Taking Another Stab: SCREAM VI

Scream VI works on two levels, as befits an entry in this series of slasher meta-commentaries. The first is as a bloody mystery, a cast slashed to gory bits one by one as a way of ruling out suspects until a grand splattery finale reveals all. The second is slyer, as a movie about characters who are really tired of being in this series. When Jenna Ortega, a survivor from the last one, turns to her sister (Melissa Barrera), a fellow carryover from 5, to fatalistically ask when, or if, she can simply be a normal person again, I felt that exhausted sadness. She’s over it. Later, a victim bleeding profusely from the abdomen will turn to look practically straight down the camera and mutter, “fuck this franchise.” Oh, not this one, per se. In the world of the Screams, their real slaughters have been regularly turned into the series-within-the-series of Stab movies. Its a neat ouroboros, sometimes too neatly fan-flattering, here turned into something like a lament. The movie’s world is ever more full of costumes and posters, having thoroughly commodified the traumas our characters drag around with them. Talk about intrusive thoughts. Their whole world is intrusive, and this movie is sharp enough to realize, in our modern moment, the internet facilitates that. It hasn’t just made pop culture fandoms louder; it’s made true crime and conspiracy theories part of them, and a form of social currency among the know-nothings who flatter themselves amateur truth-tellers. It’s its own brand of hell those caught in the center of tragedy can’t escape.

Here’s a movie about survivors threatened once again by the Ghostface Killer, this time in New York City, with yet another villain’s elaborate plot to draw blood from the old familiar tropes. They’re menaced by the ghost of sequels present. It’s tense and twisty and violent and funny, and well-paced, balanced, and framed. It stands comfortably with the best of the series, albeit without the late Wes Craven’s human touch balancing mean-spirited cleverness with genuine feelings for its victims. Still, this one’s very best moments—of tender connection, of honest emotion, of sisterly bonding or genuine first-blushes of romance—hook into a similar place. Returning directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick redeem the worst routine dissatisfying notes of their previous attempt at sequalizing the once-dormant franchise by using this effort to turn their newer characters from stock repeats into something closer to understandable individuals. (Even the legacy characters who appear (namely Courtney Cox and Hayden Panettiere) and the fresh faces (Dermot Mulroney, Liana Liberato, and Jack Champion) step into something closer to believable focus akin to the series’ Craven efforts.) The movie runs them back through the machinery of its punishing plot, and wrings enjoyment out of it, even as it sees the whole slasher cycle as a curse its characters are doomed to relive every few years until the box office appetite for these cools off again.

To Be Or Not: IF I STAY

It’s cliché to say that every problem seems like a life-or-death scenario when you’re young. But the truth is, with burgeoning plans for colleges, careers, and relationships, being a teenager is filled with decisions that can have a lasting impact. Teens feel that pressure. It’s the first time people have a good deal of autonomy over the course their lives will take. No wonder it’s a point in life that leads to such angst, and great movies chronicling it. If I Stay is not a great movie about being a teenager, but it captures some of the subjective experience of having the weight of your future on your hesitant steps into something like adulthood.

It’s a teen weepie that features a high school girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) dealing with her first real boyfriend (Jamie Blackley). She’s a brilliant cellist and wants to go to Julliard. He wants to stay with his skinny-jeans-wearing garage band in Portland and hope to get signed to a record label. Will they break up or try a long distance relationship? It’s a small problem shot in typical glossy teen melodrama style. I’ll admit it’s not very interesting from the outside, but the movie does a good job of communicating the subjective enormity of the question.

What elevates this standard teen romance is a very real injection of life and death. She’s in a car crash. It’s bad. She’s rushed to the hospital, along with her parents (Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard) and little brother (Jakob Davies). She’s in a coma. Prognosis is iffy. We see the previous 18 months of her life, the romance, the college worries, fun times with parents, dates, concerts, practices, school, hanging out with friends, and more. Intercut with those moments are shots of her hooked up to tubes in the ICU, heart monitors beeping while tearful bedside visitors – grandparents (Stacy Keach and Gabrielle Rose), friends (Liana Liberato and Lauren Lee Smith) – wait and worry. All the while, and here’s the movie’s biggest and corniest symbolic flourish, the girl’s spirit walks around the hospital, watching her family, remembering her past, and trying to decide whether she’ll stay or go, whether she’ll wake up or die.

Despite bouncing between her normal teen past and comatose present, all this is presented in a fairly conventional and linear fashion, little time for artsy expressiveness. Imagine what a Terrence Malick or Apichatpong Weerasethakul would do with this material, and then forget it. This is a movie more interested in tenderly evocative prose rather than cinematic poetry. Documentarian R.J. Cutler makes his fiction film debut here and brings to it a good eye, fine pace, and delicate touch. He pulls emotional triggers without seeming to be excessively manipulative about it. Major weepy potential is softly played, sad without belaboring the point. The slick widescreen photography by John de Borman is beautifully blocked in a way that doesn’t call attention to its casual beauty, while the editing finds minor trembles of emotional stream of consciousness in standard plotting that gains power through its juxtapositions.

On its own, the girl’s life would be a minor, but likeable, pokey drama. It’s pleasant to spend time with her great parents. They’re cool, former punk rockers. They’re understanding, judiciously permissive and always ready with smart advice well spoken. There are also some minor pleasures to be found in a teen romance that plucks at some of the right heartstrings. Adapting Gayle Forman’s novel, screenwriter Shauna Cross, who also wrote the wonderful roller derby comedy Whip It, has a good feel for detail. It’s genuine in its approach to quiet fumbling, biting of the lower lip, sudden moves. Worries about separating over a long distance possibility are shortsighted and nicely observed. A first love scene is neatly edited with a series of dissolves, set to an acoustic cover of Beyoncé’s “Halo,” as the girl compares caressing the boy’s body to playing the cello. It’s sweet.

Juxtaposing average teen movie worries with a ghostly bedside vigil brings a mournful weight to it. Sure, these are ordinary teen concerns, not overly original or especially interesting on their own. But through the risk that these last few months might end up being her last, there’s an underlying urgency. When I read in the news about a car accident that leaves an entire family broken apart, dead or dying, it makes me feel sick. The normal details of their lives are suddenly imbued with a melancholy. If someone survives such a crisis, how can one go on living with so much suddenly gone? That If I Stay captures even a glimmer of that response is to its credit. I didn’t need Moretz wandering hospital halls to provide it.

But this is an affecting, heartfelt little drama that slowly overcomes its shaggier artificial impulses to find a strong emotional core, admirably underplaying big moments when it could go histrionic. The climax turns on two small scenes. The first finds Stacy Keach delivering a teary monologue in what is one of the most vulnerable performances of his career. The second is a flashback campfire sing-along jam session to Smashing Pumpkins in which all the characters spend what will be their final happiest moments together. Both are played quietly, all the more effective for it. Commercial concessions, like an overreliance on voiceover that tramples over potentially powerful silences, only smooth over rough edges. It’s a good movie, with fine performances and solid resonances. But imagining longer silences, more artful editing, I could see a great film in there somewhere.

Lights On, Nobody Home: TRESPASS

Trespass is what is known as a bad movie, plain and simple. It’s phony to its core. The movie comes from director Joel Schumacher who has made some good movies and some bad ones over the course of his career. This is definitely a bad one. It’s a home invasion thriller that’s only the slightest mood shift away from being a flat-out comedy. It’s a film of stupid criminals and lousy hostages that keeps inventing new reasons to keep the characters in the same place well past any kind of logic, internal or otherwise.

The movie starts when the rich man (Nicolas Cage) comes home to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and daughter (Liana Liberato). We know he’s rich because we hear the sound of Cage rapidly negotiating the price of a diamond accompanying the opening aerial shot that tracks his convertible down a long winding road leading to their beachfront steel-and-glass mansion that’s tucked away in the forest. Once there, he continues to negotiate while he tries to help his wife make sure their willful teenage daughter doesn’t get to the local bad girl’s house for a party.

The girl huffs upstairs and the husband and wife prepare for their evening, which is soon interrupted by a home invasion. A group of thieves barges in and waves around their guns while barking for security codes. It turns out they know about the diamonds and would really like them. There’s the conflict. It’s a good thing that the daughter snuck out of the house and sped away in a friends car just a scene or two earlier.  

What follows is filled with yelling, whining, cajoling, pleading, and frustrated barking from all of the characters all of the time. It’s monotonous. As the head of the gang, Ben Mendelsohn stalks about while his gang members wander around looking mean, constantly waving around guns that make clickety-clack noises at the slightest touch. These crooks are so obvious that you can size them up in a second, like the henchman played by Cam Gigandet who will pretty clearly end up being the criminal with second thoughts since he gets so shifty eyed in his every reaction shot. Collectively the gang seems to be pretty dumb. They keep changing their demands and producing different threatening objects. It’s like they want to hang around this house for some time.

Have they even thought this plan through? Sure, they have electrical tape around their fingertips, but their masks are so porous I was identifying the actors underneath them almost immediately. And all Cage has to do is start poking holes in their scheme and the characters get to sit around and threaten each other all night. At one point the daughter sneaks back into the house and walks straight into the danger. Why? If she were smart enough to call for help the movie would be over.

Karl Gajdusek’s script does everything it can to keep the movie rolling forward beyond all plausibility. The homeowners are able to take their captors off task with such skill that I found myself hoping for some ultimate ludicrous twist that never materializes despite the ever-growing pile of ludicrous twists and diversions. This is the kind of movie in which the intelligence of any given character at any given time is dependent solely on what the plot requires at that point. These aren’t characters. These are barely caricatures. It’s all one big phony construct. This is barely a film. It’s a feature-length stalling tactic that keeps the characters, and the audience, locked up in this house well past any reason they should be.

Quick Look: TRUST

If Trust is not the worst movie of the year so far, and it’s not, it’s certainly one of the queasiest. I could imagine a good version of a movie about a young teen girl seduced by an online stranger who then rapes her and throws her, and her family’s, life into emotional overdrive. This is not that movie. Not at all. It’s a sick vortex of awful hysterics and kids-these-days grumbling that plays as overblown and, worse, fake. It even sucks in usually dependable actors like Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, and Viola Davis. Young Liana Liberato, as the victim, is quite good as well, but the film isn't up to the level of the cast. I’m not expecting a movie like this to have easy resolution, or resolution at all for that matter, but I wish director David Schwimmer and writers Andy Bellin and Robert Festinger could have had something of interest to add to a timely discussion. Instead, they have this manipulative, pat tripe masquerading as a Very Serious Statement. It’s clunky, formulaic, and uses online culture as nothing more than an overwhelming source of paranoia. What a slimy well-meaning picture. Here’s a review in two onomatopoeias: Yuck and Ugh.  It’s so purposelessly cruel to its characters and its audience that the name of the girl’s school, New Trier High School, is an unfortunate coincidence.