James Corden always has some funny bits, but this poor guy calling for It instead of IT is pretty great. Please watch won’t you? I mean I guess you don’t have to, and I can’t force you to entertain yourself, but I think you should. Because honestly what else do you have going on right now?
David Harbour Looks Begrudgingly Good As Hellboy!
I am still struggling with a Hellboy not being helmed by Guillermo del Toro and not staring Ron Perlman, but I have to admit David Harbour looks pretty dang good as HB. If the rest of the movie can match the quality shown above, maybe, just maybe, they will get my butt in a seat January 2019, but they are going to have to keep showing me good stuff like this.
Someone At Marvel TV Needs To Watch DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow!
For the most part Marvel’s Netflix shows have been pretty great. Yes there have been some downer moments, but most of the time Netflix/Marvel has delivered a quality product. However, the fight scenes on the shows have started go down hill, and nowhere was this more apparent than The Defenders. This should have been the show where they pulled out all the stops, but instead it was generally just four people fighting in the dark next to each other. There were a few decent one on one fights, but the group together was pretty meh, and getting the gang together was the whole point of this show.
Now on the other hand DC’s Legends of Tomorrow can sometimes have some pretty meh storylines, but holy heck, a few times a season the fight scenes are just crazy awesome. Granted on Legends of Tomorrow there are a lot of heroes with different fighting styles and powers, while The Defenders mostly just kick stuff, but still, they could have found a way to feature them all in a better light (or just in the light).
Look, I believe in the writing team behind the Marvel Netflix shows, but they need to find a new fight coordinator, or at least one that watches some of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. I just want the action in the shows to be as good as the story telling.
Shmee Floats With It!
It is hard to resist the siren’s call of a good blockbuster. Let alone the remake of a TV miniseries that was a rite of passage for a lot of children. If you were born in the 80’s it was almost a guarantee that at some point you would have to watch It, and even if you didn’t see It, all your friends no doubt filled you in on all the details. Sharing with you their new found fear of sewer dwelling spider-clowns. Which is why a lot of people questioned the wisdom of redoing a ‘classic’ (if you watch the original now, it isn’t that good, aside from Tim Curry), but let me tell you, director Andy Muschietti and crew made a film that more than lives up to how terrifying we remember the original It being.
At this point I am guessing we all know the basic plot to It. Kids in the town of Derry are going missing, and just about every other kid in the town is being tormented with visions of a creepy clown (Bill Skarsgård) and whatever else they fear most. After the disappearance of his brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) decides to get the bottom of what is going on with the help of his friends in ‘The Losers Club’.
Man, they made this movie so delightfully creepy and unnerving! And It is not a slow burn either. This movie is out to get you from the first fifteen minutes. Not many films flaunt their monster the way It does, but Skarsgård is so good as Pennywise it would have been a shame if they hadn’t. It is one frightful set piece after another. I don’t think I ever sat in my chair properly. The movie kept me propped up at strange angles. It was as if my body was trying to find a configuration that could better process what I was seeing.
The Losers Club was great. In a post Stranger Things world, all horror media involving kids in the 80’s is going to be compared to that show, and It compares very favorably. The kids are snarky, funny and loveable. It is easy to root for them. While I am not a fan of putting kids in danger, I will say a horror movies about kids always makes more sense. When adults make dumb horror movie choices, you roll your eyes. When kids make dumb horror movie choices, it is understandable.
I never thought there would be a Pennywise that creeped me out more than Tim Curry, but Bill Skarsgård managed to do it, and now I don’t like to stand in dark rooms by myself. It was scary even though I knew what was going to happen, and It will replace It as a horror classic. If you are somehow still employed as a clown, you should retire now, because It is here to scare a whole new generation, and that generation is going to hate clowns even more than my generation did. Which is saying something.
It Proves 2017’s Poor Box-Office Was Due To Bad Movies, Not Sequels And Remakes!
Apparently I was one of the few people that didn’t head out and see ‘It’ over the weekend. The Stephen King adaptation did approximately $117 Million worth of business at the box office, and insiders say the number could go up to $120 Million since hurricane Irma was downgraded. That is the second biggest opening weekend ever for an ‘R’ rated movie, and the largest opening weekend in September by over $68.6 Million. This of course all comes during a very down year for major movie studios.
Studios and theater chains have blamed everything from Rottentomatoes.com to the lack bankable stars. Though the major target has been sequels and remakes. Surefire franchises like ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales’ have flopped, and while the ‘Fate of the Furious’ made $1.25 Billion worldwide, its domestic total was down quite bit, ‘only’ bringing in $225 Million. ‘Baywatch’, a major release for Paramount this year, failed hard, as did ‘CHiPs’ from Warner Brothers. Both remakes of old TV shows, so obviously sequels and remakes are to blame.
Not so fast. The biggest movies this year have all been sequels and remakes. ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming‘, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 2‘, ‘Beauty and the Beast‘, ‘Wonder Woman‘ was a follow up to ‘Batman v Superman‘, and now ‘It’ based on Stephen King’s popular book. Though the creators admit the idea came from the massively successful TV miniseries, thus a remake. What do all these movies have in common? They are all good. While what makes a movie good or bad is subjective, it helps if a lot of different sources all say the same thing, and all the movies in this list have been universally praised. While all the other movies listed before have been universally panned.
Of course all this ragging on sequels/remakes makes even less sense when you consider big movies like ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets‘ are original, but tanked anyway. Again, the movie was crushed by critics and fans saying it was nothing but a pretty face with little going on behind the eyes.
I think what is going on is that audiences are finally wising up to the fact that they can do a little research on movies before they spend their money. Sure they can go to places like Rottentomatoes.com, but they can even go on social media and see what other people are saying about the movie. They don’t just have to spend $12 and pray that the film is good. For movie studios this is probably a nightmare. They can’t guarantee success with good marketing anymore. They will have to make good movies too. In the end this will be better for us since studios will have to produce a more quality product.