"It: Chapter 2" review

He's baaaack. Pennywise, that is. Stephen King's evil clown who single-handedly ruined the profession of clowning and destroyed the joy of childhood. Like a stubborn boil, he's (or It's) reappearing in It: Chapter Two. Avoid sewers, red balloons, and, just to be safe, the entire state of Maine.

All kidding aside, it's time for the damnation of faint praise. As usual, I'll start by saying nice things.

Director Andy Muscietti’s two-part movie does a credible job of distilling King’s massive tome. The writing is clever; the special effects rock; the actors act from their hearts; the CGI kicks ass. (And I really loved the nod to John Carpenter's The Thing.) But ...?

But Chapter One packed more of a punch. It had a simpler story structure. (Aggh, there’s a crazy killer clown in the sewers. Losers, unite! Kill the clown!) That's pretty much It.

Chapter Two gets complicated. Gary Dauberman's screenplay adds a vision quest thing. Once the present-day Losers assemble in Derry, they must each find a beloved token of their traumatic childhoods and sacrifice it in the Ritual of Chud to kill the clown. This necessitates constant flashbacks to the adolescent Losers. It's compelling material, but it drags the story's rhythm. It also makes the horror predictable. (Loser revisits past. It gives him/her a jump-scare. Loser narrowly escapes.)

To create his adaptation, Dauberman makes different choices than the TV miniseries. (I prefer most of his choices.) He trims or kills expendable passages and bits of business. He shoehorns in more of King's longwinded novel by means of clever synecdoches. You see It’s arrival on earth in Mike's flashback. The smokehole ceremony is another trippy flashback. Also Mike's. It's sharp, economical writing. But ...

The screenwriter makes King's long story short in Chapter One. In Chapter Two, he makes a short story long with those incessant Stand-by-Me-esque flashbacks to the Losers' unhappy childhoods. 

It's great writing, don't get me wrong. Character-based. Moving. Imaginative. There's a lot of good stuff. But there's too much stuff. All that extra material would make for a great, new miniseries. But it drags the movie down in Chapter Two. And that's not so great.

Like an evil clown emerging from the sewer, a great horror movie should scare the living bejeezus out of you.

It should never feel slow.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" review

[SPOILERS ENSUE]

Welcome to 1969. That was the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, 40,000 hippies enjoyed peace, love and mud at Woodstock, and Charlie Manson's followers butchered seven people in the Hollywood hills. 

The party's over. The party of the 1960s, that is. Manson's massacre killed it. America would quickly lock its doors, stop picking up hitchhikers, and thank God they put Nixon in the White House. Kiss all that free love, fearlessness, creative experimentation, and risk-taking goodbye, folks. Get ready for the sell-out 70s. Ah. But what if the kill-crazy spree never happened? Let's make believe ...

And Tarantino does, natch. His "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" imagines that fairy tale alternate reality. In his version, the story has a bloody happy ending.

Before arriving at Quentin's counterfactual Cloudland, we dig into the lives of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio as the washed-up action star of a Western TV show cancelled in 1961) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt as a washed-up stuntman suspected of killing his wife). 

Dalton's agent, (Al Pacino) gives him a shot of ugly truth at Musso and Frank's. He's officially a has-been. And can now look forward to a thousand deaths as a guest-star bad guy. Either that, or Spaghetti Westerns.

Dalton swallows this bitter pill and feels sorry for himself. His stuntman sidekick (reduced to gofer status) can't even claim to be a has-been. What next? Who the hell knows? For now, their careers are dead in the water.

Their lack of action unfolds on the Sunset Strip in 1969. As  seen from inside Dalton's Cadillac. Which keeps driving back and forth on the Strip. These cats drive a lot. And talk a lot, too. This is a Tarantino movie, after all.

Lotsa flashbacks ensue during the drive. Booth and Dalton bullshitting through a TV interview on the set of Bounty Law. Booth holding a speargun on a boat while his soon-to-dead wife busts his balls. Booth busting Bruce Lee's balls and sparring on the set of The Green Hornet. 

Lotsa nostalgia porn outside the window. A lovingly, painstakingly recreated Sunset Strip. Every freeze-frame artfully calculated. Movie marquees, touting Krakatoa East of Java. Pandora's Box is there, though it was actually torn down in 1966. But this is the Tarantinoverse, so don't adjust your set. 

All that, and glimpses of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) in the early flower of Tate's career. Not many lines. But an amazing presence. Manson is the death angel. She's the life force.

Also glimpses of flower children. All female, all young. Digging through dumpsters. Singing creepy, culty songs. hitching rides. 

Booth picks one up, resists her jailbait charms, drops her off at Spahn Movie Ranch, then bullies his way into a shack to check on the owner, his old pal George Spahn. The Manson cultists gather, call him names. It starts to feel like a horror movie. A Children of the Corn vibe. A hippy knucklehead sticks a knife in Booth's tire. Booth busts his chops and makes him change the tire. One cultist rides off to alert Charles "Tex" Watson, who's guiding tourists on a horse trail. He gallops back. But Booth drives off in the nick of time. 

Then the film fast-forwards to August 8. Dalton is back from his latest Spaghetti Western with his new Italian wife. Having a free evening ahead, Booth tries an acid-laced cig. Then the four Mansonites take a drive down Cielo Drive. They get deflected when Dalton runs out screaming at their noisy muffler. Linda Kasabian drives off. The remaining three killers shift targets to the Hollywood types who taught them to kill in the first place.

After that, well. Bloody horror ensues. But a different bloody horror. This time, instead of helpless victims, Manson's hit squad runs into a crotch-chomping pit bull and two kickass badasses, including one with a handy flamethrower.

After that, presumably, the cops would pick up Charlie Manson. He'd get his 15 minutes of fame, but instead of haunting America's nightmares, he'd be a laughing stock. Without that nightmare, America would take more risks, have a little more guts. The 1960s burst of creativity would flare a little longer.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

"Network" • redux, rerun, rehash, review

"And another thing!"

Network came out in 1976. Classic movie with a dream team behind it. Sidney Lumet directed it; Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay. Amazing performances by Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, et al. On top of that, great cinematography, editing, the whole nine yards. Bravo.

This amazing film blew me away in the multiplex. Saw it again on TV. It still blew me away. But ...

Not quite so much.

Why?

I'm still wrapping my head around that question.

Network is one of the greatest movies of all time. At least for the first hour or so. Then it crashes like a lead balloon. It eventually recovers, and makes it to a bang-up ending. But why'd the movie fall in the first place?

Let's start with what it is. The code that runs it. Not the acting, directing, cinematography, or editing. The screenplay. (Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay.) What is it? 

Network is a satire. Mostly. A caricature of TV network bullshit, specifically. Accurate? Who cares?

Satire doesn't have to be realistic, kind, or fair. But there's good caricature, and bad caricature. A bad caricaturist draws a blob and adds big ears. Voila! President Obama. A good caricaturist groks the essence of the face.

Chayefsky's caricature is pretty damn good. It should be. He knew what he was talking about. He was one of the greatest TV writers of all time, after all. The golden boy who wrote Marty in the Golden Age of television. Kudos. But he paid a price.

I imagine he sat through thousands of hours of TV executive meetings, grinding his teeth, seething with unspoken rage, and ultimately distilling that bile in his acid portrait of the corporate bastards. Money, money, money! That's all they think about!

Chayefsky kept his mouth shut and his ears open. The corporate dialog rings true ...

Diana: The Beale show Q score is down to thirty-three. Much of the loss occurred in the child and teen and eighteen-thirty-four categories which were our core market.

The man had a good ear, obviously. And probably kept a journal. But ...

The satire is a tasty coating. Bite into it, there's a hard candy shell at the center. Hardcore rants. Polemics. Lecture. Chayefsky had a thing or too to tell you. 

The movie functions as a delivery system for Howard Beale’s “I'm mad as hell speech”—and all the others. Beale is a stand-in for Chayefsky. The Voice of the Author. Giving you a piece of his mind. The rants are powerfully written. Passionate. From the heart. 

Unlike the portraits of the network executives, Chayesky's portrait of Howard Beale isn't realistic. Hell, neither is Swift's Modest Proposal. Or Heller's Catch-22. Rants or not, it's still great satiric. writing.

That's not the problem. 

The problem is the B story. The romance between Diana Christensen and Max Schumacher. It doesn't add up. Based on the actors' ages, he's 58 years old; she's 35. Max is an old-school TV journalist with solid convictions; Diana is an opportunistic sell-out. He's about substance; she's about empty style. He's on his last legs, she's young and on her way up. What the hell does she see in him? What the hell does he see in her?

Diana should be manipulative and seductive. She should fake Howard out with a false front, adore, admire, flatter and f***k. Instead, she natters on about biz statistics when they're in the sack. It's about as sexy as banging an adding machine. 

A missing scene could make you buy it. Max could say he loves her superficiality. He's pissed his youth away on truth. In a perverse middle-aged act of defiance, he throws it away and has an affair with a sexy fraud. 

But there's no explanation, no motivation. Faye Dunaway is alluring, so you're supposed to buy it. 

To dig the grave deeper ...

Chayefsky deliberately wrote their dialog in soap opera style. A parody of dull hackneyed writing runs the risk of actually being dull. This is. 

The Max and Diana subplot is a deadweight drag. Cut it, and the movie would soar. Chayefsky didn't cut it. He didn't want to kill his darlings. That's the problem.

But it's still a great movie.

Witch Hunt Inc.

Los Angeles Convention Center. Located in the heart of heartless LA. It shimmers in the endless heatwave like a Jorge Luis Borges nightmare of an infinite shopping mall. Business has been good lately. One con after another, pun intended. Last week, defense contractors pushing face-rec drones the size of bees. This week, WITCHCON 2037. Hunter-gatherers of a different kind. And very big business.

Hall after hall, booth after booth, auditorium after auditorium, the place is packed. Monster crowd, broad assortment. Industry reps, industry pioneers (in person!) industry wannabes, customers, the odd reporter, brats playing Witchfinder, and significant and insignificant others. Crowd’s in a good mood. Happy babble echoes off the walls. They’re all laughing, joking, swiping coin for t-shirts, hats, hoodies, mugs, cozies, and other swag. You’d think Steve Jobs just came back from the dead. Or Brad Ragnarok was still alive.

Brad is the star attraction today. You want to talk industry pioneers? Start with Brad. He pretty much invented the whole damn industry, right after the Second Great Awakening.
Today, some of you chumps might get to meet him.

A kid in VR specs crashes into Brad like a bull. Right in the gut. Brad doesn’t flinch, what with his amazing abs and all.
Brad smiles. Kid takes off his blindman specs.

“Sorry,” kid says. “Oh, I’m real sorry.”

“No worries, kid. What’s your name?”

“Tommy,” says the kid.

“Tommy What?”

“Tommy Smith.”

Brad takes the specs, looks through them.

“Well, Tommy Smith. Fun’s fun, but you’d best play safe. Dial back the filter, huh? Don’t want to keep running into folks, huh?”

“No, sir.”

Hands specs back. Tommy does a frantic voice command; the specs shade back to a reasonable tint.  Kid returns specs to Brad for his approval. Brad looks through, nods, hands them back.

“Well, that’s a whole lot better. You play safe, Tommy Smith.”

“I will, sir. Thanks.”

Tommy runs off. Crowd’s looking at him in awe. Got their iPhones out, so it's lights, vid, action. They even start applauding. Brad waves off the fanboy idolatry.

“Kid’s got to learn sometime.”

They nod like the chumps they are.

“Gotta run, folks. It’s showtime!”

They applaud again. Chumps.

Brad smiles, turns his back, walks off. Whispers, “Tommy Smith. Search and cross reference family attendance WitchCon.”

Little bastard has to be a witch. But that can wait.

Brad goes through the front doors of the auditorium, does his prizefighter run up the center aisle, bounds up on stage, takes the lectern.

“How you doing, folks?”

Big applause.

“That’s what I thought. You’re all witch-hunters, and I’m the man who started the hunt. You all know that. And you’re all doing OK. But you know you could do better, and that's why you're here. I’m about to tell you how. Now here’s another question.”

Pause for dramatic effect.

“What does a witch look like?”

An image pops up on the massive high-def screen behind the stage.

A color photo of Margaret Hamilton, in full costume and green-skin makeup as The Wicked Witch of the West. 

This gets a big laugh.

“Yeah, this one's easy to spot. But that’s only in the movies. It’s not that easy in real life. The truth is, a witch looks like you. Or me. Or him. Or her. Or me.”

They gasp with shock. Then sigh. Oh, that’s what he meant.

“I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Witches hid out for centuries. They hid out during the old time witch hunts. They kept it up for a century or two when the witch hunts went away. America nearly went to hell as a result! The great scientific minds of the Godless Age figured the climate was going to hell because of carbon in the atmosphere! They assumed abortion was a woman’s right to choose, not a human sacrifice. Wells were poisoned, crops failed, wombs became barren. Why, there had to be a scientific explanation, huh? Well there was! What was it?”

“Witchcraft!” they all shouted.

“You’re damn right. By the time our leaders figured it out, most of the real science had been lost! And then they came to me. You all know the story.”

Yeah. Brad’s big success story. Security Solutions Inc. (aka SS) was his baby. It specialized in private prisons and detention centers. Big data nearly put him out of business. Quantum computing and all that shit. It was predictive, if not prophetic. Why lock people up when you know the crime before the time? Why detain illegals, when they can’t get in anymore?

The answer is, you don’t. You find another business model. Damned if Brad knew what it was. Had two lean years.

Then a wave of religious fervor swept America and saved his ass. The new holy roller President and his cronies came to Brad. Supplicants, on their knees practically. They were convinced all our nation's problems boiled down to witchcraft. They had no idea how to find the bastards. Could he help? 

Sure. Brad was happy to help. His competitors refused. These American ayatollahs were convinced the country was rotten with witchcraft. Wouldn't big data work on that? Brad's competitors said, well, gee, what with black magic and all they can fool the computers. Utter bullshit, of course. The truth was they just couldn't stomach it. But Brad could. And he got the job. 

And Brad said the job was good. 

Once upon a time, the United States government paid Brad to lock people up. Now, they paid him to find witches. Sweet deal. Something like quadruple billing with no oversight. Flat monthly charge. Per diem. Then fee for service plus expenses, and SS gets to seize the assets of the witches once apprehended. Paid a whole lot better than throwing teenage punks in a cinderblock hellhole.

Sweet deal, man. Sweet, sweet deal. Now, just between us chickens, Brad no more believed in witches (then or now) than he believed in the man in the moon or a flying purple people eater hiding under the bed. Come on! But, hell, if you pay Brad to find the witches and sons of witches, he's sure as hell going to find them. And Brad did. 

Now, Brad doesn't say any of this in public. The official history of Brad's new business model is bullshit. PR, hype, a cover story, dig? The truth is ugly, so Brad let the chumps believe the happy lie.

He'd sold today's show as a tips and tricks kinda deal. As per usual, Brad plans to say exactly nothing. You think Brad's giving away trade secrets? You got another think coming, pal. This is a commercial in disguise, folks. But Brad's good at this shit.

Time to give 'em what they want.

Flashes the crowd a big smile.

"So, how do you find a witch who doesn't aim to be found? A cunning witch who's got the Devil and black magic on their side? Who's got a network of other witches backing 'em up?"

Brad smiled wider. Knowingly. 

"Start with the network. Witches thought it was their strength! Turns out it was their weak point ... and their downfall. Find one witch, make 'em name all the other witches in their branch of the coven. Then work your way up. Get the names of the whole coven. Then the coven above that. And then the next one. And ... you just keep going. One name after another."

Names bubble into Brad's head. One after another. Sean McCormick. Goth-type artist, little shithead. Lasted for hours. Bastard had balls, Brad had to give him that. At least at first. Then he spilled. Name, after name. Jeff Harkness, Alissa Thompson, Joe Whatsisname. His mother was a suspect, too, but she'd vanished into thin air.

"Of course, you've still got your lone wolves. This righteous nation blocked the digital evil of the world system outside the USA, and destroyed all the magic-related paraphernalia in the bonfires of 2023. But countless bad apples squirreled stuff away. Ain't in no coven, doing their witchcraft in secret. Practiced spells and so forth when nobody was looking. So how do you see what they're doing in the dark? By bringing everything to light. As you know, we relied on spirit-filled men of God to reveal the iniquity among us. The suspects always deny the accusation. God sees all—but God's ministers sometimes err. Yes, mistakes can be made. How can you be sure?"

He smiled. They knew that one.

"Fire and water, of course. We set up state-of-the-art hydraulic containment units to drown suspected witches until they confessed. If some poor innocent says nothing and drowns, their soul's with God."

Brad's dear departed wife, for example. Teresa, bless her heart, kept her mouth shut. Glaring at him through the glass the whole time, even after the water covered her mouth until she couldn't help but open it, gasping for breath, getting water instead. Hate in her eyes, until her eyes went dead. Sorry, honey. But it sure beats a messy divorce.

"As to fire, well, why reinvent the wheel? Or in this case, the stake."

Teresa's feminazi support group explored that option. Quite a spectacle. Sparks flying up like a campfire in the night. Brad stood there, smiling. While Brad was dealing with Teresa, those whores just screamed and screamed at him. (All that 20th century jive about civil rights and freedom and shit.) Now they just screamed. Bye ladies. See you in hell. 

Brad keeps it up.

Colorful anecdotes that say exactly nothing. Now Brad's reached his favorite point in the talk. The pitch. Sign these chumps up for seminars, intensive sessions and all that horseshit. 

But one lady in the audience is breaking his flow. She's waving her hand in the air.

"Sorry, ma'am. No questions in the presentation," says Brad. "We've got a FAQ on our site ... Do I know you?"

"I don't think so. Can I come up?

The obvious answer is no. Brad avoids audience participation like the plague it is. But today, hell. She's pretty. Got something about her. Why not?"

He waved her up. She ran up the aisle, just like Brad did at the start of the show. Zips up the stairs, then walks up to him at the lectern.

Good looking woman. Red hair, green eyes. 35 or so. Something about her. Something stirring in Brad's pants.

"Well, hello little lady. What's your name?'

"Alice McCormick."

McCormick?

"OK, Alice. What's your question?"

"It's not exactly a question."

She laughs.

"I just think it's kind of funny ..."

"What's so funny?"

"All this. This witch-hunting thing you all got going for yourself. Sweet deal you've got." 

Sweet deal. Exact same words running through Brad's head a few minutes ago. Shout for security? Nah. She's harmless. 

The lady giggles again.

"So what's so funny, ma'am?"


"Well ... you." Laughs. "All of you! All you high-tech witch-hunters, chasing after witches. I think you're hilarious, I really do. Like dogs chasing after cars. Did it ever occur to you ... Did you ever even ask yourselves ..."

Talking with her hands, giggling. A ball of St. Elmo's fire slowly grows in her hands. Crackling energy. Reflected in her eyes. No. Inside her eyes.

She laughs uncontrollably. The fireball grows.

"What the fuck did you plan to do if you ever caught one?"

She laughs insanely, then opens her hands. The sizzling energy leaps out and fries Brad like a mosquito in a bug zapper. The crowd screams and tries to run.

It gets bad after that.

Angerdream

Anger is the most seductive of all human emotions. Fear hurts. But anger feels good. Rage feels like righteousness. It begins as a voice in your head. The speech you're not going to say. The speech that begins with "You." Then, surprise, surprise. You hear the words coming out of your mouth.
And it feels so goddamn good.
Rage tells you these are words of prophecy.
You're Moses, Jesus and Morpheus rolled into one.
And somebody needs to hear your prophetic words.
A very, very bad person.
This son of a bitch needs to hear your speech.
This bitch needs to hear your speech.
And if you're very goddamn lucky, the hate coming out of you is nothing more than words.

The Doorway Effect

Then the next thing you know he died. He didn’t even notice it at the time. He’d been working on the unified field theory. Yes, Einstein’s great white whale. Not string theory or any of that other idiotic nonsense. Inelegant fads. Ugly models patched together with mathematical duct tape. No, sir. God did not play dice. And God doesn’t patch, kludge, tape, solder or trowel. The truth is beautiful. The truth is simple. And he had the simple formula. Let "R" stand for reality. It follows as the night to the day that …

As the simple truth dawned, he realized that he was “dead,” so to speak. This was, of course, the reason why he’d worked the formula out. His insight flowed from the clarity that “death” affords, though he disliked the term. (Vague! Inelegant!) Linguistic wrangling aside, being a "dead," non-corporeal intelligence certainly had its advantages. Unconstrained by the parameters of local space-time, his mind (metaphorically speaking) could see around corners. Cheating? No, math is math. Truth is truth.

Let R = Reality. R =

He had to write it down! Comically, he realized that there was nothing to write with. No matter. (Ha!) The truth burned in his brain. (Mind, intelligence, whatever the hell or heaven it was.) Ineluctable, indelible truth. This lambent knowledge could never be erased. Good thing.

Because he was (if such a thing were possible in this half world) distracted …

By sound. Or something that he experienced as sound. It came in the form of periodic bursts of indiscrete happiness. Like the whoops which irritating teenagers make whilst jumping into a pool.

Confident in his knowledge of the theory of everything, he "looked" around for the source of the "sound."

At this point he perceived an indeterminate series of beings. Beings of light. All standing in a queue. He then realized that he also was standing in that queue. And the queue was advancing? Approaching? A sort of whirlpool? A vortex?

A doorway, yes of course.
A doorway.

Each being of light approached this maelstrom of light and color. Before leaping into it, each being hollered (with what vocal organs he couldn’t begin to guess) something vulgar along the lines of “Yippee!” or “Whee!” He was determined not to follow their example. Referring here to their rude phatic utterances, and not the transition through the doorway. He stayed in line, and patiently awaited his turn.

The basis of his equanimity was easy to grasp.
Upon seeing the doorway, he immediately knew what it was.

This phenomenon was some sort of soul recycling station, to put it crudely. A mechanism of reincarnation. (Oppie would be pleased. And perhaps was.) Dead intelligences enter, and are promptly returned to some new life.

And therein the danger presented itself.

Earthly cognitive psychologists refer to the “doorway effect.” Simply put, passing from one room to another creates an Etch-a-Sketch effect in the brain. Having moved from Room A to Room B, the brain promptly dumps the bulk of its short term memory. It thus forgets the previous experience of Room A and resets, allowing for the creation of a new memories in Room B.

But he wouldn’t forget.

R =

It was now his turn. He would never.

The doorway swirled with garish color.

He leapt through. He didn’t say “Wheee!”

A giant hand slapped him on the ass. He screamed.

He had no idea why.

Review: "Pet Sematary"

Just saw the remake of Pet Sematary. A scary movie and a respectable Stephen King adaptation. It also
offers many valuable lessons … 

• If you have kids and move to a rustic, rural home in Maine by a busy highway, be sure to put up a fence before you let them play outside.

• If you have a cat, keep it inside as well until you put up the fence. 

• If, despite your best efforts, a maniacal trucker flattens your cat, don’t panic. 

• Avoid pet cemeteries created by unknown people who can’t spell. 

• Avoid pet cemeteries where processions of creepy children in animal masks bury their dead pets. 

• Avoid creepy guys who look like John Lithgow. Above all, don’t let them talk to your child. 

• If a creepy guy volunteers to take your dead cat to a “special” pet cemetery beyond the official “Pet Sematary,” politely decline his offer. 

• Cremate your dead cat for best results. 

• If a maniacal trucker flattens your child, don’t dig them up and bury them in the “special” pet cemetery.

• Before moving to Maine, research the property to make sure it’s not near any cursed real estate. 

• To stay on the safe side, don’t move to Maine at all.