It: Chapter 2 (Muschetti, September 2019) Movie • Page 29

I literally never said it was meant to be a noble act but that he was responding to Henry shooting a cat. Just because you're interpreting it that way doesn't mean that was my intention. I said he was trying to teach him a lesson. Never said he wasn't horrible or awful. I said what they showed us wasn't believable enough for me to believe that Henry would stab his father in the throat, carve up a younger child with a switch blade, or attempt to impale a younger kid in the head with a tool meant for putting down sheep.

There are so many more examples that they could've pulled from the book that I believe would've been more effective than what we got. To my knowledge, the only other time we see the father in the movie is when Henry is picking on the losers club outside of the school and Henry sees his father. So Henry is picking on those kids and his dad basically gives off the vibe that if he doesn't stop, there will be hell to pay then we see him again when he shoots at Henry's feet because he was about to kill a cat. There are SO many more examples that could've been pulled from the book instead of the father responding to Henry's behavior

It seems like you are getting something different from my answer than what I'm trying to communicate so I'm done going back and forth with you.

 

I mean he was possessed by It when he went completely off the deep end and murdered his father...then went after the Loser’s Club.

KILL THEM ALL

Seems like you’ve just cherry picked certain things here. Also, your opinion on Mr. Bowers shooting at his son’s feet is awful and somewhat disturbing.

Have a nice day.

 

My father had a similar incident growing up, and he made as sure as he could my childhood was nothing like his. I am by far all the better for it.

 

Same for my dad. His mother and biological father were horrendous. Luckily he had an amazing stepdad later on and he and his sister relied on each other. He isn’t perfect, but he spent his whole life making sure he broke that cycle and my brother and I never went through that.

 

Also helps you to start dancing like Michael Jackson

 

Just saw this finally. Honestly, I liked it a lot. Feel like they did a great job of really drawing out the scary bits, and the actors did a great job of making you believed that they were scared.

That opening scene was quite brutal, my girlfriend flinched every time they punched Adrian.

Movie didn’t feel like it was almost three hours long, and all of the performances were pretty good. The only actor who I felt was doing an impression of their younger character was Eddie, and even that makes sense when you look at his career/who he married. He never grew out of being that kid.

Idk I don’t get a lot of the negative reviews. I thought it was great.

Mike could have been done a lot better, and Henry Bowers could have been done a little better. Every time Henry popped up on screen, I wanted to laugh a little

 

TIL James Ransone was on the back cover of Through Being Cool

 

Finally seeing this. Paid $$ to watch it at the Dolby screen in Burbank but I don’t care.

 

Damn the way my friend went on about it I was expecting a disaster but I was pleasantly surprised. Yes it’s not perfect but I went in expecting hot garbage.

He hasn’t read the book and I wonder if there is a correlation

 

I liked the movie, saw it last night. It wasn't as scary jumpy as before, maybe because everyone knew to expect that, and it felt a little rushed in terms of story but the plot was good, the actors were amazing and id happily see it again.

 

This was fine. Entertaining. Cheesier than the first, maybe because they are all adults. Adult cast is great though. Not scary, neither was the first. I think its good they had a ton of humor since the scares just aren't there. Felt more like an action adventure film than anything.

 

Apologies if someone has already commented on this, but wasn’t the headline in that paper that characterized Mike’s parents as drug addicts a symptom of Pennywise’s affect on Mike?

He looks at the same paper when he’s on the phone with Bill at the end and the headline is changed so it just reads as a terrible tragedy, but says nothing about them being drug addicts. This goes along with what he’s saying to Bill about not being able to see things as they really are for so many years.

 

We talked in here about the fact that the paper may have just been a hallucination, but I don’t think we’re meant to take that to mean they weren’t drug addicts in reality as well. It usually tries to get under your skin by showing you the worst parts of yourself or your life and your worst fears about how people see you, but not necessarily by totally lying (especially in this adaptation). There is nothing else stated in either chapter to flesh their characters out or contradict what the headline says.

Even a throwaway line from someone else or one scene of a flashback could have changed what the movies had to say about them, but as it is I take it as a super lazy way to explain something away quickly instead of really delving into it. It’s a complete failure no matter what they intended, because it was either an intentionally gross change to the story or something important handled with zero care at all.

 

When I watched the film, I was 100% certain that the film was saying that his parents were drug addicts. I told myself after the fact that the headline was a hallucination / Pennywise fucking with Mike simply because I absolutely HATED that part of the movie and what they did to Mike's character and backstory. If it shows that on screen I definitely missed it completely.

 

I’m not paying for the movie again, so it will be a long time before I can confirm the exact nature of the later newspaper shots. I vaguely remember seeing him looking at them again, but not enough to have noticed it being literally the same paper.

I wonder if there’s ANY hope they filmed more with Mike that got cut but would make it into an extended version.

 

They show it, it says “2 die in electrical fire,” and in another article below it and to the right, it says “Child survives”

 

Is it at the very end before/as he’s taking to Bill?

 

It is as he is talking to Bill I believe. Either that or it is during the Stanley monologue

 

Cool, that’s the visual I have for it.

 

There’s no doubt in my mind, having seen it last night and also due to the relief I felt when the newspaper was different, that it was the same clipping of the newspaper but revealed to have the updated (non-Pennywised) headline.

 

Yeah, my point is that the headline still seemed to be used to say something about Mike’s backstory really quickly and sloppily, and it does that for the audience whether or not it’s literally written on the paper. Trying to have alternate character interpretations about people who have literally no characterization to start with is an impossible task, and the fact that they didn’t do ANYTHING else to portray another version of them doesn’t make me want to give any benefit of the doubt to the filmmakers. If they were the same lovely people from the book, it would have been so so easy to convey that at some point over the FIVE HOURS we had.

 

I saw it with my mom and wife and we all just assumed that the drug addicts part was a lie by the time the movie was over. I’d like to think that’s what they were going for, assuming that most people watching haven’t read and studied the books like some of the more devoted fans.

They don’t exactly convey the whole “Pennywise only shows you your deepest shames rather than lie to you” (not an exact quote, I know) deal in the film world, so I don’t think we should assume that this is the rule he is playing by at all times. It doesn’t seem out of character for him to outright want to fuck with mike by making him believe for years that the town had been fed a lie about his parents.

 

There's a big clown thing outside a place called Circus Liquor by the metro station. I avoid driving past it now. The last thing I want to think about before taking the subway is a Paul Bunyan sized Pennywise statue out to get me.

 

Not sure I ever mentioned this before, but that Paul Bunyan statue was huge in person. Looked so out of place in a town I’ve known so well my entire life haha

 

Man, even after thinking about the hallucination angle I never took any of it to be saying that there was an actual conspiracy from It faking the headline the whole time, just in that moment showing what was haunting him.

And the films are actually a lot of why I mentioned him twisting the truth over flat out making things up. He does that every now and then in small places of course, but in the movies you have a lot more examples like Georgie telling Bill it’s his fault he died because he wasn’t really sick and just didn’t want to play. We have seen what actually happened and later Bill’s admission that some of that was true, so we know It is playing off his guilt even though he did nothing wrong.

The paper thing is like if we saw Pennywise telling Richie he knows his secret without having the accompanying flashback to make sense of it. There’s no way for the audience to know what is true or not or what underlying fear is being attacked in that moment. All we know is that he feels guilty about not being able to save them in that moment, so where would the addiction angle come from in the first place?

Also slightly unrelated, but thinking about this again just reminds me of how strange and underdeveloped his place in the Losers Club is in this version. As awful and problematic as it would be, having his parents be addicts and looked down upon in death is at least is SOMETHING to explain why he’s such an outcast. They show people whispering about him, but just having a tragedy happen doesn’t explain why he’s that big a target.