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When I was younger, I read Stephen King’s “It.” That book is a PTSD diagnosis in paperback. I have never forgotten certain lines in it, like “the baby farted” when King described a particularly evil teenage psychopath recalling suffocating his infant brother. The book is as dark and unrelenting as Pennywise.
My sister-in-law read it about the same time I did, and to this day, if I say to her “we all float down here,” she’ll slap me across the face and not speak to me for months. “It” is one of those books that the world could have done without, and Stephen King could have done without writing.
Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called the movie “a waking nightmare, curated from a catalogue of horror-movie tropes.” He missed mentioning that most of the horror-movie tropes in the last 30 years were invented from the minds of people who read “It” in 1986.
Call it a symphony of orchestral meta-horror, an elaborate waking nightmare in which you, as the dreamer, are constantly reminded of what the film is trying to do, and yet are powerless to stop it.
“It” is a psychotically evil force or terror, and without regard to how technically well-done it is as a movie (versus the Tim Curry made-for-TV version), I think we could all have gone on with life if it had never been made.
The second film of the “shouldn’t have made” genre is Climate Change Pope Al’s “An Inconvenient Sequel.” This is a movie, which before it was released, garnered enough negative reviews from people who had never seen it, that if there were a poll done before it was made, no filmmaker in his right mind would attempt it. But they didn’t make this film to be commercially successful.
Like “It,” a nightmare on Gore Street was made as a catharsis of the soul, to rid it of evil once and for all. Once made, the existence of this religious talisman divided the audience like a knife.
Of the 2,645 IMDb users who rated the film as of August,2 over 38 percent gave the film a 1 out of 10. Of those same 2,645 IMDb users, just under 34 percent gave the film a 10 out of 10. In short: 72 percent of people who rated the movie gave it an extreme score, a 1 or a 10.
The reception to “An Inconvenient Sequel” lays on three major divides: (1) critics vs. audiences, (2) people who saw the movie vs. those who did not, and (3) men vs. women. It’s frankly impressive for a single film to stand astride so many fault lines. But if you’re a casual moviegoer quickly checking IMDb to see if “An Inconvenient Sequel” is worth checking out, you wouldn’t know any of that. You’d think it was just a dumpy movie — the “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” of climate documentaries.
The TL;DR version:
- Critics (who tend to be liberal artsy journalists) loved it. Commonfolk not so much.
- 62% of IMDB reviews were already done before the film was widely released on Aug. 4. “It’s hard to believe that each and every one of those pre-release reviews is bona fide, especially on a politicized film like this.”
- Women liked it, men not so much
Yes, folks, “An Inconvenient Sequel” blew the curve for movie ratings, and some people think that’s unfair. But this wasn’t really a documentary as much as a it was a religious film. It would be like Mel Gibson making “The Passion of the Christ: Part 2”: Either you believe it or you don’t.
Nobody would make a movie showing 90 minutes of an empty tomb. To those who are not fully convinced that every global disaster, storm and the death of the bees is the result of cow flatulence and motorcycle exhaust, Gore’s sequel has all the attraction of a morgue.
“It” should not have been made for the same reason as “An Inconvenient Sequel.” Nobody who sees either movie could possibly leave the theater with a smile, and both movies should come with a warning: “May cause nightmares.”
No thanks.
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