[MENTION=7]Totenkindly[/MENTION] I'm glad you're sorta excited about this remake. Nice we have a good horror movie to look forward to in the Fall too.
This movie really needed a remake. I watched IT as a kid and enjoyed the atmosphere/setting of the movie, and thought it was a pretty good scare. As an adult, I started on the novel and found it tiresome. Same for the movie. It jumps around too much. I know I'm not the only one who thinks it has problems. I just want it fixed, since there's good stuff in it. What the trailer shows is that they've kept what was good about the original, and it looks like they've added jump scares. I don't see much else in it, so I guess we'll wait and see, like you said.
For me, Stephen King's best stuff is based on simpler concepts. Thinner was my favorite. Good character development and plot escalation. I have bad taste though. I guess I latch onto something that seems more concrete. You prefer something blurry, I think, and I think that's another form of bad taste. You're probably less mainstream than I am.
THat's probably true. I do enjoy some mainstream stuff as well (I have varied tastes) but I can also range into the esoteric and ambiguous, and I tend not to like the straightforward as much because it doesn't engage my mind as much.
I did not watch the movie "Thinner" because it just had horrible reviews and I didn't want to devote the time, but I did read the book. In fact, I think I have read everything he put out under Bachmann's name including "Blaze." There's also this thing where King is great on the page, but he seems to have terrible taste in making movies when he has been involved in movies. I remember enjoying Thinner (the book) although it was pretty straightforward; but I was only ever compelled to read it once. I think the Bachman stuff I loved the most was "The Long Walk" and "The Running Man" (the latter of which is completely UNLIKE the Schwartzenegger vehicle). THe Running Man, I think he wrote on a drug-induced high over a 72 hour period; it's all pretty much plot; but I think it was awesome mostly due to the pathos involved, and the desperation. The Long Walk is more like my thing, it's kind of offbeat and weird and a bit dystopian, and it's in essence a character study + an experiment of what happens when you stick a bunch of people in a crappy situation where only one will leave alive.
AS far as his regular books, one book of his I love that many do not is The Tommyknockers. I like the quirky elements of transformation, people losing their humanity as they become something else, and the whole story of a loser trying to make up for his crappy life by doing something right by the one person in the world he cares about, as well as humanity. But it's a quirky book. Otherwise I tend to like his early stuff best, up to about 1990. Then it becomes hit or miss for me. [I like some of the Gunslinger stuff... mainly books 1, 2, 4, and 7.) Another quirky book of his I liked was Pet Sematery (however it is spelled). It's another "plot driven" book but it's really tight thematically -- there's nothing in it that is not tied to the theme of "a doctor who is compelled to save lives, tempted to use dark forces to return life when he can't live with death." Fast read.
Basically King seems to have two approaches to books -- either he has something that is pretty tight and straightforward plotwise, everything is anchored in plot (these tend to be shorter books), or else he writes these absolute monstrosities of books where he is just enjoying writing about the characters and throwing in lots of stuff to "make it interesting" that can feel like huge tangents. SOmetimes that latter approach makes for interesting reading, sometimes it just makes a hell of a long book where you wonder why the editor did not do his job.
I can't stomach the TV version of IT. Tim Curry was good and that was about it; for me, the rest was hokey PG TV-level writing (where TV writing in that time period was not what the best TV is nowadays).
My main curiosity here with the new movie versions (with the first movie focused on the kids and the second focused on the adults) is that it does change up the story structure. THe book developed its own air of mystery because of the "forgotten memories" aspect. it's essentially the adults having flashbacks as they get back to Derry and time passes and they begin reliving what they experienced as children -- like repressed memories popping back to the surface. They didn't know what they were supposed to do, they didn't really recall much about IT, they didn't remember what happened per se. And so we did not either. WE learned about their past at the same time they did, and eventually the two narratives (past and present) sync up at the end.
With the movies showing us the kids timeline first, we'll lose that (although maybe it will keep some secrets in its back pocket for the second movie?). I wonder how that will be handled or if they'll just focus on other narrative structures instead. Still, I'm crossing my fingers for this. It's rare to see a King novel go full R rating effectively.
