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

3 Comments

• Lex says:

  April 14, 2011 at 2:40 am

  So much hot squack in this thing.

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• 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.

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• 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…”

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