The version of Stephen King’s It that came out last year wasn’t bad, and in some ways was better than the source material. The young cast was wonderful, I was impressed with the acting, and the monster was weird and creepy and memorable. It ended with these kids beating back the monster that was terrorizing the town, but not killing it, and they knew they’d have to return to finish the job in its next cycle, 27 years later. Chapter Two was therefore inevitable.

Now adults, the same people, played by older, different actors who are still pretty darned good, return to Derry, Maine to reprise their monster-killing efforts and finally finish It off.

It (the movie) is unwatchably bad. It (the monster) is going to be defeated (spoiler? It (the book) is 33 years old and there have been multiple versions of the thing on TV and movies) by…random geegaws and the Power of Belief, none of which makes any kind of logical sense — the whole thing is going to build to a nonsensical conclusion. Which means that the appeal of the movie cannot rely on the ending, or the satisfaction of seeing the plot come together. Which means the movie lives or dies on the quality of the storytelling. This movie dies a grisly death, I’m sorry to say. There were many flaws, but two gigantic ones that made it impossible for me to enjoy the movie.

1. It slimed me with sentimentality.

The primary characters were wise and good and kind, with little flaws of no consequence that they agonized over, just to show how important their self-improvement was. Their difficult childhoods and youthful tragedies did not change their inherent wonderfulness, but only gave them a glow of saintly martyrdom. King has always had this mawkish strain running through his books — it’s a significant tool in his bag of tricks for getting readers to identify with his heroes — but it is indulged to the max in It. Kids are always revered innocents in a Stephen King story, with great potential and power.

But never forget: King slaughters kids in horrible, detailed, bloody ways to keep his stories moving. The little angels get dismembered, disemboweled, and decapitated, because there is some warped element to King’s psychology that he, as an author, bravely exposes for his audience to weep over, but Jesus, man, I really don’t want to see that shit.

2. It killed its momentum with flashbacks.

Oh god, this was the worst. Remember, there was an It, Chapter One that told the story of the heroes’ childhoods…but that was last year. We can’t trust that the audience remembers anything from the prior movie! Therefore, everyone has to be reminded. The movie doesn’t do this with, for instance, a little prelude that recaps the first movie. Oh, no…throughout the movie, we’re going to be fed little fragments from the first for each of the characters, and then some, and they’re going to do it intermittently. There are 6 hero characters, one of whom dies before any action occurs, and they all get multiple flashbacks to tell their back story, even the dead one. There are others, like Henry, who was a villainous switch-blade wielding teen in the first, and is now in a mental institution — even he wins a couple of flashbacks, to remind us of his menacing presence. It was wasted because all he is in this movie is a jump scare who is readily dealt with.

The central action the story is simple. The characters from the previous movie gather in Derry; they separate to gather little mementoes of their childhood that will have magic powers in their encounter; they gather in the sewer to summon and do battle with Pennywise, the evil clown. That’s it. But we get non-stop, fragmentary flashbacks to remind us why this relic from their past has personal meaning to them, and other flashbacks to explain why their lives are damaged, and more flashbacks to reveal Pennywise’s wickedness, and it pads the whole thing out to a miserable 2 hours and 47 minutes. Unlike most horror movies where I might twitch at the jump scares, this one had me cringing at every sudden backflip into 1989.

Goddamn, it ended after their triumph on a flashback to sunny, summery Maine in 1989, with smiling kids on bicycles and a haze of heartwarming sentimentality over everything.

Hated it.

Yeah, I just got out of lecture and am a wobbling blob of nerves and sweat, as usual, and it’s good to see an inspiring message. I’m not a woman, I don’t have major mental health issues, so it’s helpful to see that I ought to be able to handle my petty concerns.

All I need to do is stop drinking coffee and take a shower, and I’ll be normal again.

I am mystified. There’s an app you can download that will keep you up to date on all your Jeremy Renner news, which is a thing, I guess. Not a very interesting thing, I’ll admit, but apparently there’s all this drama on it, with users getting upset at censorship, which is the only unsurprising detail about it.

It made me wonder, though: is there any celebrity in the world for whom I would find an app interesting and worth downloading? You know, something where I could check in on a whim and see what they had for lunch, what they were watching on TV, how work was going, that sort of thing? And I realized…no, no one. Not the Queen of the UK, not Donald Trump, not even (or especially) people I actually like and respect. I seem to lack the hero worship “gene”.

Apparently, though, this is the core of the Instagram “influencers” phenomena — people who become celebrities by carefully grooming their appearance in photographs and cultivating mobs of people who regularly check in to see what a Kardashian is doing. It’s fine if that’s your deal, but I just find it weird and unrelatable, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there who similarly find it bizarre. But the difference is that we therefore do not aggregate and push up the popularity of certain individuals beyond reason, so all you see when you get a peek at the media landscape is the few who have been elevated by a minority of follower-types.

So, who would you follow obsessively? Anyone? No one? I do follow my grandchildren on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, because their parents post lots of photos of growing babies, but I can’t imagine caring what party some superstar model went to last night, or what they wore. Am I really missing out?

And Jeremy Renner? How strange and trivial is that? This tendency of humans to develop cults of personality is worrying.

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Breaking news! The Jeremy Renner app has been shut down! Follow every detail of the tragedy by googling “Jeremy Renner” at least once an hour.

I have just learned that there is no legal way to leave my skull to my children.

Even if you exploit fuzzy legal arguments in your quest to get your hands on Dad’s skull, you’re still going to run into a big problem: There is currently no way in the United States to skeletonize human remains for private ownership. For the most part, skeletonization happens only when a body is donated to scientific research. Even this isn’t explicitly legal; authorities just tend to look the other way for museums and universities. But under no circumstances can you just skeletonize your dad and display his head among the decorative gourds in the Thanksgiving centerpiece.

Well, you know, if you just do nothing at all, it will eventually be defleshed. You’ll just have to live with a rotting head for a while.

It’s just as well. I only have one skull, and three children, and I wouldn’t want to inspire the kind of vicious familial in-fighting that would occur as each desperately tried to seize the goods.

They look so familiar. I might still have them, buried in a box somewhere with my Ph.D. diploma and a pile of old similarly irrelevant papers.

The photo comes from an article on the history of Dungeons & Dragons that mostly takes Gary Gygax down a notch. It’s entertaining, I kind of suspect the tale of the deep dissent between the Wisconsin crowd and the Minnesota gamers is likely true, because even as a young man I heard rumors of the conflict, but mainly I took away these shocking points:

• Everyone in the 1970s had bad hair, and it didn’t improve as they got older.
• The main reason D&D used 20-sided dice is because Gygax wanted a reason to sell them.
• The primary conflict was between story-tellers and rules lawyers.

I’m going to take sides with the Arneson/story-teller idea, because my exposure to D&D in the ancient of days made it clear that the rules were better as a very loose framework for the story between the players to play out.