Screen Notes: Scream; Being the Ricardos

Scream 

(the re-quel)

The new entry in the Wes Craven-born Scream franchise is the fifth in the series, doubling down on the meta-cinematic premise of the original with a movie that is not quite a reboot and not quite a sequel, but, rather, a "re-quel" also titled Scream. If this sounds confusing, rest assured that the script takes ample time to tediously explain this new product hybrid development of commercial filmmaking through various characters in the film, played either by actors who look less than enthused to still be involved with this series after 25 years (David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox), or newcomers equally listless in their attempts to bring life to an already bloodless script. Numerous lines that were likely scripted as clever attempts to one-up the winking, self-reflexive quality of the original film (which, honestly, was never really that fresh to begin with and plays even less so today) tend to land with a thud, particularly as the unnecessary near-two-hour run time drags on. For instance, a scene late in the film finds Neve Campbell being attacked by the Ghostface killa with (you guessed it) a knife, and the scene plays out in yet another cinematic "homage"--this time, Raiders of the Lost Ark's Indiana Jones vs the swordsman bit--with the armed Campbell punctuating her gunning down the killer with the line: "I'm bored." If the filmmakers had any knack for visual storytelling or action, they wouldn't need the line at all, which, by that point, resonates in all the wrong ways. By the time we get to one of the few actors who invigorates the film, Mikey Madison, having to send up her flaming Suspiria homage from Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the meta-play that might have previously been playful becomes downright embarrassing.

What might, potentially, be interesting about the new Scream is the notion that the type of obsessive fandom facilitated by Reddit and the like is the "real" killer, and the victim is "highbrow" cinema, particularly within the horror genre, which this Scream actually calls out by name, citing titles from recent years like The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary. While from some critical vantage points it's become sheik to call out the pretentions of so-called "art horror" by the likes of Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster, it's clear that those filmmakers invoked within the script of the new Scream will leave a much more enduring creative stamp on this era of filmmaking than anything directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also directed the much more watchable Ready or Not) are able to manage here. It's difficult to determine what the filmmakers do want to put into play here in regards to the questions Scream has left to ask...if it had any good questions to ask to begin with. Is it simply positing that fans truly want shitty looking who-dunnit slasher fair, and would get too ruffled by anything attempting a cinematic point-of-view? I find that difficult to believe, not to mention that, by comparison, the original Friday the 13th, along with a slew of other shoestring budget slasher productions, often exhibit more inventiveness than this. Is it all just to take a dig at the likes of Ari Aster as pretentious dicks who don't understand what audiences want? Is the finale of the new Scream, punctuated by the film's second mention of Kent's The Babadook, meant to also punctuate the incredible work by women in horror this year: Saint Maud by Rose Glass, Censor by Prano Bailey-Bond, and Relic by Natalie Erika James? It's difficult to tell, and I'm not sure the filmmakers or anyone involved know either.

The new Scream most fully continues the legacy of this franchise in that it offers almost nothing that strikes the viewer as visually interesting, nor does it manage to present any creative or inspired violence, which would seem to be a primary concern when making a horror film. At the risk of sounding completely dismissive, I would say this kind of visual complacency and lack of invention is the real hallmark of the entire series. While watching the Scream "re-quel" I had plenty of time to think about what moments from any of the previous films stood out in my memory, and apart from the opening scene in the original, I couldn't come up with one. 

Being the Ricardos

Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball

Nostalgia is a problem for me, as it continues to be for the movies, in general. Whether it's Scream or I Love Lucy, the industry continues to rely on nostalgia in ways that either shamelessly cash in on timid rehashes of tired property or, as is the case with Being the Ricardos, fashion a distorted lens on the hindsight of the public in the name of pseudo-political filmmaking with an eye on awards season. While a wistful look back can result in filmmakers creating something that touches on the beauty and critical potential of nostalgia--perhaps most recently best rendered in something like Steve McQueen's Lover's Rock or Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza--the retrospective gaze of Aaron Sorkin increasingly falls short of being either beautiful or critical. While filmmakers like McQueen and Anderson take very different approaches to nostalgia and aspire in different degrees to being overtly political films, there's something similarly effective about the way they avoid layering current social commentary onto their respective periods, allowing them to behave something like themselves. This is also part of what works about Ridley Scott's recent films, particularly The Last Duel, which--while not even an entry in my year-end favorites list--gains traction in my memory for the ways in which it allows the present to peer into the past, without superimposing the present on the past, allowing the audience to do that work. All of these films are certainly much more adept and successful at addressing the past than Aaron Sorkin's Being the Ricardos (not to mention his slightly less disastrous--though still not good--The Trial of the Chicago 7 from 2020), which has the added problem of attempting to evoke the iconic mugs of the I Love Lucy cast: Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman), Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda), and William Frawley (J.K. Simmons).

In terms of structure, Being the Ricardos feels, somehow, both tightly schematized through a day-by-day countdown to the taping of a contentious episode, and loosely held together by the incident of Lucy being called a "pinko" in the headlines, with a resolution to her character being restored involving an important public phone call to the I Love Lucy set that is laughably manufactured and convenient. Nicole Kidman--an actor, I think it's safe to say without hyperbole, has had streaks of true greatness in her career--can do little here but play the costumes, since the script offers nothing to play that doesn't sound like Sorkin pandering to a whole theatre of others. As for the "Lucy" make-up (which will surely go on to be a punchline during awards season), it's difficult to believe that it was approved on any level of production. We know Nicole Kidman can fill a frame with tremendous presence, and while Lucille Ball was destined for the small screen, check out how compelling she is on the big screen in something like Douglas Sirk's Lured, or even Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance. Yet, somehow, in Being the Ricardos there is barely a moment where we feel the combined presence of these two greats. It just doesn't manifest, and the make-up is a big part of that failure (my feelings about this weren't helped by having randomly seen Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray in Mystery of the Wax Museum just before this, but I kept wishing that Fay would enter and smash Kidman's wax mask to bits so we could be done with it!). 

And, yes, as I've already mentioned, awards season annoyingly lies ahead, and so I'll make yet another whimper of protest toward viewing films outside of the outdated model that applauds performances and films like this in order to stroke the egos of an industry that could stand some serious reform. Leave the trophies for sports and little kids. In fact, there may be hope that awards may go the way of the dinosaur, given how the fall of the Golden Globes this year reminded us how much the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is an invented farce. Being the Ricardos is the perfect touchstone to once again critique the awards phenomenon, which does little for how we appreciate the craft of acting while pretending to be all about that, continually translating something like accomplished performance into actors putting on prosthetics and hamming it up. 

While I'm far from a purist when it comes to "cinema as history," the problem with Sorkin is not so much his relationship to history, but his relationship to the present. There's a way in which Sorkin uses the climate of the McCarthy era in Being the Ricardos that has the posture of subversive, relevant filmmaking, but doesn't really seem to care for creating anything that might be considered effective political cinema beyond it's function as a narrative device. Other awards season fare like Kenneth Brannagh's Belfast (which I liked more than this, and maybe only because of the Van Morrison music), similarly lack subversive qualities and offer little insight beyond being exercises in nostalgia, even though they're surely destined to be lauded as "important" films. I'm not sure how people mistake Sorkin's penchant for writing pacey dialogue as either insightful or funny, but what I found most frustrating was the extent to which it fails to get at anything truthful, whether through realism or artifice. Sorkin's political façade ultimately comes off as dishonest and empty as Kidman's Lucy mask.