I skipped out on Screams 5 and 6, so my last memory of Ghostface and his meta-merry band of body bag prototypes was Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers saying “Clear…” just before Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott leans in with shock paddles and permanently dispatches her latest knife-wielding nemesis (Emma Roberts! Right! They do blur together). As death-by-defibrillator goes, it’s no patch on The X-Files’ “Leonard Betts” (and let’s be real, The X-Files does everything better).
Still, Scream 7 felt like slipping into a warm, blood-sopped blanket, in no small part, I’m sure, because series creator Kevin Williamson is back in the (co-)screenwriters seat as well as occupying the director’s chair he forswore after the Mrs. Taylor Hackford-starring masterpiece that is Teaching [née Killing] Mrs. Tingle (1999). As evil gays go, I’ll take Williamson’s smug self-awareness, decidedly third-rate, over anything Ryan Murphy is serving (the bar, yes, admittedly far below Gehenna).
The eternally beleaguered now-Mrs.-Prescott-Evans returns with husband (Joel McHale) and daughter (Isabel May) in tow and one-or-maybe-more Ghostfaces in pursuit. Thirty years since Scream The First and Campbell is still treating the proceedings (as the second installment made literal) like Greek tragedy. Bless her, she’s wonderful, turning Williamson’s irksomely above-it-all dialogue into resonantly world-wearied wisdom while the rest of the cast — as I recall a teen character on, whaddya know, Ryan Murphy’s inaugural television series Popular once seething — “goes all Dawson’s Creek.“
Write the little that you know and steal heartily from fellow non-master Wes Craven, whose professorial adequacy in the initial Scream quartet is charmingly channeled here, most effectively in a garage setpiece where fluttery see-through dropcloths provide ample funhouse-scare ambience. Prior Scream alums pop up (a Tarantino bête noire among them), while A.I. is about as equal an antagonist (if half-assedly so) as old Ghosty. Time being the great equalizer, I was most moved by the appearance of ’90s-cinema stalwart Ethan Embry née Randall, the years evident, yet enthusiasm undimmed.
The knives are out lately, cutting deep, rending flesh, muscle, bone. But we can survive and endure. Seeing, the day after the screening, Scream 7’s parent company Paramount do the hostile takeover hack-’n’-slash on Netflix (and let’s be clear that the dead-eyed meat puppet Ellisons vs. the snake-oily bridge troll Sarandos is a ne plus ultra “Let them fight…” skydance, a battle sure to continue even beyond this particular mile-/millstone) stoked ponderings a’plenty, all of them eventually delivering me back to a favored Zen parable, reprinted here in full:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
A novel by the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty (who many years back penned the teleplay for Alan Clarke’s harrowing Elephant) provides the basis for the muted Lesley Manville-Ciarán Hinds two-hander Midwinter Break. The Troubles are the unspoken undercurrent in the relationship between long-time-Irish-marrieds Stella and Gerry, who trade the gray skies of their expat Scottish home for an off-season week in no-less-gloomy Amsterdam. Stella has ulterior motives for the journey, related to a violent incident from her past and the devout religious beliefs that resulted. Gerry, by contrast, is a drink-himself-into-a-functioning-stupor skeptic — to his mind, there is only hardscrabble life and nothing more.
They’re like Mulder and Scully (because I always bring it back to X-Files) in lightly-bickering retirement, disaffected people who feel as if they’ve squandered their potential and have little to show beyond a comfortably-uncomfortable way of life. The type of roles, in other words, that Manville and Hinds could play blindfolded and which one wishes a more tough-minded filmmaker in the vein of a Clarke (RIP) or a Leigh or a Ramsay could have shaped into something truly devastating. As is, feature-debuting theater director Polly Findlay keeps things gentle and dutiful, with even the should-be-revelatory scenes (Manville’s teary to-a-stranger confessional, particularly) curdled by senescent sentiment.
There’s little mawk in Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, but, as befits its Bollywood pedigree, plenty of everything else. The title suggests this is another in the series of his loose Shakespeare adaptations — Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014) — though the official source is a chapter from Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’s non-fiction crime novel The Mafia Queens of Mumbai (2011).
Art, in this case, is surely more fanciful and ebullient than life given that vengeful heroine Afsha (Triptii Dimri) and her slow-burn beloved Ustara (Shahid Kapoor) might be in a splashy musical number one moment and an acrobatic John Woo-like shootout the next. Though my personal favorite is a slo-mo assassination carried out during a Ganesha-honoring procession in which the characters are saturated with shimmering crimson powder while the soundtrack goes all wah-wah-wailing! Morricone.
The most obvious Bard reference is actually film-related, Afsha’s intro-via-aquarium-glass very explicitly recalling the moment DiCaprio and Danes lock eyes in Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive, so-very-’90s take on R+J. Beyond that, Bhardwaj emphasizes his own sense of convoluted cool over any star-crossed calamity. The copious pleasures of the nearly three-hour journey between the first hazy-dawn images of Ustara’s Mumbai harbor home base and the crackpot grand finale set in a Spanish bullfighting arena opposite a very Zangief-looking/M. Bison-attired motherfucker can’t be overstated.—Keith Uhlich