SMILEY FACE: The Anna Faris Problem

Smiley Face (2007) – Directed by Gregg Araki – Starring Anna Faris, Danny Masterson, Adam Brody, John Krasinski, Jayma Mays, Marion Ross, Jane Lynch, John Cho, Danny Trejo, and Roscoe Lee Browne.

So if you’re a regular reader of the Anxiety you might be wondering why I’m reviewing a stoner comedy from 2007 in the middle of Catching Up with 2011 Month. The answer is not that I have run out of 2011 movies to watch. And while, yes, it is true that I’m caught between Netflix days (Frontier in Space and Super 8 have gone back, Fright Night and Attack the Block have yet to arrive), this review stems from a review of SMILEY FACE written by pal Derrick Ferguson over at The Ferguson Theater, a site you should be reading. (Derrick is also a writer of books that you should be reading.) This led to a comment by me over on Facebook that Anna Faris confounds me – sometimes I adore her and sometimes I can’t stand her.

And that’s what’s know as the Anna Faris Problem in my overworked head. Usually, with actors, while you may occasionally like or dislike their movie, you can say that you generally like or dislike them. It’s only recently that Adam Sandler has gone from an actor I like to one I don’t, despite the fact that he’s been in lots of movies I couldn’t stand. Despite the fact that Jay Baruchel has the single most annoying voice in the history of the world, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, which has him talking in nearly every scene.

But Anna Faris totally and completely confounds me. I want to like her, because she has the great vibe to her, but sometimes … sometimes just having her on my TV screen is enough to make me want to do the dishes. It can even happen with the same role – as much as I love her in Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, I found her incredibly tedious in 3 and 4. I was incredibly psyched for Waiting, but found her and the movie wanting. I watched literally 3 minutes of Take Me Home Tonight before shutting it off, and she was nearly as annoying as Topher Grace during that time, which is quite the accomplishment. I had hoped she’d be entertaining enough to keep me interested, but it wasn’t to be. (And yes, feel free to hate on me for watching a movie for three minutes, declaring it sucks, and deciding to give American Pickers a chance, instead. Which was also kinda annoying.)

When Derrick reviewed SMILEY FACE and I let all of this out, he offered a friendly challenge – if I watched it and hated it, he’d watch a movie of my choosing to watch and review over at The Ferguson Theater. Since Netflix Streaming had SMILEY FACE available, it didn’t take too long to get to it.

The good news is that Derrick won’t have to review a movie of my choosing because I don’t hate SMILEY FACE. I didn’t love it, either, but there is one incontrovertible thing I did absolutely love about the movie …

Yup. Anna Faris.

Faris is so incredibly funny in SMILEY that it’s the performance I’ve always wanted to see her in. It’s the kind of performance that reminds you how awesome she can be when she’s on, even when the material is rather weak.

She plays Jane F, a stoner who spends the day, well, really, really stoned. The film opens with her stuck on a ferris wheel, talking to the disembodied voice of the great Roscoe Lee Browne, and then we spend much of the rest of the movie catching up to this moment. The film itself isn’t very good – she has a series of misadventures with a bunch of different guys as she tries to reach the Venice Pot Fesitval to pay back her dealer (an awful Adam Brody). Everything is set in motion when she eats her roommate Steve’s cupcakes (Danny Masterson) even though there was a note saying not to eat them. Too late, she realizes they’re pot cupcakes, so comes up with a list of the day’s activities: she needs to make Steve some new cupcakes, go to her acting audition, and pay off her dealer.

All of this means we basically spend 90 minutes watching a stoner make a series of bad decisions. Faris is really hilarious and totally committed to the role, but the rest of the film around her just doesn’t work all that much for me. When she’s waxing philosophical on the munchies, I’m engaged. When she’s pounding Doritos and sucking down orange juice from the mother (Marion Ross) of one of her ex-professors who thinks she’s someone else, I’m bored.

There’s a ton of guest stars here. Some (like John Cho and Roscoe Lee Browne) are good. Some (like Jane Lynch and Brian Posehn) are wasted.

Some of the scenes are really funny. Some aren’t. Luckily, nothing lasts too long as director Gregg Araki keeps things moving along at a pretty good clip. Strangely, I don’t really like any other character in the movie, or think they add much of anything. The point of everyone else is basically to play straight man to Jane’s stoner high jinks, and the result is a movie that’s funnier when Jane is by herself rather than when she’s interacting with other people.

I generally don’t like stoner comedies and SMILEY FACE isn’t going to change my mind on the genre, but Faris’ performance makes this a film worth watching. When we get a montage of how Brevin (John Krasinski) falls in love with her, and we see her basically eating chips or passed out on the couch covered in chips, I can totally see why he fell in love with her. Jane is one of those girls you meet every so often who’s a total wreck and yet also totally captivating. She’s the kind of girl all of your girlfriends will tell you doesn’t deserve you, and you’ll nod and agree when they say it, but it won’t matter. Once a girl like that hooks you, you’re stuck.

SCREAM 4: Trapped by Its Own Past Cleverness

Scream 4 (2011) – Directed by Wes Craven – David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettiere, Anthony Anderson, Alison Brie, Adam Brody, Rory Culkin, Marielle Jaffe, Erik Knudsen, Mary McDonnell, Marley Shelton, Nico Tortorella, Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Lucy Hale, Shenae Grimes, Britt Robertson, Aimee Teegarden, and Roger L. Jackson.

SCREAM 4 is not a disaster, and it does offer a better conclusion to the franchise than SCREAM 3, but it is also a movie that’s too obsessed with its own clever past, and the result is a movie that spends far too much time looking backwards instead of forwards.

Let’s cover the good first: our long-lived main characters, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) have finally shown a bit of real growth. Sidney has written her own book about the Ghostface killings in Woodsboro, Windsor, and Los Angeles, and now she’s on a book tour selling personal empowerment, and has come home to Woodsboro.

Because it’s obviously a good idea to return home to do a book signing about how a crazy set of lunatics put on a costume to try and kill you, but just ended up killing a whole bunch of other people instead.

Sidney is accompanied by her publicist (Alison Brie), who’s thrilled when Ghostface makes a return appearance because she’s a publicist, which means she has to be a horrible person. And that’s one of the problems with SCREAM 4 – it’s completely predictable from a character standpoint. The money grubbing publicist, the local yokel cops (Anthony Anderson and Adam Brody), the well-meaning mom (Mary McDonnell), and the glib high school kids.

Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven even manage to take the initial promise of Dewey and Gale being married and screw that up, too, as Gale spends much of the movie as a desperate, b*tchy malcontent. It’s not bad from a character standpoint, but it isn’t fun to watch. Gale has given up her big city life as a reporter to be married to the local deputy-turned-sheriff and is trying her hand at writing fiction, but she’s got a severe case of writer’s block, so when Ghostface rears his elongated white face, Gale is re-energized and wants to help, but Dewey doesn’t want her assistance.

Which means her and Dewey again spend the movie bickering.

Blah.

So much for the character growth.

Dewey has gotten better at the whole cop thing, and they’ve given him a deputy (Marley Shelton) who’s got a big crush on him, just so Gale can walk around with an even bigger grumpy face. Not awesome.

Sidney has to stick around town because she’s a “suspect” (but not really), so she stays at the family house. Well, no. She stays at her cousin Jill’s house (Emma Roberts) because the film wants her to stay at her cousin Jill’s house so we can have a tie-in with the next generation of slasher victims. We’ve got Jill, of course, and her friends Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Olivia (Marielle Jaffe). Olivia dies in a decent scene as the girls watch her getting stabbed next door. Even for a slasher film it’s unnecessarily bloody, but what makes the scene work isn’t so much the double phone conversation that’s going on with Jill and Kirby in one house and Olivia and Ghostface in the other – it’s Sidney running from the “safe” house to the dangerous house to confront Ghostface directly, and then looking around that bloodied room at the carnage.

It’s a really nice change, and Sidney’s aggressiveness is what makes SCREAM 4 feel like a truer ending than SCREAM 3, where she spent most of the film still in Little Girl Scared mode.

Unfortunately, Sidney’s aggressiveness is where the film gets caught between what SCREAM used to be, and what SCREAM could be. It recycles the whole “SCREAM is a horror movie that knows the rules of horror movies” bit, but to incredibly poor effect. There’s two film nerds this time around: Charlie Walker and Robbie Mercer (Rory Culkin, Erik Knudsen). Robbie is all about “live streaming” his life because Williamson apparently thinks this is what’s cool and fresh with kids. (Or because he’s never seen American Pie.) Charlie is the darker, more intelligent one and, well, if you can’t see where that’s going, then maybe SCREAM 4 will have some surprises in store for you. SCREAM 4 doesn’t require you to know anything about other horror movies, though; it’s completely dependent on itself (which masquerades in the movie as the STAB franchise), a fact made clear by all the fake beginnings, which comes off less as clever, and more as a cheap way to be able to put Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden, Anna Paquin, and some other attractive young actresses in the commercials.

The movie is so blatant about making a point about the characters knowing the rules, it does such a p*ss-poor job of setting up actual would-be killers (Jill’s boyfriend is such a complete tool that not only do you know he can’t be guilty, you wonder why Jill ever dated him to begin with), and we know from SCREAM and SCREAM 2 that we’re likely dealing with multiple people in the Ghostface costume, and that the filmmakers are desperate to give us some kind of twist …

Well, it’s not to hard to figure out that if the film is going to lead you in one direction that it will twist you in the other, so when Jill and Charlie are revealed to be the latest to don the Ghostface costume, well, it’s not exactly much a shock. (Especially since Sidney conveniently abandons Jill in a room and then doesn’t go back for her.)

And that, again, is where SCREAM 4 is caught between what it was and what it could be; the film is still so focused on Sidney, Dewey, and Gale that it doesn’t develop any of the younger characters to a strong enough degree, and because of that, SCREAM has become just another film about interchangeable teenagers getting sliced and diced by a homicidal maniac.

But here’s the kick – once the film finally gets on revealing Jill as the killer, the film becomes pretty good. Yes, absolutely, Emma Roberts is forced to overact a bit, but at least now we’re getting to something fresh and new for a SCREAM movie, and SCREAM 4 finally feels completely unburdened by its franchise’s past. The nice girl psychopath and the lovesick, film geek sidekick has some real bite to it, and it makes me wonder if Craven and Williamson ever considered revealing this way, way earlier in the movie. That would have been something fresh and new – seeing a SCREAM movie from the killer’s point-of-view instead of rehashing another tired guess-the-killer plot could have been amazing.

SCREAM 4 is so determined to be what SCREAM fans expect that it fails to remember that one of the things that so many of liked about the original SCREAM was that it wasn’t what we expected. SCREAM felt fresh; SCREAM 4 spends far too much time in the shadow of SCREAM for it to feel anything but derivative. It’s only in the final act that SCREAM 4 takes off, and in doing so it manages to give the franchise a much stronger conclusion than SCREAM 3. The idea that kids have become so addicted to fame and so desensitized to the violence around them provides the film with a solid foundation – it just takes too long to build anything new or engaging on that base to make SCREAM 4 anything more than a decent excuse to eat some popcorn.