The current cinema, "perhaps not the Ghostface Killah you were looking for" edition

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• Lex says:

  April 14, 2011 at 2:40 am

  So much hot squack in this thing.

• otherbill says:

  April 14, 2011 at 10:29 pm

  I just fin­ished a 15 hour day at work, poured a drink, settled in front of the com­puter, and read all 32 com­ments under “Lien on me”. Then I clicked on this post and encountered this per­fect sev­en word dis­til­la­tion of the Lex-ian world­view. My ribs hurt from laugh­ing. Absolutely made my day.

• John Keefer says:

  April 18, 2011 at 9:05 am

  I had a very strange reac­tion to this movie, wrapped up in the sickly sweet goo of nos­tal­gia I believe. It’s been 15 years since a 13 year old me encountered this meta slash­er that seemed to per­fectly capture…something I related to, prob­ably that it was a movie that seemed to love hor­ror movies that also had a reas­on­able amount of Dawson’s Creek-ish teen drama mixed in with the blood. Looking back at the ori­gin­al car­ries with it that cer­tain “oh my God what was I think­ing with that out­fit?” type embar­rass­ment. To para­phrase the Simpsons, mak­ing teen­agers to pro­ject them­selves onto highly ideal­ized ver­sions of them­selves and their friends and their per­son­al dra­mas is like shoot­ing fish in a bar­rel. But watch­ing Scream 4, the dis­tance between accept­able ren­der­ings of teens-on-screen then and now the gap felt wide but it was a gap I grew up with. Maybe I’m just start­ing to get to that point of “Damn kids look a lot young­er now!” but really, they look much young­er now. The teens in the ori­gin­al Scream may have been play­ing young­er (in fact Miss Campbell was 23 at the time) but they felt appro­pri­ately teen­aged. To see the kids in Scream 4 drink­ing, espe­cially the cheer­lead­er from her­oes, my reac­tion was “oh please, stop try­ing to look older with that 7 and 7, damn that MTV mak­ing you grow up too fast!” The tri­um­vir­ate of Campbell and the Arquettes present and former fared as old war­horses typ­ic­ally do but their pres­ence added a cer­tain sil­li­ness to the events of the film that almost felt poignant. Here we are again, going through the motions, the inev­it­ab­il­ity of the hor­ror to be sur­vived now feel­ing routine. Look at these kids today, the geeky guy and the hot girl are now how it goes, no more pin­ing from the nerds in the corner, stalk­ing via social media plat­forms no longer a warn­ing sign but just anoth­er annoy­ance of teen life, do kids still get pimples and feel embar­rassed by their par­ents? So a strange and unique to the genre phe­nom­ena cycle has been com­pleted, the meta has become the norm, the sur­prise hit has become the tired fran­chise, and I’ve been suckered out of $11 where I once gid­dily handed over my $7.50. But suckered is a bit harsh, for the above reas­ons I actu­ally found myself being enter­tained by Scream 4, uniron­ic­ally, as an adult, scared for these crazy kids and excited at the pos­sib­il­it­ies of the young hor­ror fan who watches this movie and thinks, “I wish they made a hor­ror movie for my generation…”