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Punch Drunk Drewsky posted:Trauma, and speech therapy, sometimes involves the use of grounding exercises to get control of your situation. Some folks use a mantra, like Bill, and then you've got folks like me who think primarily in visuals so I picture my stuffed Vivi doll, describe its features, then start describing my immediate surroundings while reminding myself I'm safe. Yes, I know that, because I read the book. The movie doesn't give the audience any basis for Bill saying weird poo poo.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:17 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 02:58 |
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Upon further reflection, I'm a little bit disappointed with Derry. It's been a while since I read the book, but the whole town of Derry felt like it was always a secondary antagonist. A deeply, deeply troubled town with an underlying sense of wrongness and total apathy towards what the Losers were going through. They touched on it in the movie, and I understand it's hard to fit all that into 2 hours, but I felt like we needed more adults being frighteningly negligent.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:22 |
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Yes, I know that, because I read the book. The movie doesn't give the audience any basis for Bill saying weird poo poo. My point is, this is a common practice. Therapists don't need to read IT to teach or explain the process to people. Beyond trauma/speech therapy uses, people have all sorts of rituals to keep themselves in the moment. Bill stutters, he lost his brother, and uses a mantra to ground himself.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:24 |
The damsell in distress critique is just wrong. The problematic aspect of the "DID" trope is female characters being given no agency and serving only to motivate the male characters. Beverly, despite getting captured, is a strong feminine character that repeatedly kicks rear end and has plenty of agency.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:26 |
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I'm hoping for a version where the monster says "float" even once. Is this a joke dirksteadfast posted:Upon further reflection, I'm a little bit disappointed with Derry. It's been a while since I read the book, but the whole town of Derry felt like it was always a secondary antagonist. A deeply, deeply troubled town with an underlying sense of wrongness and total apathy towards what the Losers were going through. They touched on it in the movie, and I understand it's hard to fit all that into 2 hours, but I felt like we needed more adults being frighteningly negligent. The adults' absence is already very negligent, and whenever they do show up they're all pretty awful.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:26 |
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Honestly anyone complaining is wasting their time. We know this movie failed us. There was no dam building scene.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:30 |
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Nroo posted:Is this a joke Richie says "The kids are all floating!!" as if the word "float" means anything in the context of the movie. Pennywise never says "float" at all. This poo poo is inexcusable. It's like they filmed a good movie and then jump-cut all the good parts out of it.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:32 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The main problem with the film is that people are talking about it in terms like "Beverley was captured by Pennywise and that makes her a damsel in distress", instead of "what does it mean to be captured by Pennywise?" This isn't a bad read, but it sort of misses that Pennywise is very much a thing before Beverly is even introduced. If Pennywise is the manifestation of her trauma, then what the hell killed Georgie? For that matter, what killed Patrick, who barely even encounters Bev? Pennywise, rather than any manifestation of a character's specific trauma, is a manifestation of the town's trauma; it's every dark secret bubbling beneath the town's surface, anthropomorphized. The only characters whose fears don't tie into some deep, lingering trauma of the town are Richie and Patrick; the former has nothing to fear meaningfully from the town, so it preys on his simple fear of his own mortality instead, and the latter is killed by his own subconscious guilt at partaking in the horror. The answer I would come up with to the question you initially posed, "what does it mean to be kidnapped by Pennywise," is frankly much simpler. When Bev smashes her dad over the head with the toilet lid, she removes Pennywise's ability to truly affect her; it can't make her fear anything anymore, because the only thing she was really afraid of is bleeding out, unconscious, on the ground a few feet away from them. Kidnapping her is an act of frustration, as without being able to cause her any real fear, Pennywise would get nothing out of killing her. Hell, in its lair, Pennywise tries a few tricks to see if it can scare her (the now-infamous dance), and then when none of them actually work, goes "gently caress it, Deadlights time" to see if it can use her as leverage over actual nutritious children. People are treating her kidnapping as an example of the character being weak, when if the character had been weak she simply would have been devoured like Georgie and Patrick; instead, she's the only character who's, essentially, too spicy for Pennywise.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:35 |
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Pennywise does say "float" during the film to Eddie though.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:35 |
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Also, Pennywise absolutely mentions the floating thing several times, just never in clown form except possibly in the Georgie scene. Pennywise!Georgie uses it as a motif, practically.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:36 |
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Nroo posted:Is this a joke I've got this growing feeling a lot of people want the psychologist from the end of Psycho to pop out for multiple explanations. Which, cool, not my bag but folks like what folks like. On the second part, that's established painfully well in the beginning with Bill when Bill's dad shows his approach to talking with his grieving and vocally struggling son is by yelling at him to think of what his mother's going through. The mother who was extremely disinterested in her kids and was blankly playing the piano. The biggest slice of the dagger? Bill's dad telling Bill - already emotionally low and having difficulty communicating - to ask the next time he wants to use something from the office. That's some Affliction-level parenting right there.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:46 |
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It likes to prey on fear. It could sense Georgie being some what bothered by this clown, but didn't want to scare him off. It got off on making that kid come to him. The rest of the kids, it just enjoyed loving with them relentlessly until it felt like it got them where it wanted. By that point they were already standing up to him, and that's why it gets more frantic.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:48 |
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:It's like they filmed a good movie and then jump-cut all the good parts out of it. It does feel weirdly cut down.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:51 |
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Punch Drunk Drewsky posted:On the first, I think that - aside from the Ben issues - this is why her earliest scenes hit me. Specifically, "You did this to me.". Makes it clear she's working on a register of trauma the other kids can only imagine. However, this is why the other characters come across as interchangeable. Why does the Bill imagine/pretend that Pennywise is his mom (in the slideshow scene)? Who gives a poo poo! There's even less to be gained in examining why the Jewish kid uses the flute painting to work through his issues with his father. And then you get to Egg Boy and it's like, yeah, he thinks of mummies because he likes history. (Richie hates clowns because it's a generic fear for the kid with no backstory whatsoever.) Mike is the only one who sort-of approaches Beverley's experience, but he still just plays the clown game. And note how Egg Boy is distinctly not traumatized by the sexualized H-carving attack. He shrugs it off it as just a weird thing that happened. All the boys' scare scenes are just wheel-spinning. This also means that we get a bullshit ending where the characters flail at an effigy - a scapegoat. Remember: when the Jewish kid hits the clown at the end, it ostensibly represents him cathartically overcoming his fear of there being a dark side to his father's teachings (the light on the bookshelf goes out, etc.). Has he actually learned something? No wonder IT ends with "to be continued!" LORD OF BOOTY posted:This isn't a bad read, but it sort of misses that Pennywise is very much a thing before Beverly is even introduced. If Pennywise is the manifestation of her trauma, then what the hell killed Georgie? Pennywise is not a manifestation of Beverley's trauma; he is brought to life by the boys as a game. Georgie just died in an accident - they make it a clear point that nobody was looking. The old woman just sees some blood. Bad things happen to good people sometimes, and Pennywise is simply invented as an explanation. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Sep 13, 2017 |
# ? Sep 13, 2017 06:52 |
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...what that's an interesting interpretation oh wait, is that your gimmick, cause I'm digging it
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:04 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:However, this is why the other characters come across as interchangeable. Why does the Bill imagine/pretend that Pennywise is his mom (in the slideshow scene)? Who gives a poo poo! There's even less to be gained in examining why the Jewish kid uses the flute painting to work through his issues with his father. And then you get to Egg Boy and it's like, yeah, he thinks of mummies because he likes history. (Richie hates clowns because it's a generic fear for the kid with no backstory whatsoever.) IT was a triggering experience for me so I'm gonna do my best here. The slideshow scene's important for obscuring Bill's mother's face initially. His parents are absentee bordering on abusive. Those memories are tainted now that he knows what adults are "really" like and that solace is gone, the perfect place for It to spring out some torment. Stan, yeah, he's kind of weak. I liked the imagery of the distorted woman and how It's attempts at frightening him with her was sequenced with aspect ratio shifts. But how that relates to his father is a tough guess in-movie outside of maybe Stan feeling at-odds with Old Testament treatment of women. With Ben's assault, he's able to fall into a support group. Not that support groups are 100% successful at stemming trauma before it seeds, but he's treated with enough compassion and humor that his relationship with them is immediately supportive backed by them willing to go to bat for each other. Not sure what you're getting at with Mike or that Bev is playing their game. She's the one who reaches out to them so that they can see the results of her realized trauma with the blood soaked bathroom. Concepts blend as they slowly find common ground to communicate their experiences.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:17 |
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Tired Moritz posted:...what supermechagodzilla posting in a thread about an adaptation of IT is what we in the business world like to call "a perfect form of synergy"
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:18 |
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I had weird feelings seeing an entity that thrives on fear and malice be defeated by enraged 13 year olds beating him to death in a frenzy.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:25 |
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Cephas posted:I had weird feelings seeing an entity that thrives on fear and malice be defeated by enraged 13 year olds beating him to death in a frenzy. Good god do I feel you on this one. I was feeling catharsis, nausea, sadness, jubilation, fear, and more than a bit of retributive wish fulfillment.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:33 |
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Richie's fear of clowns definitely felt like a shortcut. 'Let's just skip straight to the end for him.'
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:39 |
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I sort of wish they'd just comedically battered it into a pulp.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:46 |
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I sort of wish they'd just comedically battered it into a pulp. The end reminded me of Death Proof, which made me love it even more. Pennywise was basically Stuntman Mike through and through. They even shared the same shift in personality. Both became a mess of blubbering fear.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:53 |
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Punch Drunk Drewsky posted:I definitely could be not remembering it correctly. But let's go with this, Henry yelled, "Get the gently caress out of my town." We've got emboldened bigots across the country yelling, "Get the gently caress out of my country," at PoC regardless of whether they were born here or not. Those bigots will swear up and down that they are not bigoted, because they didn't say the magic bigot words. That you are the one who is bigoted because you are the one making it about race. "You're kind don't belong here," sounds archaic, because at this point it is cliche with a history of being a specific reference to racial prejudice. If a white character says it to a black character there is no doubt in anybody's mind by what is meant by "your kind." The approach the movie takes is to try to have the best of both worlds. Of course it's all about Mike's race, but because that's never explicit, nobody ever really has to confront the ugliness of it. You can just ignore it, or even go as far as pretending it's not about his race. I should further clarify my personal position is that I think it's kind of weird to want to see more racism in a movie. I don't necessarily have a problem with the movies treatment of Mike as much as I have a problem with the movie's treatment of Bev in contrast to Mike. If Muschietti took a no-holds barred approach, and showed everything in all of its ugliness, I would be fine with that. If he kept Mike how he is, and toned down the leering and creepiness surrounding Bev, I would be fine with that too. I don't think he comes off as outright woman-hating as Joseph Kosinski does in Oblivion, but that's the last movie I remember seeing that I thought the gender politics were so outright indefensible.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 07:54 |
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Punch Drunk Drewsky posted:Not sure what you're getting at with Mike or that Bev is playing their game. She's the one who reaches out to them so that they can see the results of her realized trauma with the blood soaked bathroom. Concepts blend as they slowly find common ground to communicate their experiences. Mike is a victim of racism/white supremacism in the same way that Beverley is a victim of sexism/patriarchy. Consequently, his fear is borderline non-anthropomorphic (an abstract cluster of grasping hands) - but Mike is still 'too childish', and so the hands immediately resolve into the figure of the clown. Again: beating up Pennywise doesn't do anything to fight racism. Mike is retreating from the real horror - that his parents burned to death for no reason at all. Pennywise is presented as merely a doll, with a head made of plaster. He's a pinata. You're right about Beverley being the one who brings the kids together and emboldens them to share their silly fears, but the game that functions as a banishing ritual (where they beat a clown doll with sticks and then become blood-brothers) is the boys' invention. In It Follows, this is exactly the swimming pool sequence - where the younger/less-mature kids likewise play a game of summoning and then clumsily battling a shapeshifting fear-creature that appears (though they don't realize it) as the molested girl's father. 'Bringing people together' is not good in and of itself; what we have in IT is unmistakably similar to 'satanic panic' conspiracy theories. Note all this thread's credulous assertions that Derry is hosed up not because of socioeconomic factors, but because of the shapeshifting reptilian pedophile who abducts children into secret tunnels beneath the town.... Setting the film in the 1980s only amplifies this aspect of the narrative. Beating the clown is a fake solution - hence the outright admission, at the end, that the film is incomplete. Tired Moritz posted:...what There are dozens upon dozens of films that deal with the same subject matter as this, in similar ways. I've already listed a few. IT is only unique in that it shies away from questioning the kids' beliefs. Even in the comedic Cabin In The Woods, you have the point that the monsters are merely symptoms of a massive subterranean blob-creature that represents capitalism. Note how hypochondriac kid imagines this cartoonish caricature of a homeless dude. For all the talk of 'crackheads', we don't actually see the poverty in Derry. We have only these kids' weird fantasies of what homelessness must be like. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Sep 13, 2017 |
# ? Sep 13, 2017 08:38 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:'Bringing people together' is not good in and of itself; what we have in IT is unmistakably similar to 'satanic panic' conspiracy theories. Note all this thread's credulous assertions that Derry is hosed up not because of socioeconomic factors, but because of the shapeshifting reptilian pedophile who abducts children into secret tunnels beneath the town.... Setting the film in the 1980s only amplifies this aspect of the narrative. I think it's a more accurate read to say that Pennywise is those socioeconomic factors given anthropomorphic, ravenous form. The true cause is the town itself being hosed up, rather than Pennywise appearing in a vacuum (hell, the clown motif is actually fairly instructive here; Pennywise is not unique to Derry, but is a "traveling circus" of sorts, existing anywhere that those socioeconomic factors do), but the effect is not meaningfully different from a shapeshifting pedophile stealing children away into the sewers. And yeah, it's a fake solution; that's why there's an entire second half with the Losers as adults coming back to face it again, because they failed to kill it. You can't bludgeon racism or misogyny to death. You can make it gently caress off for a while by bludgeoning its perpetrators, but it won't go away for good.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 08:49 |
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Saw the film, really liked it. I'm a pretty superficial film watcher and some bits really got to me. I liked how the bullys seemed linked to penny-wise, like human versions of the monster feeding on fear. it was like a symbiotic relationship where they scared kids and the smell attracted penny-wise in some cases. Same with Bev's dad, it felt like his escalation was a beacon or something and Bam! There it is. I totally felt Stan's fear of the picture, I had a picture in a book that I would keep testing myself with. The flute lady was by far the most scary thing to me. Little Georgie was heart rending from start to finish. The little chap was really good, and I got really tearful when Bill had to pull the trigger Does anyone else think that Stan would have been a better kidnap victim? It would feed better into his later acts that he went through something so much more than his friends and got that glimpse of the future where it happens again.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 08:57 |
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tessiebee posted:Saw the film, really liked it. I'm a pretty superficial film watcher and some bits really got to me. Same. Out of curiosity, what was the picture?
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 09:00 |
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Cephas posted:I had weird feelings seeing an entity that thrives on fear and malice be defeated by enraged 13 year olds beating him to death in a frenzy. Fear turned to contempt and malice into righteous fury. I mean, they were still afraid but not of imagined fears now, just the very real fangs and claws of a killer. Pennywise lost the power of being a supernatural terror and was reduced to a dangerous animal that needs putting down. MariusLecter fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Sep 13, 2017 |
# ? Sep 13, 2017 09:04 |
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Mike is the only one who sort-of approaches Beverley's experience, but he still just plays the clown game. And note how Egg Boy is distinctly not traumatized by the sexualized H-carving attack. He shrugs it off it as just a weird thing that happened. All the boys' scare scenes are just wheel-spinning.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 09:06 |
Book question... Which kid killed themselves in a bath 27 years after the first event? I can't remember for the life of me Chapter 2 should be balls to the wall violent going by the book anyway
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 10:01 |
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If they don't meet up at a nice Chinese restaurant and do the fortune cookie thing for Chapter 2, consider it DOA.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 10:07 |
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TwoDogs1Cup posted:Book question... Stan
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 10:14 |
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TwoDogs1Cup posted:Book question... Stan
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 10:14 |
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Fartt
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 10:58 |
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Jonas Albrecht posted:Same. Out of curiosity, what was the picture? It was a very old copy of Redcap Adventures by SR Crockett. The cover was plain but a full size of this was on the inside leaf https://www.google.co.uk/search?cli...vGGQ5CsSYiFktM:
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 11:23 |
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tessiebee posted:It was a very old copy of Redcap Adventures by SR Crockett. The cover was plain but a full size of this was on the inside leaf Cool.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 11:35 |
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Nroo posted:Is this a joke Yeah, it was hard for me to pinpoint why I felt that way, because every example from the movie points to the adults all being terrible. I think one thing that might have helped was not having the red balloon when the adults in the car ignored Ben (it's in the trailers, not spoilering that). Most of the other adults shown are parents of the kids, so their bad parenting definitely affects the kids but doesn't come across as the whole town being just oppressively against them. By having these two strangers just ignoring as a kid is tortured and not giving the whole "Oooh, Pennywise is here" shorthand would've really driven home that the kids are hosed even without an evil clown after them. I don't know, just spitballing after one viewing, obviously there's a lot to digest and it's hard to give any one thing that did or didn't work for something that's mostly based on how things feel.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 11:49 |
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I got a weird feeling about some of the parents it felt like Eddie's mum and Bev's dad were obsessed with keeping them children. Because dad in particular with his emphasis on being his little girl and not doing womanly things. Eddie's mum specifically states she was trying to keep him "safe" so Georgie aside there could be an underscore of growing up makes you a target. A lot of the missing kids were teen/tweens too.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 13:10 |
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Maybe I'll see it again, but it also feels like y'all are reading way too much depth into what actually plays as a lovely, generic, modern horror flock.
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 13:31 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 02:58 |
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I'm dying to know how the final battle will be handled in Chapter Two. Since the turtle was left out of Chapter One, will all the cosmic stuff be omitted completely in favor of sticking with the physical confrontation with the spider like the mini-series did?
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# ? Sep 13, 2017 13:33 |