MY MOVIE SHELF: Scream 3

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 195  Days to go: 138

Movie #243:  Scream 3

I like a good trilogy. I’m a Star Wars girl, always have been, so trilogies are kind of my thing. I miss the days when trilogies consisted of only three movies, but that’s another story altogether. A good trilogy needs to form a narrative arc that spans all three films. It has to highlight the past from another angle, revealing new motives, new players, and information that wasn’t revealed previously. As Randy (Jamie Kennedy) says — brought back from the grave in a taped revelation by his sister Martha (Heather Matarazzo) — “It’s all about going back to the beginning.”

Scream 3 starts with the third installment of the Stab movies under production. Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), now a TV celebrity no doubt thanks to his Diane Sawyer interview, even cameos as himself. Or, he’s supposed to. Poor Cotton is instead the first casualty of Mr. Ghostface this time around (or second, if you count his fiancée, which apparently no one does), just as he is in Stab 3. The buxom Sarah Darling (Jenny McCarthy) plays the character to next die in the film, and she’s the next to die at the hands of Mr. Ghostface too, who is presumably the director Roman (Scott Foley, looking particularly “raper face”-y), but what the audience knows that Sarah doesn’t is that this new killer doesn’t just do scary killer voice. He mimics all kinds of voices, as he just did to Cotton and Almost Mrs. Cotton. Dun dun DUN!!

This time our girl Sidney (Neve Campbell) is living alone on a hill somewhere. She doesn’t even leave her house to go to her job, she just takes crisis calls on her “office” line like she’s Sandra Bullock in The Net or something. She probably ordered pizza online before it was cool. And while her dog is big, if you ask me that fluffy retriever doesn’t look too menacing. He got scared when Sidney had a bad dream, for Pete’s sake, and that’s not going to do her any good for security. Which is what I assume she’s living in the boonies for. Nobody knows her address, only a few select people know her phone number. This chick doesn’t mess around. She is sick and damn tired of having weird psychopaths chase her with knives.

Of course, Cotton’s death (followed by Sarah’s) brings all the old players out of the woodwork, and by old players I mean the only other two still alive, Dewey and Gale (David Arquette and Courteney Cox, back when they were newly married and totally adorable together). Gale is out for a story, of course, but Dewey is there on the movie set working as a consultant and as security detail for the woman playing Gale in the film, Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey, my very favorite make-believe ditzy wiseass). This brings out the jealousy in Gale since apparently she and Dewey did not part on the best of terms last time. Yikes.

We also have a new ingénue playing Sidney (Emily Mortimer), and Jennifer’s personal bodyguard Steve Stone (Patrick Warburton), plus McDreamy himself (Patrick Dempsey) as homicide detective Mark Kincaid. Naturally all of these people will at some point or another be placed in a suspicious light.

This time the killer seems to have some connection back to Sidney’s mother, as he keeps leaving pictures of her at his murder scenes, really bringing the story back to the beginning after all. Is it possible Billy and Stu didn’t kill her exactly as they said after all? This movie is about the missing piece.

Just kidding, this movie is just about going from one killing to the next with some slapstick and wise cracking and raised eyebrows in between. The whole thing about Sidney’s mom is a forced and ill-conceived plot point if there ever was one, but I guess if you make it all the way to the third movie you’re not really there for story; you’re there to see how much bigger it can get.

The answer is: significantly bigger. More blood, more gore, more red herrings, more outrageous and thrilling deaths, more scare tactics, and it’s a trilogy so your killer is going to be “super human.” Thanks for keeping us apprised, Randy.

I honestly have a lot of fun with this movie, but it’s a good thing I don’t care for reboots. (Translation: No Scream 4 for me, even though I’m really starting to like Emma Roberts.)

MY MOVIE SHELF: The House of Yes

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 231  Days to go: 235

Movie #146:  The House of Yes

The House of Yes is a tour de force of linguistic acrobatics, and Parker Posey is absolutely perfect in it. Honestly, I don’t know what more needs to be said on the subject, but I will do my best to elaborate.

As someone who goes bonkers for clever word play, there’s not much out there that does better than The House of Yes. Tricky banter is one thing, but this movie turns colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions inside out, takes literal interpretations of phrases to new heights, and operates at such a rapid fire pace that you could probably watch it half a dozen times before you caught the majority of the jokes. I’ve seen this movie at least a dozen times, and I’m still rediscovering jokes.

The House of Yes is the story of a brother and a sister — twins — who have a, shall we say, special bond. Posey is Jackie (everyone calls her Jackie-O because of a longstanding obsession with the Kennedys) and Josh Hamilton is Marty.  Marty has been away in New York and is returning home to Virginia — right next door to the Kennedy compound there — for Thanksgiving in 1983, and he’s bringing a friend. The friend is his fiancée Lesly (Tori Spelling), who sets the family, especially Jackie-O, into a tailspin.

This is the movie that sold me completely on Parker Posey, forever and ever. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a national treasure who should be in every single comedy ever. She’s smart, witty, cheeky, sassy, and wry. She can be ironic or sincere, wide-eyed innocent or flamboyant villain. And she’s exactly what’s required for Jackie-O here, because she manages to simultaneously be off-putting and reassuring. She’s insane and manipulative, but you can see what others see in her, what draws them to her.

Marty, too, is many things. He clearly adores Lesly and their life together, but he falls quite easily into a rhythm with Jackie, bantering with her, teaming up on little brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), and defending everyone to his mother (Genevieve Bujold). And you see, bit by bit, his resolve wearing down, his defenses against Jackie wearing thin. As the night plays out, things either start to fall apart or fall into place, depending on your perspective.

Tori Spelling is naturally the odd-man-out here, not at all capable of keeping up with the Pascal family. And maybe she got the job because it was produced by Spelling Films, but Lesly is supposed to be the odd-man-out. She’s not supposed to fit in. She’s supposed to be outmatched. It’s her innate differences from Jackie and from Marty’s entire family that make Lesly so attractive to Marty. He wants separation from all of that, or at least he thinks he does. In this way, Spelling fits her role quite well, even as you find yourself cringing at her awkwardness throughout.

Freddie Prinze Jr. is quite good as the bumbling, out-of-step younger brother to Jackie and Marty. He’s more earnest, more honest than those two, but still calculating and manipulative in his ways — a gift he no doubt got from his mother, who is the embodiment of a distant and withholding parent. She is very arch and very particular and she has no use for people who don’t belong. Next to Posey’s, I think Bujold’s performance of Mrs. Pascal is my favorite.

The story — and the memories of our players — blurs the lines between the death of the president and the departure of Mr. Pascal on the same day, between the hurricane years ago and the one on that night, between love of a sibling and love of a lover. It’s an intricate, perfectly assembled puzzle of crazy, and as it escalates, it all falls into place (or apart, depending on your perspective).

And it’s full of quotable moments, too.