Wednesday, September 25, 2019
The Christopher Pike Blog That Wasn't
I wrote an approximately 3000-word blog on Christopher Pike.
Blogger ate it.
Was typing merrily away on it one day, as this was a blog I’ve been composing on and off for weeks. Had a list of all 61 Pike books and a fun little summary and a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on each. Plus an analysis of his work as a whole and why he’s so great.
And then it all just disappeared. The whole text area on Blogger went blank.
No, I didn’t accidentally “Select All” and delete. No, I didn’t hit any weird keys. Yes, I tried clicking “Undo” and no, nothing came back. Yes, I tried clicking “Back” and it was still blank. Yes, I tried reloading. Yes, I contact customer support and no, they did not respond.
This was possibly my favorite blog I ever wrote about a fun new writer I discovered late in life. And it just disappeared into the digital ether for no apparent reason.
Lesson learned: do not ever type your blog directly in Blogger. Just type it elsewhere, then paste it and post it. (Better yet: don’t use Blogger at all. I’m only here out of laziness, as this is where I started my blog back in 2015.)
Sometimes we have to be burned to learn wisdom and change our user behavior. Happens to the best of us.
I did luckily copy-and-paste a portion of the blog and send it to a friend a week or so before it disappeared. So I can share this with you below. Wish I was sharing the rest, too, but life happens.
His books are nutzoid in the cabeza. Cuckoo in the membrane. Insane for Cocoa Puffs. Pretty much every one of his novels has mind transference, aliens, murder mysteries, reincarnation of ancient spirits, cocaine, football players who were injured and now can't play football, time travel, evil supernatural entities, benign supernatural entities, girls named "Ann," vampires, hungry hungry teenagers, burn victims, skeptical cops, scuba diving, spaceships, ghosts, gossip, amnesia, horny horny teenagers, interdimensional rifts, venereal disease, cults, mad science, weird science, cheerleaders, meta-references to Pike's other books, pyromania, organ harvesting, the FBI, demons, high school dances, conspiracies, secrets & lies, body snatching, time-bombs coded in our DNA, dream sequences, explosions, brutal violence, harsh endings, perversion, stories-within-stories, people faking their deaths, miscellaneous high school drama, witches, endless rambling about meditation and inner peace, God, gods, fanaticism of all stripes, dinosaur people, lizard people, ancient Greek/Egyptian history, borderline-criminal parental neglect, and/or mind-boggling plot twists that also boggle the mind.
They're the best. Even the ones I don't like. You know how some books, you're not sure what will happen in the next chapter? With Pike books, sometimes you're not even sure what will happen in the next PARAGRAPH.
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
Monday, September 16, 2019
R.I.P. MoviePass
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Quick Take on "It: Chapter Two"
I won't ramble about my complex, torrid relationship with this book and its various adaptations (already did that here), so let's dive right in.
It: Chapter Two is a sprawling mess, like its source material. So let's make this review a sprawling mess, too. Pros and cons in no particular order!!!
Several scenes were very strong and effective. The jump scares are fine. The effects are slightly better than in the last It.
Opening the second movie
with the opening scene from the book, the horrifying gay-bashing attack followed by the dude
seeing Pennywise devour his wounded lover? BALLER. A+.
Then the balloons under
the bridge and message in blood splattered on the concrete wall? ANOTHER BALLER. A+.
And then the next few scenes were a solid B. I checked my watch when grown-up Ben arrived at the school. That was the halfway point of the film, and it was touch and go from there.
Having the flame-headed demon-girl recite the entire "Your hair is winter fire" poem was overkill. One line would have sufficed. Or none. I think we got the gag based on the visual alone.
The Paul Bunyan statue and old lady attack scenes are fine.
I wondered if this movie would seem incomprehensible if you weren't familiar with the book. There's so much going below the surface here, which is nice, because it definitely feels like everyone involved actually read the book.
This isn't even a complete movie, it really is just the second half of the first movie. It is not satisfying as a stand-alone work. But that's not necessarily a flaw. In fact, that might just be commendable.
Bit bummed that the only nod to the cosmic Turtle was a model on a table, an Easter egg just like the turtle imagery in the first one. But I get it, it's a heady concept and hard to visualize. But they went to the trouble to visualize It as an ancient alien entity crashing to Earth like a comet, an extended hallucinogenic scene tracing its history, and even multiple references to the Ritual of Chud. So if they could do all that, WHY THEY NO GIVE ME MY TURTLE?
The movie lets the town off the hook, too. Very very odd that it omitted the evil influence of the town on its inhabitants and also the TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWN once the entity is destroyed. The town falling to literal pieces seems like a great visual for a movie. But I guess budget/time considerations killed that.
Had no problem with them omitting the subplot of Bill's wife getting fridged.
The creature's final form as a spider is female and she had eggs everywhere in the book. Another strong visual element I was surprised they omitted, maybe to avoid seeming like the movie Aliens?
Also I get why they put Pennywise's head on the spider at the end. It's a decent visual, but the whole point of it finally appearing as a spider was a reminder that its TRUE FORM, at least as the human mind can best comprehend it, is as a SPIDER. Putting Pennywise's head on it makes it still seem like it's still the clown, just taking a different shape. Misleading and conceptually inaccurate! Shallow and pedantic!
I wasn't sure about the severed head sprouting spider legs (an image directly ripped from the 1982 The Thing, followed by Bill Hader saying the EXACT WORDS Kurt Russell said in response to the spider-head in The Thing) but then I thought about it. It Chapter 2 has a lot of pop cultural references to stuff like that from the 80s. Which is actually surprisingly clever, because in the book, the entity appears as a ton of different pop culture monsters and things from the 50s (The Crawling Eye, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Teenage Werewolf, etc.). Moving its mutated forms up to the decade of the kids' childhood makes perfect sense. It's doing the exact same thing the book did, which was echoing and overlapping with the past. I'll give it a pass on that.
The pacing of the film is jagged and uneven. And there's just too many characters to provide a fulfilling emotional experience with any of them. They should have omitted the kids' segments from the second film, or made them very quick jump-cut scenes. Entire sequences of the kids in the 80s bogged down the film.
The adults were all too intense, too. Like the filmmakers wanted to make sure they all had TRAITS. More so than making them PEOPLE. Eddie was way too intense and edgy. The 1990 miniseries got a lot wrong, but the adults in there all felt like fully human, well-rounded grown-up versions of the kids who were experiencing and feeling everything deeply.
MAJOR PROPS for giving the 1990 miniseries' young Ben actor a cameo in the scene with the grown-up Ben in this movie.
Making Mike Hanlon a neurotic conspiracy-theory type was...okay, that was interesting. I don't fully disagree there. Us librarians are all a little bit crazy...
And also randomly adding the element of Richie being secretly gay and attracted to Eddie kind of worked. They didn't hang a lampshade on that, but it added an emotional punch. And it makes sense.
The two scenes of Pennywise attacking kids in present-day were good ideas, as they reminded us that this nightmare is happening all over again, something the 1990 miniseries kind of glazed over.
Having Pennywise torment Bill by killing a kid right in front of him was brutal and very on-brand for Pennywise. Good addition there.
Stephen King's extended cameo was okay. Maybe a bit too on-the-nose. Props for being self-deprecating about how his book endings suck.
And then the next few scenes were a solid B. I checked my watch when grown-up Ben arrived at the school. That was the halfway point of the film, and it was touch and go from there.
Having the flame-headed demon-girl recite the entire "Your hair is winter fire" poem was overkill. One line would have sufficed. Or none. I think we got the gag based on the visual alone.
The Paul Bunyan statue and old lady attack scenes are fine.
I wondered if this movie would seem incomprehensible if you weren't familiar with the book. There's so much going below the surface here, which is nice, because it definitely feels like everyone involved actually read the book.
This isn't even a complete movie, it really is just the second half of the first movie. It is not satisfying as a stand-alone work. But that's not necessarily a flaw. In fact, that might just be commendable.
Bit bummed that the only nod to the cosmic Turtle was a model on a table, an Easter egg just like the turtle imagery in the first one. But I get it, it's a heady concept and hard to visualize. But they went to the trouble to visualize It as an ancient alien entity crashing to Earth like a comet, an extended hallucinogenic scene tracing its history, and even multiple references to the Ritual of Chud. So if they could do all that, WHY THEY NO GIVE ME MY TURTLE?
The movie lets the town off the hook, too. Very very odd that it omitted the evil influence of the town on its inhabitants and also the TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWN once the entity is destroyed. The town falling to literal pieces seems like a great visual for a movie. But I guess budget/time considerations killed that.
Had no problem with them omitting the subplot of Bill's wife getting fridged.
The creature's final form as a spider is female and she had eggs everywhere in the book. Another strong visual element I was surprised they omitted, maybe to avoid seeming like the movie Aliens?
Also I get why they put Pennywise's head on the spider at the end. It's a decent visual, but the whole point of it finally appearing as a spider was a reminder that its TRUE FORM, at least as the human mind can best comprehend it, is as a SPIDER. Putting Pennywise's head on it makes it still seem like it's still the clown, just taking a different shape. Misleading and conceptually inaccurate! Shallow and pedantic!
I wasn't sure about the severed head sprouting spider legs (an image directly ripped from the 1982 The Thing, followed by Bill Hader saying the EXACT WORDS Kurt Russell said in response to the spider-head in The Thing) but then I thought about it. It Chapter 2 has a lot of pop cultural references to stuff like that from the 80s. Which is actually surprisingly clever, because in the book, the entity appears as a ton of different pop culture monsters and things from the 50s (The Crawling Eye, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Teenage Werewolf, etc.). Moving its mutated forms up to the decade of the kids' childhood makes perfect sense. It's doing the exact same thing the book did, which was echoing and overlapping with the past. I'll give it a pass on that.
The pacing of the film is jagged and uneven. And there's just too many characters to provide a fulfilling emotional experience with any of them. They should have omitted the kids' segments from the second film, or made them very quick jump-cut scenes. Entire sequences of the kids in the 80s bogged down the film.
The adults were all too intense, too. Like the filmmakers wanted to make sure they all had TRAITS. More so than making them PEOPLE. Eddie was way too intense and edgy. The 1990 miniseries got a lot wrong, but the adults in there all felt like fully human, well-rounded grown-up versions of the kids who were experiencing and feeling everything deeply.
MAJOR PROPS for giving the 1990 miniseries' young Ben actor a cameo in the scene with the grown-up Ben in this movie.
Making Mike Hanlon a neurotic conspiracy-theory type was...okay, that was interesting. I don't fully disagree there. Us librarians are all a little bit crazy...
And also randomly adding the element of Richie being secretly gay and attracted to Eddie kind of worked. They didn't hang a lampshade on that, but it added an emotional punch. And it makes sense.
The two scenes of Pennywise attacking kids in present-day were good ideas, as they reminded us that this nightmare is happening all over again, something the 1990 miniseries kind of glazed over.
Having Pennywise torment Bill by killing a kid right in front of him was brutal and very on-brand for Pennywise. Good addition there.
Stephen King's extended cameo was okay. Maybe a bit too on-the-nose. Props for being self-deprecating about how his book endings suck.
Bowers' sudden attack on
Eddie and Eddie's retaliation worked. They managed to handle the escaped maniac Bowers as well as
they could within their time constraints.
I
don't HATE the new Pennywise's Scooby-Dooby-Doo-ish performance, it
just doesn't resonate as much as Tim Curry's in the 1990 miniseries. Its one note gets repetitive and it relies too much on CGI this time out.
These two films total like 5.5 hours.
That just doesn't feel like the right length. They should have dug deeper into
the mythos and made it an epic about the town of Derry and made it a 10-episode Netflix
series.
It simply isn't BETTER ENOUGH than the 1990 miniseries for me to say,
"Finally, THIS is the definitive adaptation of King's book." It just
feels like a different take. Not a disaster, not a masterpiece, just
interesting.
It 2: C+
It 1: B-
It the miniseries: B
It the book: A+
-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename
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