IT: CHAPTER TWO – BETTER THAN THE BOOK & MORE THAN I EXPECTED BUT PLEASE DO NOT TAKE CHILDREN

SHORT TAKE:

Surprisingly thoughtful, intricately plotted, well acted and very effective but terrifying finale to the film version of Stephen King’s mammoth-sized book IT.

WHO SHOULD GO:

I would like to make one thing clear: STEPHEN KING STORIES ARE NOT CHILD FRIENDLY!!!

There is a warning at the beginning of the movie which declares flashing lights could trigger epileptic seizures in the photosensitive. But that is the LEAST of the problems. There is also sexually discussed content, a profound amount of gratuitous profanity, some of it blasphemous, a lot of lethal violence and gore with child victims in close up, homicide, patricide, people being burned alive, grotesque deformities, slit throats, an explicit scene of suicide, overt physical and implied sexual abuse, and brief but conspicuous demonstrations of alternative sexuality. The violence and bloodshed would have alarmed the Grimm Brothers, though this is to be expected in any movie about a child-eating monster.

I do not know what the parents in the audience were thinking but there was a group of under-chaperoned young teens in the audience next to me for whom I cringed, given the film’s content as well as the visuals in some of the trailers. An R-rated movie will attract R-rated trailers, which R-rated “coming soon” offerings will not be R-rated “ONLY” for gore. One of the movies previewed at the afternoon showing of IT: C2, which was viewed by these kids, included scantily clad pole dancers! Even more inexplicable was the presence of young children who, predictably, begin to cry almost from the outset. Bringing kids to an R-rated movie of any kind, much less a horror fest, is a face-palming level of stupidity, bordering on child neglect, if not abuse.

Let me repeat KING IS NOT CHILD FRIENDLY. DO NOT TAKE CHILDREN.

FOR MATURE ADULT AGE TEENS AND UP ONLY!!!

LONG TAKE:

I walked into IT: Chapter Two fully expecting not to like it. I can hardly be blame. I didn’t like the book and although the TV version had a – dare I say it – certain charm due to the talents of Tim Curry as Pennywise the sinister, extraterrestrial psycho killer clown, and the recent Part 1, IT, wasn’t bad, I still did not hold out much for Part 2, having read the book.  My youngest, now 21, pointed out an element that had not occurred to me about Part 1 – that instead of a straight up horror story it could be seen as an analogy for overcoming one’s childhood traumas and deepest wounds.

Although I thought this idea had merit I still dreaded what they would do with the second installment. After all it was based upon an excessively long, often deeply disturbing novel which catered to our darkest impulses and often relied heavily on caricature-level biases against small town citizens, authority figures, and parents.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the film. While it is, by no means, a great movie, it is far better than I thought it would be. IT: Chapter Two is the second half of Stephen King’s elephantine book IT about 7 children, outcasts in different ways, who bond as The Losers’ Club to fight an other worldly monster, and their adult selves who return 27 years later to kill IT. My review of the filmed version of the first half of the book – IT – is HERE and covers the child actor versions of the characters. The kids return in clips and flashbacks.

SPOILERS – BIG, CASUAL SPOILERS – SO BE FORWARNED

The adults include: James McAvoy (whose incredibly varied resume includes: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Split, Atomic Blonde, and the entire X-Men reboot series) is Bill, the stuttering leader of the group. Jessica Chastain (Molly’s Game, Interstellar) is Beverly the grown up abused child who marries another abusive man. Bill Hader (who has done a lot of voice over acting) is Richie the comedian who as a child seems physically incapable of keeping his smart aleck bully-antagonizing comments to himself. Isaiah Mufasa is Mike, as a child one of the only black people in Derry and an orphan whose parents burned to death in a tragedy he witnessed, and as an adult is the librarian and self appointed guardian of Derry who stays to watch for the monster’s re-appearance. The significantly sleeker and athletic grown up Ben is played by born-Kiwi (native New Zealander) now Aussie Jay Ryan (who, in a note of incredible irony, before becoming established as an actor, used to perform in local supermarkets entertaining young children as —– a clown). Andy Bean is the adult Stan whose Jewish faith, when a child in Derry, made him the target of abuse by the town bullies. Finally, fatherless, hypochondriacal, mother-dominated Eddie has grown up to be played by James Ransone.

Bill Skarsgård (a worthy addition to the Skarsgard acting family which includes both brother Alexander from Melancholia, Battleship, and Tarzan, as well as his father Stellan from the Marvel movies) reprises his role as Pennywise. One might hate his performance as the psycho clown or be fascinated by his interpretation of King’s murderous mountebank, but no one can deny that Skarsgard puts his all into the character, going full out to invest Pennywise with as much horror as a harlequin can hold.

While Gary Dauberman, the scriptwriter, REALLY needs to learn the meaning of “less is more” (and yes, I know, people who live in glass houses….), he, with director Andy Muschietti, (whose only big credit up to now was another horror movie – Mama), made some VERY VERY good plot choices.

There were a number of circumstances in the source material they decided to leave out. Among the sensible deletions were, among a number of other smaller but improvement tweaks: Tom, Beverly’s abusive husband doesn’t pursue them into Pennywise’s lair in a last minute late third act conflict. They do NOT use a parody-level, laughable, King-invented creation myth of a turtle who vomits up the universe to defeat Pennywise. Derry did not blow up when the monster died, resulting in the group being heroes who save a town leaving hope in their wake instead of monster hunters who leave nothing but destruction behind them. Bill’s wife, Audra, did not show up needing to be saved which would have further padded an already excessively long run time. And they explicitly do NOT again lose their memories of Derry after the monster is vanquished, which retention implies they have learned to conquer their own inner demons as well as the extraterrestrial who externalized those fears. (NOT to mention the extremely wise excision in the first movie of the truly disturbed scene in the book where the boys “tag team” Beverly in a bonding ritual of intimacy.)

These cuts indicated a well considered re-evaluation of King’s original book. Dauberman and Muschietti kept what made a good horror story from King’s book IT and replaced the book’s failings with plot and character structures that provided IT with a deeper, layered and even subtle meaning over which King’s far more negative paper prose had steam rollered. Thankfully, and in a rarity, the filmmakers had a bit more sense and gentler hand than did the initiating author.

Dauberman also chose to craft the story around a continuation of the first film’s theme of conquering childhood fears. Each adult, who had formerly been a member of The Losers’ Club, contributes to the defeat of the fear-eating monster by facing and debriding some wound which fundamentally shaped their personalities. Bev once and for all denies her abusive father’s hold over her by embracing Ben’s unconditional genuine love for her. Ben, at one point, is trapped in their childhood underground clubhouse with its walls closing in on him, physicalizing how he was trapped in the fat of his own prepubescent body, but vanquishes this self-killing insecurity by declaring his love for Beverly in acknowledgment that he is not alone and is worthy of loving and being loved. Bill almost drowns in the same sewer water in which his brother Georgie died, then kills a younger self-accusatory version of himself, finally putting his misplaced guilt over his brother’s death behind him. Eddie uncovers Pennywise’s fatal weakness when he throws off his germophobia long enough to successfully wrestle a leperous manifestation of the evil clown.

And so it goes. As each member adds to the pot the Losers get stronger.

To defeat Pennywise they must all reduce him to a killable size. Metaphorically this makes perfect sense. One’s childhood fears can seem to increase proportionately as one gets older, towering over us unchecked and unconfronted to destroy us. But in the light of mature perspective, trauma can be reduced to manageable size from which one can learn, grow, and even benefit. This is a philosophy worth considering and manifests in a monstrously (if you’ll excuse the pun) dramatic way in Pennywise.

There are also a couple of fun cameos – Stephen King, himself, as an opportunistic second-hand shop owner, and Peter Bogdanovich (real life director of Noises Off, Paper Moon, and What’s Up Doc?) playing to type as a film director.

BUT for all of its successes as a horror film – IT is WAY too long – by about a third. Just having to accommodate a large ensemble cast will make for an inherently long story. Accommodating TWO ensemble groups – with present-time adults and childhood dove-tailing flashbacks – is one of the reasons this movie is almost a full 3 hours long. Its padding is mostly due to not trusting the average ticket buyers. Dauberman, et al, needn’t have worried that audience members would RANDOMLY wander into a movie house showing a movie titled IT: Chapter Two. We really did not need all the backtracking, and re-covering old childhood ground with “new” adult eyes to understand what was going on.

In addition, I do not think they understood the difference between pausing long enough for tension to build and holding on to the “punch line” so long you start checking your watch. There are a LOT of jump scares in IT. This movie practically parkours its way through the entire plot on jump scares. And every SINGLE jump scare endures a prolonged preview. For example, Rich and Eddie encounter a cute Pomeranian dog – probably because Rich had jokingly stated a wish that he hoped the monster’s true form would be in this shape. We all know the dog is going to jump scare into a monster-size zombie dog but far too many beats go by as Rich and Eddie comment about how cute it is before this happens. So, yeah, about an hour could have been chopped just by jumping, instead of dragging, their way to the jump scares.

The language is ridiculously and unnecessarily crude, using the “F” word like a baker does flour. Granted all of them subtly reverted back to elements of their childhood during the course of the movie – Bill’s stutter and Eddie’s psychosomatic asthma for examples. Childhood Richie had a marked dependence on profanity as a defense mechanism against his own insecurities, so adult Richie’s profane filled vocabulary should not surprise us, but even so, the repetition became gratuitous.

Benjamin Wallfisch returns to create yet another creepy musical backdrop which functions as a character in its own right. Heavy, and effectively random use of oppressive jarring percussions and wandering dissonant acrobatics on flute and violin provide a disjointed, otherworldly, off balanced and forcefully unsettling soundtrack for most of the movie accompanying Pennywise, which music occasionally, like brief moments of sunshine during a terrible storm, give way to lovely, lyrical, and melancholic passages representing the children and their adult dopplegangers.

IT: C2 is a solid horror movie with an intelligent sub-text but certainly appropriate only for older teens and up given the language, the extreme violence, and multiple scenes of physical, emotional, verbal and implied sexual abuse.

And as I have already mentioned – more horrifying than Pennywise’s presence on screen was the attendance by a number of early teens and even YOUNGER audience members, some of whom were with parents who REALLY should have known better. As if the movie IT: C2 was not inappropriate enough for these children, the previews certainly were, including stories which featured real world violence and pole-dancing strippers. If a movie is “R” rated, as IT is, then authority figures should realize previews are going to be “R” rated as well and often not just for gore and jump scares.

So if you liked Chapter ONE IT then you’ll find IT: Chapter Two very satisfying, with creatively gross monsters and an interesting underlying analogy about learning to heal from childhood trauma.

But PLEASE avoiding traumatizing your own child with this movie and leave the kids at home.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: DC v. MARVEL – It’s a COMIC book not Kafka…..so be nice

SHORT TAKE:

Justice League is an amusing and entertaining excuse to unite the DC comic book characters into their version of Marvel's Avengers but requires some parental supervision because of two short but poorly chosen off hand political and anti-Christian polemics which should require discussion between younger viewers and their parents.

LONG TAKE:

Writing an origin story isn’t easy. You have to deal with a lot of exposition and expectation all while trying to find a new way to tell an established or sometimes even cliched story line. Sometimes it works spectacularly well – like the Chris Reeves’ Superman or this year’s Wonder Woman. Sometimes not so well, like Wolverine or Eric Bana’s Hulk. And when you’re trying to do a team effort that issue becomes exponentially more difficult.

Such is the challenge facing Justice League, especially when three of the characters have only appeared in cameos in Batman V Superman: Flash/Barry Allen (Ezra "Fantastic Beasts" Miller), Cyborg/Victor Stone (Ray Fisher), and Aquaman/Arthur Curry (Jason "Drogo from Game of Thrones" Momoa).

The premise is that Bruce Wayne/Batman, in the wake of Superman’s untimely demise, has discovered that the void left by his super-colleague is attracting very ugly aliens called parademons who look an awful lot like larger flying version of the dwergers from Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing.

To prepare for the invasion by the parademons master, Steppenwolf (super villain, not the ‘60's band) who seeks to remake the world in his own image, Bruce and Wonder Woman/Diana set out to recruit other supers.  Bruce to seek the Flash and Aquaman, Diana to convince Cyborg. All three of the newbies have troubled pasts (Cyborg, Flash and Aquaman can put their baggage in the closet with the steam trunks from the traumatized Batman and grieving Wonder Woman) but eventually agree, only to find out that their considerable combined efforts will not be quite enough to even create a stalemate with Steppenwolf.

A nice little theme of not putting your light under a bushel, of being able to overcome your fears of failure or worse, dread of the responsibility in leadership, is interwoven in the storyline, but only as light embroidery, not as sustaining warp and woof of this cinematic costume quality fabric.

Other reviewers have complained the story felt disjointed and somewhat disconnected. By necessity this is what happens when you try to introduce three major players into a five "man" mix with a story intended to propel them together and still try to keep the movie less than 15 hours long. A few things have to be cut and you have to edit down a bit.

While Justice League isn’t as lighthearted as Guardians of the Galaxy nor near the apex of the genre that is  The Avengers, or Wonder Woman, it’s an engaging enough flick. And isn’t that good enough?! I mean, come ON, it’s a live action comic book!! If you want Shakespeare then you could watch…..well, OK Branagh’s Thor….

But seriously, there are at least four compelling reasons why I liked Justice League and can forgive them a lot of plot and presentation weaknesses because of them:

1. We get the return of Wonder Woman in a vehicle which did not require a three year wait as many other sequels are glacially cranked out. It was very nice to see Gal Godot don the Amazonian one piece and watch as she balletically beats up bad guys again.

2. DC has managed, as with Wonder Woman, another transformation I would never have thought possible. As a kid Aquaman was on the top of the list for the lamest of super heroes. Mostly a Ken doll who could hold his breath for a very long time he didn’t even make a blip in my Superman-loving radar. But in Justice League Aquaman is a whiskey swilling, tatooed, long haired Norwegian-ey good ole boy who looks like a wrestler and acts like a rock star. This guy is just fun to watch as he exudes the kind of joy battling parademons we haven’t seen since Woody Harrelson’s delightful walking dead killing spree in Zombieland.

3. We see the return, albeit in cameos, of Jeremy irons as Alfred, JK Simmons as Commissioner Gordon, and Cyborg's father Silas Stone played by Joe Morton, whose pedigree with sci fi dates back a lot further than you might think – through a stint on Warehouse 13, to a key role in the Terminator franchise all the way back to 1984's quirky sci fi indie Brother from Another Planet.

4. And most importantly, which reason would have been enough to get me to see this movie all by itself……..well……I’m not going to tell you, but you’ll know it when you see it.

That being said, there are also three reasons I have to take exception to, which are largely unrelated  or at least unnecessary to the story or comic book characters per se:

1. GLOBAL WARMING PROPAGANDA:

Bruce shoehorns a throw away comment to Aquaman about global warming as though it is an established fact rather than the cock and bull fantasy of environmental wackos who want an excuse to tyrannically limit First World progress into the 21st century in order to feather their own Al Gore-jet flying coffers.

2. ANTI-CHRISTIAN CHEAP SHOT:

Lex Luther takes a gratuitous stab at Christianity which I, for one, didn’t appreciate. Granted, he is a bad guy, but his comment stepped right over offensive into blasphemy. When a statement is so over the top that it shocks you out of the suspension of disbelief it does nothing to promote the storytelling either. It neither served the plot or character well nor will endear it to any Christian audience members, and was just plain rude. I continue to be annoyed by the singular targeting of the Judeo-Christian faith by a Hollywood which used to produce movies like Going My Way and Schindler’s List.

3. As I have alluded to in the earlier part of this post there is an awful lot of derivatives, echoes and dopplegangers between the two rival comic book universes DC and Marvel. Along with the ones I have already mentioned like parademons, there is Steppenwolf (DC comics) who looks a LOT like a combination of the fire demon Surtur who appears at the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok (Marvel comics) and Thanos from Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel). Further Steppenwolf’s goal is to bring together three "mother boxes" (DC) which are not explained well but when glowing look like red versions of  the blue Tesseract from The Avengers (Marvel), and when joined will reshape the Earth with tentacle transformers made of Element X (DC) which look an awful lot like the tentacles from Thor: The Dark World set loose by the Dark Elf Malekith from the Aether (Marvel).

See what I mean? After a while they all kind of blend together. In addition, the are a LOT of other counterparts in each world. I have made a short list below of the most noticeable ones. (And the years they first appeared in order to put to rest any debate about who predated whom. In short – DC and Marvel took turns being "first".)

DC vs Marvel

For the most part Justice League is an airy simple romp. Lots of cartoon violence, super powered heroics, and over the top demonic bad guys. Bringing the "old band back" is a hoot to watch and like the first Star Trek movie, or the first waffle off the griddle, they are entitled to "warm the pan up," so to speak, for future efforts. Besides, they should be able to pull off pretty much anything now that they have Wonder Woman and………you'll see.