MOVIE DIARY 2023: WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT THE MOVIES??
Ok before we get started here, I want to let you know that since the last post, I actually did watch way more movies than just Scream VI. Unfortunately, I got started writing about Scream VI and it just went long and it ended up being the only movie I had the chance to write about, so apologies in advance for that. On the plus side, we’ve got beloved special guest and Editor in Chief of Fran Magazine, Fran Hoepfner returning to MOVIE DIARY 2023 to talk about Bottoms! What a treat for you and what a privilege for me! I love Fran! We all do!
Bottoms (2023) - dir. Emma Seligman
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: FRAN HOEPFNER
I'm embarrassed to be as moved as I am by the general premise of Bottoms as I am––girls beating the shit out of each in order to process their trauma of being alive and also hopefully to get laid––as much as I am embarrassed to still be kind of moved by the premise of Fight Club. Is there where I admit to having read, like, a lot of Chuck Palahniuk? Not recently, of course, but during my formative years as a reader. Probably around when I was the same age as the girls in Bottoms. And not just the Palahniuk books that became movies––I read some deep cuts. My favorite to this day remains Rant, which, as far as I understand, is kind of a riff on David Cronenberg's Crash (soapyhadid voice) with car crashes and cumming, but there's also an element of time travel and I think a guy winds up becoming his own dad at the end of the book.
Bottoms is not about time travel; Bottoms is about two teenage girls, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who are losers and lesbians eager to get laid before they graduate. Their high school is heightened and delightfully unreal––the football players are worshipped like gods despite being Machiavellian (Miles Fowler) or gay-ish (Nicholas Galitzine––one of the best new last names to hit the scene). PJ and Josie's lives are bad not only because they are not cool, but they are also the mean kind of uncool, judgmental and embittered, rude towards their supposed ally Hazel (Ruby Cruz) because they really wanted to hang out with and/or open-mouth kiss cheerleaders like Isabel (Havana Rose Liu––a star) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber––it's not her fault we don't have cheerleaders named "Brittany" anymore).
There is a plot in Bottoms, but it doesn't matter. Not much matters in Bottoms, which is perhaps one of its issues. Bottoms comes from the twisted mind of Emma Seligman, who co-wrote the script with her not-Jewish Shiva Baby muse Rachel Sennott, and the film feels more an attempt at vibes and moments than it does character and theme. That's fine: there are some funny vibes, there are some good moments. Enough individual people are doing their jobs well enough that the film is, on the whole, a refreshing, breezy time. But I found myself frustrated about the extent to which Bottoms felt like an individualistic endeavor, that everyone was trying to eke out a laugh for themselves. This is not only a problem of performance––though it is––but a problem of script designed for gifset or screenshotting, of cinematography framed around getting consistent head and shoulders and little else. I came away from the film not really believing in its message, if there was one, or its universe, if it was real to them, or its characters, as much as I liked many of them.
We get snippy and snide about the Marvel-style language, the Whedonesque quips that permeated a type of culture, but I'm not sure Bottoms is that much better, relying instead on "Okay..." in lieu of "So that just happened..." "Okay..." is not a no, but it's not a "yes and" either, rendering scenes of otherwise comedic escalation as relentless self-commentary. This would work if the film was commentary, but it mostly seems like a good ol' fashioned goofy time. Why not let them have a laugh? My broad concern with comedians being "too hot" these days is that I mostly mean that comedians are not willing to be ugly. For a movie about girls beating the shit out of each other, I wish they beat the shit out of each other a lot more. I wish we saw them really fucked up, and not glamorously fucked up. By the time there is real violence in the movie, it felt too little too late. Forgive me, but I wanted to see someone on crutches.
My last thing: I think Marshawn Lynch is funny, and in losing the "studio comedy," we've also lost when we put a random athlete in a movie to see if they have the juice (Marshawn Lynch has the juice). We forget that LeBron James had the juice in Trainwreck. Let's let some athletes have juice again.
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Fran Hoepfner is a writer with an MFA in fiction FOR SOME REASON. She lives in New York.
Scream VI (2023) - dir. Tyler Gillet, Matt Bettineli-Olpin
SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILERS
Maybe this will eventually get a critical reappraisal the way that Scream 4 did a few years ago, but I was pretty unimpressed by this one. I love all of the Scream movies and I think all of them have their specific charms. I was kind of whatever about this new wave that kicked off with Scream (2022) mostly because I don’t really think Melissa Barrera has enough juice to carry a horror franchise, but there were enough weird/dumb/funny things to like about it (shoutout to ghost Skeet Ulrich) that I figured maybe Scream VI might be able to build on that and make something new.
All of those intro kills in this series are pretty much perfect to me, and Scream VI starts off with a really fun one with Samara Weaving. Unfortunately it’s kind of all downhill from there. Scream (2022) wasn’t called “Scream 5” or “5cream” or whatever because I guess they really wanted to sell it as sort of a fresh start for the franchise, so I kind of write off its flaws as coming with the territory of what amounts to a transitional movie in the series. Sort of like how in sports, sometimes after a nice run of success a team will blow it all up and ship off their big name players, opting to bring up some younger talent to take the team forward. Scream (2022) was the movie equivalent of a rebuilding year, so it’s fine that it wasn’t perfect out of the gate because they were still cleaning some stuff up, still testing out the new lead characters. Scream VI moves them all to New York, signaling a fresh start, but it does very little to capitalize on its new setting.
True, a significant part of the emotional thread of this movie is dedicated to developing the relationship between sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega), but for the most part Scream VI seems not all that interested in moving the franchise forward and finding its own identity, instead regressing further back into nostalgia and self-mythologizing. Some of that is fine, expected, and understandable— you gotta start a Scream movie with a cameo role from a famous actor who very quickly gets murdered before the title card drops. That’s a tradition, and sometimes traditions are sacred because they just fucking work no matter what. The rest of the movie, however, totally collapses under the weight of its nostalgia for itself.
Scream (2022) and Scream VI both seem to insist that they are aiming for a new, fresh take on the Scream franchise, but it’s obvious that they’re much more concerned with the idea of legacy and looking back on the past in a way that only the most creatively bankrupt franchises are. We’ve got these characters no longer trying to establish and then sidestep the rules of a horror movie trilogy, instead they’re breaking down what the new rules are for franchise IPs. It has the appearance of an update to make the movie aware of the current climate of cinema, but I think it’s less that and more a big indication that Scream is running out of gas, itself becoming the stale horror fare that it was trying to subvert in the first place. The climax of Scream VI takes place in an abandoned movie theater that’s been repurposed to act as a sort of museum of props and memorabilia from previous Scream movies. It’s like Planet Hollywood if it were just about Scream. Each scrap of memorabilia is carefully placed behind display glass, lending each object a totemic weight that is meant to read as reverence, but instead comes off as absolutely ridiculous. They treat the Ghostface mask like it’s the fucking Shroud of Turin, which is fucking hilarious until you realize that they are serious and that they do want you to treat it like the Shroud of Turin. It works as a kind of over the top meta gag since this collection of literal slasher Easter eggs belongs to the killer from the previous Scream (2022), who was himself a sort of commentary on a specific kind of annoyingly pedantic horror fanboy (who is definitely not me and absolutely not what I am doing in writing all of this), but I kind of feel like this was just way too much and way too obvious. There’s way too much pointing to the past without having anything interesting to add.
Scream has always been about reference and homage, but I guess the way that these last two movies kind of take that energy and apply it to the previous Scream movies rather than the genre at large just feels gross to me. To be fair, there are plenty of other references (both subtle and not so subtle) to other, non-Scream horror movies, but even those seem more like the filmmakers desperately trying to convince us of their horror bonafides the way you might try to convince someone at a record store that you’re not like those other idiot customers, you have taste. You know some “deep cuts!” You have favorite B-sides! The beauty of Scream to me was that the series didn’t ever just simply do an homage or make a reference to classic horror movies. There was something extra thrown in there, some kind of commentary on their reference point, or some kind of clever new layer added to the moment. It was never overly reverent about any of its cinematic forebears. Now it’s basically just the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme, but worse because a studio is behind it and they’re insisting you treat the previous movies as some sort of biblical urtext so that you can rewatch every movie with a rabid fervor, which will help them hit their engagement targets. God, I just remembered that there’s this scene our main guys are riding a packed subway train filled with people dressed in Halloween costumes and the costumes are all references to characters from horror movies or other media properties that you can, like Scream VI, stream now on Paramount+. Fuck off!
It used to be that one of the main draws of Scream was the fun self awareness and subversion of horror tropes rubbing up against the fact that as “smart” as these characters were, they still had to somehow wind up dead. Scream VI has the characters pointing out “the rules” of horror movies just like in all the others, but with the added layer of also pointing out how “the rules” have changed in this climate of sequels, reboots, and “re-quels.” It sounds like a fun idea, but Scream VI doesn’t really follow through on it. One of the big problems for me with Scream VI is that it points out the rule or the trope or whatever, and then it just kind of leaves it there. It doesn’t deliver on the element of subversion or satisfying meta commentary that worked so well in previous movies. Pointing out the trope isn’t enough! Once you’ve addressed it, I feel like you have to actually do something with it besides simply pointing at it. They make a big deal about how since this is the sequel to the “requel” or whatever, no one’s safe, even the core characters can be killed. No shit. Ideally, the idea that any of your characters could be murdered is the vibe that most slasher movies are going for. It’s kind of a pointless and obvious thing to spotlight, like saying water is wet. Personally I’m already coming into any social situation thinking that no one is safe anyway, so tell it to someone else because I already fucking know, dude. Interestingly enough, with all the chirping about how no one is safe, none of the core characters die in this one, not even the last legacy holdover characters! So I guess I’m wrong, I guess that’s sort of a subversion of the “no one is safe” horror trope that they point out in this one. Finally, a horror movie smart enough to have all of our guys live!
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I’m sorry I went so long on Scream VI, but here are a few thoughts that I had kicking around while watching Scream VI:
If they keep doing these, I hope they never stop doing the thing where Sam keeps having these visions of ghost Skeet Ulrich telling her that murder is cool and sometimes you’re right to do it because it’s kind of our family’s thing. It’s so goofy, but it’s also legitimately so funny to see a digitally smoothed over Skeet Ulrich doing a performance that’s essentially just the Jack Nicholson nodding gif.
So funny to see Henry Czerny in this as Sam’s scared therapist. I only know Czerny as Kittridge in the Mission: Impossible movies, so I was like half-expecting him to menacingly punctuate his sentences by calling Sam “Ethan.” This actor is just not believable as someone who would be rattled by a woman telling him that she’s murdered someone before.
They should just fully push the meta angle even further if they keep doing these movies. Like get real Animal Man with it. Have Jenna Ortega look directly into the camera and scream in terror as she sees us, the audience, watching her every move. Have Ghostface murder the director(s) and take over, becoming the new God of Woodsboro or New York or whatever. You’re six movies in and you’re not getting really weird with it? What are we doing here?
Ok that’s all, I promise. We can talk more about it in the Discord if you want. Thanks to Fran for coming back to MOVIE DIARY 2023! See you all next time!