All of the lights

[rockmarooned]

After the Mountain Goats extravaganza on Friday, Marisa and I spent Saturday in Philadelphia with Bayard and Alex. We hit the Philadelphia Book Festival, which as a science-fiction-friendly and science-fact-averse English major I'm surprised to report was sort of upstaged by the Philadelphia Science Festival. Maybe some people dropped out due to

Comments

[freakjaw]

Re: Scream 4 (Don't Read This, I'm Going To Talk About The Ending!) - I thought the movie was a real mixed bag, with some ideas I was excited by and some characters I liked, and a busload of other characters and a screenplay that could have used a lot more refining. They didn't do a particularly good job of integrating the returning characters and the high school storyline, the cast was enormous and the demands of the whodunit narrative meant that we didn't get to know some of the new characters as much as I would have liked, and it got a little creaky when so many characters have to leave wander off-screen just to make sure they were still credible red herrings. But while there were missed opportunities, sloppiness, and maybe even an excess of ambition in this new movie, I did feel like it was trying (struggling! sometimes failing!) to engage in the trends/tropes/rules of horror movies more than either of the other two sequels (correct me if I'm wrong, since I haven't seen either sequel since shortly after they came out on video).

You're right that there aren't a lot of rules for Part Fours, but neither are there rules about Part Three, at least as far as horror movies go. While I vaguely remember some talk about "trilogy rules" in Scream 3, the good idea they started with in this one was to engage some of the horror trends in the years since the last one came out. They take quick shots at torture horror and supernatural horror, they make frustrating nods toward found-footage horror, and they engage most directly with remake culture. The characters themselves comment on how the killer is basically remaking the original film as frequently as horror movies were invoked in that original film, and in some ways the new film fulfills some of the same functions of any potential remake: hot young cast playing roles from the original film, re-creation of a couple of iconic scenes, more brutal violence and a much higher body count, simultaneous playing on nostalgia and attempting to engage the audience with new characters/actors. And with the scene in Kirby's kitchen they actually seemed to be handing off the series from Sidney to a slasher-protagonist, which is a horror trope they'd actively gone against so far in the series. I was genuinely surprised by the ending in the hospital precisely because I'd read the same chatter about this being the beginning of a second trilogy and the ultimate ending seemed to pretty emphatically cancel those plans. They'd killed off literally all of the new characters except Marley Shelton (is that because they didn't want to kill all of them? because she was Sidney's contemporary? because they were thinking about having her around as a potential victim/killer next time?) and they explicitly condemned the idea of a remake/reboot/next-generation continuation of the series. Weirdly, I'd say the fact that all three returning characters survived this movie makes it seem less likely that they could do another sequel. After four movies with the three main characters surviving brutal massacres, and without the villain-identification that other horror series rely on, I'd guess that the filmmakers like these guys as much or more than the audience does and might let them quite while they're ahead.

Biggest frustration: when the idea of the killer filming the murders was introduced I thought they might be trying to engage directly with found-footage horror and I was kind of excited about seeing them tackle the rules/tropes/idiosyncrasies of that genre and try and incorporate them. Might have been too ambitious or too difficult to integrate, but it ended up feeling like a real dropped ball.

Biggest disappointments: Lack of business for Sheriff Dewey (he basically just spent the movie showing up late to different crime scenes and then getting beaten by a teenage girl with a bedpan) and no use of "Red Right Hand" (maybe it wasn't in their budget, but it would have fit the concept of the film perfectly if they'd had somebody young do a cover for the movie).

Biggest Shock of the Entire Film: The realization that Hayden Panettiere was probably my favorite thing in it.

MORE SPOILERS

[rockmarooned]

There is some rumbling online about whether the hospital sequence at the end was the "original" ending in the script or as originally shot (they did some reshoots earlier this year), or if maybe Kevin Williamson's earlier "sketched out new trilogy" would've taken off from slightly earlier in Scream 4... but that may just be typical movie-fan "I know the real/better ending" BS. I really liked the ending (and the silly but fun crazy opening) as it was, though I think it would've had more power if the movie hadn't scrambled so much on its way there, more concerned with, yeah, red herrings than the actual characters. To that end -- the scrambling nature of it, I mean, which, don't get me wrong, resulted in many enjoyable bits -- I don't know that they were really engaging in trends/tropes/rules of horror (and you're right, Scream 3 was already stretching to talk about the "rules of trilogies" which barely exist at all) so much as bringing all of it up so no one could accuse them of overlooking anything.

Not only was Dewey just showing up late and turning his car around over and over, really none of the three survivor characters got many big scenes with each other. It really felt like they were working around limited schedules (or limited willingness to spend time on the movie), but also working to make it not seem like they were brought back for two scenes to hand it off to the next ones (which, as you say, they seemed to be consciously avoiding by the end of the movie; a nice surprise, but also paints them into a corner of sorts if they want to continue... not that continuing is particularly necessary).

Also (this is also a spoiler), it was weird to me, although I suppose typical of the kind of scrambling that went on throughout the movie, that HP's death didn't seem as "confirmed" as the others. She got the kind of wound that other main characters typically survive in a quasi-surprising fashion, and didn't have one of those extra and-now-she's-really-dead moments; I kept waiting for her to come back and kick some last-minute ass. If they did want to continue (and box office, reception, and the movie itself, etc., probably won't be considered a mandate to do so anyway), it seems like it would be fun to have a heroine who's less of a cipher and closer to a genre-savvy Randy figure. Clearly that doesn't fit with the kill-em-all strategy they wound up employing, but better HP than Marley Shelton in those terms.

Re: MORE SPOILERS

[freakjaw]

Seriously, stop reading if you don't want to know the ending
Yeah, there was a definite running-through-a-checklist-vibe to some of the references this time around ("here's what's wrong with torture horror and J-horror...there, we mentioned them"), and I'd be genuinely curious to find out whether this was Williamson's original ending. I too liked the ending, in part because it violently and explicitly made it clear that they were ultimately more interested in making a slasher movie about middle-aged (or almost middle-aged?) people than they were in the younger characters, but it did leave me kind of baffled regarding the "second trilogy" talk. (Also, I thought it was weirdly not suspenseful, since at that point I figured if they hadn't killed Sidney in the kitchen, they weren't going to do it in the hospital.) It's interesting that if the hospital sequence was a late addition, I think it radically changes the film from being almost a Star Trek-style reboot where we'd follow the murderous-Emma-Roberts/new-evil-Sidney-substitute in subsequent films into a blatant repudiation of remake/reboot culture.

And, yes! I did expect/hope to see Kirby wheeled out on a stretcher, Dewey-style, at the end of that kitchen scene. Once the hospital sequence kicked in, I realized that they really were just killing all of the new characters. Only then could I mourn her.