Film

No joke

I read It when the novel came out in 1986 and was mostly underwhelmed. Cool premise but sloppy, overlong, out-of-control prose. That sucker needed some ruthless editing. I was gobbling up Stephen King books at the time—big fan of Christine and Different Seasons— but had experienced a bit of a lull in interest with his lousy Peter Straub collaboration, The Talisman. I felt like King was overextending himself a bit, and the novel It came off as a big mess.

So, I’ll just start off by saying I’m not a huge fan of the source material.

Then, the wimpy TV miniseries happened, complete with John Boy, Jack Tripper, Harry Anderson and a decent Tim Curry as evil clown Pennywise, but also featuring that damned, unintentionally hilarious puppet spider at the end.

The benefit of a movie like Andy Muschietti’s It is that the director and his writers can keep some core themes that worked but switch things up a bit and streamline the narrative to make the story work a bit better 30 years after it was written. In that respect, the new It is a triumph.

While the original miniseries dealt with both the young and older versions of The Loser’s Club, the posse of kids that stand up to evil, the new It stands as Part One, completely dividing the kid and adult stories. There’s also a major time change, with the kids’ story taking place in the late ’80s instead of the ’50s. Thank you, Stranger Things.

The core story remains the same: Children in Derry, Maine have been disappearing for many years, and the film starts with the sad case of Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), a little boy in a yellow rain slicker who follows his paper boat to the sewer drain and makes an unfortunate acquaintance.

That acquaintance is Pennywise, the sewer-dwelling clown, played as a savage beast by Bill Skarsgard. The big difference between Curry’s Pennywise and the new incarnation is that Curry’s Pennywise was almost a normal circus clown until he sprouted monster teeth and took you out. He was into trickery.

Skarsgard’s Pennywise is a shit-assed, makeupcracking, straight-up scary demon clown with an ability to charm for a short while, but he just kind of sucks royally from the get-go, oozing with evil. If you saw him at a circus, you’d be seriously afraid for the trapeze artists and lions. He even drools a little when addressing Georgie, shortly before tearing his arm off.

It’s in this moment that It declares itself as an R-rated, no-holds-barred King affair rather than the sanitized King that was the TV version.

The kids are great. The standout is Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh. At one point, one of the Losers calls her Molly Ringwald. Lillis has that kind of leading-lady-in-a-teen-film commanding screen presence. Jeremy Ray Taylor will break your heart as Ben Hanscom, the chubby kid who has a crush on Bev. Their first meeting is one of the best scenes in the film.

Stranger Things costars Finn Wolfhard and Jack Dylan Grazer provide solid comic relief as Richie and Eddie, while Jaeden Lieberher, excellent in Midnight Special, does a damn fine job with the stutter and leading-man job as Georgie’s big brother Bill Denbrough. As for the bad kids, Nicholas Hamilton is the second scariest entity in the film as bully Henry Bowers. He’s very real. I’m pretty sure I got in a locker room fight sometime in the ’80s with Hamilton’s Bowers.

Muschietti scores some big scares, especially during a slideshow gone very wrong, and a meeting between the Denbrough brothers in the family basement. (“You’ll float, too!”) There’s a true sense that there was never a writing room moment when Muschietti and his team paused and thought, “Say, perhaps that idea would be a bit too unsettling? Maybe it’s a bit much and wrong?”

It: Part Two, with the adults, while not official yet, is a certainty. As for It: Part One, it draws the best elements of King’s inconsistent novel effort and comes out a frightening winner. Ω

“Yep. i totally voted for Trump.”

it 12345

313 Minutes Thirteen minutes … that’s how close a bomb made by a man named Georg Elser came to possibly killing Adolf Hitler in 1939. Had Elser succeeded, the history of the world would’ve been forever altered in unimaginable ways. Many of us have often played the time machine game where we ask ourselves and friends, “If you had a time machine, what would you do?” The most common answer to that game is probably something along the lines of “Go back in time, kill Hitler.” Elser was the living embodiment of that time machine game answer, and he almost succeeded in taking out the evil dictator before he sent Germany to ruins. 13 Minutes, the latest from director Oliver Hirschbiegel, is a biopic on Elser (well played by Christian Friedel). It ruminates on his possible motivations for the assassination attempt, while exploring what was surely a vicious and awful interlude with physical and psychological torture after his bomb missed its target and killed eight people. It’s Hirschbiegel’s second feature focusing on Hitler, and while it isn’t as powerful as Downfall, which studied a panicky Hitler in his final days, it’s still an occasionally fascinating piece of work. With 13 Minutes, Hirschbiegel has created bookend movies for the Holocaust horrors brought about by Nazi Germany. This movie deals with the buildup to the war, while Downfall dealt with the last paranoiac days. I’m sure watching the two films in succession would be a powerful experience, but I’m going to put that one off for a little while. I’ve had enough of Nazis and bullheaded political rallies these last couple of months.

3Annabelle: Creation Annabelle, the creepy doll from The Conjuring movies, gets her second standalone film with Annabelle: Creation, a silly movie that’s nevertheless enjoyable thanks to some deft direction and surprisingly competent acting. The movie holds together thanks to solid performances from Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson, the latter being the same child actress who gave incredible work in the also surprisingly good prequel/sequel to a so-so movie, Ouija: Origin of Evil. The film is full of good performances from the likes of Miranda Otto, Anthony LaPaglia and Stephanie Sigman, but it’s Bateman and Wilson who get most of the credit for pulling it off. The film is set many years before the first Annabelle movie, with orphans Janice (Bateman) and Linda (Wilson) on their way to a new home, a group of other girls and happy nun Sister Charlotte (Sigman) at their side. Once at their new home, the doll is discovered, and the resulting playtime totally sucks ass. Last year, director David F. Sandberg delivered a decent genre film with Lights Out, based on his terrifically scary short film. (Talitha’s younger brother, Martin Bateman, starred in that one.) Sandberg also makes good-looking movies. The authentic Southern Gothic look of this film lends to its credibility.

3Atomic Blonde Charlize Theron goes on a tear for the ages in this fun if somewhat shallow venture, another pin on her action hero lapel after her ferocious turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. As Lorraine Broughton, an undercover agent on a mission in Berlin in the late ’80s as the wall begins to fall, she showcases her ability to kick people through walls with the best of them. She also shows how to use a freezer door as a weapon. Directed by David Leitch, one of the directors of the original John Wick and future director of Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde pops with the same kind of kinetic energy as Wick when the bullets and kicks are flying. Also a legendary stuntman, Leitch knows how to make a hit look real, and the choreographed action scenes in this film stand as some of the year’s best. When Charlize lands a blow in this movie, you feel it in your face. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, the film drags at times, especially when Lorraine does the standard interrogation room narrative scenes with Toby Jones and John Goodman drilling her for answers. 1 Birth of the Dragon This is a fictitious take on the real-life fight between Wong Jack Man and martial arts legend Bruce Lee, and it has a couple of good fight scenes in it. In fact, they could be called very good. And, yet, I’m forced to give this movie my lowest mark because those fight scenes are surrounded by crap. Picture a diamond like the blue one that the old lady had in that Titanic movie. Dip it in gold and put it in a bag with $780 million dollars and a Babe Ruth-autographed baseball, and then drop that bag into a communal spot where a bunch of sick hippos have taken massive shits and formed a virtual lake of shit. Let that bag sink to the bottom and become immersed in the lake of sick hippo shit. That’s what happens to the very good fight scenes in this movie. Lost in shit. Sick hippo shit. (Sorry to pick on hippos for this analogy, but, hey, they are huge, and, I imagine, rather disgusting when overcome by intestinal stress, making them capable of generating the amount of shit I needed for this particular illustration.) The movie deals a little bit with actual real-life fight between Lee and rival martial arts teacher Wong Jack Man, but it blows the details up to ridiculous extremes, even turning Lee and Jack Man into Batman and Robin by film’s end. It’s garbage.

2Logan Lucky A gang of losers plots to rob a NASCAR racetrack on one of its busiest weekends, and they do it in a hackneyed way that makes absolutely no sense. Steven Soderbergh comes out of retirement to direct Channing Tatum as Jimmy Logan, a former football player who has fallen on bad times, then suddenly gets it in his head to rob the racetrack in a way that involves sneaking people out of prison, blowing things up with gummy bears, and secret allies within the establishment. Soderbergh did the Ocean’s Eleven movies, the first of which has a reasonably fun and inventive heist. This one is sort of Ocean’s Eleven for rednecks, and their ability to pull off the heist is totally unconvincing. The film is almost saved by some of the supporting performances, including Daniel Craig as an incarcerated safe cracker who digs hard boiled eggs, and Adam Driver as Jimmy’s one-armed brother. But, for every character that’s a plus, there’s a lame one like Seth MacFarlane’s heavily accented millionaire that’s not as funny as he thinks he is. The movie doesn’t come together in the end, and its robbery scheme is too cute to be realistic. The big reveal feels like a cheat. It’s good to have Soderbergh back in action, but this is just a rehash of something he’s done before with a Southern accent. Hilary Swank shows up in the final act, a role that feels entirely tacked on.

4Wind River If you’re a fan of last year’s excellent modern Western Hell or High Water, you have some big reasons to get yourself into a theater for Wind River. Taylor Sheridan, who writes and directs, has a wordsmith’s way of capturing American dilemmas on par with the likes of Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy. The man knows how to pen a great thriller with depth, and his works—he also wrote Iscariot and Hell or High Water—have in common a somber tone. This is a guy who knows that many of the people you pass on the street today are dealing with an eternity of grief and loss. They are making it, but it’s a bitch, and it’s not going to get easier. Wind River marks Sheridan’s second feature directorial effort, after 2011’s low-budget Vile, and it stands as one of the summer’s best films. It’s a solid mystery-thriller and a showcase for two fierce performances from Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen—yes, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch. They both offer up career-best work, with Renner searing the screen as Cory, a man with a tragic past, paid to hunt wolves and lions on a Native American reservation. Olsen commands her screen time as Jane, one of cinema’s gutsiest FBI agents since Clarice Starling. With this film, Renner has been tasked with some of the more difficult, emotionally brutal scenes an actor has had to handle this year.