Scream 4 | Just Go with It | Unknown | Somewhere

The Scream movies have always been about writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven wanting to have their cake and eat it too; on one hand, these are “smart” horror parodies where the characters know that they´re in a slasher film and all the rules of the game, and on the other, the filmmakers abide by said rules in an attempt to get away with delivering the cheap thrills of a traditional slasher film. You can´t have it both ways, sez me; it´s amusing when a character points out the cliché of a car not starting, and then her car won´t start. But it ain´t scary.

Scream 4, like the previous films, simultaneously sends up and pays homage to the horror genre; like those films, however, it isn´t really a horror film, save for the killer-in-a-mask conceit. It plays out like an Old Dark House (or Scooby-Doo) mystery, keeping us guessing at who the killer is as bodies fall and suspects are eliminated. As one of the characters says during the film, “the unexpected is now the expected;” to really surprise us, Scream 4 would have to play things straight. But it´s far too late for that. Instead, the film successfully obscures who the killer is, but by revelation time, we´ve been guessing so long we no longer care.

The movie that follows it, however, is bloated and tiresome: we´ve seen all this before, in the earlier Scream films, the films that they parodied, and the films that have since parodied them. There´s nothing new here. To differentiate from the previous outings, there´s a greater emphasis on comedy, which only sometimes comes off – a scene with the killer, right after all is revealed, is (accidental?) comic genius. But it´s at the expense of the horror/thriller elements; Scream 4 is in no way scary (outside of a few boo! moments, there´s nary an effort to scare us) and the suspense is dialed down a few notches, too.

Williamson crams a lot of ideas into his script, including thoughts on horror sequels and remakes and throwaway references to classics like Peeping Tom and Suspiria. After four films, they only provide fleeting amusement for the horror aficionado. Scream 4 makes for an interesting comparison to Craven´s last film, My Soul to Take, which was basically the same movie played straight; that film was better directed and more atmospheric, but lacked Williamson´s self-referential creativity. The end result, however, is the same.

Just Go with It

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Directed by Dennis Dugan. Starring Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler, Nicole Kidman, Bailee Madison, Eric West, Dave Matthews, Rachel Specter, Elena Satine, Kent Avenido, Brooklyn Decker, Dana Goodman, Jonathan Loughran, Peter Dante. Written by Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling, based on the screenplay for the film Cactus Flower written by I.A.L. Diamond, from the stage play by Abe Burrows and the original French play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy.

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Just Go with It was originally a French play, adapted into English by Abe Burrows and then into a screenplay for a 1969 film by I.A.L. Diamond. The title through all these incarnations was Cactus Flower (Fleur de cactus in French), which was a metaphor for one of the lead characters: a lovely blossom on a prickly plant. I only mention this because even if you are unaware of the significance, Cactus Flower is an interesting title, while Just Go with It is one of the blandest imaginable, and a sign of the creativity at work here.

Sandler plays Danny, a plastic surgeon who finds that wearing a wedding band greatly increases his luck with the ladies. His assistant is a Katherine (Aniston), a spinsterish mother of two. They treat patients with one permanently-raised eyebrow or one giant breast, and Danny attends a party featuring a man with an expressionless plastic face (Kevin Nealon), a woman who looks like Mick Jagger, and a man with a giant ass. If you don´t find these freaks of plastic surgery funny, I warn you: they are the high point of Just Go with It´s humor.

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That protagonist is Dr. Martin Harris (Neeson) a man who wakes up in a Berlin hospital with some vague form of amnesia, and he´s not who he thinks he is, or maybe he is and others don´t want him to be. Surely, someone knows what´s going on and can come along and explain the situation to him, and us, and that´s precisely what happens at the end. Till then, the filmmakers string us along, carefully obscuring the facts before arbitrarily revealing them. It´d be a lot more fun if we weren´t so aware of the craft.

Unknown belongs to a very particular genre of thriller, which might have started with Hitchcock´s The Lady Vanishes, where the protagonist has to think themselves out of an impossible situation while everyone is telling them they´re wrong. The hook is in the premise: in Polanski´s Frantic, Harrison Ford´s character has to account for the disappearance of his wife in Paris, while authorities question the existence of the wife; in Breakdown, Kurt Russell faces a similar task; in Bunny Lake is Missing and more recently The Forgotten and Flightplan, a mother searches for her child while others tell her the child never existed.

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It´s certainly not for everyone. It´s difficult to describe the experience of watching Somewhere. The film begins with a minutes-long shot of a Ferrari racing around a track, and progresses to a minutes-long shot of twin strippers dancing around a portable pole in Marco´s hotel room (hint: these scenes are equally boring). These shots might be compared to watching paint dry, but then we´d at least get a sense of progression. Here, Marco feels like he´s nothing, and going nowhere, and Coppola effectively conveys that to her audience through the endless monotony and repetition.

The weight of the film rests upon the shoulders of Dorff and Fanning; if they´re not right, this thing collapses under all the pretentiousness. But they´re both excellent, effortlessly conveying the kind of disarmingly “normal” people that we see so little of in cinema. The cinematography plays a big role here too, making sure to capture every last minute detail; it´s by Harris Savides, who also shot a trio of Gus Van Sant films that would make a good comparison here – Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days.