Hacker Cinema
It
2017 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Andy Muschietti
In a small town in Maine, seven children known as The Losers Club come face to face with life problems, bullies and a monster that takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise.
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26 comments on Hacker News
Would you put reading horror novels like IT or movies like The Thing in the same category?
To be fair, the article starts out seeming real for about the first third. It's only after the first list — Barbie, Damini, Sita,... Azhar, It — that it descends into obvious parody. Quote:
"What's interesting about the (Fiction) list here is that it's pretty international: only two of the top ten movies come from Hollywood, 6 are from India, one from Indonesia and one from Turkey. So it's definitely an international phenomenon."
Here the writer slides seamlessly from talking about movies with title drops to talking about movies with single-word titles which are also the name of the main character, but is still saying things like "What's interesting about this list..." and "...an international phenomenon," as if those are remotely the defining characteristics of the list he just gave. (The defining characteristic, again, is "movies named after the protagonist." That's all.)
Then there's a section break. Since the article clearly outed itself as parody right before the break, I think it's totally reasonable for anyone to stop reading it at that point. (Although maybe not 100% reasonable to come back and comment on HN about it, except maybe to express disappointment and save other people the bother of reading that far themselves.)
Anyway, after the break the author says, "You might have noticed [an icon on each movie that is] named after one of its characters." But scroll back up and you'll see that icon is missing from 4 of the movies in that list of 10: "Saina", "Nussa", "Arif v. 216", and "It". Of those 4, 3 are clearly named after a main character. The fourth (like "Ecks vs. Sever") is named after two characters (Arif and 216) but the graph shows that the author is counting instances of the name "Arif" alone, not instances of the phrase "Arif v 216".
So not only is the article trying to be funny, it's not even playing by consistent rules — it's a parody of an academic paper but also just flat-out lying about the data! That's not only annoying but uncool.
I would actually be interested in reading a real article on the phenomenon of title drops in movies, e.g. by someone who'd gone through a bunch of movies and tallied which of them contain title drops. But the linked article is just garbage.
It's possible there are just more lines of dialogue in Barbie than It, given the conventions around each genre. I haven't seen It, but I can assume with It being a horror film there are longer periods with no dialogue for suspense etc.
While it is somewhat arbitrary, I am sure that "Barbie" is intentional, the somewhat obnoxious repetition of the word "Barbie" fits the theme. Also, maybe you stopped reading a little too early as the case where the title is a character name is specially addressed.
"It" may be the the special case here, as it is a very common word by itself but that a movie is named like this is notable enough for it to be included.
The movie "It" neither uses title drops, nor was the title plucked from the script.
Intentionality matters. "It" should not count as a title drop. Nor Barbie (or any movie where the title is the characters name). But I understand it would be way more difficult to run the numbers with such a constraint. But this is a case where, to me, the results are very much tainted and thus I had to stop reading. To me this is like when developers run into a hard issue and somehow play a game of semantics with the wording of a ticket to avoid putting together something useful for the user
I agree, I think this analysis can benefit from some data sanitisation.
It is a silly one to include, because the word it is picked up by their analysis. Need to remove all hits except where the characters are referencing Pennywise directly.
I also noticed that in some cases a namedrop was registered where the eponymous character speaks, e.g. ALIENS: hisses. These need to be removed as well.
Movies where the name of the movie is the name of the leading character needs to be removed as well, or at least filterable from the list.
All of this makes the site a little less interesting imo. A good title drop in a movie is a fun little easter egg, especially if the name a bit more conceptual, e.g. The Phantom Menace. The way this site is set up at the moment makes it a bit more difficult to find those really good title drops.
The movie It doesn’t have as many title drops as I would’ve expected. Also I don’t recall anyone ever saying The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in that film.
I find it interesting that I like a lot of movies based on Steven King's writing (The Shining, Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and Misery are top of mind), but I don't particularly care for Steven King's writing style or many of the books that are considered his best. I didn't care for 'IT' at all. It's like Lovecraft, I appreciate the ideas, body of work, and talent, even if it needs a different style for me to get into it.
If there is a disagreement between the director and the studio, they will negotiate with each other about which changes to make. But the director is never cut completely out of the process.
There are a lot of directors who would disagree with you on that...
Disney is notorious for this; off the top of my head, Ant Man, Rogue One, Solo, and Brave changed directors because of disagreements with the studio in post-production. With the Marvels, it is widely known that the director did not have final cut of the film. Bryan Singer and Steven Soderbergh have been replaced on movies due to disagreements with studios after filming had started (and in both cases, the films at issue went on to be multiple-Oscar nominees). Cary Joji Fukunaga was replaced on It due to disagreements with the studio (but retained writing credit) right before filming started; and he replaced Danny Boyle on No Time to Die after Boyle was let go due to disagreements with the studio.
If the studio tries to take creative control completely away from the director, the director can petition the DGA to have his or her name removed from the film.
The director always is consulted during the edit, and in most cases works very closely with the editor. The studio may or may not insist on changes later, but there is just no universe where the editor makes changes alone with no input from the director at all. The DGA would have a fit if that happened.
This is just incorrect. Indeed, what you suggest is at odds with over a 100 years of film history...
The DGA does not have a fit over stuff like this because a director is not entitled to "complete creative control" or to "final cut" unless they negotiate for it, get themselves hired as editor on the film they direct (which would also involve them being a producer), or work with a studio that embraces the auteur school of filmmaking (in which the released film represents the director's vision of the film).
It's one thing to support the auteur school since it usually results in better films (counterpoint: most Netflix films), but it is objectively not the way most films are made.
I don't think all 180 uses of the word "it" in the movie It should count, since when the pronoun "it" is used in the movie's dialog that doesn't always mean the pronoun referred by the title.
> it was so bad [...] there was nothing salvageable
[1] disagrees. Do you have a better source?
"Batgirl’s test score, which was for a director’s cut, is comparable to scores for the first It (2017), which wound up grossing $700.3 million globally, as well as an early score for the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of those films tested in the 60s."
(SFOTG is, admittedly, a bit of a flop sitting on about $130m gross currently.)
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-hbo-max-movie-dc-canceled-1235191932/
Are you referring to the second It movie? That was based on a book from 1986. Nearly 40 years ago.
This is great! On minor thing: you should scroll to the top of the page when the next button is clicked.
I found some not so terrible domains that are actually available:
repofire.com - Sounds like one of those named security exploit websites
startrekfirstcontact.com - Need I say more?
mscave.com - Man cave for the misses
mailomega.com - Ship via USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and more!
healthwestern.com - Sounds like a legit business
rethical.com - Tethics but with an R
shopfitr.com - Web 2.0 clothes shopping
cokego.com - Coke in an easier to carry can so you can do cool stuff
xscut.com - As seen on TV exercise machine or diet pill
coughbank.com - What were they thinking?
blingstack.com - The latest craze in web development: bash, linux, indigestion, netcat, and ghostscript
bankwestbank.com - Banking services by the Department of Redundancy Department
myonefamily.com - Anti DNA testing lobby group
itsorigin.com - Prequel to It the movie
awayget.com - Vacations for dyslexics
I'll see myself out...
Do you support searching which country a movie is available to stream in?
For example the movie It is available in Netflix Austria (but not many other Netflix regions), but to find that, I searched It, then randomly picked countries from the dropdown list. It looks like the API has country as a required field as well, so to do this programmatically it would be similar.
I believe the first blackout was during the release of 'It'.
Of course they never called it a blackout... they just always seemed to experience technical issues... and always on Friday or Saturday... on always on a Friday or Saturday when a popular movie was being released. What a coincidence!
Dune is a great movie. It's just not completed. The first part, up to the meeting with the fremen,is great. Set, costume design, music are all top notch, and actors are all great. But it would be 6 hours long to fit all the book, and the producers didn't know they can split movies in two parts like "It" or "Kill Bill"
The most unassuming movie I was recommended, but turned out to be spectacular: Upgrade. I read somewhere the producers had really low expectations for this movie as it is low budget and not about comic book superheroes. Apparently, there are no plans for the 2nd installment. But, imho, creative camerawork, beautiful cinematography and wild choreography put it anywhere above and beyond most any superhero flick out now.
The movie that shattered any expectations I had for it: Enter Nowhere. I stumbled upon it on Amazon Prime, thought the synopsis was somewhat interesting and went into watching it with extremely low expectations (the title is crap, the poster is crap, it has Clint Eastwood's son with wooden expression throughout the movie). But this movie turned out to be a trippy puzzle unlike what we are used to (Cube, Saw, Escape Room). Instead of wealthy people with kinky(?) sense of entertainment and insane philosophers, it has something to do with WW2. Unusual.
Low budget movie that takes place in a single room, yet won't bore you even for a second: Circle. It's a survival game movie where predicting the outcome of the game is half the fun. Blew all my expectations out the park. I watched a lot of survival movies of late and this is one of the (very few) best.
The movies that deserved all their hype: Arrival, It, Us, Annihilation. In Arrival I loved the design of aliens, their environment, the way the linguist tries to decipher their language and the final twist. One negative is how the movie deals with geopolitics - it's crude and laughable. For a movie led by kids, It (the movie) is really a solid one. It is polished like a huge budget superhero flick, but also, uh, literate and entertaining. Us is a beautiful, very slick movie that pops in your face. It has a couple of interesting twists and some funny bits. Refreshing break from the regular Hollywood fare(schlock). That said, Us is riddled with holes as if someone shot at it from a semi. But even with that it's fun to watch as Hollywood doesn't make movies like Us often (only on special occasions?). Annihilation is gorgeous. Period. The set design is a work of art and I love the subject matter. Again, H'wood doesn't dabble in this sort of stuff very often. The move signals the ending twist half-way through, but I am not sure it's even a twist. This movie doesn't end with a bang as it's all about the process. To me it is a meditation on research, often frustrating and unsuccessful (though, the linguist in Arrival was very much successful in her endeavor :) The soundtrack is unusual (and beautiful) for this kind of movie (although the movie itself is unusual). I love the sound design in all these four movies. Really attractive.
Among the memorable shorts (I watch a lot of them; I can recall many, but can't remember their titles) I saw are The Gun Fighter [0], Paradox (try solving the problem in the movie before it ends)[1], Thresher [2], Rakka [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWs4WA--eKU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnfh3qcpBxA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNdbHHWtBc
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjQ2t_yNHQs
This is not new. Clowns are genuinely terrifying, even before they made novels and movies like "it"
The marketing on reddit is what gets me. Aside from the fact that reddit video is terrible.. if you spend enough time on reddit (which, sadly, I do) you start to see patterns emerging. These have gotten more and more blatant over the past few years to the point where it is ruining a lot of the larger subs. The particular case i'm thinking of is when the movie "IT" came out recently. There was so much guerrilla marketing everywhere it was just a real pain in the ass to browse around.
In general though it goes like this:
"TIL XXX did YYY" - fairly innocuous postings about a movie, game, product, or company seemingly out of the blue, a few weeks/months before anything happens (in the case of IT there was a load of stuff about Tim Curry or Stephen King a long time before any real announcement the movie would be releasing soon)
"XXX has rumoured to release a YYY v2" - sparked discussion about the possible launch of something, be it a movie, game, etc.
*maybe a few more TILs/related content/memes digging up old screenshots of said movie, game, etc.*
"XXX has released YYY" - a hugely voted post which gains a lot of visibility very quickly
(depending on the level of marketing) *Floods of memes relating directly to XXX or YYY which don't usually look like fan content*
maybe i'm being overly paranoid, but there seems to be a definite trait in my head. Other than the occasional self-congratulatory Medium post, HN luckily doesn't seem to be falling to the same fate (HN funded incubators aside, which is fine). I guess thanks largely in part to the mods here. Gj dang!
I don't think It really counts as "elevated horror". The book is interesting; you might call it an elevation of pulp horror. But the movie is just a garden-variety spooky clown movie.
Big budget horror movies are nothing new; look at the Alien franchise.
"elevator horror" is a funny term but I definitely meant "elevated horror"; edited.
It's seen as facile within the industry. Hence the reputation and lack of prestigious awards recognition. Easy to write, cheap to produce, and now in the digital era, the jump cut scare tricks and camera effects can be inserted by the dozen. See the trailer for Blumhouse's The Nun to get a sense.
But with the blockbuster success of films like It, Get Out, and A Quiet Place we will see something never witnessed before in cinema history: the coming of the big budget horror flick. I think The Conjuring 2 budget was upwards of $40M. And it looked terrific. The upcoming Venom and Shane Black's The Predator are no doubt deeply influenced by classic horror tropes.
But for the real deal. Still nothing compares to the classics. I finally got to screen David Cronenberg's Videodrome the other night. Holy Guacamole. They don't make anything quite like that anymore ;)
I couldn't disagree with that at all. I enjoy reading Stephen King books, at times, but there aren't that many of them that have become great films.
Off the top of my head the best King films have been "The Shining", "Misery", "Pet Semetry", "Stand by Me", & "The Shawshank Redemption".
So many more films have been terrible (I've not seen the recent version of "It").
That's not true, but why let the facts get in the way?
6/10 highest-grossing movies last year were not comic book movies: Dunkirk - Original property Fast & Furious 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property Despicable Me - non-comic franchise based on original property It - remake Beauty and the Beast - remake Get Out - original property Star Wars Episode 8 - non-comic franchise based on original property
The most profitable movie of 2017, Get Out, was an original franchise. This follows on the heels of 2016s most profitable movie, Split, a sequel to an original property (The Sixth Sense/Unbreakable universe).
The last few years have been a kind of mini-golden-age for low- to mid-budget horror, if that's your thing, and especially if you like your horror a little off-kilter. It Follows, The Babadook, The Conjuring (kind of a low-key superhero movie blended with very not-scary horror, in many ways, but well acted, plotted, paced, and put together), Train to Busan, You're Next, The Void. The new Evil Dead. Some others I'm sure I'm forgetting right now. I've heard Girl with all the Gifts and Get Out are excellent, but haven't seen them yet.
There are serious stinkers to avoid (It, Insidious series, many others) of course, so it's a bit of a minefield, but worth the effort if you enjoy that kind of thing.
absolutely; any arthropod that was featured in a horror film (which admittedly covers a lot of ground;'them, it, she, and, the blob' (yes yes most of those aren't arthropods))