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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Danse Macabre, actually, though On Writing certainly has its share of that stuff. I'll have to pick that up - one of the few King books I haven't read yet.
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Sep 25, 2017 16:22
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Dienes posted:I'll have to pick that up - one of the few King books I haven't read yet. It's really, really good and has a solid bibliography. I'm really grateful for it introducing me to The Auctioneer by Joan Samson, a great novel. If you have an Audible trial, I'm pretty sure Danse Macabre is on that.
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Sep 25, 2017 16:26
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Danse Macabre loving owns.
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Sep 25, 2017 16:43
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Jonas Albrecht posted:The EW article hints heavily that it's gonna be there. I thought that Chapter 2 hasn't been cast or written yet. How could they know?
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Sep 25, 2017 16:46
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They asked the director what he wanted to do.
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Sep 25, 2017 17:03
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Samovar posted:He didn't say fear was dangerous, he said that Pennywise was dangerous when the kids feared him. It's very different. Well no; BiggerBoat's post is a complex argument that Pennywise represents the danger of a nonspecific 'harm' related to insecurity over puberty, and kids must be taught self-reliance, to prevent this 'harm'. Since BiggerBoat argues that self-reliance is what ultimately allows you to 'conquer fear' and thereby 'transcend childhood', the 'harm' is implicitly arrested development/immaturity. The killing of the homeless man represents a rejection of collectivist ideology/ideologies and subsequent graduation to the next level of human evolution. In an apolitical way.
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Sep 25, 2017 18:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The killing of the homeless man represents a rejection of collectivist ideology/ideologies and subsequent graduation to the next level of human evolution. In an apolitical way. That's not how I read BB's statement, taking this: BiggerBoat posted:The whole loving thing is about overcoming adolescent fear, transcending into maturity and coming to terms with an inherent mistrust of grown ups and their inability to protect you from harm; the realization that you have to conquer your fears by yourself. Or in this case with friends. The "Or in this case with friends" is collective action, the kids' personal responsibility only matters insofar as they're able to create something (The Losers Club) to combat the collective indifference of existing support systems (parents, media, police, community,etc.) There's an element of "individual conquers all" at play, but individually they can only resist and can't overcome. They've created a signifier (the club) they can all pin their individual fears to but grow to take on the responsibility of each member of the group against the other (symbolized as Pennywise, burning hands, blood and hair, and so on.) The blood oath at the end is an embrace of collective ideology instead of rejecting it as Pennywise's allure is a false promise (floating) when they ground themselves in shared pain to grow up. Edit: by the way BB, if I'm misreading you or you disagree with something please feel free to correct. Same of course to you SMG :-)
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Sep 25, 2017 19:06
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BiggerBoat's ideas about 'transcending childhood' are contextualized by his definition of adulthood/maturity. Adults are defined, in his post, as those who have 'overcome their fear (of adulthood)' and 'come to terms' with these ostensible facts: -You cannot trust anyone. There is an 'inherent mistrust.' -You cannot protect others, and others cannot protect you. -You can only rely on yourself (and/or your immediate circle of friends (although even friendship is fairly unreliable (hence the parentheses))). This is of course extremely political.
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Sep 25, 2017 23:22
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People are talking about how they're going to gently caress up the second movie, I'm worried about it getting made, I mean kids grow fast. If they're going to have the kid cast return for part 2 they'd better get on it, but am I right that they haven't got a script yet? What are they waiting for?? I really want part 2 to happen.
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Sep 25, 2017 23:33
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Croisquessein posted:People are talking about how they're going to gently caress up the second movie, I'm worried about it getting made, I mean kids grow fast. If they're going to have the kid cast return for part 2 they'd better get on it, but am I right that they haven't got a script yet? What are they waiting for?? I really want part 2 to happen.
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Sep 25, 2017 23:35
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Away all Goats posted:Probably for the kids to grow up. It'd be kinda crazy/awesome/risky if they went the full Linklater or Up series route and did this.
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Sep 26, 2017 00:07
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Well no; BiggerBoat's post is a complex argument that Pennywise represents the danger of a nonspecific 'harm' related to insecurity over puberty, and kids must be taught self-reliance, to prevent this 'harm'. I think the argument that the film is non-political is one that misunderstands what the kids achieve. In both the book and film, Pennywise isn't defeated because the kids overcome childhood. He loses because they embrace childhood. The books makes this much more literal in terms of the imagination that he takes advantage being turned against him and utilized by the kids. But a big theme of the novel and film is that childhood is inherently terrifying and children are inherently dangerous. For all this talk of Pennywise as a monster who utilizes fear to control and hurt children, do you know who primarily uses fear to control children? Adults. The film shows this with Eddie's mom, Henry's dad, Mike's grandpa, and Bev's dad. Pennywise is just an exaggeration of what the adults in Derry do. Pennywise is pretty much hosed from the jump because Bev already figured out that she didn't need to be afraid when she overcame her dad. They didn't overcome fear because they became adults. They overcame fear because they embraced the thing that all adults fear most about children: What happens if they just say no? What happens if they realize that the imagined stresses used to get compliance only have one foot in reality? Bev saying she's not afraid of Pennywise isn't her realizing there's no boogy man in the closet. It's her realizing that a lot of adults can't really function without fear. As a group they realize that Pennywise is not just afraid of them, but afraid that the strength of their friendship is ultimately stronger than the fear he projects. When Pennywise realizes that she's not afraid, he's a played like a flustered substitute teacher who has to resort the big guns just to shut her up. And I get how you can say, "Well, that's not political, that's just describing the relationship between adults and kids." As a teacher, I will tell you that the themes that the movies brings up become a battlefield in terms of how we should actually teach our children.
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Sep 26, 2017 02:14
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Looks like they are saying Sept. 6, 2019 for part 2.
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Sep 26, 2017 02:31
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Harminoff posted:Looks like they are saying Sept. 6, 2019 for part 2. I figured we were in for a 2 year stretch.
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Sep 26, 2017 03:38
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My favorite part of any CineD thread is when SMG pulls at non-existent threads and defends his bloated and incorrect analysis. Sometimes I agree with you but those times are never when you go on long tangents. Some close friends of mine finally saw this and, well, she hated it because she feels like any adaptations of King's work are inherently terrible and he hated because she did. I pointed out that King really liked this version but I guess he doesn't know what he's talking about.
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Sep 26, 2017 07:55
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Inzombiac posted:I pointed out that King really liked this version but I guess he doesn't know what he's talking about.
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Sep 26, 2017 13:33
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tetrapyloctomy posted:When it comes to the quality of adaptations of his works, he actually kinda doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. But broken clocks, etc. etc. I look at it like a calligrapher being asked to design a stable building. Both are strong artistic forms, but it doesn't mean the (deceptive) simplicity of one translates to the (with many people involved) complexity of the next.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:32
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tetrapyloctomy posted:When it comes to the quality of adaptations of his works, he actually kinda doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. But broken clocks, etc. etc. My understanding of King's criticism of many adaptations is that they're not good adaptations. The Shining is supposedly great (I haven't seen it), but King's discussion of it in Doctor Sleep's notes makes it clear that he objects to how Kubrick took out the emotional heart of his original work, and not that it's not a good movie.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:42
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I like that he is still turning that over in his mind 37 years later.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:44
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Arivia posted:My understanding of King's criticism of many adaptations is that they're not good adaptations. The Shining is supposedly great (I haven't seen it), but King's discussion of it in Doctor Sleep's notes makes it clear that he objects to how Kubrick took out the emotional heart of his original work, and not that it's not a good movie. I genuinely can't understand why you would say Stand by Me or Shawkshank Redemption are bad adaptations.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:02
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ImpAtom posted:I genuinely can't understand why you would say Stand by Me or Shawkshank Redemption are bad adaptations. *shrug* I like Shawshank plenty. I don't know if he criticized that one, to be honest. Actually, a quick look around says he liked it: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/stephen-king-shawshank-redemption_n_5877810 I think King's just picky. It's his right to do so, but it's kind of silly. Sure, there's been a lot of great adaptations of his stuff, and he's liked a good number of those; but he's also responsible for some of the worst adaptations himself AND he keeps licensing his stuff out like whatever. I guess it goes back to what people were saying about King letting his works stand alone - he might be willing to give adaptations a chance, but he's also willing to call them out when he doesn't like them.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:30
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King, for better or worse, tends to write with his heart on his sleeve. It's one of the reasons why so many of his books feature the same saccharine "group of friends rally together to defeat evil through the power of love" trope. As eye-rolling as it can be, he legit buys into it. I don't think the man has ever really written something just to make a paycheck, and that earnest love for his work can be a double-edged sword. It can make him too precious to separate the good from the bad. In the case of The Shining, so much of the book is autobiographical, it's not hard to see why he would take offense to Jack being painted as an outright monster. As for his praise for The Dark Tower, well, I honestly think that was just a bit of self-fanboyism on his part.
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Sep 26, 2017 16:38
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Inzombiac posted:My favorite part of any CineD thread is when SMG pulls at non-existent threads and defends his bloated and incorrect analysis. what King gets out of movies based on his stuff does not remotely resemble what ordinary viewers who didn't write the novel are going to get out of it so no, he doesn't get to veto disliking movies
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Sep 26, 2017 18:19
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:what King gets out of movies based on his stuff does not remotely resemble what ordinary viewers who didn't write the novel are going to get out of it so no, he doesn't get to veto disliking movies This is one of those things that seems fairly obvious when you write it out, honestly.
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Sep 26, 2017 21:07
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:what King gets out of movies based on his stuff does not remotely resemble what ordinary viewers who didn't write the novel are going to get out of it so no, he doesn't get to veto disliking movies Okay sure but my point was that she automatically dislikes any adaptation because she feels like its a dump on King's vision. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I think we've all known people who take a work of fiction too seriously and feel a kind of unearned kinship with the creator.
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Sep 26, 2017 21:28
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Inzombiac posted:Okay sure but my point was that she automatically dislikes any adaptation because she feels like its a dump on King's vision. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. 
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Sep 26, 2017 21:31
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Sep 26, 2017 23:09
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Excellent. Voting 5.
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Sep 26, 2017 23:42
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Fart City posted:It's one of the reasons why so many of his books feature the same saccharine "group of friends rally together to defeat evil through the power of love" trope. I'm not super well versed in King, but what are some other examples of this? I've always thought it would be cool if King licensed his short story stuff for some sort of Black Mirror type anthology show. I remember a bunch of his short stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes ending with the kind of morbid twists that Black Mirror is famous for.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:03
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I think the thing with the disconnect between King and the films is simply a matter of intent and what the writer had in his head when he created the piece. He clearly had a vision in his head when he wrote things and if the visuals and narrative don't match up (which is almost impossible to achieve), I can see being disappointed. As an artist, I run into it all the time - not that my work has ever been adapted to other mediums - but where the meaning behind my work is often misinterpreted and also the way that most people favor my least favorite work.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:11
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I'd like to (if all the lawyers can play nice) see a collection of his Dollar Baby films. It would be interesting to see all the many ways his stuff has been adapted over the years.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:14
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GoingPostal posted:I'd like to (if all the lawyers can play nice) see a collection of his Dollar Baby films. It would be interesting to see all the many ways his stuff has been adapted over the years. I've always wanted to see these, particularly the (real) Lawnmower Man, I Am The Doorway and Grey Matter.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:15
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Timeless Appeal posted:They overcame fear because they embraced the thing that all adults fear most about children: [...] the strength of their friendship is ultimately stronger than the fear he projects. The trouble here is that this dichotomy of youthful irreverence vs adult authority crumbles in the face of irreverent authority. Bart Simpson politics can't handle a Tony Stark or, say, a Donald Trump figure. Really, you could call Trump the end-result. The black kid kills The Racist and the girl kid kills The Sexist. Nobody in the audience identifies with those grumpy rapists and, consequently, no parent in the audience is getting scared by the prospect of being murdered by their disobedient children. (Contrast with The Bad Seed, or Who Can Kill A Child?, or plenty of other films in the 'evil kid' genre.) It's the GET OUT problem, where white liberals identify with the black liberal characters, and consequently do not perceive themselves as the bad guys. Adults identify with the children, and cheer when the satanic-panic bogeyman is clubbed to (near-)death. This is why BiggerBoat's post about ascension and transcendence has these weird spiritual overtones: those talking about the children are really talking about themselves. It's important to avoid 'CineD Subtext Game' pseudo-critique where you take the basic plot and then play a mad-libs substitution. Like, the good kids are friends and murder a bad clown, so let's say the clown represents adulthood - or the opposite: let's say the clown represents immaturity. That the clown can be made to represent anything, in this way, is what bamboozles people ITT and gets them thinking that it's all a postmodern game (to be reacted against with a 'return to values'). The truth about IT is, instead, in IT's form/function. As Frederic Jameson wrote about JAWS, the shark does not represent nature or immigration, or whatever. It represents all those things, and yet none of them. "The vocation of the symbol - the killer shark - lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood more in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than as any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator." In other words, IT is a figure of a master-signifier that everyone seemingly agrees is real (and must be eliminated), and yet no-one can actually define IT. IT is a mix of contradictory, even incompatible traits - and there are only two explanations for this inconsistency: that IT is merely a person and/or that IT is ''The Jew", the figure from antisemetic fantasy. "The function of the shark is to unite all these fears so that we can in a way trade all these fears for one fear alone. In this way, our experience of reality gets much simpler." -Zizek Nobody talks about the scene where Ritchie gets locked in a room full of clown dolls and then slowly approaches a casket. This is because, first, it sucks. It's like a placeholder scene that you can tune out. But second, it's because the scene is a very banal illustration of fantasy at its purest: the fantasy of being present for one's own funeral - the fantasy of becoming a disembodied gaze and observing one's own nonexistence . Ritchie sees clown dolls (as opposed to actual people in makeup) because he is imagining that he has become a ghost and transcended humanity (so he can look down at his own corpse, bemused that he himself was such a pathetic toy).* Of course Pennywise then jumps out and yells 'ooga booga', and it's almost deliberately idiotic. We trade all the anxieties for one big fear, right? So Ritchie trades his awareness of his mortality for a yelling clown. IT's appearance is invariably comforting; it signals that you don't need to pay attention anymore. *And again: no kid thinks like this, with the Annabelle dolls and poo poo. We shown this tension between the maternal adult POV trying and failing to understand childhood fear and the crassly exploitative James Wan thing, where it's almost teasing a connection to the 'The Conjuring Cinematic Universe'.
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Sep 27, 2017 09:07
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Looten Plunder posted:
I don't know if it's more like Black Mirror, or something more like Once Upon A Time that ropes multiple stories into a single narrative, but Castle Rock is coming soon
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Sep 27, 2017 13:09
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Looten Plunder posted:I'm not super well versed in King, but what are some other examples of this? As for an anthology, nobody really knows exactly what Hulu's Castle Rock project is going to be, but it's supposed to be a sort of Stephen King Extended Universe thing. I'd be surprised if some of his short stories aren't pulled in.
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Sep 27, 2017 14:00
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Fart City posted:There's a running theme though his work that love is not some sort of ethereal concept, but an actual force of nature of sorts that can bend the scope of reality. It's by no means written insincerely. It's all earnest. Stephen King and Christopher Nolan have more in common than I thought, both trade in dark and brooding imagery for the most part but are saps deep down.
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Sep 27, 2017 14:16
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Fart City posted:Dreamcatcher, major parts of The Dark Tower, arguably the ending of The Stand (though the actual climax is predicated on a literal act of god). Needful Things' ending as well. There's a running theme though his work that love is not some sort of ethereal concept, but an actual force of nature of sorts that can bend the scope of reality. It's by no means written insincerely. It's all earnest. I think it's more overtly spiritual on the level of The Stand, but David from Desperation has some elements of this. Kind of a binding pure force that, if I'm remembering correctly, David's priest calls God but could be anything. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The black kid kills The Racist and the girl kid kills The Sexist. Nobody in the audience identifies with those grumpy rapists and, consequently, no parent in the audience is getting scared by the prospect of being murdered by their disobedient children. (Contrast with The Bad Seed, or Who Can Kill A Child?, or plenty of other films in the 'evil kid' genre.) This is interesting to me. I do identify with the grumpy racists (not so much rapists), I just chose not to write about that and instead focus on the traumatic aspects of IT. Is it some failure on ITs part that I'm avoiding that discussion? Not that I'm in any particular hurry to write about how terrible I used to be, and I get that you're using "nobody" as more of a broad point for your analysis, but I'm curious if it's some failure on IT's part that the effect results in the 'CineD Subtext Game.'
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Sep 27, 2017 18:13
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Looten Plunder posted:I'm not super well versed in King, but what are some other examples of this? He did for a miniseries. Results were mixed, but I recall Battleground being p. cool
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Sep 27, 2017 23:52
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I saw IT. I liked parts of it, some I didnt like. I would have liked if the clown acted differently. They should have made it more like the book. Why didnt they make the clown visible to adults? Now to wait for part 2!
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Sep 28, 2017 02:04
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End of Shoelace posted:I saw IT. I liked parts of it, some I didnt like. I would have liked if the clown acted differently. They should have made it more like the book. Why didnt they make the clown visible to adults? I'm pretty sure It and everything It creates is invisible to adults in the books. Like there is a scene where he shows up as a gigantic statue and there is a dad with a small child near It who is completely oblivious to the several story tall plastic clown monster towering over him but his toddler freaks the gently caress out. They pretty much needed to have the clown be as different as possible since if they had tried to ape Curry's iconic performance it would have felt forced and wrong. It's a bit like Christopher Lee's Dracula vs Bela Lugosi's. They're both Dracula and do Dracula stuff but the way they act is totally different. Lee leans a lot more into the nocturnal predator aspect of Dracula and Bela Lugosi more into the exotic nobleman aspect. Both are great in their own way. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 02:11
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