Category Archives: Counterforce at the Movies

The Oscars are on tonight, right?

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Blah blah blah I am not excited about the Oscars this year.

I am not excited about trying to celebrate the bleakness that was Film in 2011. There were a few solid, good movies out there and a lot of… Sigh. A lot of trying to grasp at relevancy. A lot of trying to fit in while dumb down. It’s in my DNA to care about the Oscars and to be curious about winners and bitch about nominees and what have you, but the urge is just not strong enough this year to watch. Normally, when this flaccid about the Oscars, I’d at least watch the opening, then turn away, and check back in during the last hour, but this year… This year I’m going to follow Benjamin Light’s lead, and perhaps just keep one eye out on twitter, tumblr, and, shit, I don’t know… Yahoo! news, maybe? Ugh.

But I know. “Another guy bitching about being unenthusiastic about the Oscars.” How boring, right? Believe me, I’ve tried. I’m just not there. But like A. O. Scott said, “Oscar cynicism has become its own special form of Oscar hype.” Too true, I guess.

So anyway, I’m going to put up a thing here of my predictions of winners this year – just cause. Just cause it’s in my DNA, as I said. Review, debate, ponder, ignore, do as you please. Let’s look at the Top 7 Categories of Oscar Interest:

Best Picture

And the nominees are: The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Tree Of Lie, and War Horse.

Fuck me. I’m not feeling any of this. Y’know, last year they added an additional 5 nominees to the Best Picture potentials and somehow The King’s Speech still beat out The Social Network.

Let’s talk about movies that don’t have a chance here: Midnight In Paris, The Help, and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. And Moneyball. I’ve seen Midnight In Paris, and it was okay, a fun little film, Woody doing Woody nicely, but Oscar material? No. Sorry. And that right there, ladies and gents, is the Theme of this year’s Oscars. Moneyball is a solid, good film, but nothing about it is strong enough to win an Oscar. But let’s not shit ourselves, we all know where this is heading: The Artist vs. The Descendants.

I’ve not seen The Artist because I think that I might rather watch paint dry on a mirror. I am enamored by old, classic Hollywood as much as the next amateur film geek sounding off from their internetastic soap box, but I’m not that hard up. The Descendants was a solid film, and it was about cancer and infidelity and bringing a family back together and a girl cries underwater. This is all Oscar material. I want The Descendants to win. I want that (I guess), but I suspect that The Artist will take it. Why? Because I think that the Weinsteins are going to prove to us yet again that money trumps talent every time.

Best Director

And the nominees are: Woody Allen, for Midnight In Paris. Michel Hazanavicius, for The Artist. Terrence Malick, for The Tree Of Life. Alexander Payne, for The Descendants. Martin Scorsese, for Hugo.

The winner will be: Alexander Payne.

I’ve seen some people predict a split and predict that The Descendants will win Best Picture and The Artist will be the Best Director choice, but… Nahh. I can understand an argument in which you judge the Act of Directing to be different from the Completed Product/Finished Film, and yet… those two should be so intrinsically connected that I would think that the Best Director winner would automatically cue you in to the Best Picture winner, but… What do I know? Everything. Nothing. Everything. Nothing! I don’t know.

Best Actor

And the nominees are: Demián Bichir, for A Better Life. George Clooney, for The Descendants. Jean Dujardin, for The Artist. Gary Oldman, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Brad Pitt, for Moneyball.

Again, I’ll admit that I have not seen The Artist, but I’m not enthused to (and I’ve long nursed a suspicion that you could judge all Oscar movies and their corresponding performances by the trailers, as weak of a suspicion though that may be), and I have my doubts about that being a Best Actor-worthy performance. I haven’t seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, only because it wasn’t playing anywhere in a theater remotely around me (thank God it comes out on DVD in March), but I like the idea of Gary Oldman winning, you know, just to fuck with people. IYFF, Hollywood. And Brad Pitt is a solid actor, always, and will someday have a performance that will be more than worthy a Best Actor statue, but to me, that performance wasn’t happening in Moneyball. So… George Clooney.Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. That’s my pick for the winner.

I mean, c’mon, he’s the closest we have to real, functioning Hollywood royalty these days.

Best Actress

Glenn Close, for Albert Nobbs. Viola Davis, for The Help. Rooney Mara, for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Meryl Streep, for The Iron Lady (as Maggie Thatcher). Michelle Williams, for My Week With Marilyn.

Sadly I’ve only seen one of the movies that had one of these performances, and because I am a huge dork and Fincher fanboy, it was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Rooney Mara’s performance was very strong in that film, and equal parts very alien and very, very humanistic, at least compared to the terrible Swedish adaptations of those novels, but I don’t know if I think there’s a Best Actress performance there. And I doubt the Academy thinks so either.

I suspect you’ll see this award go to Meryl Streep, because she does a physical change and she plays the British Godzilla we call Maggie Thatcher, but I’d be okay with either Glenn Close or Michelle Williams winning, especially Michelle Williams, to further propel her along on an interesting career.

Or Viola Davis, just to make people spit out their drink when this award doesn’t go to an old white lady with blonde hair.

But, even still, my prediction: Meryl Streep.

Also, did I read this all right and Shailene Woodley is not nominated for anything? Seriously?

That makes me want to cry underwater, yo.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, for My Week With Marilyn. Jonah Hill, for Moneyball. Nick Nolte, for Warrior. Christopher Plummer, for Beginners. Max von Sydow, for Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close.

My suspicion/hope: Christopher Plummer. Beginners was, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, one of those movies that I really wanted to see last year but just never got around to seeing for whatever reason. I have a good feeling about the movie, I guess.

Runner up suspicion/hope: Kenneth Branagh.

Third choice: I don’t know… Max von Sydow? Though, that said, I would strongly like to see Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close win nothing.

Side note: I originally mistyped that was “Extremely Cloud And Incredibly Loose.” Ha ha! Anyway. Here is another picture of Michelle Williams in pseudo-Marilyn mode (because we want those hits to be through the roof on this post):

I doubt Nick Nolte will take it, just because… well, who saw that movie? That’s the one with Bane vs. Uncle Owen, right? Whatever. And JONAH HILL, ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME!?!? I suspect his inclusion here is just the work of some jokester in the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences wanting to see if anyone actually even reads this shit.

Best Supporting Actress

Bérénice Bejo, for The Artist. Jessica Chastain, for The Help. Melissa McCarthy, for Bridesmaids. Janet McTeer, for Albert Nobbs. Octavia Spencer, for The Help.

My suspicion: Man, I don’t have a clue.

Octavia Spencer?

This is a picture of Bérénice Bejo:

And this is another:

Anyway, I have not seen a single one of these movies, so this is a real guess. The Weinsteins want to buy Best Picture awards, so I don’t think they care about Best Supporting Actress awards. And Jessica Chastain… I don’t know. I feel like she’s someone, like Jeremy Renner and Sam Worthington, that somebody in Hollywood really, really, really wants to make happen, so you’re going to see them crammed into a lot of shit. Kind of like how Spielberg adopted Shia LeBeowulf for a while and shepherded him for a while until that plane crashed into the mountain. And Melissa McCarthy? Is her performance worthy of an Oscar or is this someone trying to say that these awards are “relevant” and capable of being “edgy”? You tell me.

I was going to cover both Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, because I am a writer nerd. I collect all the Screenwriter Trading Cards! But the nominees for Best Original Screenplay are boring as shit this year, so instead…

Best Adapted Screenplay

And the nominees are: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, for The Descendants. John Logan, for Hugo. George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon, for The Ides Of March. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, for Moneyball. Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

My suspicion: Sorkin and Zaillian.

No, I take that back. My suspicion: The crew from The Descendants. Partly because a Google image search for “Sorkin COCAINE” came up with a lot of boring hits, but also because…

The Dean from Community with an Oscar? That’s total LOL worthy. That’s EPIC LOLZ FOR DAZE worthy. There’s an amazing meta-in-joke on a future episode of Community (whatever that looks, tastes, feels like) there. Shit, you might as well just had Jim Rash host the ceremonies this year in character as the Dean from Community. I mean, cause why the fuck not?

I read something somewhere the other day that said that they suspect that Alexander Payne develops his projects based on where he could film them, and that made me LOL hard.

Runner up guess: The duo who adapted John Le Carre.

Closing thoughts: The Ides Of March, based on the play, Farragut North, was an okay film, but just okay. Clooney and Gosling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and even Evan Rachel Wood were all just okay in it. There wasn’t a whole lot to chew there. Sadly, I feel like The Ides Of March are more out of place here than even Moneyball is. Also, I don’t think the guy that wrote Star Trek: Nemesis (which, you’ll remember, or not, starred Tom Hardy as Captain Picard’s clone) should be allowed to be nominated for an Oscar. Sorry, bro.

Final category: The Host.

Billy Crystal? Ugh.

This seems like a direct continuation of The King’s Speech winning last year. A return to the tired and the slightly boring. Granted, the Oscars is always a conundrum, and a study in contradictions. The old classic Hollywood vs. the new, the exciting, the experimental. And I think the celebration of those sides is always lost, or the mix is always wrong. The artists who are always pushing this medium forward aren’t being celebrated and encouraged and appreciated like they should. Last year’s debate of The Social Network vs. The King’s Speech was really about the New vs. the Old, and guess what? Boring won. (I’m going to guess that perhaps Weinstein $$$ didn’t hurt that debate tipping to one side over the other.)

Okay, and I don’t hate Billy Crystal, with all the changes they made and their attempts to “revolutionize” and update the Oscars, they’ve basically already said they’re in trouble. An infusion of new blood wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’m sure there’s equally vanilla hosting options out there, ones that are still something new to this operation. Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, Brett Ratner producing was just too bizarre, as was the idea of Eddie Murphy hosting, which would’ve been interesting, but ultimately a pipe dream. An insane, fascinating pipe dream, but Eddie’s gotten too weird with his ego lately. Maybe he could have co-hosted with Scary Spice? Or maybe not. Speaking of Eddie and Scary Spice…

Benjie Light and I discussed this before, but I don’t think that James Franco and Anne Hathaway being chosen as hosts was necessarily a bad choice, but the bad choice was to make them work (with an unfair division of labor because Franco was obviously stoned the whole ceremony and Hathaway was trying to compensate) with the same tired staple of Bruce Villanch jokes. There’s got to be better, edgier, and quite frankly, smarter and safer host choices out there. At least a host that can pick their own joke writers. A Jon Stewart, perhaps? Or Tina Fey? Donald Glover. I’m just spitballing here, but I’m liking it.

Anyway. Tonight’s the night. Let’s see where we end up…

Your opinion is wrong

Posted by Benjamin Light on

Hidden Indicators of Bad Taste: 2011 Movie Edition

 

Clarification is always necessary. If you hold the viewpoints of one of the things on this list, or you sorta liked or kind of agree with some of the things mentioned, it doesn’t mean you irrecoverably have bad taste. But you might.

 

“Bridesmaids” is Oscar-Worthy

 

A thoroughly lazy and mediocre comedy. Too long, too many stretches where you feel like you’re watching a tossed-out SNL sketch idea get beaten into the ground. I probably wouldn’t hate this movie so much if it weren’t for the ridiculous praise it gets from lazy bloggers and media people. Oscar-worthy? Be fucking serious. There is a fallacy I see a lot of writers fall into, especially those writers who live in LA, where when something is successful its inherent quality becomes this unquestionable given. This is not a well-made movie. It’s standard Apatow hackery, just with more girls this time. And put away your aspirations of Feminism, it’s a movie about weddings and stupid wedding bullshit, about as gender-stereotyped as you can get.

 

So is “Drive”

 

This movie reminded me so much of all the bad LA crime film knock-offs that exploded out of the woodwork in the mid-90s after Pulp Fiction came out. Oh look, it’s a an overly-stylized troubled anti-hero in a cliched heist plot where there’s lots of over-the-top violence and some scenery chewing by cast-against-type comedy actor playing a mob bro. But the main guy doesn’t talk much, cause the director read a book about Sergio Leone once! And there’s an against-the-grain soundtrack! And… … Why the hell are so many critics in love with this movie? I’m baffled. The visual style evokes a freshman film school student discovering the low-light setting on his Canon 5D. I really wanted to like this movie, but the longer it went on without any discernible substance, the less I did.

 

Andy Serkis deserves a nomination for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

 

No he doesn’t. Also, his Gollum was totally over-rated. If you think that’s good acting and not just scenery chewing, you’re probably amazed by the performances in high school plays too. Plus, he’s just providing a rough draft, there’s an army of animators and effects people working on every frame of his performance to make it better.

(Note: I did not see “Attack the Block” nor do I intend to, but judging by the way Harry Knowles and his acolytes gush about it, I’m just going to assume that it actually sucks.)

 

The Swedish version was better

 

No it wasn’t. It had all the quality and production value of a Lifetime channel movie. Noomi Rapace was a formulaic goth chick straight from central casting. You’re just saying that because you think pretending to like foreign films makes you more cultured. Fincher’s version is so well made that you kinda regret just a bit that his talents aren’t being put to use on better source material.

(The 2012 version of this is going to be “‘The Hunger Games’ is just a ‘Battle Royale’ rip-off.” It isn’t, and despite my distaste for Jennifer Lawrence, it will probably be much better than the supremely over-rated “Battle Royale.”)

Rise of the planet of James Franco.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

One of these days James Franco will write another book of short stories or a novel featuring a character called James Franco and it’ll be loved by dozens. He’ll also do the cover illustrations for the book. The front cover is a painting of the main character, and the author will model for it himself, and the back cover will be a conceptual void. The author will also personally model for it. The novel or book of short stories will be called simply “James Franco.”

Tiny liberal arts colleges in the corners of this great nation will feature small poorly-funded programs that delve into this book. The relatively minor success of the book and the mild interest in James Franco studies will also lead the author to securing a film deal. He’ll adapt the book himself and also direct it, provide the sets and the costumes for it, cater the affair, and do all the make up and choreography. And, provided the studio can meet his price, he might even star in the low budget film. This man was both an Oscar host and one of the stars of Spider-Man 3, remember.

All of this will be merely just the beginning.

Harbingers

Posted by Benjamin Light on

As you may have gathered from some of my past writing, I’m a big Neal Stephenson fan. He is one of my favorite authors. I was discussing with Marco the other day how when reading, say, the fifth Harry Potter book,  it felt like Rowling’s editor needed to step in and convince JK to tighten it up a bit. But with Stephenson, even when he’s plowing into a chapter-long tangent, you don’t mind, because he takes you interesting places. That’s not to say that Rowling is not a talented writer, but the voice that Stephenson writes with is just on a different, more stylistic level. His sometimes indulgent asides are what make him so much fun.

I’d like to talk about a concept of punishment he puts forth in his novel Anathem. It’s called the Book. A brief primer: Anathem takes place in a world similar to our own, but where scholars live a quasi-monastic life of simple means behind the walls of big stone concents, cut off from the rest of society for a period of one, ten, 100 or 1000 years. This separation allows the “avout,” as they are called, to dedicate their lives to scholarly work without distraction or interruption. While there are your typical chores and kitchen duty that can be assigned to reprimand bad behavior, there is also the Book. When an avout needs sterner discipline, the administrators can “throw the Book” at them.

The idea of the Book, as the main character Erasmas explains it, is to punish the mind of the wayward avout. It’s 12 chapters long, filled with inane, inaccurate and possibly insane content that must be memorized and tested against. Imagine a mathematician being forced to learn and apply false proofs, or a writer who must memorize incorrect definitions. The Book is designed to poison the mind, taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of an avout’s critical thinking and logical faculties. And each chapter is exponentially harder than the one before. In the novel, it’s said that only 3 men ever completed all 12 chapters, which took a lifetime, and they were all thoroughly insane when they finished. That the avout have dedicated themselves to learning makes it all the more heinous a punishment to them, as they are forced to corrupt their minds and waste their time working counter to their own life’s work.

One example Erasmas gives is a chapter full of nursery rhymes that almost, but do not quite rhyme. Another is five pages of the digits of Pi. In the novel, he is assigned the first five chapters as penance, which takes him several weeks to complete. And the idea is that, if you get in trouble again, you could get assigned even more. It is suggested that going higher can permanently damage one’s ability to process and organize information effectively.

I mention all this as prelude to my latest movie review:

this is the end, my friend

Surely, if the Book were real, Chapter 6 would be the shooting script to Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. And the less said further the better.

–Benjie

This post didn’t live up to the hype

Posted by Benjamin Light on

So August Bravo tweets at me last night: “super 8 didn’t live up to my expectations but was still pretty good.”

It made me wonder, why do we go through life judging things based on our expectations? Obviously, there are a lot of low-level heuristic reasons for this in terms of everyday brain processing. But why do we do this for movies, books, events, personal experiences? It’s tempting to say this is a modern age phenomenon. That we didn’t do this before the internet. I mean, did people in Colonial America really walk around saying “man, that play didn’t live up to my expectations. The town cryer totally over-hyped it”? But I’m hesitant. Any time you start thinking that anything new is happening in society, you’re probably going to be wrong. Just ask the lorites. Still, the internet has a way of amplifying the echo chamber in ways that didn’t used to be possible.

The first time I can remember this sort of “didn’t live up to the hype” attitude permeating culture was when the Seinfeld finalé aired. Not that this didn’t happen beforehand, but this is when I started to notice. So Much Hype, they would all say, and the show had Failed To Live Up To It. Soon, this way of thinking seemed to spread to practically any form of entertainment or news event. Y2K? Overhyped! Star Wars Prequel? Didn’t meet my expectations. New Franzen book? HYPED! And so on.

But why does hype matter? Why do we go through life with the need to judge entertainment and events against our expectations? Why is it no longer sufficient to just say “I thought X was okay, but not great.”

The answer probably lies somewhere is the middle of modern internet shared culture, man’s fear of being made a fool, and the apparent need for everyone to have an opinion about everything. I guess it’s easier to talk about yourself and what you wanted from something rather than to articulate a critical viewpoint on it.
I would just posit this: it’s no way to live. Stop thinking about the hype. Ignore the hype. Don’t worry about whether your expectations are too high or too low, because in the end, nobody cares what you thought you would think, and you shouldn’t either. Just take it as it comes. (editor’s note: that’s what she said)

I really liked Super 8. Not a perfect movie by any means. Not a classic. And that’s okay. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a movie like this. Visual storytelling! Steady pacing! Kids who act like kids, not precocious one-liner machines or dead weight! People call this Spielbergian, but I feel like this is a disservice to both Spielberg and JJ Abrams. There was a time, lets call it “the 80s,” when this is what tons of movies looked like. They weren’t just a handful of CGI set pieces strung together by the weakest of scripts with lowest common denominator humor. Sure, maybe the idea wouldn’t be that groundbreaking or original, but at least they made some movies that weren’t remakes, reboots, sequels or adaptations back then. I miss this kind of movie. There should be more like it.

Also, Elle Fanning is ridiculously good in this. Worth seeing it just for her. Star-making.

This is what August Bravo thought. (editor’s note: no, we don’t know what he’s talking about either.)

August Bravo: Ok, I’ll get this off my chest first. The teaser for Super 8 had me really excited to see this movie. JJ Abrams could literally touch my bowel movement and make it into art, so I knew this would be an astonishing movie with some mediocre(ha) special effects.

The great thing about a teaser, especially like the one for Super 8 which I thought was just a working title, is that they say nothing. Ideas are populating your mind.

Naturally, I’m thinking Cthulhu.

Naturally, I’m wrong. How much is this guy going to fuck with us(me)? It’s cool, because it was still very awesome. Not as awesome as I’m thinking in my head because teasers let the mind wander. While most aren’t this broad, people can’t help but think of things beyond their imagination. Why else release a teaser trailer? Because they don’t have enough content to fill a whole trailer? Well yeah, probably. But they want to give the audience a ride. They want their expectations to be high.

And then with the full trailer, they want to smash all your Cthulhu-loving dreams and just show you it’s a movie about some kids with a camera. Albeit, still a very very good movie, with a very meaningful(aliens!!) plot. But audiences expect nothing and something. And I’m sorry that with Abrams I expect everything.

So what if it wasn’t Cthulhu, I still thought it would be something more. Yeah, it would have been cornier if it was more about (spoiler alert!) aliens, rather than having it very down to Earth. But I’m into bad movies. I think expectations are what get the movie going, the audience going. I’ll end it with this. Don’t put practically nothing in your teaser if you don’t want me to dream big.

As far as expectations go, I set mine at an all-time low and I’m generally never disappointed. Generally.

Straight up.

You Were My 90s!

Posted by counterforce! on

That’s right kids, it’s time for another round of CounterForce at the Movies. The Scream 4 edition!

Benjamin Light: A mild anecdote. On the first day of my film directing class in college, we all had to go around the room and say what movie made us want to go to film school. This was an upper-division course, so mostly juniors and seniors were present. By which I mean that a large part of the students’ capacity to enjoy film had already been destroyed by academia. Most people had some fairly pretentious answers designed to make themselves look deep and intellectual. The Graduate, The Godfather, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Breathless, or a Gus Van Sant film or some foreign bullshit, etc. I said Scream, because it was a clever, entertaining movie, and I wanted to make clever, entertaining movies. It was like the whole class hated me after that.

Marco Sparks: A beautiful story. So, yeah, we’re going to try and discuss Scream 4 here, which is just another entry in some bullshit horror movie series, and yet… It should be so much more. As you said, the original was an important movie. It was smart and clever and entertaining, and it was something else, something that we didn’t realize til later, but it was so fucking 90s. 90s in a good way. Not like, you know, Reality Bites (Editor’s note: fuck that movie). The original Scream was born in an era where you could do something and also comment on it at the same time. You could do something and reference other things at the same time. And you could do it all cohesively and creatively and it could actually work. Of course now, things are a little too post-post-post modern for the old ways to still work, right?

And the thing that Scream did and commented and referenced and reinvented back then was the horror movie genre, which, like metal, was completely dead by that point in the 90s, and desperate for a rebirth of some kind. Especially the “slasher” subgenre. Funny now, somewhere more than ten and less twenty years later, and I’m thinking about Scream‘s lessons and comments on horror movie series and how bad their sequels typically were. And ironically – fill out your 90s buzzword bingo card starting here – we’re using Scream 4 as the catalyst for this conversation.

Benjamin Light: One more note for context: the modern “teen” movie was partially created by Scream. There was a good long time where they just didn’t make movies for teens. “Clueless” was the prototype of the genre, and then Scream took it to the next level.

To make this even more surreal, I saw Scream 4 with an old friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in years. In Hot Tub Time Machine, Darryl from The Office has that line about Rob Cordry’s character “he’s our asshole.” This friend I saw Scream 4 with was Our Asshole, back in the day. Marco’s and mine. The kind of guy who drove a shitty chevy nova way too fast, fingerbanged your ex-girlfriend’s little sister and wore t-shirts that said Nine Inch Dick in the style of a NIN logo. Now, he’s a fucking housecat, totally neutered and body-snatched. I wondered, walking to the theater, if this was a harbinger of things to come.

My interest in Scream 4 was mainly in how a thoroughly 90s movie franchise was going to come off in this late era of irony without wit. Would it still be 90s to the core, or would it “update” itself to this new, lame decade of pop culture? Afterwards, I think Marco and I both agree that the answer to this was, sadly, “both.”
Marco Sparks: It’s funny that you mention that guy, “Our Asshole,” because the movie (and the series) and him have some frighteningly strong similarities. They’re both works of fiction and at one time they became so real, so amazing. They were strong, clever, passionate, funny, wild, rude, crude, full of attitude, and dripping with verve. Something your parents were uncomfortable to be around but something exciting, something you clung to and enjoyed strongly.It’s about 15 years and three movies later and… My God. Benjie told me the story of our friend, “Our Asshole,” and I felt like crying hearing it. It’s hard to explain just what happened to our friend. He’s married to a “nice” girl – “nice” being in quotations because it needs to be, rather than me saying anything frighteningly honest about her – and has gone fully domestic. But this girl, it’s not like she married our friend and he mellowed over the years. It’s like she’s married to a neutered housecat. Our friend, the Stepford Husband. The guy who used to think that Nic Cage and Bruce Campbell belonged in every movie and who now doesn’t understand what’s funny or interesting about Nic Cage’s recent adventures in New Orleans. I could go on about our friend a little too much here, I think. But like Scream 4, there seems to be no purpose to him anymore. Someone took up the brand and watered it down, then threw the water out. There’s no joy, no passion, no reason for existence.
That might be a little too harsh of a criticism of the movie, but not our friend, because if I was a movie studio executive and you presented this movie to me in script form, I would’ve said, “Hey, this is a great first draft, guys. Can’t wait to see what future drafts bring out of it!”
Benjamin Light: At this point, I think it needs be mentioned that Ehren Kruger can go fuck himself. For the record, Marco and I are of the stance that Scream 1 was better, but Scream 2 was more fun, and we’ve tried to block the Ehren Kruger-written Scream 3 from our memories. What an abortion.
Supposedly Ehren Kruger took a pass at this script, so I’m willing to throw a little benefit of the doubt Kevin Williamson’s way for this. The triple opening — Stab within a Stab within a Scream movie — was a good idea, and almost executed well enough. But it just wasn’t quite there, not quite clever enough. And as a result, I spent most of the rest of the movie wondering in the back of my mind what the Stab 5 with time travel movie would be like.
This didn’t occur to me until later, but I think the main problem here is the movie is trying to be all things to all audiences. People who liked the original Scream would have been fine with a Grosse Point Blank-style look at our characters 10 years later to see how they, and in turn, we have changed. Instead, we get the barest cursory glance at Sidney “reinventing herself as someone other than a victim” and Dewey and Gail having meta marital problems. there’s no time to go deeper, because we have to get introduced to a shitload more characters in the target teen demograph. None of whom really registered at all.
Hayden Panawhatever felt like she was acting in a different movie, Emma Roberts was just there, the geeks were, emphatically, NO RANDY, and the rest were forgettable fodder. There’s no Stu here. No Tatum.
Marco Sparks: Courtney Cox was amazing being herself in this movie (or what I want her to be like in real life, as far as my Courtney Cox fan fiction is concerned, I guess), and interestingly enough, the only character who really felt like themselves, unchanged, stuck in that time capsule of cinema, was Dewey. Wonderfully, I should add.
But you have to wonder: Did David Arquette and Courtney Cox’s marriage implode behind the scenes of this film just to make this shit all that much more META and SELF REFERENTIAL? Cause that would be serious devotion to the craft.
I thought that something interesting might be afoot with the multiple openings to the film, but it just didn’t feel thought out enough. It didn’t feel effortlessly fun enough. Scream was never just mindless fun. There was always something somewhat cerebral about the scary movie games played within it. And Benjie’s right: Scream was good, and Scream 2 was a hell of a lot more fucking fun. But something those movies displayed that’s been lacking in the second two movies in the series were smart set pieces. There’s a kind of seduction game being played with the audience when you’re presented with that set up… a character with a phone alone in a house and you just know that there’s a killer (or two) surrounding them, ready to strike. That dance wasn’t present here.
That said, Scream 4 was a hell of a lot better than Scream 3. Wes Craven seemed to be more with it and there were one or two interesting ideas in Scream 3 (and double that in Scream 4) that just never panned out or just weren’t dealt with at all beyond their introduction. Scream 3 became just another shitty horror movie, the kind that the first two movies would have gladly skewered. Scream 4 at least realized that there was atonement that needed to be made, even if it was shrugging, not sure how to achieve it, as if it’s mere presence alone would trigger the light of 90s nostalgia within us and all would be forgiven.
Benjamin Light: I read or heard somewhere that good writers should avoid using adverbs. To get annoyingly specific on Scream 4: We’ve seen the “scary phone calls in a house” scene done better before. You might remember the film, it’s called Scream. Also, we’ve seen the “stuck in a car that won’t start with the killer hiding outside” scene done better too. See also: Scream (1996, Dimension Films.) The fun thing about these scenes is that it puts you, the viewer, into the mindset of the victim. We know the rules of this game and we must think, ok, what would I do in this situation? And we scream at the screen “no, don’t open the door!” and “ooh, that’s really smart–wait, fuck!” And it’s all very fun and satisfying to watch a film that screams back at you; that plays with your own expectations.
Scream 4 briefly has a little fun in the opening, and when establishing soooo many characters who could be suspects, who could have motives, that you can almost hear Kevin Williamson laughing at you and daring you to guess who the killer is. But, like meeting someone you used to know several years later, the magic just isn’t there. Emma Roberts beating herself up to look like she’s been attacked might be more visually bracing, but nothing will top Billy and Stu stabbing each other in Scream 1. You had just never seen anything like that in a movie before. And like everything else in Scream 4, Emma fucking her shit up is just a lot of More, Now, Again. It’s an old idea, newly executed with more gore, or more twists, or more often. There weren’t that many killings in Scream 1, but all of them were very clever. Here, not so much.
Williamson must know this, as he meta-references reboots and remakes incessantly. And there is definitely some finger-wagging at the end about celeb-reality culture, but it ends up feeling more whiny than anything else, even though I basically agree with him. You can complain all you want about not getting work unless it’s a sequel to your old hit, Kevin, but you still had a chance to take us somewhere new in the genre and you honked it.
Marco Sparks: I feel like if the series had wanted to do something shocking, to have really kicked us off right for a new film, a new decade, a new trilogy, then they probably would’ve killed Neve Campbelle’s Sidney Prescott either right away in this movie or at the end. They probably would’ve let Emma Robert’s niece of the Sidney character indeed get away with the murders at the end. That’s something you would’ve never seen before. And what a message so fitting to this era: Ha ha! Fuck you! In this day and age, the bad guy/girl wins!
But no such luck. Like Benjie said, the introduction to our old favorites and to the new kids is so shallow, so devoid of meat, that you can’t tell for half the movie who the potential killer could be because you just don’t give a fuck. And that annoys me because, honestly, one of the reasons I like slasher films is because they add in that whodunnit quality. It lets the audience interact with the film more and feel like the detective and keep their mind working, constantly turning over clues in their head. But in so many films, Scream 4 included, I’m afraid, the real killer was ultimately bad writing.
It’s funny that Commander Light and I had a lot of the same thoughts on who the killer could be through the film. First choice: Marley Shelton’s (who seems like she hasn’t had an acting job since the 90s, minus an appearance in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse) deputy who went to high school with the gang back in the day and cooks lemon squares for her boss. That is until that weird scene on the stairwell in Sidney’s aunt’s house. That red herring was a little too red. And then fifteen minutes later we both just knew it would be Emma Roberts’ character, probably for a variety of reasons. The biggest for me? That skinny awkward little girl just kept disappearing for no reason at all. Like a killer would. And, as I believe Benjamin Light pointed out to me earlier: The killer always has something to do with Sidney’s family.
If Neve Campbell comes back for a Scream 5 – and I see no reason why she wouldn’t at this point – I really hope that they just do something so ridiculously cartoonish with her character. I can’t see her being tied down to reality anymore, not after having gone through this scenario four times now. It was interesting when she gained a sense of strength and confidence in her safety in the world at the end of Scream 3, so much so that she didn’t have to worry about living behind fake names and locked doors (in fact, she felt comfortable to leave doors open to things like potential sequels), and somewhat interesting about her wanting to rewrite her role in this film, but honestly, where could one go with this character next? Seven people have gone to elaborate means of trying to kill her across four movies now. Unless they have her in a mental hospital in the opening of the next film then I really hope they give her a jet pack and a laser gun. Or let her do some time traveling, like they did in Stab 5.
Back to the killers in this film momentarily: I didn’t see the reveal of Rory Culkin coming just because his character was so badly concocted and so badly delivered in the acting that I just didn’t care, even though I was curious the whole time if they’d resurrect the possible multiple killers angle.
Benjamin Light: They tipped their hand on the two killers a little early. In the scene where Sidney’s aunt President Roslin dies, you see that there must be more than one.
Allison Brie, Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell are all fine actresses who for some reason get short shrifted for boring Emma Roberts and Hayden Panattieerreereeerie (who seems to think she’s in a 40s noir movie). I’m not even going to mention Rory Culkin or the other gay geek, because, as I said before, they are NO RANDY. I felt like I knew Sidney less after this movie than I did after Scream 2. But like Marco said, David Arquette was perfect as Dewey. Would it have been so bad to target your fanbase instead of a demograph and actually make the film about the franchise characters we all know and love?
from here.
Are we taking this too seriously? Probably. Maybe. But like one teen starlet says to another in Scream 4, “You were my 90s!” And it’s true. Marco and I were the perfect teen age for Scream when it dropped. We would probably not be as good of friends as we are if Scream never existed. Our first screenplay was our own attempt to make a Scream-style movie that played with the audience. Imagine my disappointment when I went off to film school to discover that college is not like Randy’s film class in Scream 2 at all. Ah well.
I suppose we wanted Scream 4 to mean something the way Scream 1 did, and it just didn’t get there. But hey, I’ll say this for it, I felt more happy nostalgia to see Dewey than I did seeing our old friend, our old asshole, that new stranger. Seriously. We missed you, Dewey.
Marco Sparks: Yeah, exactly. Dewey was a welcome sight, the one part of this movie that didn’t let you down, even if he spent the whole movie just getting calls that something was going down somewhere else and then driving there off screen. Like Commander Light said, we may be taking this too seriously, partially because the movie takes itself a bit seriously, and partially because I guess we foolishly did want this to mean something to us, to possibly make a comment that would be interesting and important to our lives now as it did back then. Somewhere in those intentions, we became just another part of the body count.
Alison Brie was so great in her role, really lighting up the screen with her presence. Her death scene was the exact opposite of compelling but it was certainly nice to see her character there for the brief time that she was on screen.
Man, you had to feel bad for Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody in this movie. TV stars always get it the worst.
I was reading something a moment ago from Wes Craven talking about after Kevin Williamson left the production of Scream 4 (to go back to The Vampire Diaries) and Ehren Kruger came on, the screenplay, and thus the film, was no longer in Craven’s control. So much became dictated by the studio, which is always good, targeting those demographics rather than worry about story. And yet, you wonder how much of the clutter in the story here could be blamed on Kruger/the Weinsteins and Williamson himself.
Remember how much sense Randy’s rules made in the first Scream and Scream 2. No such luck here. Maybe it’s partly the fault of this current climate we live in, but the new “rules” given here made no sense beyond bullshit plot contrivances. The whole film was like that, like watching the last remaining members of the 90s realizing there decade was over and firing a time capsule into the future, only it landed five years ago and we’re only just seeing it now. The killers are going to videotape themselves committing the crimes? Didn’t we already see that in a movie starring Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett?
At least the film acknowledged the new technologies not present during the 90s. Characters text here. They have flip cameras. You can get an app on your cell phone that does the Ghostface voice! That’s awesome. But somewhere in all of this, as the film “crawls further up its own asshole,” as The Onion’s AV Club actually very accurately put it, you really get the sense that Kevin Williamson/The Voice Of the 90s really hates this twitter age we live in.
Benjamin Light: Williamson may be on to something. Too bad he missed the mark. But seriously Kevin, all will be forgiven if Scream 5 has time travel. Especially if you can time travel back to Scream 2 and bring back Timothy Olyphant.
Marco Sparks: You’ll notice that we’re certainly avoiding a lot of the deeper things that come along with the horror genre. The psychosexual imagery, the phallic weapon, the twisted male gaze and perception of the Final Girl… Instead we’re talking about the 90s and bitching about things like the lack of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” being used in this film.
I guess that to a certain extent we are, like most children of the 1990s, still stuck there. I don’t know what percentage of us that is, that we left behind there in those halcyon days of acid washed jeans and Color Me Badd and things that were about “nothing” and still contained so much meaning for us, but we’re there, and we’re looking forward at this future and kind of left curious and wondering and fascinated by this strange new world we’re wandering about. That’s not to say that we don’t look back with equal curiosity on the goofy weirdness of the 90s, especially the fashion choices, but perhaps that’s why Scream 4 was such a big deal to us.
It was the return of old friends and beyond that… maybe we were hoping to find a bridge of some sort between back then and now, if you will?
But it’s just a movie and not much of a bridge. As a film on its own, Scream 4 is fine, not great, and not terrible, and very much the fourth entry in a slasher film series that will be twenty years old before you know it. And though it’s hard not to, you can’t go backwards, can’t ever go home again. You can only deal with know and try your best to prepare yourself for the future. Sometimes that just means dreaming of sequels that feature time travel.

hey, i’m a child of divorce, give me a break.

Posted by Peanut St. Cosmo on

evelyn: what about the past?

patrick: we never really shared one.

this man wasn’t just what they thought he was. or was he? that’s a tough call to make. i’ve read the bret easton ellis book american psycho and seen the movie again for maybe the 17th time just recently. 17th, yes, definitely. i see patrick in all his consumer elitism, hiding inside his nice suits, above average haircut, tortoise shell glasses, 18 pack abs, and jaw dropping business cards….i see it in us.

look at that subtle off white coloring

this man is sweating bullets (don’t think louis didn’t notice) over his business card not being the talk of the conference table. i can’t help but draw parallels between a movie/book about the mid 80′s and how it relates to life today. more specifically, social networking. as we’re all social beings, our networking is very important. if we go out on a friday, we’re sure to take our smart phones and upload those photos. not only do they go to our facebook and maybe even myspace (may it rest in peace)  but also to our twitter accounts. that’s if we’re so foolish as to not link our updates!!!!

omg, in the middle of 3some. #brb #philcollins

i’ve had talks with Capt Light, you may know him. we’ve discussed the way that people like to present themselves to the outside world. to certain people we are daughter/coworker/person we cheated off of in geometry. and that image may be who we actually are, or it may be just what we like to let others believe. but online we are anyone! we have camera phones! and four square!

i just became the mayor of your mom's box. #sorrybro

we can go out and let all our friends know about it. tell them where we’ve been and when we’ve moved on elsewhere. tag the people in photos that were our accomplices. and then the friends that couldn’t make it are left to :/ and comment or “like” it instead. it presents the most social and witty side of ourselves that we wish we could be more often. or at least present to those friends/followers/geometry inferiors.

oh yeah, i'm following @augustbarcelona. thought you knew.

is the real us such a let down? the real peanut is an unemployed sociology student that loves being a literary  elitist and music snob. when and if (!!) she graduates in two years, she’ll be begging for a job in social work that won’t pay the mounting debt accumulated by college. assuming our economy doesn’t continue to plunge deeper and deeper into the bowels of hell. but do i enjoy a peek into twitter or facebook? do i post photos of my drunk self out and about?

don't we all?

my intent here is not to say beware of your friends. we all know a crazy or two, and they’re good for a retweet. it may be more of a beware yourself. why must we present this better self?

…..why does or doesn’t patrick go all nail gun crazy on his secretary?

u know skirts, heading out for sorbet...

i guess we all want to protect our inner bateman’s…..

Motion pictures arts & sciences.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the glitz and the glamor of the Oscars or Hollywood royalty or whatever, but let’s get down to brass tacks, people: Predictions. I want to hear yours. I only have a few I want to talk about here, so let’s get down to what I feel is the strongest lock of the night…

Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network‘s screenplay. What is that, Best Adapted Screenplay? Yeah.

Next: Best score.

Probably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Social Network? I guess? Though I do like Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception, but I just don’t see it or any of the other nominees taking it. Reznor and Ross’ score is just so different and stands out head and shoulders above the rest in so many ways.

Next: Best Acress.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think that Natalie Portman will get this?

I’m surprised they didn’t mail this to her like a week ago. Actually, that’s not true. I’m saying there’s a 94% chance it’ll go to Portman, and a %6 chance it’ll go to Annette Bening for Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right.

I want to make the point that, sadly, I haven’t seen as nearly as many of the nominated movies as I’d like this year, but that’s true of just about any year, unfortunately. Even sadder still is that I don’t think you need to see the movies to make fairly informed guesses on who’ll win. So much of the Oscar wins can be predicted on either buzz or what the Academy has done before or both.

Next: Best Supporting.

I feel like Christian Bale and Melissa Leo are both going to get it for David O. Russell’s The Fighter.

Much, much smaller chances: Geoffrey Rush or John Hawkes, but I just don’t see it.

Next: Best Actor.

I don’t have a clue. Colin Firth, most likely. If you’d put a gun to my head, that’s what I would’ve said. But maybe Javier Bardem too, but I’m saying that just because he seems like such a dark horse candidate.

Next: The main event. Best Picture.

Forget all the other movies, it all comes down to The Social Network and The King’s Speech. Right?

from here.

But not Black Swan. Sorry, Black Swan, you’re not perfect enough.

If I had to guess, I’d say that The King’s Speech will get it, unfortunately. I’d love for Inception to get it. You know why? JUST CAUSE. Fall asleep on an airplane and I’ll put that idea in your brain. But I think Time magazine pegged it most accurately: This all comes down to the new vs. old. The Social Network is a movie completely unlike anything else that’s been nominated for Best Picture before and The King’s Speech is just another helping of the same old shit. As Time also put it: This comes down to head vs. heart. The Social Network is a highly intellectual film and The King’s Speech is pappy crap, that same shit that tugs on your heartstrings again and again each award season. Vanilla bullshit.

Voting for The King’s Speech is a bullet in the head of a newborn kitten! You might as well go vote for Life Is Beautiful again! Ugh. And yet, I feel like it’ll win, as do a lot of people, of course. I feel like the writing is on the wall…

That said, I feel like this might be one of those weird years where whoever gets Best Director might not get Best Film as well. Or maybe not. I just can’t see Aronofsky or David O. Russell taking home a little gold man tonight.

This should be exciting though. Are you ready? Can you feel the heat?

And what’s your predictions?

Hyperspace/Multiversity.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

For your viewing pleasure, a collection of “hyperspace” scenes from various movies:

from here.

From the video poster’s page:

The hyperspace is an enduring concept in science fiction, as it provides a kind of panacea for all conflict. The slip into hyperspace/warp speed as a plot device is ordinarily used either as a) An accidental tunnel to the unknown, or B) An escape from danger via total oblivion.

I originally found this video here, via the always cool Topher Chris.

Also pretty cool, though not as cool as Topher Chris, is this video I found on youtube featuring a colossal zoom out from the Earth and our solar system into the larger universe around us and eventually into hyperspace and multiversal fractals of all existence and beyond:

All things should have a “and beyond” tacked onto them, don’t you think? That’s fast tracking your shit to next level epicness.  Anyway, tomorrow (or relatively soon) there’s something I want to do here, something semi special, and something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while now. That’s what’s next, whenever “next time” is. See you then, space cowboys and cowgirls.