Any Other Business: Part LXVIII

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That was then, this is dumb

Watching Daria on a loop as it cycles from season 1 to 5 and back again at 6am on MTV weekday mornings over the past few months I’ve been struck by the inane ads for inane shows that air before, during, and after Daria. And come to the only conclusion possible. Daria was commissioned to give 90s MTV a smart female audience. And yet now the dumb jock and bimbo characters mocked in it, Kevin and Brittany, are not just the MTV target audience but the stock personalities of the ‘reality’ shows that MTV substituted for music a long time ago. Doesn’t it just suck when you become that which you once sought to satirise?

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The decline of chance

We have all lost a year of chance occurrences. Perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that we have lived thru a year almost entirely devoid of serendipity. I have been preoccupied with the role of chance in our lives for quite some time. Think of how it works – that moment when, for no rational reason, you take the long way round instead of the shortcut, just to enjoy the scenery, and then you unexpectedly run into someone you had no earthly reason to expect would also be in the environs, let alone taking the long way too. Once you start thinking about the double coincidences you really start to bake your noodle like Neo wondering if the Oracle hadn’t said anything would he still have broken the vase. There are unseen lines of chance that take place in everyday life: a number of tiny decisions lead you to a certain place at a certain time, where you might run into someone who is also there because of a number of tiny decisions they made without even really thinking about them. Or you might not, because they did not. This is not fate, this is a roll of the dice; you need two sixes.

At least we still have… : Part XI

The eleventh in an occasional series in which I try to cheer myself up by remembering what still exists in the world and cannot ever be taken capriciously away.

1980s flashback flashback

Which is to say that I was surprised to see this song appear on MTV Classic in a countdown of 1980s film hits, until I saw River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton appear beside an aged Ben E King in the video. Making this a flashback to the 1980s that was itself a flashback 25 years to when Ben E King as a young man had a worldwide smash with this in 1961.

Social Distancing

I have been watching rather a lot of MTV Classic in its pop-up MTV 80s guise recently. For obvious reasons. And I realised that the oxymoronic call for us all to come together by staying apart could almost see in the national psyche/soundtrack Ben E King’s song of love and solidarity be abruptly followed by The Police urging you to back up the minimum 3 feet for the love of God.

Status Red

And if we are putting together a playlist for these strange times then this would be the fitting final entry. The Specials weren’t actually singing about streets deserted because of fear of the coronavirus but…

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Reloaded Revisited

I recently watched The Matrix Reloaded all the way thru for the first time in many years when Sky One idly decided to screen it. Oh, the wasted intellectual time and energy that went into trying to make this movie more than it was when it came out in May 2003. To indulge in hyperbole, between May and November 2003 sci-fi fans engaged in more delusional counterfactual speculations and fantasias than people wasting their time trying to disprove Darwin since 1859. Some of these fantasias were rather good, unfortunately the execrable Revolutions dynamited all the sophisticated ways that people had sought to frame Reloaded as both smarter and more successful artistically than it was. It is awful. It is memorable in places. But that is not enough to make it not awful. The film is almost an object lesson that merely subverting expectations doesn’t actually achieve anything. Cutting your climatic action sequence to pieces at the start and end of a film, ending a film with the climactic action beat being impenetrable polysyllabic gobbledegook in a room, having your plot be a ‘get that thing, to do this thing’ which only starts 40 minutes into the damn movie – all of these choices subvert expectations. And they are all awful. The proof of the pudding is that nobody has taken these models of subversion and run with them in the way that Skyfall and The Avengers both pilfered “The Joker planned to be caught. He wanted me to lock him up in the MCU!” from The Dark Knight. The Architect is memorable, but that scene is awful. Lines from it, bitterly engraved on my soul from fruitlessly going over and over the VHS, and from the memorable Ferrell/Timberlake MTV take-down of it, float across my consciousness from time to time. As Michael Gove lays the foundations for flouncing out of trade talks that haven’t even f***ing begun yet by announcing an impossible and arbitrary timetable one line seems … apropos. At some point it might even be uttered by M. Barnier to Gove. On being flatly told, “You’ll cave, Germany needs British car sales to survive”, he might riposte – “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept”…

Billie Eilish mourns 007?

Oh dear, here we go again… Sam Smith’s derivative and embarrassing caterwaul ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’ should have tipped us off that Spectre‘s artistic decisions were not coming from the top drawer. Now we finally have Billie Eilish’s much anticipated Bond theme ‘No Time to Die’, and it is a mournful dirge. Why is it a mournful dirge? What happened to the musician who wrote the earworm hook of ‘Bad Guy’? Why is it that only Adele seems to have really nailed the archetypal Bond song in all of Daniel Craig’s outings? (Though Chris Cornell comes a close second).  Perhaps this was Eilish’s genuine musical response to seeing an early cut of the aged Craig in action, which should make us very afraid for what No Time to Die is actually like. I don’t know that there’s much that Hans Zimmer can do with this barely there song in the score, but that’s okay, John Barry twice magisterially ignored songs he didn’t like in favour of other songs for his Bond scores for Thunderball and The Living Daylights. Back in 2015 I suggested pressing Radiohead’s celebrated cover of ‘Nobody Does It Better’ from the mid-90s into action instead of Sam Smith. This time round I am not that exercised. I fear this song may accurately reflect a lethargic tiresome film.

From the Archives: Rescue Dawn

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is shot down on his first mission over Vietnam. Captured by the Vietcong he plots to escape and find his way home.

Christian Bale adds another impressive characterisation to his resume playing real life Vietnam War POW Dieter Dengler. Rescue Dawn is inspired by events in Dengler’s life previously documented by the legendary (by which I mean famously bat-crazy) German director Werner Herzog in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Bale expertly plays a German who has become an American citizen and whose accent is American, but not quite genuine, and whose mental state could best be described as…peculiar. Herzog, the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo is quite at home in this cinematic territory of insane heroes in the jungle and produces his best fictional feature in years. Werner Herzog is after all the man who dragged a boat over a mountain for the making of Fitzcarraldo, about a 19th century rubber baron in Brazil who wanted to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon.

Herzog brilliantly uses minimal dialogue for the first half hour to tell the story of Dengler’s capture and torture at the hands of the Vietcong thru the medium of pure cinema. He wordlessly conveys the utter terror of the Vietcong whenever an American airplane screams overhead. Herzog achieves a sense of location few Vietnam films have, even Apocalypse Now’s intense feeling for its locale is eclipsed by his extraordinary eye for landscape cinematography which makes the lush jungle almost another character. Bale’s time in the POW camp moves out of this art-house territory towards more mainstream fare, and the film slows down and becomes less distinctive. The men sit and bitch about being prisoners of war, plot escape plans (as all prisoners of war seem to spend most of their time doing, to the detriment of their guards’ nerves) and try to raise morale by fantasising over their favourite meals. Herzog inserts some excellent gags here but never lets you forget that Dengler is a very odd hero figure for these men to rally round.

The relationship between Bale and Steve Zahn as a fellow American prisoner in the small Vietcong camp is highly convincing but Jeremy Davies is endlessly irritating as the only other American POW. Davies has been using the same mannered tics since 1994 and has blighted films from The Million Dollar Hotel to Solaris. His popularity with casting directors continues to mystify. Steve Zahn, by contrast, grasps with both hands the chance to do something more substantial than his usual comedic sidekick roles and delivers a touching portrayal of man worn down by despair and malnutrition. Herzog’s languid pacing in this film, particularly in the second act, may irritate people raised on MTV editing but the majesty of the landscape and the emotional depth he achieves is more than adequate recompense, Rescue Dawn is an offbeat take on a familiar genre, welcome to the extreme as a matter of course.

3/5

From the Archives: Surf’s Up

Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives brings up a rather forgotten CGI animation starring the voice of Shia LaBeouf.

Teenage penguin Cody Maverick leaves home for the Big Z Memorial Surf Off in sunny Pen Gu Island where he falls for a pretty lifeguard and meets a mysterious hermit. Will Cody emulate his hero Big Z or will he learn there’s more to life than winning?

Yes, we’re back with bloody anthropomorphic animals again, although mercifully an early gag establishes that these particular penguins neither sing nor tap-dance… Young Cody Maverick (Shia LaBeouf) is eager to escape his preposterously boring life of fish-sorting (hilariously depicted) in Shiverpool, Antarctica. A childhood memory of legendary surfer Big Z sustains his dream of using his surfing prowess to escape to sunnier climes. Documentary film-makers follow his progress as a talent scout for slimy promoter Reggie Belafonte (James Woods) plucks Cody from obscurity to take place in the Surf-off that provides the film’s action climax. The documentary film-makers are of course voiced by directors Brannon and Buck (it’s so post-modern it gives me nosebleeds). Cody is voiced by LaBeouf as a variant of his Transformers persona, but that splendidly awkward turn loses a lot of its humour here as Cody seethes with resentment of his bullying older brother.

The presentation of the film as a rough-cut of an MTV style documentary is quite brilliant. There are many of those trademark editing flourishes and a number of great visual gags like SPEN (Sport Penguin Entertainment Network). This all underscores that there’s a genuine intelligence and wit behind this film that just didn’t quite translate into a great script. The CGI is startlingly good during many of the surfing sequences, helped by the hand-held look (so painstakingly rendered) which makes the peril of a wipe-out painfully suspenseful. But such style cannot disguise the short-comings of the writing. Jeff Bridges, as the reclusive surfing guru Geek who mentors Cody, could have done a hilarious reprise of his role as The Dude from The Big Lebowski, if someone had bothered to write the references. Jon Heder as Chicken Joe, a surfer dude chicken, is likewise saddled with a promising role featuring too few gags. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy star Zooey Deschanel is sadly underused as the love interest, quirky lifeguard Lani, which is an especial pity as she’s one of the very few actresses around with a distinctive enough voice for animated roles.

Ultimately you want to like this film a lot more than it actually deserves. Sure it meanders badly as Cody and Geek do their Luke/Yoda thing while building surfboards and there’s far too little development of the Cody/Lani romance. But it doesn’t have the smugness of the insultingly mediocre Simpsons Movie,and its moral that enjoying yourself is better than winning at all costs (like anti-social jock villain Tank Evans) is quite brilliant; especially given that most CGI animations with A-list voices endlessly promote the message that the most important thing in life is to just be yourself … if you’re pretty.

2/5

Keanu Reeves at the Lighthouse

The Lighthouse cinema is gearing up for something called Keanurama, a whole season of films starring the inimitable Keanu Reeves. Talking Movies‘ reaction to this news could only be captured by one word – whoa.

There is a veritable feast of Keanu Reeves on offer here, from his team-ups with Winona Ryder in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Scanner Darkly and Destination Wedding to his 1990s-defining action movies Point Break and Speed, from his indie classics River’s Edge and My Own Private Idaho to his mainstream hits Parenthood and Devil’s Advocate, from his original breakthrough Bill & Ted movies to his recent John Wick comeback trilogy.

John Wick & John Wick: Chapter 2 DOUBLE BILL

May 10th

Keanu had three movies (Henry’s Crime, Generation Um…, Man of Tai Chi) that didn’t make Irish cinemas but made one hell of a comeback as the principled hit-man universally beloved in the hit-community, the larger underworld, and the small town he retired to. Keanu’s stunt-work was an endearing mix of fluency and occasional rustiness, and he made us love Wick as he rampaged after the mobsters who killed his puppy. The flabby sequel expanded the Man from UNCLE-like Continental universe too much, but featured some memorable fights; especially the Wellesian throwdown with Ruby Rose.

Destination Wedding

May 10th

Fellows 1990s icon and latterly cinematic exile Winona Ryder made her great comeback in Stranger Things in 2016 so it was only fitting that she would reunite for a third time with Keanu in this 2018 rom-com by Mad About You writer /director Victor Levin about two misanthropes travelling to a hopelessly pretentious destination wedding and being lumbered with each other there. In a curious twist it seems that this film, just like 2017’s similarly themed rom-com Table 19 about the people you invite to weddings and seat far away to avoid them, hides some very formalist experimentation behind innocuous trappings.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

May 10th

Keanu and Winona’s first film together saw them gamely battle with cut-glass English accents as married couple Jonathan and Mina Harker for Francis Ford Coppola’s curate’s egg of a horror movie, that aspires to great fidelity to its source text even as screenwriter James V Hart makes sweeping inventions about reincarnated immortal beloveds so that Gary Oldman’s rejuvenating Count can lust over Winona. Roman Coppola rummages thru the Old Hollywood playbook for practical magic, and Sadie Frost and Monica Bellucci go all out for eroticism, but despite an impressive ensemble (including Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing) this never catches fire.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

May 15th

Legendary hit-man and lover of dogs John Wick is excommunicado, having conducted business on Continental property. Now Ian McShane has given Keanu one hour’s grace in which he must fight his way out of New York with a $14 million contract on his life and every assassin in the Five Boroughs eager to collect. The production photo of a besuited Keanu riding a horse thru NYC has already taken on a life of its own, and we’re promised an equally tantalising samurai sword fight on motorbikes, as well as a detour to Africa with ally Halle Berry.

Speed 35mm

May 25th

Die Hard cinematographer Jan De Bont made an auspicious directorial debut with this high-concept action blockbuster about a mad bomber targeting an LA bus that has to stay above 50mph in a city known for its congestion. The leads Keanu and Sandra Bullock strike sparks, Jeff Daniels and Joe Morton are terrific in support, and Dennis Hopper chews the scenery as the crazed bomber – sorry, he’s not crazy, “poor people are crazy, Jack, I’m eccentric” – delivering witticisms from the pen of Joss Whedon. Mark Mancina’s score is a triumph of urgency and elation as Keanu attempts to save the day.

A Scanner Darkly 35mm

June 1st

Richard Linklater adapted Philip K Dick’s hallucinogenic novel using his favoured animation technique, rotoscoping, to create a uniquely hellish new world in which an undercover cop in a not-too-distant future becomes involved with a dangerous new drug and begins to lose his own identity as a result. Keanu is said cop, and he’s romancing Winona Ryder in their second film together. But she, and indeed everyone else, may not be what they seem as the drugs start to take hold. A pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr is very, very funny in his role as a rambling, voluble, paranoid junkie.

Parenthood

June 5th

Director Ron Howard bade farewell to the 1980s with this ensemble comedy led by Steve Martin dealing with his ever-expanding Midwestern American family. The impressive cast includes Dianne Wiest, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Joaquin Phoenix, and Rick Moranis. Keanu stretches his comedic muscles as Tod, the not too bright but thoroughly amiable boyfriend to Martin’s fiery oldest daughter Julie (Martha Plimpton), a small but memorable turn. It’s tempting to draw a direct line from Keanu’s performance here to that of Reid Ewing as Dylan, the nice but dim boyfriend to the eldest Dunphy daughter in this current decade’s defining sitcom Modern Family.

River’s Edge

June 7th

Keanu and Dennis Hopper co-star again in a far more sombre movie than Speed. A group of high school friends including Keanu, Ione Skye, Crispin Glover, and Roxana Zal must come to terms with the fact that one of their gang, Daniel Roebuck, has unapologetically killed his girlfriend. This look at the private lives of teenagers; their misdemeanours, code of honour, betrayals; consciously courted controversy by basing the grim tale on a real-life occurrence in California. This is one of Keanu’s earliest roles, agonised and soulful, in a haunting and pitch-black 80s teen drama that almost seems to have invited Heathers.

The Devil’s Advocate

June 14th

Keanu’s up and coming Florida lawyer Kevin Lomax accepts a high-powered position at a New York law firm headed by legal shark John Milton (Al Pacino). Meanwhile, Keanu’s wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron in her first Hollywood iteration) begins to have frightening hallucinations warping her sense of reality. Kevin quickly learns that his mentor’s life isn’t about simply winning court cases without scruples. Pacino and Connie Nielsen have something far darker in mind. Pacino literally being the Devil in this gaudy thriller featuring creatures by the legendary Rick Baker; he of the lycanthropic transformations in An American Werewolf in London.

My Own Private Idaho

June 18th

Writer/director Gus Van Sant followed up his hit Drugstore Cowboy with a far looser movie featuring one of Keanu’s most nuanced performances and an affecting turn by River Phoenix. This key work of the New Queer Cinema follows two street hustlers, Phoenix’s Mike and Keanu’s Scott, as they embark on a road-trip from Portland, Oregon to Mike’s hometown in Idaho, and then eventually to Rome in search of Mike’s mother.  All the while Scott Favor has no intention of leading this street life forever. Van Sant incorporates Henry IV better than you’d believe possible with Keanu as bisexual Hal.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

June 21st

Bill S Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu) are in danger of failing their history final most heinously. This will result in Ted’s disciplinarian cop father sending him to military school. And that would be the end of Wyld Stallyns, the band the pair are trying to make into an MTV sensation despite a total lack of musical ability. It turns out, as Rufus (George Carlin), a dude from the future tells them, it would be the end of the world too. And so comedic time-travelling and borrowing historical figures ensues to ace the history final!

 

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey

June 22nd

Keanu’s major sequel problem (John Wick: Chapter 2, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and being blacklisted by 20^th Century Fox for passing on Speed 2) began with this bogus journey. William Sadler is sublime as the Grim Reaper, straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and crummy at Battleship. There is some wonderful set design, but, despite multiple robot versions of our heroes and more time-travelling and time-travel fuzzy logic than you can shake a stick at, this just isn’t as much goofy good-natured fun as its underdog predecessor. Third time’s the charm next year dude?

So first you watch one film with us, and then you watch another film with us, right after?

Bill & Ted DOUBLE BILL

June 23rd

WHOA! Two heads are better than one dude!

“Will you be at this party?” “Definitely.”

Point Break 4th July Party

July 6th

“Vaya Con Dios…”

Point Break

July 11th

Keanu leads this hybrid undercover cop in too deep/surfing/action heist/bromance Point Break with alternately lyrical and muscular direction from Kathryn Bigelow and a script polish by James Cameron. A string of bank robberies in Southern California where the villains disguise themselves as former US presidents sees hot-shot FBI agent and former college football star Johnny Utah (Keanu) assigned the dead-end case and Gary Busey’s gruff veteran. Keanu and Busey realise their crazy theory is correct – these bank-robbers are surfers! Keanu goes undercover, and romances Lori Petty’s surfer while growing closer to the gang’s leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). Will he arrest him?

And coming directly after all that is the 20th anniversary re-release of … The Matrix.

At least we still have… : Part II

The second entry in an occasional series in which I try to cheer myself up by remembering what still exists in the world and cannot ever be taken capriciously away.

Why, there’s Dom and Nic’s trippy video for the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’, prominently featuring the vocals of Noel Gallagher. The autumn of 1996 in a bottle. I still don’t really do dance music, but this was the first single I ever bought (and on tape!). It had the power to move me to cross the dug-in trenches of genre. It seems odd I never knew they were directing so many key videos; ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’, ‘Ava Adore’, ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’, ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’, ‘D’You Know What I Mean’; but it seems odd now that MTV played them!

And then there’s the immortal Snoopy Dance. Some weeks ago a younger co-worker did an end of shift dance which I thought was like the Snoopy Dance. She was highly offended by this, which was puzzling. When she did it again later I used her term, the end of shift dance, only for her to call it the ‘Stupid Dance’. Ah! Sorting out this mishearing involved grabbing a co-worker closer to my age who knew what the Snoopy Dance was and instantly pulled up on his big-screen laptop the above clip to showcase the glory of Charles Schulz’ creation. On seeing it there was a pause, and then an admission that that was kind of like her dance alright… On reflection the end of shift dance is probably closer to Jenny Lindberg’s dance in Warpaint’s ‘Disco//Very’ but that’s another post.

MovieExtras 10 Years

Have you always wanted to stand around in the background behind Matthew Macfadyen murmuring “mumble, mumble, it be Jack the Ripper”? Well, here’s your chance!

MovieExtras is celebrating 10 years with an Open Casting Weekend, Friday 13th and Saturday 14th July, in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel on Grafton Street. The open casting hours are 10am-7pm for both days. All members of the public are invited to sign up for membership, have their make-up done by MakeupFablicious.com, and have a photo-shoot with an award-winning photographer.

MTV’s Laura Whitmore began her career with MovieExtras.ie, finding out what the behind the scenes world of TV & film was all about. So, for those who want a walk on part beside their favourite celeb or, like Laura, want to feed their curiosity about what really happens on set, MovieExtras.ie is for you. Over 550 companies and casting directors have access to the MovieExtras.ie members profile and can contact them for work as an extra, model, actor or for promotional work. Based in Ardmore Studios, MovieExtras.ie was founded in December 2002 by Derek Quinn and Kevin Gill and has become Ireland’s leading agency that provides extras and background artists to the film, television and advertising industries. MovieExtras.ie has won various Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards.

Recent Irish productions include TRIVIA, Asterix and Obelix, Titanic: Blood & Steel, Republic of Telly, Amber, and Ek Tha Tiger (where Bollywood met Dublin). MovieExtras.ie members have also starred in adverts for Bank of Ireland, Heineken, AIB, An Post, Budweiser, Aldi, The Referendum Commission, Dairygold and Paddy Power. And for football enthusiasts, members were part of several Euro 2012 promotions. Currently MovieExtras.ie are working with high profile productions including Ripper Street (starring Matthew Macfadyen), An Crisis, and Stay (starring Aidan Quinn and Mercy heroine Taylor Schilling), which is being shot in the West of Ireland. Previous notable productions include Camelot, The Tudors and Shadow Dancer.

“Our members have been involved in over 1,200 productions and adverts, and have had great stories to tell about amazing experiences and meeting some wonderful people, including lots of international stars including Pierce Brosnan, Colin Farrell, Glenn Close, Anna Friel, Bob Hoskins and Kiera Knightley,” says co-founder Derek Quinn. Members have received over €8m in fees and have been involved with well over 1,000 productions including films, movies, documentaries, adverts (TV, billboard & print), theatre, soap operas, idents, photocalls and reconstructions since the company was set up 10 years ago. All are welcome to attend the open casting weekend. The cost for an individual one year membership is €99.95 and for a special family package is €299.95 (for up to 6 members) and includes 3 professional photographs. Those who are unable to attend the Open Casting Weekend can register online at www.MovieExtras.ie.

 

Scream on the Rocks

I was listening to ‘Pure Shores’ while unsuccessfully trying to find someone else excited about seeing Scream 4 a few weeks ago, and it led to these musings on how something can be all-conquering, then just disappear…

I was surprised that no one I knew was excited about a new Scream film, given that Kevin Williamson had returned to writing duties, and has lately been writing wonderful (cliff-hanger a minute, major twist every episode) dark popcorn for The Vampire Diaries. 11 years though is a long time… The Beach was released in February 2000 and, this being in prehistory when MTV not only played music but played certain videos on constant rotation, its imagery penetrated deep into people who never saw the film courtesy of All Saints’ video for the sublime ‘Pure Shores’ incorporating an awful lot of clips from Danny Boyle’s film. 11 years ago I finally saw Scream on TV and then Scream 3 in the cinema in quick succession and never got round to watching The Beach till 2003. It’s odd to think that these films, which were all pervasive at the time, seem to have been more or less forgotten. In the case of Danny Boyle his belated and ill-advised entrance to major Hollywood movies has been completely forgotten because of a couple of belting truly Alex Garland scripted movies since, and an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. The Beach also represented after the American Psycho debacle DiCaprio’s attempt to make a post-Titanic film that proved he could act. He’s long since been able to point to his Scorsese collection, and latterly Revolutionary Road and Inception, so The Beach is also a footnote for him.

But why has Scream fallen so low in popular esteem that its belated sequel could so utterly flop? Perhaps Scream has been a victim of its own success. It brought forth a wave of self-conscious horror films like Final Destination where good jokes were as important as scary shocks, and the audience and film-makers continually winked at each other regarding clichéd conventions of horror cinema that could still be exploited to make you jump in your seat, but only if that was followed by a good pay-off line. That arguably brought forth a counter-wave, the infamous torture porn of Saw, Hostel and Wolf Creek, where the film-makers grabbed the audience by the throat, demanded they stop winking, stop turning away, look at this horror, be horrified, and start screaming now… Now it seems to safe to declare torture porn more or less dead, we seem to be stuck in a field of shlock, Piranha 3-D, the everpresent efficient teen horror, My Bloody Valentine, and nouvea 70s viciousness in the form of remakes, Last House on the Left, and nasty originals, Eden Lake. In that landscape where torture porn seems to have permanently upped the acceptable ante for both gore and viciousness the very concept of a Scream 4 is an anomaly if not an embarrassment.

I only hoped that Scream 4 might be as good as Scream 2, but truthfully it’s more like Scream 3, the one Williamson didn’t write – an efficient film with flashes of inspiration. There are wonderful moments throughout, not least Courteney Cox muttering that a massacre must take place at a Stab marathon, “what could be more meta?”; a confused David Arquette asks what that means, to which she replies “I don’t know, it’s just some word I heard the kids using.” Scream was a great film because it was original, the cold open of Scream 4 with its nods to how Scream 2 introduced Stab, a film of the events of Scream, goes far too far in alienating the audience with postmodern meta-nonsense at the expense of emotional engagement. When you have not one, not two, but three different sets of TV stars (from, deep breath, 90210, Privileged, Veronica Mars, True Blood, oh forget it) all enacting the same basic scenario with commentary on the predictability of said scenario, mixed with snipes at torture porn, it’s time to return to basics. But the basics aren’t easy. The motive of the Ghostface Killer is a huge problem. Each sequel has tied itself in ever more preposterous knots regarding motivation, and Scream 4 obeys that rule of sequels. An even greater problem is the split focus caused by the bizarre notion the film persistently voices about itself being a remake rather than a sequel. The ‘new’ versions of original characters Billy Loomis, Randy and Stu don’t work at all because they are severely underwritten, while the beloved original characters aren’t given enough screen-time either. Hayden Panetierre and Emma Roberts are the only actors of the new young cast given enough material to really make an impression, and a good deal of this is purely due to their skills rather than the script. Roberts in particular is not afraid to be shown in a far colder light emotionally than you can imagine her aunt ever being willing to play, and her relationship with screen cousin Neve Campbell powers the film.

And then, if you’re me, you realise something with a shock while watching – Adam Brody isn’t going to step up to the plate in the third act and do something, his minor supporting role is just that; he has been totally forgotten. How terrifyingly forgotten The OC has become. Only 4 years after it finished its 4 season run which was captivating and hilarious and spawned a whole set of music, books, comics, styles and clichés, Seth Cohen himself, Adam Brody, can’t seem to get good parts anymore outside of Jason Reitman enabled cameos. Josh Schwartz is now the guy who co-created Gossip Girl or Chuck. He’s never thought of as the youngest creator of a primetime network show which was what The OC made him. And so it is that Kevin Williamson is now the co-creator of The Vampire Diaries not the wunderkind behind Scream or even Dawson’s Creek. Glory is fleeting…