9/10 #4 IT (2017)

Went to our first movie in St. Paul yesterday. Cool little theater on Grand Ave.

Now, I really think this flick is a good Stephen King adaptation. Not quite on par with the first episodes of Mr. Mercedes, but a lot better than the misguided Dark Tower. The casting is stellar, the scares are right, the changes from the source material have thought behind them.

Even the time shift. But that's kind of what I want to talk about. This flick is good and you should see it if you haven't (most people had, it had a stellar opening weekend). The thing I want to talk about is the strange cultural awareness of Pennywise the clown. In the original book and the miniseries (which still holds up too, due largely to IT'S casting and execution), Pennywise was a clown because it was his ruse to lure children into his grasp. Now, there's something weird that has happened since then. As far as I know, my generation may have been the first to openly find clowns terrifying. Sure, maybe some kids didn't like them at the circus before this, but there was a shift in the attitude towards clowns that happened in the 80s, and Pennywise was a big part of it. Suddenly they were generally seen as unsavory. Creepy even. So, it's weird to see the evolution of that. Tim Curry's (and King's) Pennywise was charming before he was frightening. He really was kind of a clown with a monster underneath. Which caused us all to rethink clowns' purpose and motivations in general. But the book (and original movie) were set in the late 50s, when kids were still kind of drawn to clowns. It's how Pennywise lured Georgie close enough to rip his arm off.

So, my question is, now that IT is set to start int he 80s, when this shift was happening (because of Pennywise, Gacy, and, maybe, Bozo), why does IT even bother with the clown thing? The answer the new movie gives us: Because he's just straight up scary.

Now, that's a tall order. That means Pennywise is a monster from the get-go. Georgie is just kind of an idiot who wants his boat back bad enough to take it from a monster in a drain. It lets the air out of this scene, but also creates a challenge for the rest of the flick. It makes it so Pennywise has to go UP from being a terrifying monster. Fortunately, this movie handles it well. Sarsgaard's Pennywise is crazy and, with more than a little help from the effects team, they do accomplish the task of making him 'everything we are afraid of'. So, Bravo, IT. You pulled it off.

My hope is that the sequel will back off the effects and let the traumas inflicted by Pennywise fuel the terror of the Losers Club as adults. Maybe Sarsgaard will have a little more room to move in the next chapter. Because it's either that or try and up the bar on the CG fueled scares even more, which may be pretty difficult. This first flick used the effects well, but there comes a moment when the suspension of disbelief snaps and computer images cease to be real enough to inspire terror. Whatever the outcome, I'm happy to see this material handled with such care and eager to see where they go from here.