Popcorn Kernels: Aw, Screw It (Again)

I always try to give full-length reviews to current movies, because I assume they’re the ones readers will be most invested in. But every December I race to catch up on the flicks I missed during the year and my backlog gets clogged like a yeti’s shower drain. So please forgive me as I knock out a couple of mini reviews for 2016 titles I don’t have particularly strong feelings for and came out long enough ago that I don’t feel guilty about cutting them short.

Demolition

Year: 2016

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man loses his wife in a car accident, so he starts to take apart everything in his life to figure out what he needs to be happy. It makes sense in the movie, I promise. Sort of.

Imagine, if you will, that the kid from Donnie Darko grew up and got an actual job and a wife. There, you’re about halfway to the anthropomorphic pretention that is Jake Gyllenhaal in Demolition.

Demolition tries so hard to be an Important movie abut grief, life, and truth that it forgets to craft characters who aren’t one-note assholes. It’s like the folks from jackass accidentally stumbled into a Terrence Malick film. Gyllenhaal does a fine job even though his character is one centimeter away from going full American Psycho and the movie doesn’t seem to realize it. Then he hangs out with a terrible woman who threatens to be a love interest until he meets her terrible son and she ceases to exist.

Demolition is almost episodic in its carelessness, forgetting about what came before in pursuit of higher and higher melodrama. But it drowns itself in overwrought narration and a mise-en-scene that shrieks to be noticed with obvious lighting shifts and pointed, almost huffy framing. This is a movie that frequently cuts to slow motion shots of a beach for no reason before it pulls another card out of its Cliché Plot Devices deck.

It’s not terribly made. It’s just frustrating to sit through; a startlingly empty drama that gives the impression that it might be deep. Looking through my notes, I already can’t remember half of what I wrote down because the movie slips through your fingers like uninspired sand. When the most interesting thing in your movie is watching as Jake Gyllenhaal slowly grows a beard, maybe you’re not destined for the Oscar you’re so desperately making a bid for.

Rating: 4/10

Mascots

Year: 2016

Director: Christopher Guest

Cast: Zach Woods, Sarah Baker, Parker Posey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

Christopher Guest is a very funny filmmaker. His ensemble improv comedy films are delightful treasures packed to the brim with genuine talents, but unfortunately he hasn’t made one since 2006. Now, ten years later, that has changed with the Netflix exclusive Mascots. But maybe there was a reason for this decade-long radio silence. If Mascots is any indication, the format has gone stale.

Maybe this is because the comedy genre has shifted so much, folding improvisation into more and more run-of-the-mill movies thanks to the influence of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig. It’s no longer a fresh, exciting style but rather something normalized, almost mundane. Or maybe we just don’t have much need for the slower-paced naturalism of Guest’s filmography that allows his characters to breathe. Or maybe, like all brilliant filmmakers, he just produced a dud, a one-time embarrassment to be swept under the rug as we move on.

Mascots is overstuffed with characters and understuffed with plot. Observe.

The plot: Various mascots compete to win first prize. One wins.

The characters: Unhappily married mascot duo Mike (Zach Woods) and Mindy Murray (Sarah Baker) – take my “take my wife” jokes… Please!; Owen Golly Jr. (Tom Bennett), a British mascot who feels pressured by his father to carry on the family legacy; Cindi Babineaux (Parker Posey), a possibly incestuous crypto-lesbian who performs interpretive dance pieces while dressed as an armadillo; Tommy “Zook” Zucarello (Chris O’Dowd), an Irish-Canadian ice hockey bad boy; and Phil Mayhew (Christopher Moynihan), who plays a mascot plumber. And that’s not even scratching the surface what with the hangers-on, family members, judges, TV executives, and so on that flesh out this hideous, bulging pustule of a cast.

These are very funny actors and thus they produce a handful of funny scenes, but that’s just not enough. There’s a severe lack of focus in this narrative, and when the jokes are mostly in the vein of the tired (nay, exhausted) sitcommy trope of “marriage sucks” or the overdone “stay in the family business” plot line, there’s not a lot to lean on when the movie does touch down on one subject for more than a couple seconds at a time.

Then, for the final half hour, Mascots throws all pretense of plot away for an extended sequence of mascot performances. Some are downright hilarious but by the halfway point of this grueling segment, the movie becomes just as banal as the competition it’s supposed to be skewering. In the end, it’s just difficult to tell why they expected anyone to care.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 878

Hellular Telephones

Year: 2000

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette

Run Time: 1 hour 57 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Wes Craven is not a horror director. That is to say – like so many before him – he is a director who began his career with a pair or earth-shaking horror flicks and was immediately put in a box, not really allowed to do anything outside the genre. You’ll never catch me complaining about this, because the man has turned out some of the best genre pictures in three consecutive generations. But the fact remains that Craven had other stories to tell.

It was in pursuit of one of those stories – 1999’s Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep,  - that Craven was strong-armed into helming the third entry in the Scream franchise. He agreed to come back in exchange for a green light on his heartwarming violin picture. Needless to say, his music-loving heart wasn’t in it. And neither was Kevin Williamson. 

The screamsmith was far too busy with the seminal, life-changing teen soap Dawson’s Creek to write more than a treatment, and screenplay duties were left to one Ehren Kruger, who must have gotten the gig on the strength of his last name alone, because his CV is a gaping hole that eventually leads to such pivotal masterworks as The Ring Two and three Transformers sequels.

As you may have already guessed, the Scream 3, she is not so good.

I mean, maybe it might have been if Meryl Streep was in it.

Scream 3 instantly starts us off on the wrong foot with its cameo opening deaths: recurring character Cotton Weary (Live Schreiber) and his girlfriend Christine (Kelly Rutherford). Cotton I can understand. We’re capping off a trilogy after all. But Kelly Rutherford? She’s so inadequately famous for this role that Scream 3 is listed second on her IMDb “Known For” page. That’s just embarrassing.

Anyway, these two get murdered using a plot device so New Millennium, it’s all I can take not to vomit all over my keyboard: Apparently Ghostface (the ever reliable Roger Jackson) now has a voice processor machine, via which he can perfectly imitate the voice of any character in the movie. This is technology that doesn’t even exist now, 15 years later, and it s deeply, unequivocally irritating. It would be a better plot point just to say that he’s great at doing impressions and leave it at that. It would still be hideously ludicrous, but at least it doesn’t make me want to smash my Blu-Ray disc against a concrete wall.

Alright, it’s out of my system. Scream 3 depicts the production of Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro, a sequel to the two highly successful horror films based on the life and times of Sidney Prescott (Never Campbell), who had two sets of her friends get murdered in high school and college. Fun stuff. Real life Sidney is now a recluse, living in a remote house in the mountains and working for a women’s crisis counseling hotline. When the cast of Stab 3 begins to die in the order that they are killed in the script, Sidney once again teams up with Woodsboro deputy-turned Hollywood consultant Dewey Riley (David Arquette),  and the acid-tongued reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), as well at the newcomer, the movie-loving, suspiciously macabre Detective Kincaid (McDreamy).

Ah, don’t you miss the 2000’s?

Honestly, this is a great plot on paper. The killer is bringing the movie to life, but constant rewrites (one of the film’s more successful self-reflexive jokes) have left three versions of the script floating around, and nobody knows which copy the killer got a hold of. But just like Scream 2 before it, this great concept slips through its fingers before it even gets a chance to establish a pattern, degrading into a mush of stabbings, cell phone calls, and sinister faxes. We never even see the script we’re supposed to be worried is coming to life.

The difference between Scream 2 and this one is that it still had a solid character arc to fall back on. That film was about Sidney processing her old trauma under the shadow of a new one. This one is about Sidney sitting in a variety of comfy chairs, out of which she occasionally rises for some vigorous avoid-the-knife calisthenics.

There are some stabs (ha) at character expositions, in which Sidney’s mother Maureen (Lynn McKee) is revealed to have a secret past. But these are rendered entirely useless by the script’s dogged insistence on vilifying Maureen as being a slut because she was raped, which relies on such twisted, ugly gender politics that making Megan Fox’s ass a more nuanced character than her actual role in Transofrmers 2 actually seems like a progressive step.

Really, the script is just a drag, replacing the series’ characteristic movie references with a rotting heap of F words in a feckless attempt at being “edgy.”

Scream 3 is about as edgy as a Dungeons and Dragons die.

I do have love in my heart for all the Scream movies. Even this – the left-handed stepchild of the franchise. But sometimes you have to work hard in a loving relationship, and focus on the good, which is what I shall do here. There are a good handful of genuinely funny moments, though they are more broadly comic than the franchise is accustomed to. So at least the sense of humor is intact, though there is only one sequence (a chase scene through a stage recreation of Sidney’s old home) that even approaches the live wire tension of its predecessors. At least two moments achieve that delicate balance mingling horror and comedy, and the cast ain’t half bad.

Actually, that is to say, they’re exactly half bad. The cadre of pretty young thangs shoveled into the film’s bloated midsection (including Jenny McCarthy, Emily Mortimer, Matt Keeslar, and Deon Richmond) is uniformly anemic, though Parker Posey breaks free from the mire once she’s called upon to do some stellar one-on-one time with Courteney Cox. David Arquette, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, straining to connect the dots of his undernourished love-hate relationship with then-new wife Cox., but excelling once again at subtle, self-deprecating comedy. Cox herself is good as ever, though forced to act from behind a set of bangs that seem to have been burned off with acid. Neve Campbell and Patrick Dempsey fail to make much of an impression, spending all their time as they do gnashing their teeth at one another, but Scott Foley finds his time to shine as harried young director Roman Bridger.

Really, it’s not an inspiring set of pros. Especially not when the cons include those bangs. So I leave you with this: Scream 3 is the worst Scream movie. It’s still an alright Scream movie, but it’s the worst. What can I say? I’m in Wes Craven’s court till the day I die, but you can’t win ‘em all.

And sometimes you pick the wrong day to insult your hairstylist's favorite band.

Body Count: 10

1. Christine is stabbed in the back.
2. Cotton is stabbed in the chest.
3. Sarah is stabbed in the back and shoved through a window.
4. Stone is stabbed in the back and beaten with a pan.
5. Tom dies in a gas explosion.
6. Angelina is stabbed in the torso.
7. Tyson is stabbed in the gut.
8. Jennifer is stabbed in the back and shot.
9. John Milton has his throat sit. 
10. [Roman is shot in the head.]

TL;DR: Scream 3 is the weakest of a fairly strong bunch.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1266
Reviews In This Series
Scream (Craven, 1996)
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)