Scream 2

Year 13, Day 295 - 10/22/21 - Movie #3,960

BEFORE: Yeah, I'm going "all in" on this franchise - if not now, then when?  If not me, then who?  Umm, whom?  I don't even know if I can pass this way again, so let's just get it over with.  Last year was the year I finally watched the "Twilight" series, and the year before that, it was "The Hunger Games". So really, it's four films where I don't have to worry about linking, I just know it's going to happen - because I checked.  And they're talking now about a new "Scream" movie maybe coming out this year, so I may not watch it next year, but I'll watch it eventually, and I need to be ready.  These things all tend to come around again, eventually.

As with the "Scooby-Doo" films, I've got a married (at the time, anyway) couple carrying over between films, Courteney Cox and David Arquette both carry over from "Scream". 

THE PLOT: Two years after the first series of murders, as Sidney acclimates to college life, someone donning the Ghostface costume begins a new string of killings. 

AFTER: Really, isn't this just the SAME thing that the SAME writer did with "I Know What You Did Last Summer", he moved the lead female character up from high school to college, but set the mysterious killer on her trail again?  If you have to steal from YOURSELF as a writer, you might be really desperate.  OR, they sometimes stay, find what works and stick with it, maybe that's also true.  But is this my life now, just watching the same storyline with (some of) the same people, trying to figure out which one is the killer, before it gets revealed?  I think I started nodding off last night at the worst possible moment, just before the killer was going to reveal, umm, THEMself (whew, covered it, no spoilers, that was a close one). This killer's pronouns are THEM and THEY, and try not to read too much into that, mmKay?  It could be several people working together, or it could just be me trying not to give anything away.

I didn't think that a film could get more self-referential or in-jokey than "Scream", but boy, was I wrong, they really doubled down on all that here.  The opening murder takes place in a movie theater that's playing the film "Stab", which is what they call the "Scream" movies in the Scream-movieverse, because I guess having a film called "Scream" within a film called "Scream" would confuse people, and is somewhat stupid.  But having a film called "Stab" within a film called "Scream", well that helps people keep everything straight, but it's also a bit stupid.  HOWEVER, having Ghostface kill somebody in a theater FULL of people dressed up like Ghostface, all pretending to stab each other with fake, non-sharp knives, that's a little bit of genius.  Nobody even notices a REAL stabbing in the middle of all the pretend ones - it's like Ghostface is suddenly "Where's Waldo" or something.  "Did you see the killer?"  Umm, dude, like which one, there were 30 or 40 of them in the theater.  

As you may know, I worked at a movie theater all this past summer, sweeping up all the popcorn, candy and occasionally loose change that found its way to the theater floors.  I hated it, but there was a certain zen to sweeping up, I found that it did satisfy my OCD to some extent.  Without a doubt, the cleanest audiences were the ones who went to see "In the Heights", make of that what you will, and the messiest theaters were the ones showing kids movies and horror movies. Yeah, it's a gross generalization but every stereotype may have a bit of truth to it somewhere.  I never saw anybody dress up to go see a horror movie, like nobody showed up for "Candyman" wearing a hook hand or anything like that.  Maybe they did this in the 1990's but now it's not really a thing, not since somebody got shot at a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" a few years back.  

But "Stab" the movie looks an awful lot like "Scream", just with different actors playing the parts. That TV reporter wrote the book that inspired the movie "Stab", so, umm, why is she still a struggling TV reporter in California's 8th-largest TV market?  Why didn't she cash in on that movie-rights thing and quit her job?  (Sure, like THAT'S the most unbelievable thing about this movie...). But it turns out that the couple killed at the movie theater go to the same college as Sidney Prescott, the girl whose mother died several years ago, which was the murder that Cotton Weary got framed for, and in the middle of all that craziness seen in the first film, that murderer was cleared and is now a free man.  

BUT, there's another killer out there who somehow also thinks that the best way to get revenge on Sidney is to kill other people she knows, because killing her would just be too easy?  I know, I know, it doesn't make much sense, but this killer is an "artiste" using the technique of building up suspense.  If he were ever to kill Sidney, yeah, he'd have his revenge, but then what?  What do you do with your rage after you kill the person you hate, then where's your focus, how do you even get up in the morning and make it through the day, so I get it.  You can't just kill your nemesis, you have to HURT your nemesis, you have to kill everybody she cares about, you know, in alphabetical order or by descending height or something, that's not crazy at all, you're just focused, that's all, and you'll get through this, I promise.  And then your father will love you again, I just know it. 

Wait, what? Where were we? Who said that? What was that noise upstairs? Is somebody in the house? No, thank God, but now the phone is ringing.  Oh, damn, it's that voice again, you know the one. You can leave town, go to college, try to get a new set of friends, but eventually that phone's going to ring and start asking you trivia questions about horror movies again, so you'd better be ready.  I know I am, I'm brushing up on as many horror films as I can, just in case. 

Everybody still standing after the last film is back again, like sweet but inept police officer Dewey Riley, TV newscaster who doesn't know she needs to get paid for her book rights Gale Weathers, and horror-film expert Randy Meeks, who is now a nerdy college student in film school instead of a nerdy student in high school.  And Sidney's studying drama, acting in classic Greek tragedies like "Medea", it looks like, thank God there are no triggering elements in those old plays, like knives and such, because that would really be traumatic for her. (Seriously? She's somehow OK with this?)

Those "rules" about horror movies say that the killer may already be somebody that Sidney knows - but who?  The innocent guy who went to prison for two years because of her testimony against him?  Nah, that would make sense, but it's much too obvious. Is it the TV reporter that Sidney can't help but punch in the face, every time she sees her?  Nah, that's too unlikely.  It wouldn't be...Dewey, would it?  Not sweet, lovable screw-up Dewey!  But if not any of those people, then WHO?  We need to know, because casting on "Stab 2" probably starts up in, like a few weeks, so if you can just get to the reveal, that would really help us out. Thanks!

It's a bit like predicting "The Masked Singer" (which is totally fixed, by the way, as my wife and I have determined...) when the panel presents four possibilities for the identity of the celebrity under the mask, and one of them is totally spot-on.  It's never two judges right, never four judges right, it's hardly ever ZERO judges right, it's almost always ONE judge right.  Come on, do you think I'm that naive, that Jenny McCarthy or Nicole Scherzinger suddenly has incredible powers of insight and deduction, when neither can count to TWO without taking off their top?  You just know that there's a producer who feeds the right answer to ONE dumb judge on any given week, and then there's that voting process?  Where the "audience" in the studio and at home get to determine who unmasks?  Yeah, sure, there's no way to fudge the numbers on those electronic voting devices - that's the real voting scandal to me, not the 2016 Presidential election, but all the hijinks going on with the voting on "Masked Singer", somebody really needs to look into this. Totally fixed. But I digress.

Somehow Sidney didn't die again, but hope springs eternal, there's another chance tomorrow in "Scream 3", so here's hoping...

Also starring Neve Campbell, Jamie Kennedy, Liev Schreiber (all three also carrying over from "Scream"), Sarah Michelle Gellar (last seen in "I Know What You Did Last Summer"), Laurie Metcalf (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Elise Neal (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Jerry O'Connell (last seen in "The New Guy"), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood"), Rebecca Gayheart (ditto), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Omar Epps (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Lewis Arquette (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Duane Martin, Portia de Rossi, Tori Spelling, Luke Wilson (last seen in "Middle Men"), Heather Graham (last seen in "Horns"), David Warner (last seen in "Mr. North"), Craig Shoemaker, Marisol Nichols, Philip Pavel (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), cameos from Wes Craven (also carrying over from "Scream"), Joshua Jackson (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Nancy O'Dell, Adam Shankman (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2'), Kevin Williamson and the voices of Roger L. Jackson (also carrying over from "Scream"), Selma Blair (last seen in "In Good Company")

RATING: 6 out of 10 movie sequels slightly better than their first parts

Scream

Year 13, Day 294 - 10/21/21 - Movie #3,959

BEFORE: I've got time to knock off another horror franchise before I have to link to the start of my November chain. I'm bullish on connectable horror films in the future, partially because I've got a proposed chain for Shock-tober 2022 already, and even though that may leave me with a bunch of disconnected pieces, I also made a list of franchises I hadn't yet planned on watching.  Even if I knock off the "Purge" movies next year, that still leaves franchises like the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, "Friday the 13th" movies, "Final Destination", all the "Saw" films, "Species", "Creepshow" movies, "Evil Dead", "Child's Play" and of course the obvious one, the "Halloween" franchise. There's a lot to work with, so I may never run out of horror films, but I don't have time now to research which films might help me link all the scraps I have together into a coherent chain for 2023 - it's more pressing that I put together a definitive romance chain for next February, just to make sure that none of the films left on my 2021 schedule could be crucial in making those connections.  If so, then I'll need to drop them and replace them with something else before watching them in November or December.

Drew Barrymore carries over from "Spielberg", and that's why I needed to drop in that documentary in the middle of a horror chain.  I hated to lose a movie with so much archive footage in it, it almost could have connected ANY two movies, but then again, it did exactly what I needed it to do.  There will be more movies in the future with giant casts, for example, "The French Dispatch", I wonder when I'll watch that one, what purpose will it serve?  

THE PLOT: A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a new killer, who targets the girl and her friends using horror films as part of a deadly game. 

AFTER: You learn a lot of things by watching linked movies, I can attest to that - like I already knew that the little girl from "E.T." grew up to play the first murder victim in the "Scream" franchise.  Sorry, spoiler alert for a film from 1996, if that's even possible - I sort of feel like the last person in history who hasn't watched these films yet, so I don't think that's much of a spoiler.  Also, last night I learned that the young actor who played Tim in "Jurassic Park" grew up and played John Deacon in "Bohemian Rhapsody", which I think is ever weirder than Karen Allen being in "Malcolm X" or realizing that the mother in "Close Encounters" also played the mother in "A Christmas Story". Sometimes I just have to note these things and move on, I guess.

Tonight's film featured a bunch of actors who were RED HOT in 1996, like Jamie Kennedy, Neve Campbell, and Skeet Ulrich. Yeah, their stars may have dimmed a bit since then, but at least Jamie Kennedy seemed aware of that fact when he appeared in that "Last Blockbuster" movie.  It also comes from the writer of "Dawson's Creek" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer", the director of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise, and executive producers Bob & Harvey Weinstein, now most famous for sexual harassment lawsuits. I noticed a sudden influx of Miramax films that suddenly became available on cable last year, which could mean there distribution deals were cancelled or hung up by legal issues until then, I'm not sure. I mean, good films always win out and eventually return to TV and streaming, but I do notice that they tend to come in waves.  

I also find myself tonight at the crossroads of horror and comedy (sort of?) once again - but dark comedy for sure, not like "Scooby-Doo" level slapstick comedy. There's so much self-referential material here, as if the characters in this horror movie KNOW that they're in a horror movie, they talk about "sticking around for the next reel" and certain people know all the common tropes, like the fact that teens who have sex in horror movies basically are living on borrowed time, they're doomed, but aren't we all?  Horror movies have RULES, and this is a horror movie, so naturally it has rules, too, but is that because it's following the genre rules, or poking fun at them?  Maybe a bit of both?  Don't drink, don't have sex, don't feed them after dark - no, wait a minute.  

And for God's sake, don't answer the phone when you're in the house late at night - what the HELL are you doing? I'm seeing some connections to "I Know What You Did Last Summer" here, with the killer putting people through essentially a horror-movie trivia contest, only one with deadly stakes. This was maybe the first horror film to make use of this new-fangled (at the time) technology called "cellular phones" - jeez, we'd only been granted the gift of cordless phones a short time before that, and caller ID a couple years before THAT.  But the kids watching this movie for the first time might not understand - people used to call other houses at random, for the purposes of humor or "pranking", and that person HAD to answer the phone, they had no choice.  What it really was someone you knew, or a very real radio contest, or TV's "Dialing for Dollars"?  And every time that prankster called back, the target of the prank HAD to answer, apparently, it's not like they could just turn the phone OFF or leave it off the hook, right? Wait, I think they could...

Look, the other reason I had to wait so long to watch the "Scream" films is that I wanted to wait until I forgot nearly everything I learned about the films when they were first popular, when I probably read some reviews and took in some spoilers along the way. Everything at the right time, right? So now I'm (more or less) going in to these films cold, if I knew who the killer turned out to be, I've pretty much forgotten, so that means it's OK to proceed.  BUT, once the killer is revealed, typically what came before in the movie should make some kind of sense, right?  And I'm just not sure that's what happens here, it literally could have been ANYBODY dressed up as the Ghostface Killer, the film makes that pretty clear, so there were perhaps "multiple outs" here, there just needed to be a motivation for WHY and an explanation for WHO.  I think we get that, but tomorrow's sequel's probably going to be another crap shoot, all over again.  

Even looking at the cast list for tomorrow probably reveals too much - at the very least I already knew who was going to survive the first movie, and that already counts as spoilers.  It's an unavoidable consequence of linking films together via my system, sometimes it reveals too much of what's serving as a "plot".  The loose plot here involves the lead female character's mother, who was murdered a year ago, and a local TV reporter, who believes that the man imprisoned for that murder is innocent, and wrote a book about that. When another killing takes place in the same town, could it be a copycat killing, or perhaps was the real killer never found? 

There are like a hundred little in-jokes and Easter eggs here, from the director's cameo as a school janitor dressed like pre-accident Freddie Kreuger, to the appearance of Henry Winkler as the school principal, with Fonzie's leather jacket from "Happy Days" seen hanging in his closet. I'll try to find a list somewhere, because I do dig this sort of thing.  

I'll stick it out through this series as best as I can this week, but I really hope the sequels get smarter, not dumber.  Guess I'll find out - and another reason to clear this franchise from the books this year is that they've announced a new "Scream" film in the franchise for 2022...not sure if it's a sequel or a re-boot or maybe a bit of both.  

Also starring David Arquette (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Neve Campbell (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Courteney Cox (last seen in "Springsteen and I"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Rose McGowan (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Skeet Ulrich (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Jamie Kennedy (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Joseph Whipp (last seen in "Magnum Force'), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Henry Winkler (last heard in "Scoob!"), Frances Lee McCain (last seen in "Gremlins"), Kevin Patrick Walls, Lawrence Hecht, Lynn McRee, David Booth, Carla Hatley, Lois Saunders, C.W. Morgan, with the voice of Roger L. Jackson, cameos from Linda Blair (last seen in "The Exorcist"), Wes Craven (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), and archive footage of Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "Knives Out").

RATING: 5 out of 10 gallons of fake blood

Spielberg

Year 13, Day 293 - 10/20/21 - Movie #3,958

BEFORE: And here's that documentary I was talking about, and so here's the explanation.  Try as I might, I couldn't get all of the horror franchises I wanted to line up right - sure, the "Scooby-Doo" films could link to either of the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" films and also one or two of the "Scream" films, but not both.  And then there were a few little mini-chains that would be left stranded, no matter what order I chose.  Even with the best order I could come up with, there was still a gap between "The Rage: Carrie 2" and the start of the "Scream" films, so I went looking for a horror movie that might have one star from each film in it, and there were none.  BUT, there was this documentary, only it didn't seem right to just drop this in the middle of Shock-Tober.

But then I got to thinking about it, and who directed "Jaws", one of the scariest movies ever made?  Who produced "Poltergeist", the scariest movie I ever saw at the tender age of 14, that kept me from sleeping soundly for over a week, back in 1982?  That would be Spielberg.  I didn't even think about the dinosaur movie, but parts of that one were really frightening too.  Yeah, so he's made over 50 films across all genres, but just for those three movies alone, I thought I could justify putting this one here.  So Amy Irving, aka the first Mrs. Spielberg, carries over from "The Rage: Carrie 2".

THE PLOT: A documentary on Steven Spielberg, filmmaker. Includes interviews with relatives, film critics, peers and people who have worked with him. 

AFTER: Ah, see, my instincts haven't let me down.  The FIRST two films referenced in this documentary turned out to be "Jaws" and "Poltergeist".  It makes sense, Spielberg had directed a bunch of TV work, like episodes of "Night Gallery" and "Marcus Welby, M.D.", and then of course there was "Duel" and "Sugarland Express", but nothing - NOTHING hit like "Jaws" did in the summer of 1975. Literally the first "blockbuster" big summer movie, no film had ever made that much money before, no film ever scared THAT many people over the course of a summer before. It's really sneaky if you think about it, make people afraid of sharks so they won't go to the beach, and then, where are they going to go instead?  Probably the movie theater. I know that I struck a deal with sharks then and there, I'd stay out of their ocean if they'd stay out of my bedroom, and that may be a fragile alliance but it's still in place, all these years later. 

Who knows, maybe we wouldn't have "Star Wars" be such a big hit in 1977 if not for "Jaws" in 1975, and then much of my life would have been very different.  But then right on the heels of "Star Wars" (episode 1 which was really 4) came Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", a very different sci-fi movie. I recall going to a classmate's birthday party where they parents just took all the kids out to see this movie, which I didn't really understand at the time - I mean, come on, I was expecting another "Star Wars" and it just wasn't that.  Same plan as "Jaws", though, less was more when it came to sharks and aliens, save the big effects and the reveals for the end. That's how you build up suspense, make the audience wait for the pay-off. 

It turns out, though, that all that suspense in "Jaws" was somewhat accidental, they had such problems getting the mechanical shark to work that by necessity, they had to film most of the movie without the audience seeing the shark.  Retroactively, that's what you call a "happy accident" because the reviewers praised the film for the suspense and tension that came from mostly NOT seeing the shark.  And also the jump-scares that came from when you DID see the shark. 

Speaking of birthdays, though, it's my birthday today - so I think it's well-warranted to look back through my memories today, and this film is perfect for that.  Once I got to films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "E.T." in 1982 and 1983 (umm, you know, along with the "Star Wars" movies), there was probably no stopping me when it came to movies. I was hooked, just like some big...damn, what's a big fish that you can catch on a hook?  Never mind, it'll come to me.  I needed to learn everything about "Star Wars" and "Raiders" and that led me to read George Lucas's autobiography, "Skywalking", and then somehow I started to think that maybe I could get into filmmaking.  The damage was done, and there was no turning back, and a few years later I found myself at NYU film school - so, basically Lucas and Spielberg ruined my life, took away any chance of me being in some profitable career like insurance or finance or medicine.  Eh, those all seemed too hard anyway, who wants to work hard when they can just join the circus?

Here's the problem, though, and I learned this by staying in touch with Spielberg, and Lucas, and my new friends Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, et al. - I wasn't very good at making movies.  Maybe I could have been if I had more confidence, because now it seems that every director just adopted a "fake it till you make it" attitude, and I guess I just couldn't fake it.  So halfway through film school I took a bit of a turn and started taking classes in animation, documentary production and comedy writing.  Also producing class, because I figured if I couldn't connect with my own film ideas I could devote my life to helping other people get THEIR ideas on film, and that's what happened. A year out of film school I was working as a P.A. on music videos in NYC, and then a few pieces for Sesame Street, and I worked my way up - in a couple years I was an office manager and associate producer, and I sort of didn't look back.  Umm, until 2020. 

I don't mean to compare myself to Spielberg, I wouldn't dare, there's just no reason to - he's a titan in the industry with a couple Oscars and over 50 successful films on his resume, and me, well, I've produced a few minor successes, 3 animated features and some shorts, one of which got an Oscar nomination.  This round to you, Steven - hell, all the rounds to you, I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut.  But even Spielberg made a few stinkers, like "1941" an unfunny World War II comedy that I'm surprised they even mentioned in this documentary, that's how bad it was. It's surprising that they let him direct another movie after that, it turns out World War 2 and comedy were NOT like chocolate and peanut butter, you really shouldn't mix them.  

I wish that this documentary could have just stepped chronologically through his career, but it doesn't.  They sort of grouped the films in weird ways, like once they got past the "alien" films, "Close Encounters" and "E.T". there was a grouping of the films with children in peril as lead characters, like "A.I.", "Empire of the Sun", and "The BFG".  Then there were the "World War 2/Holocaust films that weren't comedies", which means "Saving Private Ryan", "Schindler's List" and  "Munich" form some kind of trilogy. (But, do they?). And then that leaves the "political message" films, like "Amistad", "Lincoln" and "Bridge of Spies".  The two Tom Cruise sci-fi films, "Minority Report" and "War of the Worlds" form some kind of duology, I guess.  That sort of leaves "War Horse" and "Hook" out in the cold, and there's no mention at all of the 1989 film "Always" - jeez, was it THAT bad?  

Look, there were probably a dozen other ways to group these films, like why not put the four films starring Tom Hanks together - "Catch Me if You Can", "The Terminal", "Bridge of Spies" and "Saving Private Ryan", or is that too obvious?  Plus, what about "Hook"?  The Indiana Jones films get their own montage, but that's really the only franchise that he stuck with - now I've also noticed that Spielberg directed only the first film in the "Jaws" series and only two films in the "Jurassic Park" franchise, what happened after that, did he lose interest? 

The other challenge here was probably in keeping the length down to just two and a half hours - it was probably tempting to just throw in more and more great clips from great movies, this was what we called the "shoveling" technique in high-school. This is when you had to write an essay, and you'd start with a theory, and just keep listing more and more evidence that supported your theory, and then the teacher would have to agree with you.  The theory here is that Steven Spielberg is a great, talented filmmaker, and there's more evidence than is necessary to prove that point.  Still, there's a tiny bit of backlash, like should he have directed "The Color Purple"?  Did he have the proper background to direct a film on the black, lesbian experience?  At that time, it was probably just a gig, but in today's world, audiences would probably demand a director with closer ties to the subject matter.  

Still, you can't argue with success, and his films have raked in billions, and he's got the top spot as the most commercially successful director, even when you factor in "1941". I wish there had been time to include "Ready Player One", which came out a year after this documentary, but I understand you've got to make a cut-off somewhere, or the doc will never be finished. And I think I've seen all of his films, except for "Duel" and some obscure 1990 film called "The Visionary". Forgive me for being a populist, but after finally watching "The Color Purple" earlier this year, I think I'm all caught up on Spielberg's filmography, and that in itself is an accomplishment. Film #1 on this blog was "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", and now here I am, almost 13 years later, realizing that I can't do what I do without him doing what he does.  Or at least, I could, but it wouldn't mean as much. I need fuel for my engine, and like it or not, he's provided it - the same way Spielberg himself was inspired by "Lawrence of Arabia" when he was a teen.

Even if you'll never be Steven Spielberg, that's OK, I've learned to live with it. Whatever you do, keep doing what you do, persevere, and also, don't be afraid to fail. It sounds corny, but it's true, and I should know. I mean, change course if you have to, but try to keep working. That's my advice, for whatever it's worth, after 53 trips around the sun. 

Also starring Steven Spielberg (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Tom Hanks (ditto), Bob Balaban (ditto), J.J. Abrams (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Leah Adler, Christian Bale (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Eric Bana (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Stephen Bochco, James Brolin (last seen in "Burlesque"), Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Coyote (last seen in "Sphere"), Dustin Hoffman (ditto), Daniel Craig (last seen in "Knives Out"), Tom Cruise (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Daniel Day-Lewis (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Brian De Palma, Laura Dern (last seen in "Little Women" (2019)), Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), David Edelstein, Sally Field (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), Harrison Ford (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), David Geffen (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Doris Kearns Goodwin, Holly Hunter (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Michael Kahn, Janusz Kaminski, Lawrence Kasdan, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Ben Kingsley (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Tony Kushner, George Lucas, Frank Marshall (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Janet Maslin, Melissa Mathison, Todd McCarthy, Dennis Muren, Liam Neeson (last seen in "Third Person"), Walter F. Parkes, Michael Phillips, Sid Sheinberg, Martin Scorsese, A.O. Scott, Anne Spielberg, Arnold Spielberg, Nancy Spielberg, Sue Spielberg, Tom Stoppard, John Williams, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Robert Zemeckis, Vilmos Zsigmond, 

with archive footage of Alan Alda (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Karen Allen (last seen in "Malcolm X"), William Atherton (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Richard Attenborough (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Margaret Avery (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "The Go-Go's"), Ruby Barnhill (last seen in "The BFG"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), John Belushi (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Adam Goldberg (ditto), Gene Shalit (ditto), Ed Bradley, Marlon Brando (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Edward Burns (last seen in "27 Dresses"), John Candy, Kate Capshaw (also last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Dana Carvey (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Barack Obama (ditto), Sean Connery (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Alec Guinness (ditto), David Costabile (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Joan Crawford, Melinda Dillon (last seen in "Reign Over Me"), Hugh Downs (last seen in "Mermaids"), Denholm Elliott (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Peter Falk (last seen in "Employee of the Month"), Morgan Freeman (last heard in "Coming 2 America"), Paul Freeman, Teri Garr (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Danny Glover (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Tina"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Cary Guffey, Mark Hamill (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "Like Father"), Alfred Hitchcock, Hal Holbrook (last seen in "Promised Land"), Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Serenity" (2019)), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "The Dresser (2015)), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Ben Johnson (last seen in "Hustle"), Wayne Knight (last seen in "Cheaper By the Dozen"), Charlie Korsmo (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Ronald Lacey, Marcia Lucas, Robert MacNaughton, Lee Majors, Joseph Mazzello (last seen in "Bohemian Rhapsody"), Mike Myers (ditto), Samantha Morton (last seen in "In America"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"), Frances O'Connor (last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), Kevin J. O'Connor (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Peter O'Toole (last heard in "The Sandpiper"), Al Pacino (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Dan Rather (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), Ariana Richards, John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "Time Lapse"), Giovanni Ribisi (last heard in "The Virgin Suicides"), Miranda Richardson (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Pat Roach, Oliver Robins, Geoffrey Rush (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Clear History"), Mark Rylance (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Roy Scheider (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Omar Sharif (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Robert Shaw (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Martin Short (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Tom Snyder (also last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Robert Stack (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Howl"), Henry Thomas (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Francois Truffaut, Christopher Walken (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Dee Wallace (last seen in "Love & Mercy"), Dennis Weaver, Robin Williams (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Robert Young and the voice of Maurice LaMarche (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond").

RATING: 6 out of 10 episodes of "Amazing Stories" (also conspicuously absent...hmmm)

The Rage: Carrie 2

Year 13, Day 291 - 10/18/21 - Movie #3,957

BEFORE: There have been a few articles written recently about the too-common practice of having actors in their late twenties, or even early thirties, being cast as high-school students - exceptions can be made, of course, for films like "Never Been Kissed", where there's an older character actually pretending to be a high-school student, but for the most part, casting directors seem to think that the audience can't tell the difference between a teenage actor and an older one. Right now the focus is on 28-year-old Ben Platt trying to pass in "Dear Evan Hansen", and apparently failing. 

Tonight's film is probably guilty of this practice, across the board.  Lead actress Emily Bergl was 24 when the film was released in 1999, Jason London and co-star Dylan Bruno were 27, and Mena Suvari was 20.  At least one actor, Zachery Ty Bryan, was age appropriate at 18.  But if you go back to the original "Carrie" film, which was released in 1976, star Sissy Spacek was 27 at the time, John Travolta was 22, Amy Irving was 23, Nancy Allen was 26 and William Katt was 25.  I guess age ain't nothing but a number, but come on, at some point didn't these actors feel a little bit ridiculous playing high-school kids?  

Work is where you find it, I suppose, and high-school's just a perfect setting for a horror movie - even before you add any monsters, demons, aliens or supernatural powers.  Aren't the horrors of gym class scary enough by themselves?  (I guess for some people it would be the exams or the school lunches, but for me it was gym class.)

Robert D. Raiford carries over from "The Handmaid's Tale"

THE PLOT: A horrible massacre strikes up after an outcast teenage girl is taunted by a group of high school jocks, all of them unaware of her cutthroat telekinetic powers. 

AFTER: I suppose this last week of filming hasn't been very kind to teenagers and young women, first they were stalked in the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise, and then they were turned into unwilling surrogate babymakers for infertile couples in "The Handmaid's Tale", and now in this one, Rachel and the other teens in her school are dated and dumped by the football jocks, who are playing some kind of seduction game with all the girls in school, assigning point values to each conquest.  Rachel is unaware of the contest and develops real feelings for Jesse, especially after he helps take her dog to the vet following an accident, but later on when she realizes that she's just a pawn in this ratings-system game, she gets very angry - which would only be a problem if she had weird telekinetic powers like that "Carrie" girl did at the same school, 20 years ago. 

It's a little funky here that the film is subtitled "Carrie 2", when there's nobody named Carrie in the story, and this leads me to think that there was much debate over whether this should be a remake of the classic 1976 horror film based on a Stephen King story, or an indirect sequel.  The story ended up being so similar, though, that it's essentially BOTH, a sequel AND a remake, or maybe a reboot.  Probably there was one studio executive in the meeting who ended up in a fetal position on the floor, rocking back and forth while muttering that marketing's going to be a bitch because the character mentioned in the title doesn't even appear in the movie.  Jesus, why not just do a re-make, if it's going to follow the same exact plot points, because as it is, focusing on Rachel when this is clearly just Carrie's story repeating itself. 

They did get Amy Irving back from the original film, her character somehow survived prom night, and yep, she's got the same name, Sue Snell, and she's older and she now works as a counselor at the high school in the same town.  Very convenient, because of course she remembers what went down with Carrie White back in her high-school days, and when Rachel starts displaying the same powers, there's a half-baked theory that maybe they're half-sisters or something, but it never really gets proven or disproven. Sue thinks maybe they had the same father - but 23 years apart?  I suppose it's possible. Sue's theory is that the telekinesis is passed down through the father's genes, but what does she base this on? How many psychotic  telekinetic girls are there to form this theory around? 

This is just one of many questionable choices made during this film - another one is having the character played by the biggest name actress at the time commit suicide early on.  Between "American Pie" and "American Beauty", Mena Suvari was putting asses in theater seats back then, so by all means, let's write her character out within the first 10 minutes of the movie, that's a great plan. No worries, we've got Emily Bergl to hold everyone's attention...

But this suicide causes a lot of trouble at school - the football player who was playing "Date & Dump" with her was 18 and she was only 16, and that's a statutory no-no.  So that football player suddenly has to deny sleeping with her, and get back the photos they took together on their date. (This was back when photos had to be taken to a drug-store or photo-center to be developed, and you had to wait like three days to get them back, you couldn't just take a photo with your phone and see it instantly. I know.)  And who works at the Photo Hut?  Why, Rachel, of course.  

So at first I think Jesse had to try to date Rachel just to get these photos - but then there's also this points-system dating game that everyone's playing, and then he helps her with her dog and maybe develops real feelings for her.  This is what's known as a "convergence", or perhaps "plot point overkill", the screenwriter is determined to get these two together, no matter what, so he creates multiple paths to get there.  Later on, Rachel doesn't know which end is up, whether Jesse has genuine emotional depth, or if they're together for one of the other reasons.  Umm, girl, he's a football jock, so probably he's as shallow as a puddle.  Somehow this is the opposite of a writer painting himself into a corner, instead he's metaphorically splashing a bucket of paint around the whole room just to make sure that doesn't happen. 

It's a football town where football rules, so there's no chance of those rape charges sticking, and after that, the football team is basically allowed to do whatever they want to whomever they want, who cares as long as they win the state championship, right?  Because Amurica. So sure, why not reveal the sex game to the girls at the big blowout party, because the recruiters saw the game, everybody's getting a scholarship and what's a helpless girl going to do about it?  It's not like she's got some crazy telekinetic power that can help her get revenge on the men who tortured her, right?  Oh, wait...

A few years later, in 2013, somebody else did a remake of the original, and I have that one, too, only it doesn't link to anything else this year.  But I got both this one and that one on DVD about a year ago, and I'm honestly in no hurry to watch the remake - I think I can work it in next year, though, if my plans pan out. Like this one, it's probably just the same old story being told again, only slightly differently. 

Also starring Emily Bergl (last seen in "Blue Jasmine"), Jason London (last seen in "Dazed and Confused"), Dylan Bruno (last seen in "Taken 3"), J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Amy Irving (last seen in "Adam"), Zachery Ty Bryan, John Doe (last seen in "Wyatt Earp"), Charlotte Ayanna (last seen in "Training Day"), Rachel Blanchard (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Justin Urich, Mena Suvari (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Elijah Craig, Eddie Kaye Thomas (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), Clint Jordan, Kate Skinner, Gordon Clapp (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Steven Ford (last seen in "Black Hawk Down"), Rus Blackwell, Harold Surratt, David Lenthall (last seen in "Love Liza"), Deborah Meschan, Katt Shea, Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Kayla Campbell, with archive footage of Sissy Spacek (last seen in "Hot Rod"), William Katt (last seen in "The Other Side of the Wind") and the voice of Piper Laurie (last seen in "White Boy Rick").

RATING: 4 out of 10 shaved heads

The Handmaid's Tale

Year 13, Day 290 - 10/17/21 - Movie #3,956

BEFORE: There is a third film in the "I Know What You Did..." franchise, in addition to the current TV series - again, I feel like everything will be a streaming TV series someday if it isn't already - but the 2nd sequel shares NO actors with the first two films, so I can't go there. Rules are rules, except when I want to grant exemptions. So I had to change tactics a bit, move over to another franchise - "The Handmaid's Tale" is also a series now, it's been killing it on...Netflix? Or is it on Amazon? The fact that I don't even know for sure shows you how little interest I have in streaming series. (It's on HULU? Really? If Amazon is like McDonald's and Netflix is like Burger King, Hulu's like the Dairy Queen of streaming...like it's great if you want ice cream, but who goes there for burgers?)

Sure, I watched "Tiger King", "Queen's Gambit" and "Norm MacDonald Has a Show" over the past year, but I've been avoiding "The Boys", "The Umbrella Academy" and most recently, whatever "Squid Game" is. They may all be fine productions, and those first two are based on comic books so they MAY be right up my alley, but I watch so many movies that I just haven't got time for any new series, unless they're revivals of "Law & Order" or "CSI". THOSE I will make time for. 

Muse Watson carries over from "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" - at least I've been assured by the IMDB that he's in this film somewhere. 

THE PLOT: Under a dystopian religious tyranny, most women cannot conceive children. Those young women who can live in a form of sexual slavery to provide children for influential families. 

AFTER: I know what you may be thinking - "How is this a horror movie?  There are no witches, demons, vampires or zombies in it..." But it is one, isn't it? Just not the typical Halloween-y kind, but the fact that this COULD all be real someday is what makes it scary, right?  I mean, what's more terrifying, a zombie that can't possibly exist saying "I'm coming for you...to eat your brains!" or a Supreme Court justice saying "I'm coming for you...to take away your reproductive rights!"  You can totally team up with your friends this year to go to a costume party as the conservative justices - seriously, what's scarier than Brett Kavanagh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett and Clarence Thomas in a room together? If you don't have an African-American friend available, just stick to the three Trump appointees, that's still plenty scary, and if you've got another female in your group, just add Zombie Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. Halloween solved, you just need some black robes and a couple gavels.  You're welcome. 

I'm really lucky that the linking this year allowed this one to be part of the mix, because I put this chain together a few months BEFORE the recent anti-abortion laws passed in Texas. Come on, we all know the new laws aren't going to stick, they're clearly unconstitutional, but still, this sort of thing is very worrisome, especially when we all know that the rich people are still going to find ways to get abortions for THEIR daughters, it's really just another way to punish the underprivileged and exert control. But the GOP seems more confused than ever - without access to abortion, won't there be MORE people below the poverty line, MORE people born to poor parents, and therefore FEWER people of privilege, who are the ones more likely to vote Republican? I'm thinking there's a contradiction in there somewhere, low-cost and available abortions for all is something that helps keep the U.S. birthrate down, might help keep the world from being overpopulated, and that means less of a strain on the planet, more resources for all, and we'll all be better off in the long run. Somehow the Republicans tend to forget that elections are all a numbers game, and fewer abortions could translate into more voting Democrats 20 years from now, and that should be something they DON'T want, right? It's kind of like how the GOP is against vaccination mandates and mask mandates, without realizing that this stance could kill off more of their Republican supporters in the long run, it's simply penny-wise and pound foolish.

But I've got to consider tonight's cautionary tale and take it at face value, the source was a novel written in 1985 by Margaret Atwood, set in Gilead, a country that used to be the United States but had "gone wrong" - the film doesn't specify exactly when or how it went wrong, which might have been helpful here. My guess is that Atwood looked around at the conservative policies of the Reagan era (Moral Majority, evangelical preachers, right-wing politicians) and just projected all that into the future to a somewhat illogical conclusion. I recorded this off of NYC's PBS station, which runs three semi-obscure movies every Saturday night (one short film, one "classic" feature and one "indie" feature) and the movie's host couldn't stop talking about how this 1990 film was poorly received at the time of release, but in the end, was just a few decades ahead of its time.  I'm sort of on the fence about this, though, because it feels like Atwood and this movie got some things right, but other things wrong.  

In the future of Gilead, there's been some kind of widespread disease (OK, check) possibly related to pollution or toxic waste (umm, could still happen) that rendered 90% of women infertile (nope, not yet, though the possibility of infertility was allegedly contributing to vaccine hesitancy). There are checkpoints at the U.S. borders in this future, but they're there to keep Americans from LEAVING, not to prevent immigrants from entering - so that's a 180-degree big miss, but we do have travel bans still in place, right?  So let's call that one a push.  The people trying to flee the U.S. are rounded up and treated as undesirables, with the fertile women among them "recruited" into the Handmaid's program. Then there's a montage of black people being similarly rounded-up, and since the rest of the movie is African-American free, is this some kind of riff on Hitler's concentration camps? Sure, we'd like to think this could never happen in America, especially since we're on a path to Caucasians becoming a minority over time (again, GOP, if this happens, and you don't approve, your anti-abortion policies are partially to blame) but the U.S. is still the country that rounded up Japanese-Americans during World War II and put them in camps.  Internment camps, sure, not death camps, but it's still a human rights violation. 

So then the movie explores the sexual politics of the new reality - but again, it's the social mores of the 1980's projected forward, not necessarily the social mores of today. Yes, of course, today's women should always, always be on their guard to retain and maintain their social status and the equal rights that have been fought for over time. But it's just not the same world that it was in the 1980's, women are having children later, many are more focused on career than family, and then you've got gay rights and trans rights in the mix, blended families and diversity and surrogate parents and honestly, isn't the nuclear family just a quaint remnant of the past at this point? I've been in many situations, even recently, when I realized I was probably the only straight person in the room and I felt like a total throwback. So in 1990 it was probably quite shocking to have a married couple use a younger, more fertile woman to carry a child to term, but now it's just another way to have a baby.  Bringing a third person into a marital relationship was something of a jaw-dropper back then, but now we just call it a "thrupple".  (Really? The English language is quite flexible and diverse, but is that honestly the BEST name we could come up with?)

But of course, there's the issue of consent.  The handmaids just didn't sign up for this, and that's where the "horror" element comes into play here.  The fertile women in the minority are not in the program willingly, and the program itself seems to be religious-based, Old Testament style, and also has elements of brainwashing and hive-mind mentality.  Sorry, to me "religion" and "brainwashing" are nearly synonymous, but I'm not sure how you feel about it all. I was raised Catholic and my parents were very involved in the local parish, but at some point during mass when everybody stands up together, sits down together, recites the same prayer together, I started to feel like I was in a cult, so I got myself out.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but I just want you to know that you've got options, you can stop going to church at any time, just saying.  If God exists and is everywhere, they why do I have to go to church? Who benefits? Probably the people passing the collection plate.  

Where were we? Oh, right, rape. Brainwashing, subjugation of minorities, separating parents from their children, using women as baby-makers against their will, how is this NOT a horror movie? That 10% of women who were still fertile just couldn't organize themselves into a powerful voting bloc, and a substantial number of older infertile women no doubt had some say in subverting their rights, because they still wanted children, for some reason (I don't understand the appeal of having kids either, but hey, you do you.). Believe it or not, this does seem possible, considering how many women live in red states and voted for Trump, at least the first time, so yeah, they voted conservatively and are apparently anti-abortion and are actively selling out their own gender, because they somehow believe it benefits them to do so. It's a head-scratcher for sure, but that's where we find ourselves. My guess is these are the same women protesting vaccination and mask mandates at their kids schools, which is also confusing, don't you WANT your kids' teachers vaccinated, don't you WANT your kids to be healthy and NOT catch COVID and NOT bring it home to kill you and Grandma?  Oh, right, you want your personal freedoms, and congratulations, you get to keep those, but now Granny is dead.  

There are signs of hope - fewer women voted for Trump the second time around, which is encouraging - I'm guessing the 2020 election split a lot of families right down the middle. Many wives voted for Biden, even if they didn't tell their husbands about it.  Single women, gay women, trans women, women who were turned off by Trump's sexual history, all that gave Biden 57% of the female vote, while he only got 45% of the male vote.  Trump got 53% of the male vote, so you just know that somewhere right now, GOP leaders are trying to figure out a way to allow only men to vote in 2024, right?  But I'm sorry, Miss Atwood, the future is female. There simply are more female-Americans than male-Americans, and a greater percentage of them turn up and vote. While women didn't get the right to vote in American until 1920, I just read about how they started voting differently from men around 1980.  The "blue wave" that put more Democrats into the House in 2018 was also called a "women's wave", and now we've got a female VP for the first time ever, and I wish Biden good health, but on the other hand, we're just one bad ticker away from a female President. I secretly really want to see the GOP lose their shit over that. 

Now back to the scary stuff - 55% of white women still voted for Trump in 2020, despite his horrible record of molesting and abusing women, despite the possible loss of reproductive rights, despite the possibility of putting more conservative justices on the Supreme Court and turning the U.S. into Gilead. WTF, white women? Why throw your fellow females under the bus? Is this a race thing, a class thing, or a self-loathing thing? It's another head-scratcher to me.  

Anyway, back to the movie. Maybe the Hulu series really is the best way to go, because over four seasons (and counting) they've really had the time to flesh out a lot of the ideas concerning the social politics of the future and the subjugation of the fertile women into a constantly-abused working class - which again, you'd like to THINK couldn't happen because of this thing called the Constitution, but who can say?  The 1990 movie, which many people seem to have forgotten completely about, does seem a bit rushed, by comparison. There are some good plot ideas put forward here, but many of them are also very nebulous and seem not completely thought through?  I could get more into detail here about what works and what doesn't work, but it scarcely matters. Like, how can the commander and his wife consider the baby to be THEIRS, when perhaps both of them are infertile, and they're neither the mother or the father of the baby?  And where are the women who become infertile and say, "Oh, God, what a relief!  Now I can just live my life and enjoy myself!"  

The screenplay here was written by the esteemed Harold Pinter, but when the film's director asked for revisions, Pinter was simply too busy, and referred the director back to Margaret Atwood, the author of the novel. I don't even have time to discern all the differences between page and screen here, but apparently they're substantial - this film was by default written by committee, apparently, and maybe that's why it doesn't feel like it truly ends, it just sort of stops. Any time you take a 500-page novel and condense it down to a 110-minute film, that's bound to happen. As always, my rating below reflects my immediate enjoyment of the film, and is not necessarily a measure of the film's ultimate importance and/or cultural impact. But maybe the whole reason we have dystopian cautionary tales is to make sure that those futures never come to pass.  So register to vote, stay informed, stay vigilant, and "Illegitimi non carborundum". 

Also starring Natasha Richardson (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Faye Dunaway (last seen in "The Champ"), Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "The Wife"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Victoria Tennant, Blanche Baker, Traci Lind, Reiner Schöne, Robert D. Raiford, Bill Owen, David Dukes, Blair Nicole Struble, Zoey Wilson, Kathryn Doby, Lucia Hartpeng, Karma Ibsen Riley, Lucile McIntyre, Allison Holmes, Mirjam Bohnet. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 games of Scrabble