Palo Alto Movie Review

To grow up in a filmmaking family and be constantly surrounded by people who make it their life’s work to tell stories through motion pictures must cause you to absorb the techniques so that you end up with intuition through osmosis. The patriarch Francis Ford Coppola went to film school to learn his trade and honed his skills while making some of the great classics of American cinema. His knowledge passed to his daughter Sofia, who has made some excellent films herself. Other members of the extended family have had success as actors, writers, and producers. Now comes Gia Coppola, granddaughter to Francis, and niece to Sofia, with her directorial debut Palo Alto, which she adapted from James Franco’s story series of the same name.

Scream 4 Movie Review

You might have thought enough time had passed between Scream 3 (which presumably closed out a trilogy) and Scream 4 (which attempted to cash in on the resurgence of the horror genre) that writer Kevin Williamson could have found a newly fresh take on the genre. The first film in the series was undoubtedly remarkable for managing to skewer the genre, calling attention to itself and its absurd tropes, and at the same time be a skillfully crafted addition to the horror canon thanks to the direction of Wes Craven. Craven returned to helm the third sequel, which would suggest a belief somewhere that it was worth returning to the franchise more than a decade later.

The action returns to the original fictional town of Woodsboro, where the next generation of teenagers has grown up on post-ironic horror films as well as the fictional Stab series which is supposed to be based on the events of the Scream films. Scream 4 opens promisingly, although you don’t realize it for several minutes. A hackneyed dialogue between two teenage girls as they receive threatening phone calls and Facebook messages from a stalker is revealed to be the opening of Stab 6, being watched by two other young women (one of them played by Anna Paquin), which is then revealed as the opening of Stab 7 being watched by two teenagers who are, in fact, characters in Scream 4. Ignoring the metaphysical paradox when you work out the logic, it is an opening that outdoes itself.