We All Float Down Here - IT (September 2017)

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Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

The version of It that takes place in 2008 would for sure have Pennywise take the form of the Six Flags guy.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 03:53

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 00:58

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

LegionAreI posted:

The direction for Mike in that article makes me a bit uncomfortable because they could get really racist with it if they go crazy homeless crackhead, etc. Maybe it'll be fine but knowing Hollywood I have have a sneaking feeling about it ....

Honestly, I'm not thrilled with Mike in Chapter One. In the books, Mike basically has probably the best parental situation. His dad and mom are objectively good people and good parents. Taking away a fictional black character's good parents just seems a bit weird.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 23:02

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

Punch Drunk Drewsky posted:

I've made my feelings on the movie pretty clear, and I admit there's some issues with Mike, but overall there are a lot of factors not being discussed.

Part of the movie is this uncovering of a violent darkness that the town chooses to ignore. Making Mike a librarian would discount the fact that he has to live this violence, for the other kids it's just being bullied. Would you expect the kid to research his own oppression when he lives it? Consider the frankness with which Mike is able to speak at the parade, this is a fact of life for him ("Get out of our town!") as opposed to the other kids who are stunned by what their parent's can't protect them from. Similarly, the conversation at the beginning mirrors our insane ongoing debate as to whether it's okay to punch Nazis or not (it is).

Then there's the profession Mike helps out with, an allusion to Charles Burnett's film. Finally consider his vision, which is a blending of Holocaust imagery combined with the lingering memories of black residences and churches burning to the ground, combined to form a visual trail referencing events too many people deny happening. To me, there's no more stereotyping of what Mike is capable of improvising during a fight than there is to what Bev is able to accomplish with a pipe, but they are loaded with visual metaphors of overcoming their respective bigoted torments.

I think you're sort of underselling how Mike and his family are in the books. For the kids, Pennywise very much seems like a disruptive force that shakes up their decent but quietly hosed up lives. Mike and his family I feel like are coming at it from a different direction. They know Derry is ultimately a monster. Pennywise is just a part of it. His knowledge of Derry's past makes him a character with no illusions of what Derry is.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2017 00:48

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

MisterBibs posted:

Eh, you get into reductive nonsense when you start thinking that every woman character being stolen by the enemy is a Damsel In Distress. That's dumb. If Bev only existed to be the Girl Who Gets Kidnapped So That The Heroes Can Save Her, it'd be one thing. But she's not, she's a character that another character has legitimate story-based reasons for trying to take off the chessboard.

That's fair, but she is saved from the Deadlights by True Love's Kiss. And I don't think that matters so much. I mentioned this earlier, but the film never really makes it explicitly clear if she didn't gently caress Bowers or if her dad was full on raping her. But those things are irrelevant when she's with their Losers. Friendship is transformative and her becoming Sleeping Beauty in the end is indicative of that. But yes, it is using damsel in distress tropes.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2017 03:20

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

MisterBibs posted:

I'm not sure how you can realize the latter but take issue with the former. It takes her because she's strong as hell, but it takes a greater power from those explicitly less strong to rescue her.

I'm not taking issue with it. I'm saying that it's disingenuous to imply that people are being reductive when they say Bev is a damsel in distress. The film is purposefully using the language of the damsel in distress. Not only is friendship transformative, but they're flipping the script on Pennywise. They're warping his horror story into a fairytale. I dig it, but I also get people troubled by it.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2017 04:06

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

CelticPredator posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5KDc4_PQQc

This scene kind of reminds me of the Judge Doom scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Which works out timeline wise for being something Pennywise would invoke.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2017 02:01

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

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'.

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.

The book argues in a lot of ways that arrested development is not in opposition to adulthood but for a lot of people what defines adulthood (Ending up with facsimiles of your parents, doing coke as a substitute for the natural highs of youth). Our association with arrested development is being stuck in a child like state, but I don't think that's true at least from the book's point of view. Childhood is when people develop. It's later that it all seems to slow down and freeze.

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.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2017 02:14

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

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.

Not really because you're creating a dichotomy based on a cartoon character, your own misunderstanding of why Donald Trump was elected President, and ignoring the fact that my whole point is that Bev was able to call bullshit on Pennywise's own irreverence.

Despite think pieces on how Donald Trump won the presidency because of South Park and Reddit, Donald Trump mostly won because of what some perceive as law and order which they interpret as asserting fear and control over people they don't like (Including these out of control young people who don't know nothing). Go back to the Republican primary debates last year, and see how much of those debates was a bunch of flabby old men arguing who would be the scariest and toughest to America's enemies. Trump didn't break the rules, but more acted as a more literal and over the top manifestation of what the Republican Party has been since Nixon. Trump is not a disrupting force. He is just everything wrong with American politics at its most cartoonish.

Pennywise originally seems like a disruptive force as all monsters in closets do. He has no respect for the rules and authority of Derry. As the film goes on, it's revealed more and more that Derry is complicit in Pennywise. As Ben reveals, he's baked into the city. The idea of him being disruptive or irreverent is a sham. He's just an adult making kids afraid to get what he wants. Bev overcomes him because she sees that, because she already won the battle when she stood up to her dad.

But honestly, your jump to "Bart Simpsons" politics is kind of revealing to the sort of politics I was alluding to. Children being autonomous and not being scared into compliance does not equal irreverence.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2017 00:55

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

[Like many presidents and schoolteachers, Pennywise is secretly a giant spider, travels through the pipes in your home, and is only visible to people under the age of 15.]

Look, you weren't really responding to what I wrote.

My original statement was that the movie is about how adults try to control children through fear. It's not really a subtext game, but pretty surface level textual. Almost every major adult in this film is somehow using fear to try to control children. And that includes Pennywise who acts like a befuddled substitute teacher when he realizes Bev isn't scared of him before remembering he's a cthulu monster. I was responding to claims to a film being about the nature of childhood not being political being flawed because as a teacher, it literally is the fight that is being had regarding education. There are adults who honestly think the purpose of school is to control kids and fear is the way to achieve this.

You created this weird dichotomy of either kids are being controlled through fear or are Bart Simpson which is working with a lot less nuance than both the film and book. I admit I went way too far up my own rear end to try to respond to you.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2017 15:44

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The problem here is, first, that phrases like 'using fear' are extremely nonspecific (the kids themselves 'use fear' to control other kids) and, second, that even those loose terms don't apply in the film.

We don't see a single teacher using fear to control kids in the movie; the filmmakers make a very deliberate point of how the events take place during summer vacation. The police do not use fear to control kids; they are simply distant. Billy's dad doesn't use fear to control Billy - and Pennywise himself does not use fear to control kids. Pennywise scares kids for fun, but controls them with hypnotic light shows (signals from the TV, etc.). These same signals serve to pacify the adult population.

The specifics are important.

It's a broad umbrella in the film. Eddie, Henry, and Bev's parents are all completely different in their intent, but they all use fear to get some level of compliance out of their children. The film begins with Pennywise engaging in very child predator behavior leveraging Georgie's guilt of losing the boat to coax Georgie in doing something he knows is the wrong thing to do. The intent is different, but in function it's not different from "I worry about you, Bev."

I'm not saying that the film is a statement on cops or teachers, and I'm unsure where that's coming from besides being a teacher is a lens that I bring with me. I'm saying that adults utilize fear to get what they want out of kids, be it compliance or be it abuse or even a misguided sense of safety (Eddies' mom). It's a theme that is transferable.

I can't find a good clip of the actual scene, but it's worth noting that the kid show is designed as an old-school call and response TV show. It's an adult sitting in the center of a group of kids, telling them what to do and what to think. You're correct that it's not necessarily fear, but more the complaint group think that is Derry.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2017 22:54

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

Honestly, if you were going to do an It show, you should call it Derry and make it and anthology show that may or may not ever actually touch on the actual events of the book. Start with the very beginning of Derry's founding and keep jumping around in time telling different stories of It's reigns of terror. Mix in the local drama of the time and the slow build up of Pennywise as a threat.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 14:09

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

Guy Mann posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Rock_(TV_series)

I have a feeling Castle Rock is probably going to be more an original story with a bunch of nods to the other books.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 21:47

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

They should cast Amy Adams as Bill's wife.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 11:30

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 00:58

Timeless Appeal: May 28, 2006

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

I'm certain that Muschetti got attached to the project to begin with to work with J. Chastain again but seriously Amy Adams is much better casting.

What I meant was that Bill ends up marrying a woman who looks a lot like Bev. So they should just cast Amy Adams as Chastain's doppelganger since both actresses look quite a bit alike.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2018 01:01

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > We All Float Down Here - IT (September 2017)

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