SCREAM 2: Hello, Sidney. Remember Me?

Scream 2 (1997) – Directed by Wes Craven – Starring Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jamie Kennedy, Jerry O’Connell, Jada Pinkett, Liev Schreiber, Omar Epps, Elise Neal, Timothy Olyphant, Duane Martin, Portia De Rossi, Rebecca Gayheart, Tori Spelling, Luke Wilson, Heather Graham, Laurie Metcalf, and David Warner.

SCREAM 2 is both a really fun film and a mildly disappointing sequel. If you like the characters of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette), Gale (Courteney Cox), and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), SCREAM 2 provides plenty of thrills and chills for the main stars, but if you’re looking for a story as solid as the original SCREAM, you’re likely to become increasingly disappointed as the movie progresses, as much of the cinematic energy is locked into the film’s opening half.

SCREAM 2 sees Sidney and Randy relocated to Windsor College. Sidney’s got a perky roommate/best friend named Hallie (Elise Neal), a perfect new boyfriend named Derek (Jerry O’Connell) and the same old unrequited lapdog in Randy. Everything is progressing spectacularly for Sid (including a sweet-*ss dorm room that they definitely did not have at Syracuse), whose biggest concern seems to be Hallie attempting to use her to get into a sorority. The lead sorority sisters (Portia De Rossi and Rebecca Gayheart) want Sidney in their sorority because notoriety is, like, wicked awesome or something.

The problems start for Sidney with the release of Stab, a horror movie based on the events of SCREAM. There’s a good bit of fun seeing the “real” transformed into the “fictional,” complete with Heather Graham as Casey Becker/Drew Barrymore, Luke Wilson as Billy Loomis/Skeet Ulrich, and Tori Spelling as Sidney/Campbell. The Spelling bit is an in-joke since Sidney complained in SCREAM that if her life was turned into a movie, they’d likely get Tori Spelling to play her. Just as writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven engineered in SCREAM, SCREAM 2 starts with a murder that’s personally disconnected from Sidney. Here, we have Phil and Maureen (Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett) getting offed at the premiere of Stab.

It’s a pretty good opening, with the same kind of “horror knowledge” interplay between audience and characters as we have in SCREAM. Phil and Maureen are black, and black people, as they’re both aware, don’t have a very high survival rate in horror movies. Unfortunately, where Williamson was willing to tweak conventions in SCREAM, here he mostly embraces them, as both Maureen and Phil are murdered during the showing of the movie. Later, Sidney’s friend Hallie (also black) similarly gets killed, even though it’s Sidney who’s being the dumb/brave one when she goes back to the scene of an accident to try and ascertain Ghostface’s identity. She goes back to the car and Ghostface isn’t there because he’s gone around the back to kill Hallie.

It’s an important killing that gets completely overlooked when it happens; it’s not that Sidney isn’t affected by the death, but it’s impact is lessened by its placement, coming in between Ghostface kidnapping them by hijacking the cop car they were riding in and Sidney’s mad dash to the theater house where the final violent act occurs. It’s the only death in the movie that’s really personal; Ghostface is revealed here to be Derek’s best friend Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), who keeps getting rebuffed during the movie by Hallie in several small scenes. It’s telling, too, that he makes certain to kill Randy, too, while failing to finish off Dewey, given that Randy is Mickey’s rival in film class. He’s also successful in killing fellow film class student Cici Cooper (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and his best friend Derek, suggesting that it’s the deaths that he’s most personally involved in that he sees through to the end. It’s the attempts on Sidney, Dewey, and Gale that come up short, and these are the deaths that his sponsor, Billy Loomis’ mother (Laurie Metcalf) has the most interest in seeing completed.

The revelation that Mickey is the killer is a bit lame because Mickey is gone for a huge section of the movie. Also, the swerve that local news reporter Debbie Salt is actually Mrs. Loomis comes up completely flat because for it to work two things have to be believed: that Sidney, Dewey, and Randy never see her in the pack of reporters (since Sidney recognizes her instantly) and that Gale doesn’t recognize her despite having multiple confrontations with her throughout the movie. Her insistence that, “I’ve seen Billy’s mom but she doesn’t look like that,” comes up short.

The worst part of this final act, however, is that Williamson and Craven decide to have Mrs. Loomis and Mickey act all bug-eyed crazy. It’s stupid. We did that last movie, and having stone cold killers would have been a nice change.

If you want to give Williamson and Craven some leeway, it certainly exists. The original script had Mrs. Loomis working with Hallie, Derek, and Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) instead of Mickey, but when the entire script was leaked online, they were forced to re-write the film on the fly.

Either because the scenes were leftover from the original script, or because Craven and the actors had a real feel for how these characters would react in these situations, it’s the scenes between the returning cast members that work best. The growing relationship between Dewey and Gale is wonderfully played by Arquette and Cox; he’s miffed at her for writing less-than-flattering things about him in her best-selling book, The Westboro Murders, and she’s still drawn to him, increasingly seeing him as a real person instead of a source. As annoying as Randy is, his death sequence is very well done. Ghostface calls the three of them as they’re standing on campus and Randy is given the task of talking to him while Dewey and Gale go looking for him. When Randy gets close to Gale’s news van, the killer opens the sliding door, pulls Randy inside, and gruesomely knifes him to death.

Randy’s death is the only part of the film that feels like SCREAM 2 is its own film, rather than a cog in a franchise that demands as many of the popular characters, as possible, survive in order to guarantee the bankability of the third film. That’s not to say SCREAM 2 is a bad movie; it’s mostly an enjoyable film that balances a strong use of returning characters in an interesting enough story. Like The Empire Strikes Back, SCREAM 2 is also the film where the lead shifts from it’s first star (Luke/Sidney) to its more interesting character (Han/Dewey and Gale), and that’s why the film is ultimately worth watching, despite its limp, bug-eyed finish.

BETTER OF TED: It’s Like Eating a Hamburger that Tastes Like Strawberries

Better Off Ted (2009) – Season 1 – Starring Jay Harrington, Portia de Rossi, Andrea Anders, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Barrett, Isabela Acres.

After my big re-watch of Arrested Development, I was looking for another really good, really under-appreciated sitcom to watch. I wanted something good because, well, why would you want to watch something that sucks, and I wanted something under-appreciated because I didn’t want to sit through 137 episodes. I wanted something relatively brief and funny.

So I watched the premiere episode of Parks and Recreation.

And it sucked. Really, really sucked.

I hear it gets better but I’m always amused by comments like that. It gets better? Cool. How long is it gonna take to get there? Because I’ll never watch every show I want to watch, and I’d rather just get to trying out one of them if I’ve got to sit through an entire season before Parks and Rec really picks up. People love True Blood, so I dutifully got the first disc of Season 1 from Netflix and was bored out of my freaking mind. It was awful. When I told this to everyone who swore up and down that it was the greatest TV show in the history of history, they all invariably said the same thing: “It gets better.”

When? Because I couldn’t make it through two episodes without being so bored that I had to hit the fast forward button – and when I stopped hitting the fast forward button, the mentally-challenged lead guy was still saying, “Sookie, Ah’ve a come to court you.” People also loved to casually raise the point that I must not like it because I’m some kind of prude – “it’s vampire porn!” several people told me, as if that was something I wanted to watch. It made me think, 1. they didn’t know me very well, and 2. they’d never actually watched porn.

So I went to Option #2: BETTER OFF TED, a much-loved, short-lived series that seemed a perfect fit. The first few episodes were hilarious, but by episode 5 or 6 I was bored and by episode 9 or 10 I was desperate for the season to be over.

It’s not that BETTER OFF TED is a bad show, at all, but what the show does is do a new kind of comedy in an old kind of format. Arrested Development isn’t just good because it’s funny, it’s good because it rewards you for coming back week-to-week. I can see why that format wouldn’t work as a weekly show, but it makes for a really good DVD or Instant Play watch when you want to sit down and churn through 6 episodes in a night.

Likewise, maybe if I’d watched BETTER OFF TED once a week when it came out I would like it a lot more than I do now, because if you start watching a bunch of episodes in close succession, a formulaic sameness starts to kick in and jokes and bits that were funny at the start end up being predictable and lame at the end.

BETTER OFF TED isn’t any different in its approach to doing comedy than something like Two and a Half Men and 99% of all sitcoms – every week you basically get the same episode. It’s like the old joke: “Did you ever see the episode of Gilligan’s Island where the Professor had a plan to get them off the island but Gilligan screwed it up?” Well, yeah, I’ve seen that episode because I’ve seen a single episode. Every week on BETTER, bland Ted sits in the center of Veronica being a bossy bitch, Linda being the anti-corporate conscious, and Phil and Lem making something wacky in the lab.

It’s funny, but it’s not hilariously funny. Ted’s frequent ploy to break the Fourth Wall and talk to the audience invites you to think of all of this as a put-on and the characters as functions rather than people. That’s no different from any other sitcom, of course, but by drawing attention to it in these semi-confessional asides it hurts your ability to believe in these characters as people.

Which would be okay if the show was really funny, but it’s just kinda funny.

Everyone on the show is written as an exaggeration of a type, but not so much that it works to help the show’s satire. Portia de Rossi is hilarious as Veronica, the cold boss who thinks she’s better than everyone else, but I’d rather see the show from her perspective than Ted’s. The show employs that “put a normal guy in the center of a crazy situation” style of storytelling, but Ted is so bland and so boring that it doesn’t generate enough consistent humor. Plus, the show never takes advantage of the fact that he’s middle management – there could be some sense of desperation to his situation of being caught between the bossy bitch above him, the crazy nerds below him, and the cutesy do-gooder sidekick.

But there isn’t. Ted is totally happy being the corporate middle man and it would be nice, I think, if there was some gruff coming at him about his position from somewhere. Someone made at him for settling, someone pushing him to be the boss, or some recognition from Ted that he’s hit the sweet spot in having a really well-paying job that’s not high enough up the corporate ladder to be a threat to anyone. There’s not any of this, except in one episode from his impossible-to-please dad, whose disappointed in Ted for not being a plumber.

That’s the other thing that BETTER OFF TED does that’s annoying – things just happen in one episode and then they’re forgotten in the next. We learn that Veronica and her dad have a highly competitive relationship (he works for Veridian’s main rival and they engage in corporate theft as a way of one-upping the other) and that’s good for one episode’s worth of humor but never brought back for a follow-up.

Ted is an emotionally vacant guy – he likes Linda but won’t pursue his feelings because, “I’ve already my one office affair.” It’s a totally made up rule, and it’s Ted’s only made-up rule. In other words, it’s a made-up rule because the show wants a contrived reason for Ted and Linda to not get together even though they’re attracted to one another. Ted’s one office affair was with Veronica, a fact that no one but them ever brings up. Maybe it’s clever or insightful that the show had Ted create a made-up rule over something that no one else seems to give a crap about, but since the show doesn’t really ever do anything with it, what’s the point?

When the show is at it’s best is when it takes an absurd premise and sees it through to completion. Early on, Ted has to bring his daughter Rose to work and passes her around to others to watch. Rose seems perfectly capable of sitting in Ted’s office for an hour while he manages a problem, but that wouldn’t be funny, so she ends up being watched by Veronica. You’d think this will be a disaster because Rose and Veronica are completely different (Rose is warm and has a conscious), yet it ends up working out beautifully because Veronica realizes having a kid in her office prevents her employees from being overly emotional. Veronica then takes immediate advantage of this fact and ends up having Rose fire one Veridian’s employees. It’s funny stuff – it’s completely absurd that a kid is going to fire someone, but the show stays committed to this premise all the way through and we’re rewarded for it.

The following episode, Veronica asks if Rose can-

No, that’s a lie. Veronica never asks about Rose again, and that’s what is ultimately so frustrating about BETTER OFF TED – it’s a good show that could be something great if it would carry things over and see things through to the end. In a later episode, Ted invents a dummy project called “Jabberwocky” because he wants to give Linda a project to work on that she cares about and the company doesn’t, and it ends up being this hot project around the corporation – no one knows what it is and so everyone wants to be in on it. The bit deftly works on a corporation’s need to be in the know. No one can dare admit that their inferior on the corporate ladder knows more than they do, so everyone blindly tells everyone else they know what it is. Ted and Veronica eventually have to pitch the nothing project to upper management, which they do successfully by telling them Jabberwocky will revolutionize the way they do business without ever actually saying what the project is or how it will cause this revolution.

And then it never gets mentioned again.

BETTER OFF TED is both smarter than a normal formulaic sitcom and exactly like a formulaic sitcom and the result is, well, you’ve read the title of this review. By trying to be both one thing and another thing it crosses itself up and all the cleverness is pretty much wasted. It would be better off either being more traditional or less traditional, but the track it took ends up being more of a negative than a positive. Where are you going to put this show on a schedule and expect it to work? If it was less traditional you could pair it with something like Arrested Development and it would be a decent follow-up. If it was more traditional you could pair it with something like Community and it would be a decent follow-up. But as it is … where would you put it? If you’ve got nowhere to put it, it’s not going to stick around.

I’ve heard that BETTER OFF TED gets even better in the second season, and I’m sure I’ll watch it eventually, but I need a break. As solid as it is, it’s not funny enough nor rewarding enough to watch a bunch of episodes in one sitting. When I sit down to watch a hamburger, I want to taste hamburger. And maybe some bacon.

I don’t want it to look like a hamburger and taste like a fruit cup.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: The Story of a Wealthy Family Who Lost (Not Quite) Everything

Arrested Development (2003 – 2006): The Complete Series – Starring Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Jeffrey Tambor, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jessica Walter, and Ron Howard.

Regular readers here at the Anxiety will notice it’s been rather quiet here of late. Partly this is a result of me getting ready for the Pertwee re-watch/review that will start as soon as the Stanley Cup is finished. Partly this is a result of me getting my next book ready for publication (the proof arrived today). And partly this is a result of me having just watched the entire 53-episode run of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

I try to stay away from “Best of” lists and overly hyperbolic statements like, “This is the funniest show ever,” but ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT would definitely be on the former and could make a claim on the latter.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT focuses on the Bluth family, a dysfunctional, wealthy family that’s just seen the family patriarch arrested for a whole slew of crimes (everything from embezzlement to treason) related to his real estate development company. Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) is the middle son and prior to his father’s arrest had expected to be named CEO of the company; when he’s passed over, he decides he’s going to take his son, George Michael (Michael Cera), and leave, but he ends up staying in order to keep the company afloat and the family together.

What makes ARRESTED so good is that all of the characters have both admirable and deplorable characteristics, running across a spectrum from George Michael (the most innocent) to Lucille (the most manipulative). Mitchell Hurwitz and his team of writers do an excellent job working the characters’ admirable and deplorable characteristics against one another, and while Michael is the star of the show and the “good son,” he’s far from perfect. Michael is the most self-aware of what his own father (Jeffrey Tambor) did to him and his older brother Gob (pronounced like the Biblical Job), and he’s determined to have a close, loving relationship with George Michael instead of one based on manipulation and lies. And he does, but he misses the larger picture and in his own way, Michael is just as smothering, continually attempting to balance his focus on work and handling the rest of the family by forcing George Michael to continue to do things they did when they were younger.

Jason Bateman is fantastic as the mostly decent would-be savior who loves his family despite his continual contempt for their behavior. He wants to be wanted, and it’s to the credit of the show that they eventually call him on this point, mocking his repeated insistence that he’s leaving them behind and taking George Michael away to live someplace else. It’s a really brilliant narrative move – had we known this at the start, of course, the whole tenor of those opening episodes changes, but when it gets revealed later on that he’s done this over and over again, it makes the character seem all the more complex and flawed.

Unlike most sitcoms, where every character has a function to play, in ARRESTED everyone has an arc to undertake. The result is that even though the characters typically generate the same kind of humor from episode to episode (George Michael’s awkwardness, Gob’s ego, Buster’s mother issues, etc.), the show can do quite a bit with them as they take that comedy through some actual … wait for it … development. We see George Michael’s awkwardness with his dad and with girls as he grows away from the first and towards the latter as he tries to become his own man. Likewise, Buster (Tony Hale) is constantly trying to grow away from his mother and towards any sense of self-individuation. Gob is constantly looking for his father’s approval, which has resulted in him having an ego that far outstrips his abilities as a son and a magician.

The show also wrings a tremendous amount of humor out of its use of a narrator. Ron Howard does the uncredited duty (though he does make an appearance in the final episode) and he’s the most likable character on the show. His almost folksy approach helps to balance the acidity of the characters which is needed because these really aren’t very likable characters. Almost all of them struggle with issues related to self-esteem and so it’s a brilliant decision to have Howard, who has always seemed to be completely comfortable with who “he” is (meaning, his characters).

The show isn’t perfect, because what could be perfect over 53 episodes? You do have to at least question any show that doesn’t take full advantage of its greatest talent, and even though they give him two roles to play (George, Sr., and George’s twin brother, Oscar), I wish the show could have found more to do with Jeffrey Tambor. George spends the first season in prison and the second living in the attic, and while the show needs to keep him locked up, he’s the one character that doesn’t really get an arc to fulfill. He’s in jail, he wants out, but when he gets out he has to stay hidden in the attic. Oscar just doesn’t match up with George as a character; he’s a stoner in love with his brother’s wife and the weakest character on the show. It’s to Tambor’s immense talent, however, that he makes these two brothers so completely different.

There’s a weak set of stories in season 3 involving the British. George Sr. tells Michael the Brits have set him up and made him a patsy, and Michael ends up involved with a British woman (Charlize Theron) and her uncle (Dave Thomas). He falls for the woman, but then thinks she’s involved in what’s going on with his dad and things blow up. Then they get together and he realizes she’s mentally challenged. It’s not bad, and Theron and Thomas are good, but the story just doesn’t work as well as what surrounds it.

On the other hand, it contains one of the absolute funniest moments in TV history when we learn, via flashback, that Buster once destroyed the family kitchen because he was mad at the Bluth’s housekeeper and he thought that’s where Lupe lived. Later, we see his throwing a dust buster at a public transit bus, and we’re told that Buster thinks he’s throwing Lupe’s favorite toy at her car.

There’s several great guest shots over the course of the show, with Henry Winkler chief among them. Playing the Bluth’s hapless attorney, Winkler is tremendous in his ineffectualness.

In-jokes are all over the place, too, such as Justine Batmeman appearing in the episode “Family Ties,” a reference both to her being Jason’s real life sister as well as “Family Ties” being the name of her former show. There’s a few Fonzie references for Winkler, and Will Arnett’s real life wife shows up to play his in-show wife.

It’s the variety of humor – sometimes clever, sometimes absurd, sometimes referencing the internal narrative and other times referencing the external world – that really sets ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT apart. This is a fantastic show that cleverly rips on its own characters. What the creators know is that they’ve got some unlikable and shallow characters here and it skewers them for us, and it humanizes them by making their faults real. They’re a family of selfish people that love each other because they’re stuck with each other.