Screams within Screens within SCREAM 4

O Courtney Cox, you were my favorite Friend, but now--with lip all Howardly and skin glowing like a radioactive-luminous mask, and your Gail Weathers character still yoked to David Arquette's perma-wincing sheriff Dewey--yours truly is a SCREAM 4 for the Munch. Just as the ghostface killa mask is frozen in a 'Scream' so your once gorgeous face is now Botox-frozen in a world you never made, but which you haunt in a shadow state like that other memorable Munch painting, Madonna.

The rest of the original cast is also back, with changes reflecting the relatively longer stretch since the last installment. Sidney is now a glum memoirist who either doesn't want to talk about it, or does but either way, as self-righteous as ever. Gail has given up journalism to become a struggling fiction writer and stay-at-home wife to Dewey the sheriff, whose bewildered, pleading look lets you know he  has gotten no better at sheriff-ing --he can't even find his cell phone yet remains determined to do all the decision-making for the community with no help from his far shrewder wife. He's the sheriff, Gail! Not her.  If anything, he's almost an accessory to the crime through his sheer incompetence.  Upping the hot mess women ante in Dewey's life: a cute, clueless deputy with DSM-IV-darkened teeth who's so asking for death she doesn't unsnap her gun holster as she's sneaking up on a serial killer she knows for sure is in the next room!

"Bela loves hick sheriffs!"

The last time a sheriff and deputy were this outmaneuvered was in Monogram's 1944 classic, VOODOO MAN (above, my praise here). As happens there and in SCREAM 4, the characters eventually learn to not even bother calling the cops, who would likely just shoot them by mistake, at best. Still, since Dewey's refusal to accept any help endangers everyone in town, it can't even be called well-meaning, just lazy writing. Rather than suss out a believable (one would hope) defense against an unknown stalker/killer, the sheriff's strategy is to just lopes in the direction of one scream after another, trusting his bewildered twinkly eyes and droopy aww shucks good intentions will disarm all comers.

But what marks SCREAM 4 as the logical extension of the first three is media desensitizing. If you recall the first one was all about 80s slasher movies being quoted and turned to in times of copycat killing - the effect was genuinely chilling, like having some creepy guy breathing in our ear behind us at the movies; the second finds the events of the first now a major film adaptation; the third goes to Hollywood to the set of the sequel; this fourth one finds the characters now older and saturated by sequels and new avenues of media (iPads, etc.) on which to watch an inexhaustible slew of sequels, providing a refracted meta chorus to the ongoing events, locking the future and the past in an endlessly tightening Moebius lasso that's continued to tighten, unchecked, via direct-to-video (where they are up to STAB 7) downloads. Everyone is watching them on youtube, even while they're being stalked and stabbed in 'real' life, practically watching themselves getting murdered with the same cut-off apathy. And now the 'Ghostface' voice is actually available (within the film's diegesis) as an iPhone app, you never know if it's the 'real' killer or a tasteless prank.

Focus, please.... focus

We know it's all meta because the characters say the word meta and pretend to be empowered even as they tastelessly prank call each other mere hours after learning their best friends have been gutted. In this, strangely, they are less like slasher characters and more like the eloi in The Time Machine. No one thinks about arming themselves with a gun or a knife, or staying indoors at night, or not answering the door when the person on the other side refuses to identify themselves even when half their friends have been killed in a matter of days. No one calls out for help, or calls he cops, or looks in closets in advance of dropping their guard and popping on earbuds. The film would have benefited from someone who doesn't wait before she is the final girl to pull one of the ever-present butcher knives from out its tasteful wooden counter top knife block, or try to gouge her assailant's eyes when being strangled instead of just overacting with the bugged-out eyes and the gasping.

Another odd grace note is the metatextual terror of aging going on across the original cast, all now long in the tooth, in one way or another. Even the actor providing the Ghostface voice sounds less scary and more just old--a Stuntman Mike from beyond the grave--hackneyed from the ax of over-familiarity. More could have been made of him sounding older, ala Hamlet's father's ghost or Charlie on Charlie's Angels. In fact we never see ANY old people in the film, so Ghostface's voice becomes--even though we know the voice isn't 'his' but some phone app--the film's sole representation of latter middle-age and irreversible physical decay and therefore more sad than scary. Meanwhile there's this business of smearing the lens with Vaseline and deep color washing that makes all the girl's faces glow in a CGI airbrushed blur. It can only be some stipulation in the Cox contract--she wants to be filmed in layers of digital airbrushing to hide some sign of age, therefore all the girls must be filmed likewise, no matter how young. This smartly solves the issue so common in Barbara Streisand movies like Nuts where she seems to exist in a smeary cloud while everyone else looks normal. It's tacky for sure, but it works since no one knows the difference between movie, anime, digital, analog, and real life anymore; the color-style gloss underwrites a miraculous disconnect that helps actors and characters hide from their own aging or sense of self-preservation. They even cheer bloody movies based on their own future deaths, like a man cheerfully devouring his own foot and working his way along the digestive ouroboros centipede until all that's left is a desert snifter of credits and a gluttonous laugh.

There's only one girl who sees past it all, and even looks like she's filmed with a clean lens, the mighty Sidney Bristow (Neve Campbell, au natural) who, like all trauma survivors in movies, is traveling on a self-help book tour. With her grave pout and moistened eyes, Sidney lets us know she's well-aware that the only one who survives these events is the one who takes them super seriously. Alas, even she--who has mucho experience with these things--doesn't bother to employ standard dirty fighting tricks until all of her friends are dead and Wes Craven is making a wrap-it-up gesture from behind the camera. Excluding Gale and Dewey, the rest of the cast live only to die, for their death scenes and have all the survival instincts of Yvette Mimieux and company when la morlocks come calling. Suspense is ratcheted to a point but once these kids are stabbed and bubbling blood out their mouths there's no longer pain or tragedy --they become merely actors game for a throe, even tossing off bon mots before their glorious death rattles. As a kid who died a lot in our old war games and super 8 movies, I appreciate a dramatic death; on the other hand, it helps if they're not total douches.

The sad thing about survival is this: If you're lucky you get old.  If... you're lucky! As Sugur says in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, "that is the best deal.. that you're gonna get" - and that's a very sad, sick deal indeed. In Hollywood it's perhaps better for a legend's longevity to not get this lucky. Marlene Dietrich and Garbo both retreated into exile to spare their fans the shocking Baby Jane-in-the-mirror horror of seeing them play moms and grandmothers. Marilyn Monroe perhaps knew that if she took her life at least her fans would have what they always wanted--an immortal Aphrodite for their icon-stellation--and she could finally get some real sleep far from the flashbulb strobe panic and gossip column groping.

The alternative to death or hermitage is not always good: Hollywood is cruel to those over 30, like that game of 'carousel' in LOGAN'S RUN. Imagining a future where screens and streaming have so overtaken us that we don't even have to worry about a Japanese ghost girl getting us through the screen like THE RING because we're already inside, hoping just to get as much face time with the camera as we can before we get stabbed. Our biggest goal is not to survive but to have the bloodiest, best death scene, because in the simulacrum life is measured not in heartbeats but in hit counts (I'm paraphrasing the killer here). 

In the end, that ducky overbite on Ms. Cox and the Streisand-ish Vaseline fog over all spells out that mummification on the altar of the image is the answer. It's pretty squirmy when Cox makes wry COUGAR TOWN references coming on to nerdy film geeks young enough to be her children's slightly older friends. It's nothing new in Hollywood, just a scary look at the pyramid reversal created by that great arbiter of eloi equality, the web. The horror nerd fan base was never meant to have this much power, or get hit on by this kind of weird, desperate onabotulinumtoxin Mrs. Robinson. They don't know how to handle it, yet handle it they must, for suddenly they run the world... or at least they run the screen... through... with a ripppppp...

Pauline Kael, Wonder Woman, Bright Lights #74

The latest issue of the awesome BL is up, and in it I salute Pauline Kael, the voice of madness in an age of damned dull sanity. And there's William Leung's How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman

"As long as popular culture has a place for a woman hero, Wonder Woman is relevant; as long as Wonder Woman is relevant, Lynda Carter is relevant." -

The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten


"We miss her and need her today — someone with enough literary clout that her praise can define and refine the response to a movie the way she helped define and refine the responses to Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Carrie. There are recent movies that have gone panned and forgotten but would surely have been embraced by Kael, like Observe and Report (she would have saved it from getting lumped with Paul Blart, Mall Cop), Enter the Void, and the Twilight series (panned by adults who haven't seen it or are ashamed to admit they have — she would no doubt recognize that they fill a too-long-ignored, underserved demographic). She was confident enough to get wise to Fellini's and Woody Allen's essential shallowness... she was wary of film critics who prized themselves for elitist judgments. "I don't trust critics who care only for the highest and the best, it's an inhuman position, and I don't believe them. I think it's simply their method of exalting themselves" (265)

We need her! Luckily there are some great critical voices still out there, in the Village Voice, in fact, and on websites like Bright Lights Film Journal!

Americanus Ignoramus: RED STATE, BRIDESMAIDS

No one's ever accused Kevin Smith of being a closed-mouth man. He likes writing characters that like to talk, and talk, and talk in language so unlike actual human speech it wears out the actors unless they pace themselves. Either they go all red-faced and sleepy by the end, or we fall asleep halfway through. Smith doesn't care - camera still rolling away. RED STATE (2011)--his first venture into 'straight' action thriller--is marred by at least two lengthy monologues that stop the film so cold you may forget all about it and start playing cards, forgetting the TV is even on. The first is a long, unfocused ramble by Tarantino stock company regular Michael Parks as a crazed bible-thumping arms hoarder and leader of a 30-strong family that's a little bit Waco, a little bit Westboro Baptist.  Parks is great but he's not much of a preacher, barely talking above a mutter when he should be shaking the rafters with righteous hellfire.  The second big monologue is far, far worse --John Goodman-- unfocused, haggard, and a hundred pounds too thin--rambling out a lengthy, half-asleep metaphor and a lengthy, drop-dead dull explanation of a plot device spoiler alert decency excuses me from revealing. Goodman's usually energetic and fun, but here he takes the idea of a lumpen proletariat ATF man to a tedious extreme. You want to feed him some Twinkies just to raise his blood sugar.

The plot has the crazy Christians using the devil's tool (Craigslist) to lure a trio of fledgling high school buddy virgin douchebags way out into bumfuck country by promising them a menage a quatre with a local divorcee.  From there we get a little torture porn, a little Mexican stand-off, some tense 'won't someone think of the children' drama, and a small arsenal that most of the captured menage-hungry douchebags are too stupid to take advantage of. We get the feeling Kevin Smith had just seen the entire output of both QT and RR in one long weekend before writing the script but QT's dialogue always works in brilliant ways that Smith can't seem to grasp. Lengthiness does not equal greatness. At the film's end, as Goodman, long-winded and exhausted, attempts to tie up the loose ends a proper movie wouldn't have left dangling, what we learn is that Kevin Smith hates the bible belt lunatics and thinks shotgunning Jesus fish in their holy water barrel is some kind of righteous apocalyptic satire, but as I wrote awhile back in my take on TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL --a real auteur, a Nick Ray or Godard, harbors compassion for the damned and that's why their films endure. 

BRIDESMAIDS (2011) on the other hand, feels real and lived in and we can thank SNL and Groundlings for the breezy, lived-in rapport the two veterans of those sketch comedy ensembles, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig, share in little termite scenes at coffee shops and during mundane errands. When they talk to each other in low-key natural speaking voices it's suddenly apparent just how fake and trite most rom-com friendships are. Theirs is a quick lived-in rapport that only occurs when both parties are brilliant on their own, truly love one another, have known each other for years, and have been rehearsing and improv-ing for weeks or months beforehand.

But they drift apart when Maya marries into a cabal of rich, bland, whitey lawyers. Adept comic actress Jessica St. Clair is Whitney, the materialist wife of Maya's future husband's boss who tries to jostle Wiig out of alpha BFF position. And since Maya's real-life dad is the legendary Quincy Jones it's a nice touch that her onscreen dad looks like Quincy, and can afford the super rich wedding this unbearable (but hella hot) chick Whitney dreams of...

However, this movie has douche chill moments galore. Annie (Wiig) starts out the film in free-fall after her small business dream of a quirky bakery has gone bankrupt and her hot guy lover (Jon Hamm) only wants her as a second tier booty call. Along the way she throws over the Canadian cop who really loves her because her esteem is low, and that's all quite believable and well-done but still douche chill cliche down to its rom-com core.

That said, BRIDESMAIDS earns huge props in its skewering of the rampant materialism and bourgeois oppression that's encouraged and indulged in the name of bringing 'magic' to a wedding. Snob consumer Whitney flaunts her knowledge of expensive couture and personal relationships with haughty bridal boutiques and MELANCHOLIA-size country estates. We all know this type of girl, so naturally we relish when Annie just attacks her head on. Even if her motives are self-centered and/or lifted from MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, it's damn heroic.

But in the end the film basically undoes the anti-bourgeois take-downs that have preceded it. After Wiig tells it like it is we're supposed to champion her ability to not wince at the mega-rich tackiness of the wedding at the climax - replete with lasers and fireworks and waterfalls and a surprise performance by Wilson Phillips.

The best scene prior to is when Whitney brings all the bridesmaids to pick out a dress at this ritzy all-white boutique and the fawning silken strong arm suffocation is so well done that the vomiting that ensues seems natural and deserved -- a performance art reaction ala Penny Arcade to the peer pressure-driven bridal business. Don't deny it deserves it! Bridal biz, you suck! Playing on female insecurity and competitiveness to choke what should be a special day near to death with table flower whimsy and lovely little ribboned bits of business is a friggin crime, so shit on it, sista!

More could have been done with Jill Clayburgh's AA mom--an actress and 12-step group both dear to my heart--and how much Wiig's meltdown, hitting bottom, and subsequent redemption, resembles an AA intervention. But at least it's in there. The 'normal guy' cute Canadian cop who just happens to have been a fan of Wiig's old bakery is actually not as douche chilly as I said earlier, but why are all the men in rom-coms either adorably scruffy blank slates or smug douches? Still, for all its concessions to the rom-com world, this is easily the best chick comedy I've seen since MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING. Of course BRIDESMAIDS could use a man like Rupert Everett again, a master who transcends all stereotypical gay best friend cliches the way Jesus transcends carpentry.

Carpentry... ah yeah, RED STATE could use a man like George Downes, too, and Kevin Smith could really use a dialogue editor and an understanding of how narrative works. If Smith had made DR. STRANGELOVE he probably would have re-written the ending to have a long-drawn out tribunal about how Major Kong's A-bomb was a dud, and Kong had a parachute, and the Russians questioned him for three days before releasing him. Only BRIDESMAIDS even approaches real satire, and dares to snap at the hand that feeds it. Ostensibly another materialist fantasy like MAMA MIA or EAT, PRAY, LOVE, BRIDESMAIDS turns around and trashes the empty-headed over-done prettiness of so many bourgeois weddings with great finesse.

Too bad in the end, waterfalls, moonbeams, Wilson Phillips, and fairy tales of composting hippies and two dogs fighting are all America has left. BRIDESMAIDS fights that truth for awhile, then surrenders to it. RED STATE just jeers both sides before apologizing like a shame-faced kid caught soaping cars. That might be your America, Kevin Smith, but it ain't mine, and it ain't the real America... the real America is heart, safety, and speed. It's gettin' where you need to go and fast. It's Ram. Built Ford Tough. This ad sponsored by Ram. Please ram responsibly. 

Miss J. EDGAR Regrets...

Postscript 11/9/11- The Village Voice review today was pretty positive, including hints Leo didn't balk at the queer closet aspects... so maybe this wild prediction of mine is way off? I hope so.

----
Was it true that J. Edgar Hoover liked to wear women's clothes or was that a communist plot to discredit him? By all accounts he was a hopeless voyeur who got his kicks listening to bugged tapes of JFK having sex with numerous shakedown starlets and the gay stuff with sheep-dipped plant Sal Mineo even more so. He had a lifelong best friend (ala Robin to Hoover's Batman?) in Clyde Tolson, who inherited Hoover's estate, and they took all their vacations together, but were just pals as far as anyone knew. Biographers theorize Hoover was too paranoid from his own copious blackmailing to ever risk doing anything sexual, gay or straight, and got his rocks off as a voyeur as a result... but that thing with Tolson...

If Leo dons a fez, I'll know I'm wrong.

I worry that in Eastwood's upcoming film the voyeurism angle will be 'neutered' and his sexuality will be conveniently arrested by his duty to a strong but ailing mother figure. I've been reading James Ellroy's awesome Underworld trilogy, wherein Hoover gives his implicit but unspoken okay to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and leaves the mob alone in return for their privately eliminating threats to his tenure while he waxes wroth at the safe-to-wax-at danger of communism.

Also, Hoover was allegedly also good buddies with Howard Hughes, who DiCaprio played with similar sweaty reverence in THE AVIATOR. Just as that film dismissed the tissue box shoes and long nails of his later years with a wave of piss jars and a round the clock screening of HELL'S ANGELS, so  J. EDGAR will wave away Hoover's plots against, say, Martin Luther King, through some arbitrary dialogue.  I can see Leo's personal cadre of writers noting that DiCaprio doesn't care for racism, or gaybashing, but may allow a topless shot to show off his jailhouse abs.

I predict also that any actual J. Edgar mom issues will be sentimentalized as in John Ford/Norma Bates/Spielberg sunset sanctification and since Hoover's use of sex tapes and shakedowns made him too paranoid to either approach starlets (there were rumors of him having a thing with Dorothy Lamour) or, probably, to get funky with his longtime companion Colson, sex will be shuttled to the shadows. Leo's penchant for ghostly dead wives haunting him in guilt-wracked moments of boozy self-reflection are likely to provide the alternative 'out'.

Bottom line: the current persona of the Leo DiCaprio hero as a confused, damaged tough guy reflects his use of his own box office clout to avoid genuine emotional risks in his choices of roles. That's why he would make a good J. Edgar Hoover, but I doubt it's the reason Eastwood or DiCaprio thought he'd fit. It's like his unconscious is trying to tell him hey, Leo, you need to stop trying to look tough in manly suits and raincoats and shoulder holsters standing tall on courthouse steps in high contrast blacks and start cackling like the neurotic gunsel / Richard Widmark psychos or grinning and laughing like the romantic fools you were born to play.

Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hope Eastwood's film will dare question Hoover's intentions, manhood, and moral compass in a way that's real and honest and not mere craftsmanship window dressing on a white-washed sainthood canon shot / shoe-in Leo Oscar nod. We know from the promo Leo 'ages' into a crazy old Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be the ideal choice to play Hoover, and wouldn't flinch from covering the darker areas Leo will doubtlessly sidestep).

Leonardo needs to throw that momma of his down the stairs and get in a real fight, Mickey Rourke-style, that would solve the babyface aspect of his persona he so clearly longss to transcend.
If he wants to return to this era in his historical biopics, he should consider playing a scumbucket racist like James Earle Ray. Now that would be a stone cold brave role for old Leo. But he won't go there, and maybe one day he'll understand why that in itself makes him perfect for the part... of the real J. Edgar!

(POSTSCRIPT: See my praise that Leo did just as I advised - as in his racist role in DJANGO UNCHAINED! In best of 2012)