Modern Classic Horror Review: Scream

This is the natural closing to my personal journey because it was released during winter break of my first year in college. So I was at the beginning stages of becoming a full-fledged adult and being finished with things like getting scared by horror movies. That said, this was a cinematic experience that genuinely frightened me. This was a slasher film to put a cap on a generation's worth of slasher films that relied heavily on certain conventions. I still think it's a fantastic horror movie, but its effect has certainly worn off and been done to death in the intervening years.

Click here for a list of other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

By the end of 1996 it had been so long since a genuinely scary horror movie had been in wide release that it seemed like the genre might be dead forever. Our old friends Freddy, Jason, and Michael had been flogged into oblivion and people were well attuned to the genre conventions resulting in audiences that were a lot smarter than those going to see slasher films 15 and 20 years earlier. These conventions included things like the couple that has sex getting killed; the drug users getting killed; dumb female characters always making the wrong decisions and getting dead as a result; idiot police officers; revenge motives rooted in a complicated back story; obvious suspects as red herrings; and on and on. Kevin Williamson was an aspiring screenwriter when he wrote Scream and eventually sold it, after which legendary horror director Wes Craven was hired to direct.

Trouble with the Curve Movie Review

I have to give Clint Eastwood a lot of credit for his acting choices as he gets older. He has never shied away from playing his age, a rarity in a business that rewards youth and vigor. Roughly since Unforgiven he has continued to play characters whose age has some profound impact on the story. As Gus in Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood plays a baseball scout who faces irrelevancy by the new technologies and theories that have a way of creeping into the workplace.

The Descendants Movie Review

As a writer and director, Alexander Payne is out to show that Hollywood studios can produce small character-driven dramas that are also successful. As a screenwriter he’s one of the great contemporary satirists, having given the great social commentary pieces Citizen Ruth and Election followed up by the equally impressive, though less satirical, more dramatic About Schmidt and Sideways. He comes back to us now after a lengthy break from feature film directing with The Descendants.

She's All That Movie Review: Throwaway High School Social Classes

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 5 February 1999. I have made some minor editorial adjustments, but nothing that affects the content of the review.

He’s the coolest kid in school. He parks in a space marked “Reserved for Class President,” has his picture hanging on the wall in the school, says ‘Hi’ to everyone. Some stare in amazement as he goes by, “He spoke to me!”  His name is Zach . He’s played by Freddie Prinze, Jr., and he also dates the prettiest, most popular girl in school, who happens to be a shoo-in for Prom Queen.

So what’s this guy to do when his girlfriend dumps him for Brock Hudson (Matthew Lillard), a former cast member of “The Real World?” How about a bet? Zach bets his best friend that he can take any girl in the school and turn her into the Prom Queen in six weeks. The next thing they need is a hapless victim – Lainie (Rachael Leigh Cook) – the quiet, geeky artist. Thus is the situation in the new teen comedy She’s All That.