Elephants in the room: the timing on that Ben+Bev kiss was Bad, the magic indigenous people were a Kingism I had TOTALLY forgotten about and wanted to die during, the fact that Ben's fatness and shame is not addressed in the context of the fat jokes that Richie especially is guilty of.
Interestingly, the ONLY complaints I've seen on social media are about how homophobic it is, specifically the opening scene which... does depict homophobia happening, yes, and also like... people calling Richie a [slur.] I'm not sure how to feel about that, considering it was clumsy in multiple ways, but even that was way LESS homophobic than MOST media.
So that's cool! Real cool. I'm gonna try not to get on my soap box about this but it ties into something that REALLY bothers me about social media shit so UH anyway
They kinda glanced away from Eddie's sexuality, which I assume was partially to avoid burying their gays, and partially because there were some offensive.... tropes about closeted gay men that dated poorly tangled up in more realistic/relevant issues in his marriage.
Giving us REAL GRIEF from Richie was actually pretty powerful, that was STUNNINGLY done, which actually made then kiss WAY more tone deaf than if they'd been LESS conscientious about making sure Richie and Eddie's relationship didn't get left behind in the plot (or with with Eddie's body.)
KIND OF WEIRD how they'd given Ben the whole historian thing in the first movie (when that was Mike's thing) only to suddenly reverse again in the second movie and gave it BACK to Mike and suddenly revealed Ben had been about architecture ALL ALONG
Also weird: realising that my face blindness was bad enough that I CONSTANTLY mixed up Ben and Bill and sometimes Eddie tbh... but I still recognised Stephen King himself somehow?
Also the spider wheel never happened so now I guess I gotta read the damn book just to see what the FUCK that was, and if I remember it correctly at all
Oh and uh "the fat jokes were because Eddie's mother was fat" yes and that was treated as a joke and ALSO predicated on the trope that people are unattractive/undesireable AND unhealthy so presenting that with one hand and (VALIDATING?) Ben's insecurity/shame with the other was not a good fucking look!
Stanley was my favourite as a teen btw and I'd totally forgotten his letter so that hit me out of nowhere and I got some good searing eyeburn as it was read out, me remembering it as it was read and otherwise getting fucking destroyed
Truthfully the problem was that they had to spend so much time on the plot and the major character points they had to hit that they didn't have enough time to build up the actual fucking horror
And I don't KNOW how to fix that without either adding an entire hour to the run time or splitting it into THREE films which would have killed the pacing so
My issue going into that whole scene is that i assumed it just involved pennywise killing a gay person and was like OK well like. He feeds off fear be it from children or the marginalized, like that doesn't make the whole narrative homophobic,
but I was a fool to assume that bc I was not prepared for the actual hate crime perpetrated by humans, BEFORE pennywise came into the picture, so that fucked me up,
Peil Wiggler
: GOD his actor was REALLY good. And yeah no a LOT of people got an unpleasant shock from the scene but that doesn't... make it homophobic. It depicted homophobia, but the scene wasn't homophobia. Agh anyway. Yeah it wasn't as good but it wasn't a let down, and I'll take that.
YEAH yeah god it was sort of embarrassing how much everyone played second fiddle to them, but I was actually really happy to see them not... pushed to the sides? ESPECIALLY with the Bill+Bev+Ben thing they VERY EASILY could have centered over just about anything/everything.
It Chapter Two: A bad horror movie, but a pretty decent comedy