Thursday, September 21, 2017

"SKumm’s Thoughts" - IT



"SKumm’s Thoughts"
IT (2017, R, 135 minutes, WARNER BROTHERS/KATZSMITH PRODUCTIONS)


Stephen King books have not had a great reputation at the box office.  Sure, there were a few gems: SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, MISERY, and THE SHINING (even with its controversial elements) (don’t get me started…).  CREEPSHOW and THE MIST were also well executed.

But when you consider the breadth of the man’s works… somehow, certain elements of the terror he elicits on the page get lost in the translation.  His works are character-driven dives into the depths of personal horror, and it can be difficult to portray that onscreen.


Enter director Andy Muschietti (MAMA).  Working with a screenplay hashed out by three writers, he offers up a visual representation of a book that, if you ask any King fan, is canon in the author’s universe of masterpieces.  And he pulls it off.

For those not familiar with the tale, a group of kids in the town of Derry, Maine, take it upon themselves to rid the town of an evil which has plagued it for generations.  Children are disappearing, and it is up to this mixed bunch of adolescents to save the other youths of the small town from the clutches of evil—that evil most notably represented by a maleficent doppelganger named Pennywise the Dancing Clown.  The entire cast of kids is great, but most effective are “Stranger Things” alum Finn Wolfhard as wise-cracking Richie Tozier, and Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh.  As the comedy relief and the conscience of the story, this would be an entirely different film if those roles had gone to other actors.


That is part of the charm of the film; the cast works well together, and plays off each other just as a group of real-life friends would.  Also notable is the fast-talking Jack Dylan Grazer as the “frail” Eddie Kaspbrak, whose delivery and acting ability solidifies the group in a way the character in the actual book never did.  This is one of the nuances of this interpretation of the source material that secures the film as a marvelously executed compliment to the book.


Notice, though, how I keep using the word “interpretation”?  There is a reason for that.  Anyone going in looking for a visual duplicate of King’s bold and scary tale may be disappointed.  Yes, the house on Neibolt Street is there, and is just as creepy as King created it.  The Barrens are there as well; described in the book as a place where our heroes hang out and play in, it is reduced to a background location here, as are the sewers.  If you take those two elements out of the book, half of the drama and the scares are gone.  But again, this is an interpretation.  It is set in the eighties, whereas the book takes place in the fifties.  The childhood scares have changed a bit, as well—with the changing of times, so changes the fears of generations.

Smart and frankly creative moves on the parts of the screenwriters, and vivid visualizations by Muschietti, make this a shrewd and affective tale.  There are new scares here, and some of them are downright chilling.


And then there is Bill Skarsgård (“Hemlock Grove”) as Pennywise. There are a few moments in the film when he is a very effective antagonist.  But there are other times—frequent ones, unfortunately—when his maliciousness is so overt to almost seem comical.  And the voice… at times it works, but mostly it just sounds like he is having trouble with the English language because his mouth is full of cotton candy and peanuts.  His performance isn’t horrible, but it does nothing to set him apart from typical boogeymen.  Which is why the tone set by Muschietti is so important.  The creepy score by Benjamin Wallfisch (MOON, BATMAN V SUPERMAN) adds to the ambiance, as does Chung-hoon Chung’s (OLDBOY, THE HANDMAIDEN) cinematography, which occasionally pulls you in too close for comfort—an effective tool when it comes to several of the scares.

This is a two-part film; there is no release date for the second, and, if the producers hold true to the way the first half of the book was translated (not to mention the fact that the next film will see the kids all grown up and facing the same terror again), we may see a different director at the helm. But what Muschietti and crew set up with this first chapter is something to be appreciated for what it is: a film a helluva lot better than MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and the remake of CARRIE ever were.

Grade: B+


-- T.S. Kummelman

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