Thursday, September 5, 2019

The Trouble With It: Chapter Two

As Hollywood’s eyes turn toward Canada, where the Toronto International Film Festival is set to begin in a matter of hours, much of the moviegoing public will likely be focused on a different event: the release of It: Chapter Two, Andy Muschietti’s sequel to his record-breaking 2017 Stephen King adaptation. The follow-up film features an impressive cast—Jessica Chastain! Bill Hader! James McAvoy! Isaiah Mustafa, aka the Old Spice Guy!—an already much talked about opening sequence (in which a gay man, played by actor-director Xavier Dolan, is the victim of a brutal hate crime), and cameos from the likes of Peter Bogdanovich and King himself. Yet as K. Austin Collins writes, the film winds up being less than the sum of its parts—probably because there are so very many parts, and each one gets an abundance of screen time. “Over the course of its graceless 2 hour and 49-minute running time,” he writes, “the movie still fails. It’s a gruesome, unappetizing fact, but an essential one: Real child murder is more horrifying than any slobbering, psychologically suffocating clown, more damning than any mysterious, alien, age-old evil. The scenes in these films that touch on the realities of that violence stick; the rest start receding before your fingers have even scratched the bottom of the popcorn bucket.”
Elsewhere in HWD, we present an excerpt from New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s incisive new book, Audience of One, which examines Donald Trump and the idiot box’s special relationship; contributor Donald Liebenson learns some gruesome Hollywood history from the authors of The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage; Collins gets in one last review from the Telluride Film Festival, of a buzzy new movie centered on a bad boss inspired by Harvey Weinstein; and Scarlett Johansson makes a bold declaration about Woody Allen.