Stephen King's 'IT' (2017 film - aka It: Chapter One)*

I'm also in the good story/crap ending camp.

Read the book long before they made the TV movie. I found the way King develops both past and present plots in parallel is very fascinating, and I think it enhances the mystery of whatever evil power underlines the story. But the climax turns into a WTF? moment. Could barely watch the movie when it aired.

 

Loved the book, loved the first half of the mini-series (the kids), kinda liked the second half of the mini-series (the adults), despised the "monster" in the mini-series.

If they can somehow get the camaraderie of the kids/adults from the book across in the new version, and if they can make the final showdown actually scary and memorable, then I'll enjoy watching.

I don't see how anyone will ever be able to top Curry as Pennywise, though.

 

Just ordered the book from gohastings.com and it should be here tomorrow. I read it when I was 16 and now figured I would give it another go. My first King book too. I am rereading The Stand right now. I liked the TV miniseries and can't wait for the films.

 

The miniseries became much less appealing once the adults took over. I also thought that the book made the struggle much more realistic and life or death, where the miniseries just kind of ended.

 

They all "float" down here.

 

Nooooooooooooo!

 

He was iconic in that role. But this new kid is kinda weird looking like Curry.

 

"Pornographic" is not what I would call it, but it's definitely a very R-rated, heavy story line with certain kinds of violence and sexual activity that would be hard to show in any film. But I buy into it as part of the story and have no problem accepting it.

The book is terrific and I've actually read it a couple of times. Solid characters, very complex story, and some extraordinarily scary moments. The scene with the kid madly peddaling away from the house as the demon reaches out for him down the street... yikes.

 

"You're too old to stop me! You're all too old!"

 

I read It and thought it was a great book. I've never seen the 1990 miniseries. It sounds like the miniseries told the story in linear fashion while the book jumped back and forth between the "kid" and "adult" stories. I guess you could say they Godfathered it.

I think I like the book method better, but I guess I need to watch the miniseries.

 

Lower your expectations. Done? Lower them again. Once you've completed that, lower them a few more times for good measure.

Now, you're ready to watch the mini series and still be disappointed.

 

Part of the problem, for me anyway, with the adults in the miniseries was casting Richard Thomas as the lead. He was, is and shall ever be John Boy. I just couldn't buy him as the hero.

 

True. The rest of the adult cast was pretty decent, with John Ritter and Annette O'Toole at the top, in my opinion.

 

Ritter was awesome. A real talent gone way too early.

 

So I can assume you did not like the miniseries?

 

I liked parts of the miniseries. I was just trying to be funny about having realistic expectations. It's ok, but the book is about a thousand times better. The good parts of the miniseries are the kid flashbacks, Pennywise, and some of the adult sequences. The bad parts of the miniseries are the rest of the adult sequences, and the final "confrontation with evil."

I have high hopes the new version will excel in the areas where the miniseries is deficient, and that it gets the stuff right that the miniseries already did right. If that happens, it could be quite good.

 

Yes, the second time I read It, I was a little annoyed by the jumping back-and-forth in time between 1957 and 1984. I understand why King did it, but several times I thought to myself, "hey, what happened to the scene where such-and-such happened," and I realized I was confused because this explanation came up much later in the story than I had remembered. King also sped up the juxtapositioning of the two time frames as the story built to a climax.

The most interesting thing I remember in the novel is how the demon had actually been attacking the town for hundreds of years, and the residents kind of suppressed it or looked the other way. The scenes with the ruins of the glass manufacturing plant (at least I think that's what it was) were pretty horrific, given how many children had been killed at the explosion at the turn of the century.

 

That speeding up in the ending is almost headache inducing on first read. I blame the cocaine, Stephen...

Which is why the sections that are made up of Mike Hanlon's diary entries are essential to the story. I used to think the opposite -that they were completely extraneous and a sign of the pure self indulgence of the book- until the last time I read IT and "got it", as it were Mike explains Derry's whole connection with It in those entries. And it was the Ironworks plant that exploded, not a glass plant...on Easter, no less.

I am curious to know who the rest of the cast in this new version is going to be...they certainly made some iffy choices in 1990.

 

That was it -- an ironworks plant. Couldn't remember. Read it once in the 1980s when it came out, and again in 2004. Haven't touched it in over 10 years, never saw the TV movies.

 

The ending of the book and the TV movie were disappointing

 

The film has been shelved indefinitely.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompson...ins-for-cary-fukunagas-it-adaptation-20150526

 

I'm kind of relieved...

 

Didn't this project also get shelved in 2009? I remember reading about a remake back then.

 

I would guess the reason this and The Stand keep stalling is that they're far too long to adapt into one movie, and yet they probably keep finding that if you try to break them up into two or more movies, you don't end up with very satisfying movies. And meanwhile they've already been done for TV, and the track record for Stephen King on TV isn't very good.

 

Scripts were written for 2 films, but evidently they couldn't come to an agreement on the budget so the director (who was also co-screenwriter) backed out.