I can only speculate about what Steven King who wrote the It: A Novel many years ago was thinking about at the time. I think that King wrote this 1164 page novel about an evil clown because he was fascinated about the bullying so many young people have to endure in school and like the rest of us, wondered where this level of evil and cruelty comes from within a person so young. As most of us in this country have heard, bullying is an epidemic and in recent years this problem has become worse because of social media and cyber-bullying. We have all heard about news reports where some young person has committed suicide because of bullying or have gone on school shooting sprees, killing many people in retaliation, the most famous is the Columbine Massacre in 1999.

The evil clown known as Pennywise, played extremely well by actor Bill Skarsgård in the new movie “IT”, is in fact a metaphor for bullying and this film very effectively explores where evil like this comes from correctly pointing out that all people who bully others actually feed on the fear in their victims. Bulling is about pure evil and people who bully others never think about retribution or about the short and long term damage they are inflicting on their victims. Bullies are all looking to temporarily escape their pain from abusive parents, self loathing for any number of reasons, by finding a victim who they can make feel much worse than they feel about themselves. Its a crime very unique to certain human beings and happens more in childhood, but it also happens when you are an adult and in the working world. As an adult we are bullied sometimes because we are afraid of losing our jobs, so we put up with abuse to make a living. Very often bullying as an adult is a game of leverage and as a result a tremendous amount of stress and anger occur. On the negative side, I thought some of the bullying scenes were too extreme to make the point the story was trying to make although it was effective in showing the fear, rage and anger bullying causes with the victims.

The horror scenes and special effects in this film were very well done but for my tastes sometimes too unnecessarily shocking and violent, especially in the beginning where a young boy has his arm cut off. The beginning of this movie concentrated a great deal on the young characters who are all victims of intense bullying in the high school they go to and its mostly towards the middle of the story that we see more scenes and visions of Pennywise. I thought that this strategy did establish the main message of this film very well.

I mostly agree with the high ratings from Rotten tomatoes and IMDB, 85% and 8.0 respectively and overall I thought that IT was a very good, but not great film that I do recommend.

Screenplays have to break new ground today. Most people have seen everything in one form or another and recognize small traits or plots or special effects or any number visual tricks in just about every new movie they see. This is why coming up with a new idea right now is about as difficult for any artist who toils for months to create a new movie idea that has never been seen before. The new movie “Mother” without a doubt succeeds in being as different and as new screenplay idea as I have ever seen. Where it fails is for the same reason, trying to be so new and different that it goes too far and that includes some scenes that are extremely objectionable and completely unnecessary even for a story as insane as this one. This film was both written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and considering the story of Mother, its difficult to imagine why this idea was green lighted by any production company.

The main character of mother is played by Jennifer Lawrence who is a young woman married to Javier Bardem who is a writer and a poet. Very soon, people start coming over to their old house where Lawrence’s character is trying to fix up and Bardem is trying to write poetry. At first a few people come over, including characters played by actor Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. These people are rude, strange and never listen to whatever Lawrence’s character tells them and this includes going into her husband’s private office. This then leads to things being broken in the house and even stolen. Then of course this trend of people coming over unannounced and uninvited continues and more people come over who are similar to the first two. Then eventually the people coming over are much worse and then the movie slowly goes into insane directions, that mostly make no sense. You start to wonder while watching this strange movie if all of these weird people are aliens or a cult or something, but this very important part of this story is never explained. This film answers the question, when is trying to be different turn into a movie that doesn’t make sense or is objectionable? The answer to this question is for this film the most obvious I have ever seen. With any movie, sometimes less is more and a great example of this is the simple story of the recent great movie “Wind River”, that has also been reviewed on this blog and I do recommend people see as much as I do not recommend anyone see Mother.

Due to the objectionable scenes and ending and the way too insane plot, I cannot recommend Mother.

There are many reasons why writing a screenplay is so extremely difficult. The first that comes to mind is writing a good one or a great one could take months or even a year or more and represents a huge amount of work that most likely, unless you are an insider, will never see the light of day with any producer anywhere. Then as a writer you have to come up with a plausible story that makes sense, not only as to what happens in the story, but also makes sense because it flows into a plausible direction that a real person might actually take in real life. These are the fundamental reasons why “Home Again” fails. Even the title of this movie fails because this entire story has nothing to do with going home again.

The story line of this movie is about an almost divorced woman who turns 40, meets a 27 year old man in a bar, then has an affair with him and because he is trying to break into the movie business and her father was a famous director takes him AND his 2 friends in her home obviously makes no sense. From the very beginning this story is not plausible because why would a single woman who has 2 young daughters invite 3 men in their 20’s into her home who she barely knows, just because her mother, played by Candice Bergen says, “your father would have liked them”. Ultimately if a movie doesn’t make sense from the very beginning, it doesn’t matter what happens the rest of the way. This film seems a lot like a Nancy Meyers movie and that is because the writer director is Hallie Meyers-Shyer, is the daughter of Nancy Meyers, immediately removing any mystery of how a 30-year-old woman got to write and directs a major motion picture at such a young age.

The star of this movie is Reese Witherspoon who has made romantic comedies like this in the past, this one being one her weakest in recent years. The IMDB and Rotten Tomato ratings for this film are low, 5.6 and 32% respectively and this movie does deserve those low ratings.

This is a film that plays more like a B movie that should have went to DVD and never released.