How many B-Actors does it take to screw up a screenplay?

The B-Actors’ Club.

Back in 1990, STEPHEN KING’S IT was a reasonably successful and moderately enjoyable TV horror production, using B-Actors and basic practical special effects. After the release of its formidable 2017 remake, the 1990 version looks like a TV production using B-Actors and basic practical special effects.

Stephen King’s original novel, It, was one of his many epic masterpieces, and the filmmakers (director/co-writer Tommy Lee Wallace and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen) bravely attempt to bring that 1000+ page book to life on the small screen. Originally presented as a mini-series that spanned over three hours in two parts, it suffers the fate of every production made for the small screen – it LOOKS small screen! There just isn’t any substitute for that cool 24-frames-per-second cinematic grit. And it is dating exponentially. Each year, IT will look worse, as filmic technology ramps ever upwards. And the lackluster acting and editing and TV music and excessive fade-to-blacks (to accommodate commercial breaks) just add to the horror. And not in that pants-browning way.

IT follows a group of seven adults who were school friends, brought together again after 30 years, to defeat a recurring evil in their old home town. After a rash of killings that bear the hallmarks of that original evil, the seven uproot their successful careers (save one of them who stayed in town) to fulfill their oath and return to Derry, Maine (Stephen King’s fictional catchall county).

The movie frames the story from the adults’ perspective; as each is called, they flashback to that fateful summer 30 years ago in 1960, remembering their terrifying childhood encounters with the inexplicable It, represented as Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Tim Curry, eating scenery like sushi).

It is these flashback scenes that almost save the movie, as the chemistry between the seven teens is palpable; chemistry which the adult B-actors cannot seem to recreate. And no wonder – just cast your gaze on the wealth of talent: John Ritter (stutterer-pratfaller from THREE’S COMPANY), Harry Anderson (insipid judge on NIGHT COURT), Richard Masur (renowned “That Guy” from innumerable movies), Tim Reid (uh, this guy isn’t even a That Guy), Dennis Christopher (his coolness in BREAKING AWAY was a looong time ago), Annette O’Toole (the poor man’s hard-9, once Lana Lang in SUPERMAN III), and hey! there’s Richard Thomas (forever John-Boy Walton) as Bill, the group’s nominal leader, sporting a ponytail that even Steven Segal would call “kinda gay.”

Masur is the only adult who never makes it back to town, opting to slit his wrists in the tub rather than face It again. It’s TV, so reactions have to be homogenized, thus his wife discovers his body and reacts like she’s seeing a bad floral arrangement rather than the last pulses of blood exiting her husband’s veins.

Their kid counterparts are Jonathan Brandis (for Richard Thomas), his startling eyes reminding us of a young Jeff Fahey, Emily Perkins as Beverly (for Annette O’Toole), Adam Faraizl as Eddie the asthmatic (for Christopher), Marlon Taylor as Mike (for Tim Reid), the token black kid, Ben Heller as Stan (admittedly as vanilla as Masur), Seth Green as Richie (yes, THE Seth Green, Dr. Evil’s son, for Anderson), and Brandon Crane as bullied, fat Ben (for Ritter), who doesn’t really look fat but “built.”

Remember leafing through your dad’s Playboys in 1960?

The kids do such a fine job over their adult counterparts, we often wish the story would simply stay in flashback. (The 2017 remake would actually do this – tell the story in linear time, with the kids’ tale.  And only in that film’s final title will we read: IT: CHAPTER ONE…)

One by one we see the kids’ visions of Pennywise. He first appears to Bill’s young brother Georgie, in an iconic scene, when Georgie loses a paper boat down a drain. Pennywise appears inside the drain, offers Georgie a floating balloon, tempts him with his lost boat, then sprouts jagged teeth and drags Georgie down where “you’ll float too!” It is Georgie’s death that spurs Bill to revenge, and keeps his resolve strong 30 years later to face It and kill It.

One thing about this Warner Bros. production: they really work their rain machines overtime. Georgie follows his boat along the gutter puddles in heavy rain – while the sun slants shadows onto the ground from off-camera somewhere. Georgie’s funeral – in the rain. And later, while everyone is indoors – it starts to rain! We paid for this machine – and by jingo, we’re going to use it!

Beverly (O’Toole) is in an abusive relationship with a caricature of a misogynist businessman, and it is when she flashes back, we realize her father (Frank C. Turner) was abusive too, the movie reinforcing the psychobabble that women always seek mates who reflect their father; her childhood vision is one of blood that no one else can see, bursting from her sink and drenching her bathroom. When King goes cliché with the female coming-of-age metaphors, he soaks in it!

Richie (Seth Green) sees It as a werewolf (after being scared by the film I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF), and his reaction to being grabbed from behind by wolf claws is hilariously inept. Guess young Seth hadn’t finished his acting lessons yet. Or he was given advice by the director, “Imagine you’re seeing, like, a bad floral arrangement!”

Young Mike (who looks like Joe Morton) is the historian, researching the disappearance of people from Derry. He puts two and two together and comes up with Pennywise, the manifestation of an ancient evil that visits the town every 30 years to feast on the fear of children. And their brains, I guess.

“Honest, sir! Your balloon animals are not as distracting as your receding hairline!”

As much as talented Tim Curry is praised for his “horrifying” performance of Pennywise, Bill Skarsgard’s 2017 personification of Pennywise makes Curry look like an ass clown. And the movie is filled with lame reactions to supernatural phenomena: The kids look through an old photo album and see the photos come to life, showing Pennywise dancing down the street and into closeup in the photo – suddenly his three-dimensional claw shoots out of the photo album, grabbing at them! They scream and slam the book down. Then they, uh, just keep sitting there. And they seem pretty okay with the fact that a demon hand just reached out of a book where the pictures came to life! So, uh, no running screaming into the forest with your heads exploding in terror or anything? Okaaay…

Fat Ben pours his heart out in unrequited love to Beverly, in an anonymous poem. She thinks it’s the sexy kid, Bill. In this 1990 version, Ben looks “tough” with Beverly a head shorter than him, so it is understandable how she might be attracted to him if she found out he liked her. There is a better casting decision made in the 2017 version, where Ben is a short, tubby kid and Beverly is a stunner who must see through his physical appearance to the poet beneath.

Which brings us to the child orgy scene that isn’t in either version. So put your pants back on.

Then there’s the school bully, Henry Bowers (Jarred Blancard – not to be confused with Ray Brower, the dead kid in STAND BY ME), who christens the kids The Losers’ Club. The kids’ sequences are set in 1960, so the bullies get to “nigger” the black kid – probably one of the last times it was used in a film not about slavery. And not a Quentin Tarantino movie.

I love the way an officer busts the kids near the sewer entrance (where they’ve tracked Pennywise) and tells them alarmingly, “Another little girl was killed down by the river,” then instead of prohibiting them from being near the river, he advises, “If you come down here, come together like you are now.” What?! I guess murderers used to stick to the code of Don’t Kill Kids In Groups.

Pennywise grabs them in the sewer and boasts, “I am the eater of worlds. And of children.” — Uh, waitaminute… isn’t eating worlds MUCH harder than eating children? So shouldn’t “children” be before “worlds.” You don’t just tack on an easier task as if it’s an exclamation point. And why would a supernatural entity boast about its big mouth anyway? Just eat them if you really need them for sustenance. Why should this demon even consider the children important enough to communicate with, using English, no less?  I’ve found that things you can’t communicate with are MUCH scarier. Take a lion, for example: it won’t stop to boast or give you the respect of talking to you – it will fix you in its gaze, then pounce and maul you before your nervous system can even register you are dead; you will consciously see your own entrails being torn into its mouth, it will devour you that fast. That is more horrifying than any guy in baggy trousers telling me how great he is.

In the present, adult Henry Bowers (Michael Cole) is freed from a nuthouse by Pennywise, to go after the Losers as they close in on Pennywise’s sewer headquarters. Henry was more vital in the novel, while in the context of a movie, he ends up one of those inane characters that doesn’t progress the plot or the throughline; he stabs Mike, then is stabbed himself, and exits stage right.

John Ritter’s agent tried everything.

The adults find themselves in the sewer 30 years later. Bill (Thomas) explains, “It wakes up every 30 years and it feeds. And to feed, it needs to take on a physical form.” They go armed with, uh, Beverly’s slingshot… It is 1990, when automatic weapons can be purchased over the counter in America. But slingshots are fine against a supernatural demon.

Eddie (Christopher) confesses before their last trek, “I could never sleep with anyone I didn’t love and I never totally loved anyone except you guys.” Again, perish all thoughts this would lead to a handie by Beverly. We’re on TV.

I looked up anti-climactic in the dictionary – it said, “See the finale of STEPHEN KING’S IT on TV.” In the bowels of the sewer, the gang encounters a giant stop-motion spider-thingy. (Hooray for that lost Harryhausen art form!) It takes us awhile to realize this – is – the – demon. Excuse the pun, but This Is IT! A slow, hissing/roaring behemoth that rears up on its hind appendages and shines light on the Losers from its thorax, that hypnotizes them – until Beverly slingshots it! Only wings it. But it really discombobulates the spider-thingy. Who knew a slingshot would be better than a machine-gun?

Beverly resolutely grabs her spent rock and mumbles a prayer: “Please God, don’t let me miss again!” Uh, waitaminute – in a universe where It exists, where numerous kids have died due to It, where Stan suicided because of It, is it really any use praying to a god that obviously has some kind of master plan happening with It? Would Beverly have missed a second time if that narcissistic God didn’t hear his holier-than-thou name mentioned? “Oh, I’ll just dump my original plan of having It murder all of Derry, because Miss Sparkle-Britches over there said my name, and God how I love hearing my name!”

But it isn’t the slingshot that deals the death blow – all the Losers together attack this spider-thingy and rip out its heart with their bare hands. Geez, I’m still thinking how much faster this would have been with just one machine gun…

If you think I’m being too hard on the effects of the day, even Tim Curry (tragically confined to a wheelchair after a stroke in 2012) saucily comments on the IT remake, to big laughs from his audience: “I hope they make the end better, because on TV, I turned into a sort of giant spider [laughs] …and it was not very scary [laughs] … or convincing!”

Insipid subplot involving Bill’s wife (Olivia Hussey) being captured by the spider and cocooned along with other victims, like in ALIEN – meaning the person isn’t dead or eaten, just fulfilling the damsel-in-distress trope. Story furiously ramps toward conclusion like a TV movie tying up all its loose ends before a toothpaste commercial.

Then the toothpaste commercial.

END

Once Upon a Black Time in the White West.

Whiteys: 0. Niggers: 1

Quentin Tarantino, as he did with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009), once again punches history in the face and rewrites the underdog as the alpha dog in DJANGO UNCHAINED. And says nigger a lot.

DJANGO UNCHAINED throws that word at us in such forceful abandon that it becomes hilarious to hear from the mouths of rednecks and high society alike; a grim reminder of the times (1858, two years before the American Civil War), when even the educated elite were conditioned to call African slaves niggers, not as pejorative or juvenile display of superiority, but as reference.

Rock solid Jamie Foxx is slave Django, liberated from a slave gang by dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (eternally mesmeric Christoph Waltz), at first to help King identify a bounty kill, then going Marvel Team-Up to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold to a dandy Mississippi plantation owner, Kandie (a very sinister Leonardo DiCaprio).

As with all Tarantino films, the movie MAKING sells it, not so much the simple buddy/road-movie plot, which is once again littered with audacious coincidences and maddeningly convenient plot points. Tarantino’s signature compelling vignettes still litter the celluloid, the hip dialogue as ferocious as the bullet-fests, yet of all Tarantino’s oeuvre, DJANGO stands apart as arguably his first film that can neatly be sliced into three acts.

The acts are split into comedy, drama and violence. First act finds Django and King bonding on bounty kills, second act is the Long Con, and third act is all Foxx, hero angles, hero bloodshed, and hero slomo.

Act I, we meet heavily-drawling Don Johnson as plantation owner Big Daddy, replete with Colonel Sanders goatee, imperious white suit and finger-lickin’ necktie; Django posing as a “free man,” the plantation slaves so inculcated in perceiving black men as slaves that Big Daddy must instruct them on how to treat Django – “like a white man” – which flabbergasts them; and a wildly-miscast Jonah Hill, arguing with fellow Klan members over the eye-holes in their hoods being constrictive to their vision, like a Python sketch.

Act II is the Long Con, the most intense psychodrama sequence, where Tarantino sets up his beautiful dangerous tableaus: Django posing as a black slave trader (“lower than a house nigger”), he and King masquerading to Kandie as business partners seeking new talent for “mandingo fighting,” a whitey bloodsport pitting black against black to the death (broken arms, hammers to the head and other such whimsy). They attempt to buy Django’s wife from Kandie, on the pretense they would be investing thousands more buying mandingoes. When the ruse is uncovered – by the lowly “house nigger” – and Kandie brings out his father’s skull, we just know we’re in for some sweet Tarantino mindfuck dialoguing. And who is the house nigger? None other than Samuel L. Jackson; a wonder how he pulls off a role alternately so funny and so slimy.

Second act wraps with wild gunfire, dodging impossible hails of bullets, gouts of blood spurting in bucketfuls, each death an art statement, human entrails exploding in fiery red fountains… It’s classic Tarantino by way of Sam Peckinpah and early John Woo, with better technology, ergo better gratuitous gore. That’s why we love him. We also love Tarantino for his brazen deus ex machinae  that always seem as natural as spitting blood after being shot in the lung. But in DJANGO, for the first time – Tarantino fails to make it seem natural…

It is in these impossibly tense Kandie sequences that all Tarantino’s storytelling errors are made: firstly, King could have avoided Kandie’s revenge with one simple lie (that he bedded Broomhilda); secondly, King is outfitted with guns hidden up his forearms (TAXI-DRIVER-style) and opts not to go out blazing; thirdly, Django is saved at the annoyingly last minute by the person who hates him most, the house nigger. And he is sent on a cross-country trek with infinite opportunities to escape, like a 1960’s Batman episode. A jaw-dropping display of lazy screenwriting.

In BASTERDS, Waltz played someone so demonic, his every innocuous gesture contained menace, his every courteous word laced with arsenic and occluded intent. In DJANGO, Waltz is still lucid, ruthless, merciless (and it’s incongruously hilarious hearing him say nigger in that Germanic brogue) – but this time, he’s on our side. Here, Leo is The Christoph Waltz, teetering on a tightrope of volcanic eruption and insatiable violence, his beatific smile masking a sociopathic nihilism. And boy does he love saying nigger. Walton Goggins is a crazy-eyed Kandie ranch-hand (the guy you call when Steve Buscemi is unavailable) and the most comfortable having nigger in his redneck vernacular. But the movie is Foxx’s, to have and to hold. And he’s the only one who can say nigger with any conviction and impunity.

Act III is Jamie Foxx Unchained. Who would’ve thought Wanda would end up such a big brutal star?

On his trek to the Batman prison with three other caged slaves (minded by Tarantino in a jailer cameo with an atrocious Australian accent), Django, in his overbearing confidence, spins a tale to free himself, spitting at his dubious captors, “Do I talk like a slave?” (An excellent line, reminding us that though most slaves must have been cowed into obeisance, there must have been men among them who yet held their heads high enough to rise above the physical and psychological cowing of Whitey, otherwise Lincoln and his cronies would never have thought it morally reprehensible to keep these men captive.) After a brutally quick shootout with his captors, Django rides off armed to the teeth on an unsaddled horse, and one of the caged slaves watches him, the hint of a smile on his face. That smile, edged with tears, is a hammerblow button to this scene. It’s like the slave was looking at everything the black man could be; like he was looking at the revolution right there; witness to the beginning of the rising up from underfoot. Unwritten history written all over his face…

UNCHAINED is another Tarantino thunderball. Though based in an historical period, it unapologetically blazes outside the arc of history. Its lead character is an anomaly – Django is not just a rebel slave, he doesn’t even consider himself an underdog. It is not in his vernacular; he holds an intrinsic belief that he *is* superior to his captors, an aspect that was literally beaten and bred out of generations of Africans.

Tarantino had to field a slew of interviews to justify why his characters said nigger so much. (Why do you idiots focus on that one word? Is anyone hearing Waltz mention Alexandre Dumas to Leo, who coincidentally played THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK? Is anyone hearing the authentically Western soundtrack that contains numerous Ennio Morricone compositions, including themes from TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA? Is anyone commending QT for alluding to Wagner’s Brünnhilde?)

And here’s the thing: even though writer-director Tarantino set DJANGO during slavery and feels justified in sprinkling n-words like glitter, the tale of the unbound slave-turned-bounty hunter is hyper-realism – it’s not meant to be a documentary or authentic representation of the era – so Tarantino could have opted to be more niggardly with the “niggers.” But – as we discovered in PULP FICTION – QT just loooves dropping that bomb… I think it’s a case of just liking the way the word sounds, like “fuck.”

Like fuck, it drops like a ball-peen hammer every time you hear it. It never gets old and it never wears thin. Like fuck, it is all-purpose, can be used in any context, to friend or foe, to black or white, for stop or go. Could it be that modern Whitey guilt just doesn’t like admitting how blasé and passe the derogation was back then? That, just like rewriting “Mark Twain” and Republicans’ disavowal of slavery, they don’t want such a harsh light shone on their past cowardly White-nited States of America?

Once again, the purveyors of the message are attacked, instead of the message being heard. When I state that the Pope and his cronies fuck boys, it’s me who gets vilified for saying “fuck.” (What would you prefer I say – making love?) Do you critics think the actual crime/sin of fucking boys can be overlooked simply because you turn your hypocritical derision to the people who are calling it what it is?

Nigger, please!

END

The Race Between Religion and Spirit.

Ah yes, running in slow motion. We’ve all done it. To Vangelis’s music from CHARIOTS OF FIRE.

The loneliness of the long distance cucumber

British production, written by Colin Welland, directed by Hugh Hudson, nominated for 7 Academy Awards, winning 4 (including Best Picture), CHARIOTS OF FIRE is based loosely on two real life British runners in the 1924 Paris Olympics, who run for very different reasons. Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) runs to prove himself above the anti-semitism he’s experienced all his life, while Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) runs to glorify his christian god: “To win is to honor Him” (which should make anyone trip over from laughing so hard. Even in slow motion).

Movie opens at Caius College Cambridge in 1919, when fervor for The Great War (though what made it “great” is beyond my ken) is still high in everyone’s nostrils, and British supremacy was tangible in the world. The British runners all meet here as students.

Different people would perceive different parts of this movie as inspirational. For an athlete, the running in slow motion, the sacrifices and the winning – both Liddell and Abrahams would go on to win their respective races and bring glory to Britain; for a religious fanatic, the nutty equating of Christ with racing – Liddell gives a speech loaded with metaphor, “committing yourself to the love of Christ – that is how you run a straight race” –  demonstrably ridiculous, because Jewish Abrahams ran “straight races” as well, metaphorically as well as literally – by committing to the love of Allah.

And there are so much of Liddell’s ravings and rantings and refusing to run on Sunday at the Olympics, that it turned me off the film. This real life athlete ruined a film honoring him because his character (Charleson) had to portray him as the lunatic he was.

Liddell’s life plan is to visit China as a missionary, but he puts those plans on hold to attend the Olympics, because, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.” Suuure you do. Anything as an excuse to rationalize fun. After the Games, he does actually give up running to spread the disease of christianity in China.

Liddell meets with Olympic and state officials who urge him to compete in his Sunday race, “In my day, it was king first, God after.” Liddell replies, “God made countries, God makes kings, and the rules by which they govern.” God also makes wars. Reconcile that with your missionary work, Running Boy – oh, I forgot, missionary work IS insidious war, after all, on Other People’s beliefs.

This is one of those films where it is pointless speaking of the performances, which are so natural and top notch, it is no wonder CHARIOTS received so many awards: Ian Holm is Abrahams’ trainer; Sir John Gielgud once again defines Spectacularly Imperious by appearing in the dictionary right next to the phrase, and here as a College Master. Sadly, two young American actors who were stars in their own right appear here in their last major feature film before virtually disappearing from cinema, Dennis Christopher (who made his mark as the determined young bicyclist in BREAKING AWAY, 1979) and Brad Davis (who shook our foundations in the disturbing MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, 1978).

Watching both Abrahams and Liddell cheer each other on during their respective races for Britain – though both were mortal running enemies – was a joy that no religion could sully; the physicality of driving human bodies to such extremes of performance; the intricacy of cardiovascular function that fuels the human animal; the tendons, joints, muscles, bones impacting the Earth, surging forward in opposition to gravity; the wonder of the raging human adrenaline machine stretched past breaking point… If only Eric Liddell could have understood there is a much more wondrous power than his mythical Christ – humanity.

Run from the truth, Eric! Run in slow motion!

END