0 Scream (1996)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Henry Winkler

It's easy enough to knock Scream for attempting to have its cake and eat it too, make a scary movie and at the same time be all smug and ironical about it. Certainly the entire franchise played out that way—is still playing out, with the late-arriving fourth installment from 2011 (which I haven't seen). Many, many such exercises have followed—The Cabin in the Woods, for example, is only one of the better ones. More broadly, the whole decade of the '90s is often dismissed as an especially poor time for horror, and Scream tends to be assigned the face of that, turning horror into little twee comedy skits with occasional shock cuts and gore, until finally Saw, Hostel, the zombie apocalypse, and a lurching army of reboots reintroduced us to the experience of actually being scared by movies again (if rather unpleasantly so, but being scared is always unpleasant after all).

Still, the first 13 minutes of Scream are so good I really think we might need to back up a little here. Wes Craven may be uneven before he is anything else, but the confidence and pure verve are unmistakable. The details are just right: a teen girl alone at home at night in a big comfortable suburban mansion, Jiffy Pop on the stovetop, and someone with a funny voice who keeps calling on the cordless and asking weird questions. "Do you like scary movies?" he says. Drew Barrymore is a perfect choice to play the victim, and even better (shades of Janet Leigh in Psycho) she's gone from the movie practically before it's begun. The strokes of development are swift—from flirtatious joking with the strange caller to outright terror as he suddenly seems to be close by, and seriously malevolent too—and finally you just have to accept the premise. It forces you to, even as the action grows more outlandish and convenient. This opener has some air of the showoff stunt, but no one is about to get up and walk out after that, even as the movie quickly settles into the snide and, yes, very witty nonsense that follows.


In a kind of horror movie twofer, Neve Campbell, already on her way to becoming a horror movie icon, succeeds Drew Barrymore as the chief potential female victim of interest. Campbell plays Sidney Prescott, whose mother was brutally slain a year to the day before the events of Scream. Of course there are always one-year anniversaries of slain parents in these movies. There is also more overt attention than usual paid to virgin and non-virgin status, but as it turns out that has much more to do with the meta side of the picture. In a late scene a video store clerk outlines "the rules of horror movies" in detail. Altogether too much thought was put into them.

In fact, after the first scene, the picture plays a good deal more like classic '80s teen comedy than horror—I suppose it's no coincidence the slasher subgenre that Scream formally parodies emerged out of the same time period, the early '80s, that also produced Fast Times at Ridgemont High and everything that came in its wake. The principals in Scream are mostly high school students, the scene is often the high school interior and grounds, and the preoccupations tend toward the usual cliques, sociological value judgments, and partying, not necessarily in that order. There is some noticeably lesser degree of interest in sex, which mostly just contributes, in abstracted fashion, to explaining the predicament in which our gang of heroes find themselves.

That's because the other genre type that Scream borrows liberally from is the mystery story, cozy Agatha Christie division, in which people are way more preoccupied with "solving the case"—that is, using logical processes of elimination to figure out the identity of the slayer, who we see roaming and skittering about in a long black robe and the now-familiar iconic white mask. This is on a notably different track from blind terrorizing forces of evil and somewhat silly in the context—again, twee skits. Red herrings and elaborate clues abound, and at points someone sitting in an overstuffed armchair wearing a deerstalker cap, smoking a meerschaum, and making amazing points of deductive reasoning would not be altogether out of place.

The whole thing is a mess and a dated mess now too. There is way too much '90s music on the soundtrack—Nick Cave, Moby, an acoustic version of "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Gus—and too much of that is well, you know, smug and ironical. And yet I'm willing to forgive the excesses and weaknesses of Scream. Movies after Pulp Fiction were marred by a lot of this business for a few years there, that's one excuse. But it's nice to see flashes of Wes Craven the consummate horror filmmaker, and it's nice to see him working with a cast that brings a lot of good energy and is obviously having a ball. I don't even knock the franchise at large—I liked Scream 2 a good deal, and I even liked the Scary Movie franchise too, built directly off Scream. But the only thing that's essential in all this is the first scene of the first movie. All the rest is marginally entertaining hokum played for laughs.

Detail: Scream (1996)

0 Fly Away Home (1996)

USA / Canada, 107 minutes
Director: Carroll Ballard
Writers: Bill Lishman, Robert Rodat, Vince McKewin
Photography: Caleb Deschanel
Music: Mark Isham
Editor: Nicholas C. Smith
Cast: Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Dana Delany, Terry Kinney, Holter Graham, Jeremy Ratchford

Sometimes I think Fly Away Home may be something like my token selection out of the ghetto of G-rated movies. All the reviews seem to find a way to mention that rating very quickly and usually also include the phrase "family fare" too (so glad I got them both out of the way myself). There are things to say about this, as there are about the other extreme of this spectrum, the X or NC-17 or "unrated" rating, or whatever it is called now. Both are commercial curses—in the case of the G it tends to relegate to a narrow market where I suspect managing children and their parents are more the goals and everything else secondary. At the other extreme—what is the last movie released with one? Henry & June? Midnight Cowboy?

With Fly Away Home it's almost certainly director Carroll Ballard who is most important in making it such an extraordinarily effective story, whose thoughtful themes are rarely cheated on and, indeed, are front and center right in the title: flight, and home. He pulled off a similarly elegiac stunt involving animals and sad children nearly 20 years earlier with The Black Stallion. Fly Away Home is populated with stock figures and sequences for a G-rated picture— funnee aminals, tender and frolicsome music, approximately six kind persons and/or institutions for every malevolent one, etc.—but it hits very hard at the longings and experiences of people of all ages (there, I said that too).



Anna Paquin, who was only 13 but had already made her mark three years earlier in The Piano, plays Amy Alden, whose mother dies at the beginning of the picture in a shocking if beautiful auto accident in New Zealand. Amy goes to live with her father Tom (Jeff Daniels, who is fine as usual) in Canada. He's a kind of mad scientist and inventor artist who is obsessed with flying machines and things like hang-gliding. His house is a sty and he has a girlfriend, who though kindly has obviously been marked out as stepmother material by Amy.

At about this point, and not for the last time, some tropy evil figures enter in—developers with bulldozers chiefly and the marketing men and lawyers in cheap suits who clear the way for them—and topical issues are briefly entertained. Out of the clash, Amy finds a collection of abandoned goose eggs and incubates them into hatching. Science then enters the picture as we learn all about the life arcs of geese and, most critically, the concept of imprinting, on which the whole thing hinges. The geese believe Amy is their mother, and the problem is that when it comes time for them to migrate south in the fall there will be no one to show them the way.

I realize I am reducing this movie to its story but the story is mostly what drives it, and it's a beautiful and charming story. The young geese are wonderful, as all young animals are, particularly in G-rated pictures, and their devotion to Amy and its effect on her are equally so. The movie has a sure hand on all its elements. As caring for the geese has its beneficial, empowering effects on Amy, her father sees and responds like a decent human being. More and more I find myself deeply touched and moved in narratives by the simple expedient of kindness, and so it is with Fly Away Home. The kid cares for the geese, and though it is an impossible situation her father goes to great lengths to protect the healing fantasy she has wandered into. About my only complaint is that Paquin has a really screechy scream and too many scenes are built around that, in wacky fashion.

At about this point it becomes a ridiculous story. But the emotional side, which is well constructed and played, coupled with the stunningly beautiful photography, serve to help us not quite notice how ridiculous it is, as Tom invents a flying machine for Amy to lead the geese south to a safe home. The scientific exposition, which is constant but never heavy-handed, always serving to illuminate, has already informed us that the geese only need to be led on the route once and they will know the way back in the spring.

And so, in the second half, off we go on a great adventure, which swells in size as they travel south. Everyone is on their side except the evil developers and maybe an evil park ranger or two, and they get help from the strangest places, including the military, an old woman with a shotgun, and downtown Baltimore. That's how it works in feel-good movies—everyone is on your side. And make no mistake, this is feel-good down to its toenails. But that doesn't mean it isn't perfectly capable of making us feel good without cheating. Fly Away Home is about things that are worth feeling good about: home, flight, restored faith, deep connection, commitment, responsibility, and adorable geese. I love it with everything I've got.

Detail: Fly Away Home (1996)

0 Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar" (1996)

(listen)

Parents, lock up your children, it's Marilyn Manson, scourge of a nation. Probably I never would have given any of this a second thought—too much arch concept in the programmatic monster / monster names, to start—except someone sent me a copy of the first album, which was way better than I expected. By the time of this follow-up the band had become a first-rate performing act, which I attribute to the influence of Trent Reznor, traveling with Nine Inch Nails, and because Fort Lauderdale's finest, Brian Warner, has always been a decent songwriter. If I ever happen to make peace with the bombast of opera I believe it may be with Marilyn Manson pointing the way. Yes, this is formally and intentionally a rip on Jesus Christ Superstar, and no, rock opera is another beast altogether. The tiresome / predictable / sophomoric (thesaurus, don't fail me now) Nietzsche thread in the album for which this is the title song at least does the service of locating it all closer to Richard Wagner than Pete Townshend (speaking as one who happens to love Tommy). I think you're supposed to care about the stories in opera but I don't care about the story here. What I like is the dense wallop, with a bottom that reaches to the molten core of the earth, nothing at rest. Even quieter moments (for the dynamics, see), with say a warbling choral sound straight out of Diamanda Galas, impress more as teams of wraiths and infernal termite buzz, alternating with football cheers, demon vocals, stepping down the scale into tumult, and a heavy riff that's ultimately quite satisfying. When it achieves full roar it's hard for me to see how you can call it anything but magnificent.

Detail: Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar" (1996)

0 tu-plang (1996)

The first album by Australian band Regurgitator came in the mail the last time anyone was bothering to send me free albums in the mail, so that should give some idea how long that's been. I flipped for it in a big way—it was a curiosity and the band was a mystery (intriguing cover art, eccentric information in small font only in the booklet, this music) that went into high rotation for a couple of months. Hard to figure out who they were, or what this was. I still don't know much about Regurgitator, but I see on Wikipedia they've had a whole career and are reasonably popular even. In fact, this album itself went to #3 Down Under and even yielded a top 40 hit in "Kong Foo Sing," which may indeed be the best song here. In fairness, nothing seems to have dented any other English-speaking or European or any other charts anywhere, beyond New Zealand. Insert usual that's a shame, because there are plenty of reasons to like this, starting with the determined career suicide gesture of opening your debut album with a song called "I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am." That pushed me toward a disposition in its favor, and they delivered with these feverish mash-ups of hip-hop, drum-and-bass attack, screwy PiL vocals, heavy bottoms, surf-rock flourishes, and gratuitous obscenity as it pleases them. It's Stranglers-style mood pieces for people in bad moods, all lined up in neat rows. It's surprisingly listenable, and surprising in any number of ways, with constant, vicious hooks, a wealth of ways to use the studio and unusual instruments, and whatever, to insinuate itself continually. It's capable of a good deal of very pure heaviosity and even willful menace, which probably would have scared me when I was about 14, if I'd happened to wake up to it in the middle of the night and it was playing. But since I was already 40 by the time I actually heard it, I registered the vein and kept moving. It's a real pleasure, and I was happy to find it remains so. As heavy as it makes out, it's always cheeky, and the momentum rarely flags.

Detail: tu-plang (1996)

0 Eels, "Your Lucky Day in Hell" (1996)

(listen)

The Eels is essentially a one-man project, the man in question being Mark Oliver Everett, aka "E" (hence, somehow, one presumes, the name of the band), who is the son of a quantum physicist. I don't know the Eels well—in fact, this song, third single from the first album, Beautiful Freak, is for me more on the order of another CMJ discovery (Vol. 38, October 1996, track 2) and subsequent handy mix tape staple. It's possible you know it from one of its movie appearances, in Scream 2, Grosse Pointe Blank, Dead Man on Campus, and Yes Man. I have the first three Eels albums on my hard drive but haven't sat down yet to study them properly. This song, which has more or less made a study of me, has so far been quite enough. How does anyone duplicate the experience of one great song anyway? Last week, when I happened to be having my own private series of lucky days in hell, I found out one of its best uses is as tonic. It is moody affectation from the start, slow and deliberate, with layers of chiming vibe chords and a whining guitar, and then reedy, pulpy keyboard fills fleshing it out. The first line, so strange, powerful, and evocative: "Mama gripped onto the milkman's hand / and then she finally gave birth." This song moves and feels like a bad mood, like an inescapable bad day bearing down, yet at the same time providing the escape. I guess the word I'm looking for is "cathartic," but it didn't start out that way. It insinuates first as shrewd, doomy, intelligent pop music self-consciously slumming, slightly distant and above-it. Then it moves in for the soothing kill. It seems to know where I live.

Detail: Eels, "Your Lucky Day in Hell" (1996)