REVIEW: SCREAM 7

I've been trying hard to find to see if I can't find a way to talk around the Scream 7 situation with all its associated turmoil. On the one hand, congrats to Neve Campbell for holding her ground until Paramount recognized her contributions to the franchise. On the other hand, it's a shame they had to drown Melissa Barrera in order to welcome her back into the fold.

But these kinds of contradictions, they follow both the slasher genre as a whole as well as this franchise specifically. I definitely have mixed feelings about the delight that comes with watching this movie in the theater as the audience all winces in unison while Ghostface delivers a particular nasty cut to a young girl who certainly did not deserve to be vivisected this way. The franchise itself has mixed feelings about the fandom it engenders, punishing the mania that springs up in the wake of humans being hacked to death--while also very much depending on it. So it's perhaps not actually so heretical for me to admit that, yes, my feelings around this outing were delightfully mixed.

Thirty years after Ghostface marked her as his target, Sidney finds her oldest daughter, Tatum, approaching many of the same thresholds where she first faced off against her predator. Her worst fears are confirmed when Ghostface emerges once again. Only this time, he seems happy to pull off his mask and reveal exactly who it is threatening to destroy her family, and the person underneath may be even more terrifying than any mask she's ever faced.

Neve Campbell's great revelation back in 1996 was the ability to convey wisdom beyond her years. Thirty years on, she's fully inherited that depth of soul without having lost that vitality. Isabel May is key to giving this movie real stakes. She makes you forget how vapid and detestable slasher targets are supposed to be, and she holds her ground against a legend like Neve Campbell. I'd be okay to see her around more. I actually really enjoyed this new generation of teen characters and looked forward to seeing what they'd bring to the terrain, only to feel they had been underused by the film's climactic bloodbath. Joel McHale, he's no Patrick Dempsey, but I guess we'll keep him.

One of the problems with slasher franchises is that they've always carved out this problem for themselves of deifying murderers--even after they're dead. Scream 6 had a literal shrine to the saga's lineup of killers. The Scream saga has been carried by a strong cast of champions and survivors, and this has helped offset the worship around literal killers. Even so, the most important people in the franchise wind up being the people murdering kids. After their targets have been mutilated, the identities of the victims are basically erased, except insofar as they can be hailed as trophies for the killer.

This movie took a crucial step to returning some of the power to the victims. Mind you, I don't even know what the kill tally is across seven films, and some of the murders were definitely more distressing than others. But the movie dials into the emotions our survivor, Sidney, holds for her friend who was gruesomely killed all the way back in that first movie, Tatum, for whom her daughter is named. "She was the last friend I ever trusted," Sidney explains.

How interesting can you make a seventh movie? Turns out, there are still ways to make Ghostface mysterious. This movie finds a new way to tease out the intentions of Ghostface beyond just "who is the person wearing the mask." And it's partly for that reason why I can't give too much grace to voices who are content to write off this movie for being the sixth sequel to a 30-year-old franchise. I don't think that was ever the climb this movie faced.

The "face your past" tagline (which could have been applied to any of the last five Scream movies) winds up grilling Sidney for seeking out a happy ending. "I wanted to show that there was life after trauma." The film supposes this to be some kind of unresolved issue within her when really, she has every right to live her life. And frankly, that's the more interesting question at hand. Anyone under contract can survive the murderous designs of any given movie. But how do you depict the battlefield of real life?

And the movies already gave a more intelligent answer to that question back in 2022 when we saw that Sidney had an abundant life so far removed from her darkness that her family couldn't even be seen onscreen. Sidney herself would get to foray back into Ghostface's domain, yes, but that all happened on her terms when she chose to return to the battlefield to make the world safer for other would-be victims. Yet this film really puts Sidney on trial over electing not to help Sam and the others in the last Scream movie--when we all know exactly why we didn't see Sidney in New York back in 2023.

I wound up being validated for my foresight, yet nonetheless conflicted about whether it was fair to subject her and her family to this nightmare just to prove what most of had already suspected--and what was already much better articulated in the subtext two whole movies ago.

I say that this film makes Ghostface mysterious, and it does. (And give me credit, I actually correctly identified the person behind the mask.) But once that mask comes off, and they start monologuing, Ghostface's motives wind up sounding distinctly less compelling than they've ever been.

So, I suppose in a roundabout way ... this ratifies Sidney's final victory over her masked menace. Sidney herself is as fresh as ever while Ghostface ... just needs to move on. She has truly outlived him once and for all.

And maybe now that we've resolved this, we can decide that if Ghostface must be sated with more targets to pursue, he needs to find new territory in which to hunt. By all means, let's keep Sidney and Gale and the other survivors around (at whatever wages they deem appropriate) to help train the new kids. But despite what this film wants us to believe, Sidney has absolutely earned the right to her happy ending.

So ... someone should tell Paramount just to make nice with Melissa Barrera and bring her and Jenna Ortega back.

Then again, Paramount is busy doing some slaughtering of its own at the moment ...

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: HOPPERS

In the 1950s under the threat of nuclear warfare, Hollywood premiered such exercises as The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds where an alien power would pass judgment on humankind, holding its fate in its hands. Here in the 2020s under the shadow of such threats as climate change, Hollywood sends to be our judge ... beavers. Let me back up ... Daniel Chong's new film from Pixar Animation, Hoppers , sees Mabel (Piper Curda), a college student whose self-appointed mission is to preserve the glade where she used to find sanctuary with her now deceased grandmother. Her biggest opponent is hometown boy and beloved mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm), who has designs to plow over the glade in order to open his new freeway--estimated to save travelers four whole minutes of commuting. Mabel gets her golden opportunity when she uncovers secret technology pioneered by her professor which allows a human to rem...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

I n the early 1960s, American professor and psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg developed what is now considered to be a fundamental cornerstone of understanding humans and morality. He introduced a model by which human beings start out determining what is right and wrong based on which course of action elicits the least punishment. Successful movement through this model sees a person gradually becoming motivated by principles , not simple reward or punishment, and Kohlberg anticipated that a person did not achieve this stage until adulthood, if ever. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) This is interesting because t he media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. T heir purity forms the bedrock of much of American conversation. Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing i...

Toy Story 4: Pixar's Tribute to Regression

It was about this time last year that I came across the one person who actually hated Toy Story 3 . I was reading Jason Sperb’s book “Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Age of Digital Cinema” as part of my research for my essay on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu . It was in one of his chapters on the Pixar phenomenon that he shared his observation from the ending of Toy Story 3 , essentially casting the film as this nostalgia mousetrap for adults: “ If Andy lets go of his childhood nostalgia and moves on, then Toy Story fans don’t really have to , as the narrative recognition in the potential value in such an act is sufficient. Actually moving on becomes indefinitely deferred in an endless cycle of consumption (rewatching the movies, purchasing new versions of the movie, purchasing more and more Toy Story-related merchandise, rewatching them yet again with the next generat...

My Best Friend's Wedding: Deconstructing the Deconstructive Rom-Com

Well, Wicked is doing laps around the box office, so it looks as though the Hollywood musical is saved, at least for a season, so I guess we’ll turn our attention to another neglected genre. As with something like the musical, the rom-com is one of those genres that the rising generation will always want to interrogate, to catch it on its lie. The whole thing seems to float on fabrication and promising that of which we can always be skeptical—the happy ending. This is also why they’re easy to make fun of and are made to feel second-tier after “realer” films which aren’t building a fantasy. You know? Movies like Die Hard … We could choose any number of rom-coms, but the one that I feel like diving into today is 1997’s underrated My Best Friend’s Wedding . I’m selecting it for a number of reasons. Among these is my own personal fondness for the film, and also the fact that it boasts a paltry 6.3 on IMDb despite its ...

REVIEW: Star Wars - The Mandalorian and Grogu

I haven't historically considered myself a "Star Wars" kid. And to be clear, I take no pride in saying that or anything. I respect the property and what it's given to pop culture. But I do feel like it's worth mentioning in this review that I didn't really go into Jon Favreu's The Mandalorian and Grogu thinking I had much of what I'd call nostalgia for this movie to exploit. And yet watching this movie, I found myself hearkening back to the things about Star Wars that caught my attention as a kid. For me, that was the gladiator-style match in "Attack of the Clones." This film offers quite a few roller-coasters along those lines. And as far as the creature designs go for the monsters in these arenas, they were quite good. I wasn't trying too hard to anticipate which were computer-generated and which were puppeted, but the aesthetics of both the Jim Henson era and the Spielberg era sat very well here in this vessel....

REVIEW: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The fanboy renaissance manages to reach even higher heights with the new "Super Mario Galaxy Movie." The easter eggs and cameos are back with a vengeance, and in much richer resolution than we'd have thought possible even five years ago. It's for this kind of thing that the movie will be called "wish fulfillment" for video game nerds, but I personally felt fed as an animation enthusiast. To see such caricatured designs playing on such a vivid, textured playground is a rarity. It's only when you see the bricks of a giant, fairy-tale castle splintering and disintegrating that you feel like this world has weight, consequences, and there is something about that which feels strangely validating. And as with the last movie, as with the Mario universe as a whole, the animated world's command over its own landscape lets you swim between all sorts of exotic and eclectic locales and genres at leisure. Every single cast member...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog, for example, was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland . Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work, Gods Like Us , “...

The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights , a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them. But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all, Gladiator (2000) “Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our ...

Fine, I Will Review The Percy Jackson Show (again)

I have wondered if I was the only one who thought that "Sea of Monsters" was the weakest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians pentalogy, but I have seen my reading echoed by other book loyalists. This second installment is perhaps penalized partially because it marks several major junctions in the larger series. This is, for example, the part of the series where the scope of the adventure really starts to enlarge. We know going in that there's an angry, deceased titan out to destroy Olympus, and that he's amassing an army, and so we need a sense that this threat is growing stronger. But this also marks a turning point in how series author, Rick Riordan, chooses to develop his main character. And so, season 2 of the Disney+ television adaptation faces similar crossroads. Season 3 of this show is already filming as we speak, so its immediate future is already spoken for, as far as production goes. But stylistically, this second seas...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog