reassigned Mike's interest in the history of Derry to Ben. This is possibly going to piss some book-readers off, and I'm sure somebody is going to eventually use the word "whitewashing" to describe it.

I think it's purposeful, though. I think the screenwriters thought that since Mike is an outsider -- a home-schooled kid who doesn't even live in Derry proper -- it would be harder to explain his interest in Derry's history. A movie that adapts even half of a thousand-page novel has got to do some serious condensation and must maximize its every scene. Mike's obsession makes perfect sense in the novel, but in the miniseries, he literally sounds like Dr. Exposition, walking into the story so as to tell us things that we need to know. I think they were afraid of the same thing happening here, but figured out that they could reassign the interest in town history to Ben, who is (a) a loner and (b) a new resident with a natural interest in the place he's found himself.

It's actually quite logical, provided that the screenwriters can then find a way to gracefully transfer it back over to Mike for the sequel. Muschietti has verified in interviews that Mike WILL be staying behind, keeping his role as "lighthouse-keeper" for the others. That is likely to mean that Mike is the de facto lead character of Chapter Two, so I don't have much fear that the filmmakers have disrespected the character; I just think they made a hard decision in Chapter One designed to keep the story graceful.

There probably was a better way to do it, though, one which didn't strand Chosen Jacobs in comparison to the other Losers. Jacobs seems like a solid enough performer; he looks scared when he ought to, he looks tough when he ought to, he looks like the kind of guy you'd be able to make friends with quickly. Jacobs gets the job done, but isn't given an opportunity to do much beyond that.

That's got all the Losers covered, but there are several other roles worth talking about.



Jackson Robert Scott


Casting kids must be tough. Casting little kids must be brutal. Jackson Robert Scott, however, does a great job as Georgie. He's somebody you can understand Bill spending a year trying to find (Georgie's body isn't found in this version of the story, so he's considered missing). I've seen kid performances so grating that my subconscious self rises up in revolt, and if Georgie had been portrayed by one of those, I'd have subconsciously wondered why Bill was bothering. You think shit like that doesn't matter; it matters. It matters a LOT.

Scott has recently been cast as Bode Locke in the Locke & Key pilot Muschietti is directing for Hulu. He'll be terrific in that role. (His character's sister, Kinsey, is going to be played by Megan Charpentier, who is effective in It as Greta, the girl who bullies Bev and Eddie.)



Nicholas Hamilton


Henry Bowers is played by Nicholas Hamilton, who also, in a bit of 19, played a bully in The Dark Tower. He was fine there in a tiny role, and he's very good here.

The screenplay minimizes Henry's role somewhat; only somewhat, but he's definitely reduced in comparison to the novel. Things must be cut, though, and cutting out Henry's family history was a wise decision. Gone is Henry's singular focus on Mike Hanlon, which results in a somewhat welcome absence of racial slurs; that aspect of the novel is more or less successful (if overused), but I didn't miss it here one bit.



Owen Teague


Owen Teague -- who you might recognize as Ben Mendelson's son from Bloodline -- plays Patrick Hockstetter. He's great, and if somebody doesn't cast him to play at least one of the Ramones in a Ramones biopic, somebody is dropping the goddamn ball.

Weirdly, none of Patrick's story from the novel has made it into the movie. He's basically just there as one of Henry's gang, and he gets killed off very early. This are decisions that left me scratching my head a bit.

I've got a theory, though. I think that some of that story is maybe going to be used in chapter Two, and that Teague will be brought back to be the revenant that busts adult Henry out of Juniper Hill. That is, if Henry is still alive; it's implied that he dies here. He won't actually have died, I hope; that will be a mistake.

Either way, Owen Teague -- who had a small role in Cell and is therefore a King-movie veteran -- is terrific here.



Stephen Bogaert


Stephen Bogaert plays Beverly's dad, and he's incredibly creepy, but not so creepy that you feel as if he's unrealistic. This role could have gone badly wrong; that it manages not to is a testament to Bogaert's performance. Some people will find him to be scarier than Pennywise.

And guess what? They're not wrong to think that.



Molly Atkinson


Molly Atkinson has only a handful of scenes as Eddie 's mother, but she makes them all count. Sonia Kaspbrak is vile, but, again, not in a cartoonish or unbelievable scene. She's playing a familiar type; she's a slightly more refined version of the sort of white-trash lunatics found in Rob Zombie films. Here, the type gets a more suburban spin; she's not homicidal, she just wants to sit around watching television and giving her son advice on how not to cause his allergies to flare up.

And yet, the oppressiveness of her love for Eddie shines through. She's not so overbearing that you feel it is unrealistic that Eddie would turn out as well as he has; but she's also abnormal enough that you see how he would have turned into kind of a fucked-up little kid. Not majorly fucked-up; just fucked-up enough to stay fucked-up for the rest of his life, in silent and secretive ways.



Joe Bostick


Joe Bostick plays Mr. Keene. It's a small role -- just one scene, really -- but boy, does Bostick make an impression.

You know that one scene in the novel? No, not the Mr. Keene scene. I mean the scene in the novel, the one in the sewers, when the kids ... uh ... have to find a way to get back out again?

Well, that scene in not in this movie, thank Gan. But the movie does find ways to replicate certain aspects of it, and the ick factor of it is alive and well in the scene from which the above image is taken. Mr. Keene is leering at somebody, you see; leering at somebody he really -- really -- ought not be leering at. If this scene doesn't gross you out, you should turn yourself in to the police, immediately.

But, you know, he really does look a little bit like Clark Kent...

There are other roles, and they are all filled capably -- Steven Williams (Mr. X!) plays Mike's grandfather, for example, and does a good job of it -- but let's now move on.

We haven't talked about Andy Muschietti, have we?





Andrés "Andy" Muschietti is an Argentinian whose first film, Mama, was a modest hit back in 2013. I never saw it. I wanted to, though, because it starred Jessica Chastain, who is not known for picking garbage movies to appear in; I figured that if she was in it, it must have something going for it.

Well, I still haven't seen it, but I'm going to change that for Halloween season this year. And based on his work in It, I suspect Muschietti probably did well with Mama.

Let's get the negatives out of the way first, or negative, singular, because there's really only the one (although I could carp a bit about a mild over-reliance on CGI): the movie isn't scary. Not for my tastes, at least. And trust me when I tell you that I'm very scareable once I'm sitting in a darkened movie theatre.

In fact, I'm so likely to be scared by movies that I basically haven't seen the last decade's crop of horror films. A few here and there, sure; but most of the big stuff from, of, let's say 2008 onward...? Skipped 'em. At some point, I just decided I was out of that game. Does this make it necessary for me to change my name to Wussington McPussburger? Might be, I can't deny it, and don't even want to.

The point is, I sat down to see It prepared to be scared. Instead, what I found was a collection of heavily-telegraphed jump-scares where I could predict the timing of the jump almost to the second.

I don't mind. I didn't actually need the movie to scare me. As I mentioned earlier, I'm really here for the characters, all of whom work (Mike being a possible mild exception). I don't need to be scared, but I do need to believe that those characters are scared.

In that, Muschietti succeeded admirably. "Admirably" is too tender an adjective; Muschietti succeeded triumphantly. And it also has to be said that just because I was not scared by the movie, it won't scare other audiences. For example, if you are a twelve-year-old kid who manages to see this, you might be scared out of your wits, and in the best possible way. For people to whom this movie is an introduction to scary movies, this is quite possibly the 2017 equivalent of what Star Wars was in 1977: a sort of greatest-hits mix-tape of an entire genre of cinema, delivered in a compellingly entertaining package that plays perfectly as a child's-introduction-to-horror(/sci-fi, in the case of Star Wars).

For the record, yes, I'm saying it: It is a movie for children. This might surprise some people, but it needn't: it's a throwback to the wonder cinema of the eighties, when kid-centric films like E.T. and The Goonies and The Lost Boys and Poltergeist and Gremlins and Stand By Me (heard of that one?) and The Monster Squad appeared with regularity. E.T. gave birth to that sub-genre, I think, and most of the movies that chased its success also had its PG rating, or a PG-13 at worst.

But an R-rated kid's movie IS possible; look no farther than The Lost Boys, which is cat(kid)nip to preteens (or was in 1987, at least). I'd probably also put Fright Night on that list, and I'm sure there are plenty of others that aren't springing immediately to mind. They need not have kids to entice kids, and those movies are hugely enticing for certain types of children.

So will It be. I don't necessarily feel that Andy Muschietti -- or his sister, producer Barbara Muschietti (whose name I have only now thought to mention, although her omnipresence in the movie's press leads me to believe that she likely had/has a huge creative influence on these films) -- or the screenwriters set out with that goal consciously in mind. I think they just wanted to properly adapt the novel. They did that, which means that the kiddie-catnip aspect must be present in the novel, right?

Right, I'd say. I found Stephen King when I was fifteen-about-to-be-sixteen, which is older than many rabid King fans were when they became Constant Readers. Why is that? Simple: the genre is attractive to children. That's step one; that's where the initial interest comes from. Then, the deal is clinched by virtue of the fact that many of the kids who read King's work find so much there to relate to. This is probably truer of his seventies and eighties work, when kids featured so prominently in novels like Carrie, 'salem's Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, The Talisman, The Gunslinger, and, of course, It.

I'm straying from the point a bit, but I can bring it back around simply by emphasizing that the tone Muschietti, et al, set with this film is one that perfectly mirrors the parts of King's novel that appeal to juvenile readers. So whether the film is intended to scare guys like me or not is irrelevant in how it plays. It didn't scare me, which threw me a bit the first time I watched it. The second time I watched it, I realized that its lack of scares was actually making me more empathetic toward the Losers themselves, who -- and this is crucial -- ultimately find themselves not scared by the monster. I was prepared to be scared right along with them, but instead found that I'd gotten to the end a little bit ahead of them.

Did Muschietti craft the film with this goal in mind? Beats me. He may suck at scaring people. All I know is that the end result for this movie is a positive one.

Even if I thought it was a negative, though, I'd have no choice but to praise Muschietti's work. His performances are superb, across the board. Even some of the background players do tremendous work; the mother of one of the missing kids, Betty Ripsom, has a single scene, in which she's standing outside the school on the last day before summer, hoping in vain that (as one of the kids says with a mix of snark and sympathy) her kid has been hiding in Home-Ec all this time. The actress playing Mrs. Ripsom (Sonia Gascón) is great; she looks simultaneously haggard and hopeful, and communicates everything she needs to communicate without speaking a word. She's only in the movie for a few seconds, but in those seconds she manages to deepen the film's themes and mood and emotional impact.

So many filmmakers fail at that sort of thing. It's understandable, in a way; a character like Mrs. Ripsom is unimportant, in the grand scheme of things. But stories are like dominoes; if one falls over, it is almost certainly to hit another, and even a tiny domino can take down a whole bunch of larger ones. (Yes, I know dominoes are basically all the same size; it's an imperfect metaphor, I'll grant you.) The best filmmakers take care to keep all their dominoes upright, because they know what can happen.

There is not one single poor performance in It. Not one; no matter what the size of the role, every character/performer seems as if they are worth following and are doing interesting things in their own stories. Some get less to do than others, of course (Belch and Victor, Henry's pals, are nonentities, for example); but none feel out of place or poorly cast.

This, in turn, helps the movie feel realistic; and THAT, in turn, makes the stakes for the Losers feel greater, because it helps them all feel like real people.

I can't wait to see what Muschietti has in store for Chapter Two. If he can handle the adults as well as he handled the kids, then it could be an even better movie than this one.

There's plenty more to be said about the film, and whenever it comes out on Blu-ray, I'll return to it for a more in-depth exploration.

I'll tell you this now; that sucker is going to be a screencap-a-palooza. It's a gorgeous film, and a lot of that probably comes down to cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, a (justifiably) lauded DP who has shot great films ranging from Oldboy to Stoker to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. I'm calling it now, this guy is only a step or two away from winning an Oscar. Later this year, he's got The Current War, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Thomas Edison, coming out; might want to keep an eye on that. Oh, and for the love of God, somebody please get him signed up for It: Chapter Two.

Other notable contributors whose work I have not yet mentioned:

  • Benjamin Wallfisch -- He's the composer of the original score, and while I wouldn't say his music is among the great King-movie scores, it's quite good. (King-movie scores/soundtracks are deeper in quality than might be generally considered to be the case. I ranked the major ones in 2014, and my knee-jerk estimate of where Wallfisch's It would rank, based on two viewings and zero listens to the score on disc [it's in the mail], is probably #20 or so. While we're here, I'd say that Tom Holkenborg's score for The Dark Tower would be probably wind up around #30.) There are unsettling vocal effects, a couple of good themes, and a wistful quality that serves the movie well.
  • While we're speaking about music, whoever gets credit for song placements -- possibly music supervisor Dana Sano -- gets a thumbs-up from me. Only a few songs are used, and the temptation must have been strong to lean on that to capture the eightiesness of the setting. To be sure, the songs are all eighties in origin; and they are gems, just not obvious ones. You get "Love Removal Machine" by The Cult (awesome), a brief bit of "666" by Anvil (awesome if only for the fact that fucking ANVIL has a song in a movie that just made $100 million in a weekend), "Bust a Move" by Young M.C. (which was released in May 1989, so it represents a super-of-the-moment sound in the film, a nice touch) (oh, and, yes, awesome), "Six Different Ways" by The Cure (awesome), "Antisocial" by Anthrax (awesome), and "Dear God" by XTC (a hugely interesting inclusion given its placement in the movie plus some of King's statements about how he views the novel/movie as a meditation of faith and belief). Plus some other very brief usages I'm not going to mention. I need you to hold on and see the movie lest I ruin a couple of top-notch jokes; if you can't manage that, what'cha gonna do about it? Trust me; it's gold.
  • Gary Dauberman -- He's the screenwriter who wrote the final draft, building on an earlier draft by Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga. I think that they, combined, did a heck of a job of finding ways to make a single film out of half the novel. Less than half, really. they added their own touches, and made changes to King's story (some, such as Mike's parents having died, significant), but always in service of retaining the tone and thematic intent of the novel.
  • Javier Botet -- Read this. How awesome is it that he's getting work? He's said he wants to appear in a Star Wars movie, and this is something that needs to happen.
  • Carter Musselman -- He plays the headless boy in Ben's first encounter with Pennywise, and that's one of the standout moments in the film, for me. I've said the movie isn't scary, but here's a fact: a great deal of it is sticking with me, and there are individual moments (such as this one) that are already becoming iconic horror-movie moments.
  • Claude Paré, Peter Grundy, and Rosalie Board -- The production designer, art director, and set decorator, respectively; they all did a terrific job of making this $35 million film look like it cost a lot more. The locations they filmed on look great, and the sets do, too.
  • Janie Bryant -- she was the costume designer, and she's won an Emmy for her work on Deadwood, and got nominated four times for Mad Men. So, yeah, she's kind of awesome. Her work here is great, too; like Bill Skarsgård, she had a tough act to follow in coming up with a look for Pennywise that wouldn't disappoint fans of Tim Curry's version. I think she -- along with the makeup and hair people -- succeeded admirably. Her choices for the kids are also good; they look like exactly what they are supposed to look like, kids from the eighties. I especially like her choices for Patrick Hockstetter (vintage teenage-dirtbag look).


So all in all, this is an instant classic, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe there's a little too much CGI in some places, and maybe some of it isn't as successful as it could have been; maybe a few of the story decisions/abridgements don't fully work (although the sequel could change that in some cases). Personally, I thought the rock-fight scene came off flat (despite being scored with an Anthrax song). But so what? Those are just trees, baby; I'm talkin' 'bout a forest, and this forest is a lush and lovely one.

Before we go, let's talk briefly about the box office. It went through the damn roof, and if anybody tells you it was anything other than a surprise, they are either a liar or a genius. Me? Like I said earlier, I thought the potential was there for it to be a hit; but in my wildest dreams, I didn't imagine it could make $123 million in its opening weekend. That's the #27 top opening-weekend gross of all time. Unless you count things like the Twilight movies and Harry Potter and Jurassic World (which I wouldn't, although arguments for them could be made) as horror, then this is not only the top-grossing horror-movie opening weekend, but it's in #1 by a nearly-unassailable margin; unless Chapter Two breaks it, that spot might go unchallenged for the next twenty years. If you want to read more about the box office performance, here's a good article about it. Suffice it to say, though, this is a performance that people will be talking about for many, many years to come.

That being the case, I think it's useful to attempt an on-the-ground, embedded-with-the-troops sort of analysis of just why and how this happened. Because while it is by no means unprecedented for a horror film (or a film marketed as a horror film) to be a huge crossover hit, you have to go back nearly two decades to find the last time it happened: The Sixth Sense, which did so on the back of a truly awesome plot twist. Prior to that? Poltergeist, maybe, although that one was smaller in scale. Jaws was probably the one prior to it, and The Exorcist before that, and Psycho the one before that. Those last two are the closest examples; they were among the first true blockbusters, and they came along at precisely the right time to be what they ended up being, financially.

So is the case with It. The writing was probably on the wall when the first trailer came out and astonished the industry by setting the record for all-time trailer views in a single day. Even then, though, industry estimates as late as mid-summer were that the film was going to gross $40 million in its opening weekend and maybe a hundred mil overall.

And let the record show that that would have been sufficient to make it go down in history as a hit, AND as one of the biggest King films ever. The estimates gradually began to swell as tracking began to trend upward and social-media engagement was taken into consideration. Then, when presales began to be counted, you began to hear experts saying things like, "Well, we think maybe $60 million opening weekend, but we're hearing whispers that some industry folks think as high as $80 million." That's tracking-speak for "holy fuck, we don't know, but it's going to be HUGE." It's exactly what happened when presales for The Avengers and The Force Awakens (both of which were expected to be huge but were not even imagined to be as huge as they ended up being) began.

Why It?

In my opinion, it's a convergence of numerous factors:

  • inherently popular source material (the novel and the miniseries)
  • excellent marketing
  • great reviews (meaning that it's a high-quality product and therefore something that enables growth in performance, rather than the shrinkage that accompanies a low-quality product and the ensuing poor word of mouth)
  • the persistent, yet continually undervalued, popularity of the horror genre
  • a major -- and "major" is an understatement -- box-office slump during the latter half of the summer, leading to built-up desire to go to the movies on the part of people who otherwise go semi-regularly

There are probably other factors at play, too. The biggest: the cultural climate in America is one in which fear is running rampant. I'm not going to go off on too big a tangent about this, but I think it absolutely HAS to be mentioned, if only so that, years from now, when people are looking back on it and trying to put it all in context, they've got at least one tool at their disposal.

I am a firm believer in the idea that what you fear says a lot about you. You could modify that hypothesis by speculating that when you fear also says a lot about you. Without getting political, I think it's safe to say that there's plenty to be afraid of right now. There's always plenty to be afraid of; but, for at least the past year, and probably the last two (if not more), there's plenty that people ARE afraid of. We won't get into the specifics; this is not a political place, and anyways, it's not purely a political conversation (despite what some people would have you believe). It's a very large topic, and there will be many, many resources available to the scholars of the future trying to figure out what the people of the late twenty-teens were afraid of and why they got so scared of those things.

For our purposes, it's sufficient simply to point out that we are as afraid right now as we've been in half a century or more.

Is the enormous opening-weekend success of It a direct outgrowth of that ramped-up tension? I think it absolutely is, BUT ... and this is crucial, ye future scholars ... the success was/is not only due to that fear. There are indeed other factors at play, such as the ones mentioned above. Ask yourself this: if It had come out earlier in the summer -- let's say one week after the $140 million plus opening weekend of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 -- would it have done as well? Probably not; can't say for sure (it might have sucked some of the air out of the Guardians' performance for all I know), but I think the softness of the marketplace was a major factor. Conversely, if another horror movie had opened a week ahead of It during the same month -- let's say if Get Out had opened here rather than in the winter of '17 -- would it have satisfied much of the same demand? Maybe; although I tend to think the inherent qualities of It made it a uniquely potent ticket-selling force.

My guess is that it was always going to be at least a minor hit, even if done poorly; done well, it was always likely to be a hit. As is, though, it landed in precisely the right place at precisely the right time in precisely the right cultural climate.

And here's where the movie not actually being that scary really comes into play.

See, unlike some horror movies, I think the underlying messages and themes of this story are overwhelmingly positive. There's a terrific scene ending the movie's second act in which the Losers become fractured, and go through a sort of breakup in the middle of the street. "It wants to divide us!" Beverly warns her friends, and by the end of the movie, the message is clear: if they are going to triumph, they have to stay together, stand together, fight together. It's win together or lose apart; Bill tells them all that what Pennywise wants is to keep them separate and pick them off, one by one.

This is always good advice, but let's not overlook the fact that $123 million worth of people -- people seemingly (based on my limited observations) from all walks of life, from multiple generations, of multiple persuasions and backgrounds and interests -- walked into movie theatres this weekend and sat down to witness that idea played out over the course of a couple of hours. (And I'm not the first to notice this, by the way, Anthony Breznican published a piece making the same observation on September 11. More synchronicity, that.)

Maybe that's one of the takeaways from this film: that thing -- whatever it is (it's different for each of us, although potentially also the same for many of us) -- really isn't all that much to be afraid of, especially if we all refuse to be afraid of it, and refuse to let it continue to harm us.

We're better together than we are apart. That's one of this movie's major themes, and I don't know that it could have come along at a better time. The movie's massive opening-weekend success probably doesn't reflect that theme, but the performance from its second weekend forward surely will. I'm not into the prognostication business, because that way lies madness; but I have a feeling about this one. I think it's going to hold up quite well, and might still be playing strongly come Halloween.

Either way, both in terms of the film's quality and in terms of its reception, I don't know that King fans could have asked for much better. It's truly a fine moment to say you're a Constant Reader. I mean, when isn't? But it's nice to have a little validation from time to time.

As Beverly says in one scene here, "I never felt like a loser when I was with you guys."

Damn right.



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Correndo o risco de ter umas pedras tacadas em mim, eu confesso que sempre sou meio receosa em assistir filmes considerados de suspense pra cima, não só pelo fato de que eu sou uma medrosa de carteirinha, mas pq eu fico muito nervosa e impressionada e depois passo dias remoendo. Isso acontece sempre que eu deixo essa minha precaução de lado.
Mas aí, poxa, Elizabeth, 14 anos, doida pra assistir o filme. Eu digo, cara, não pode, vou ter que assistir com ela, a bicha tem 14 e vai de boa.
Fui com aquele pé atrás.
Ai, tipos, quando acabou o filme, eu olhei pra ela e "tá, é isso??? mas esse aí é o palhaço assustador? pq eu achei meio besta, na real."
Não sei se foi a adaptação, ou o que, eu gostei do filme, gostei das crianças, senti todo aquele climão anos 80 que eu amo e tals. Porém, achei besta.
Como uma galera aqui disse já ter lido o livro, solicito que me deem um spoiler de leve: no livro aparece mais sobre a origem dele? pq na hora que o gordinho tava fazendo a pesquisa dele eu comecei a achar interessante, mas aquilo ficou meio largado e tals, eu realmente queria mais informações.
Enfim, achei que era altos filme assustador, tava com medo de assistir e ai foi MEH.
P.S.: Continuo com O Iluminado baixado no computador e ainda não deu coragem de assistir. Aceito comentários sobre isso.
 
P.S.: Continuo com O Iluminado baixado no computador e ainda não deu coragem de assistir. Aceito comentários sobre isso.

O iluminado é massa! Vale super a pena. #KubrickFANBOY
Agora assim, na minha opinião as obras (e adaptações) do S.K. não são assustadoras, mas perturbadoras. Aí tipo, - falando dos filmes, você pode até se assustar aqui e ali, mas no geral é de boas.
 
Reboot de Cemitério Maldito traz referência a It: A Coisa

Cemitério Maldito é um dos filmes mais esperados dos fãs de terror em 2019 e ele traz uma bela referência a It: A Coisa.
Quando Rachel está retornando a Ludlow ela fica presa no trânsito, perto de uma placa indicando a cidade de Derry.

Para quem não se lembra, Derry é a cidade onde se passa os eventos de It: A Coisa. Não quer dizer que estejamos diante de um interconectado universo cinematográfico, como o da Marvel, mas é uma bela referência para os fãs.

O filme conta a história do Dr. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke), que, depois de mudar com sua esposa Rachel (Amy Seimetz) e seus dois filhos pequenos de Boston para a área rural do Maine, descobre um misterioso cemitério escondido dentro do bosque próximo à nova casa da família. Quando uma tragédia acontece, Louis pede ajuda ao seu estranho vizinho Jud Crandall (John Lithgow), dando início a uma reação em cadeia perigosa que liberta um mal imprevisível com consequências horripilantes.

O elenco do novo filme conta com Jason Clarke (O Primeiro Homem), John Lithgow (The Crown) e Amy Seimetz (Alien: Covenant), que protagonizam a história sobre um cemitério amaldiçoado.

O livro de King já foi transformado em filme no ano de 1989, com direção de Mary Lambert. No final desse ano, a obra completa 35 anos desde que foi lançada pelo autor.

A estreia de Cemitério Maldito acontece em 9 de maio no Brasil.
 
Geralmente filmes adaptados a partir das obras do S. King tem uma tendência elevada pra deixar a desejar, mas essa versão mais recente de 2017 até que me agradou bem.
 

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