Today Marks the 16th anniversary of 9/11 in the United States. all I could think when I realized it was "That crept up on me." It's odd how things fade with time, good and bad. I still get excited for Christmas, and my birthday. Most else, I just...mark.

So I saw IT yesterday, and I was entertained. I was more than once tense and on the edge of my seat. I wasn't terrified or even scared at any point. I don't get scared very often, but I did remark to Sam that IT was a monster being a monster, and Detroit was more suspenseful because it was people becoming monsters and the world thrown askew.

That being said, Bill Skarsgard's performance was incredible. The other standouts for me were Steven Bogaert as Beverly's father, and Nicholas Hamilton as Henry Bowers, the Bully.

Did it scare me? No. Did it hold my interest for the allotted time? Yep. Worth the price of a ticket? Yep. Could IT have been driven off by a couple of teenagers with wands and the incantation "Riddikulus"? Probably.

A fair and probably inevitable comparison can be drawn with Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight. Bill Skarsgard made such a comparison himself. In theory, both are clowns, what should be symbols of joy, innocence and laughter, but the only laughter we find in either one has an "S" in front of it.

The Joker that Ledger portrayed is a brilliant, calculating, manipulative character, capable of creating a meticulous plan and equally capable of steering the pieces his plan depends on into place without appearing to do so. A master of misdirection and a chessmaster rolled into one. Add to that his ability to improvise and he is an incredibly formidable adversary. What makes him most dangerous in my eyes is that he embraces the monster within, and tries to make others embrace the monster within themselves. Where he fails to do that is when he loses.

In Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett writes:

“No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened seemed enjoyable.”

I watched another film that could have been taken funny and was not.

Now maybe you have seen this film. maybe you have not. Maybe you have seen it and forgotten that you did, or maybe it just seems like a dream within a ...crap, that's Inception.

There are a lot of scenes in the film that are incredibly slapstick, mostly around Leonard's memory Problem. More, Guy Pearce plays them funny, as he glides through the movie with a Clint Eastwood-esque delivery. Where they are unfunny is that we don't want to laugh at the protagonist's serious disability.

And then we reach the end, or the beginning. We find that the protagonist we have been following through his trials has done all of this before. That he has found his wife's attacker, a total of nine times and killed that person each time. We find that his friend, "Teddy" who has been helping him, has helped orchestrate these nine revenge killings. And we find that Leonard chooses to selectively edit his notes, and therefore his memory, to suit his desires.

In short, Leonard, poor forgetful Leonard, chooses to become a monster. I guess we all need a purpose, and Leonard's chosen purpose is to hunt and kill John G over and over until he is stopped. It's a nice twist and a nice Sucker-punch that leaves you looking back at the movie and re-watching it with very different eyes.

Or forgetting it, a few minutes later.