Ben to the rescue, and other Grown Ups thoughts

Among the many things we had to do to get ready to have guests over Saturday night, for a winter feast followed by a campfire in the fire pit in our back yard, the one I was dreading most will surprise you, given that I'm a film critic and movie lover.

It was picking out a movie for the 13- and 14-year-old boys to watch on the projector in our garage.

There would be three of them, including my son -- we thought two initially, but a third ended up coming, which is good. I worry so much about social awkwardness that I even worry about it on behalf of other people. My son knows the kid we knew was coming well enough, but that didn't mean I didn't worry about how they would keep each other occupied for five or six hours. 

The movie was supposed to relieve that pressure for a couple of those hours, but instead it shifted the pressure on me.

How to find a movie that three different teenagers would all want to watch, when I can barely convince my own son to watch any movies at all?

When we had this same gathering last year, the latest Scream movie was chosen. I don't remember how it was chosen, but I definitely had my misgivings about it, given that they were only 12 and 13 at the time. My son, one of the 12-year-olds, shrugged off the extreme violence, or at least so he said.

So when I allowed myself to give it a few thoughts on Saturday between listening to baseball, cleaning, and trips to the store, I tried to think of the equivalent of Scream VI in 2024. Most of the horror movies I've seen this year have been pretty lame, and I thought if I were putting my name to it, I didn't want to sit them in front of Imaginary or Night Swim or some shit like that. (Actually, Night Swim might have worked, come to think of it.)

I did ask my son, but he said we should just wait until the others arrived. Which was sensible, but just kicked the can down the road to a time when I was busy readying dinner and the like.

Fortunately, Ben saved the day.

His name is actually Ben, so let's call him Ben.

Ben was the one we knew was coming. And before I even had the chance to worry about how this would go down, he said, "Can we watch Grown Ups?"

It struck me as a very odd choice. The movie came out in 2010, meaning it isn't some hot off the presses release everyone is talking about, and to my knowledge, it's pretty tame, especially when taken in comparison to something like Scream VI. Some ogling of attractive women, but probably not much more than, if memory served. (I hadn't seen it but I remember the trailers, and just now I see I actually wrote one of those scathing sight-unseen posts I used to write back in the day, which you can find here if you're interested.)

A brief glance on IMDB showed me it was actually rated PG. Not even PG-13. Am I being punked or something?

What's more, it's streaming on Netflix, so I didn't even have to rent it.

The fact that this decision was made so quickly and decisively -- and that the other two agreed to it, and that my son said he really liked it -- took a huge amount off my plate, to allow me to put food on other people's plates. It was a kind of bliss, really.

I always watch what the boys watch

I hadn't intended to watch Scream VI to rank it with my 2023 movies, but once I'd already rented it for them to watch last year, I figured I should get two viewings out of the 48-hour rental, and watched it myself later that night after everyone left. (I ended up really disliking it, ranking it #153 out of the 168 movies I ranked last year.)

This year, I also watched Grown Ups the next night, even though there was no closing rental window and no movie to rank for the current release year. I watched it on my son's recommendation, actually.

And am glad I did.

Enough time has passed since the movie's 2010 release for me to have gone from annoyed with most of the five stars of this movie to feeling sentimental about them, just a little bit. Then you've got a handful of great female co-stars, those being Maya Rudolph, Salma Hayek (more on her in a minute) and Maria Bello. Then of course a couple younger ogle-worthy actresses who play Rob Schneider's daughters, but it's probably not worth saying any more than that about that.

In 2010 I thought this movie would be smug, crass and self-satisfied. It probably is that, but in much smaller quantities than I expected, and with some decent heart. 

Plus as a father of children who are about the same age as most of the children in this movie, as opposed to my first still being in my wife's belly back then, I appreciated it a lot more than I would have back then. There's good content about how today's kids never get outside to do any activities and are stuck to their screens, which was even a thing back in 2010. (Video games rather than phones then.) It's probably worse now, but maybe not. 

Anyway, solid recommend on Grown Ups. I laughed a fair number of times.

Retrofitted credits

I find it sort of frustrating that Salma Hayek now goes by Salma Hayek Pinault -- and wrote about that frustration here -- but I found it downright surprising that this is how she was credited in Grown Ups.

So Netflix is retrofitting credits now?

That's the only possible explanation, unless Salma Hayek is capable of time travel.

It seems like one of the many extended favors that go along with Adam Sandler's deal with Netflix, but that doesn't make it right.

Hayek was indeed married to Francois-Henri Pinault back when Grown Ups came out, having tied the knot the year before, but she didn't change the way she was credited until last year, at the prompting of her daughter. So while she could have conceivably been Salma Hayek Pinault back in 2010, she wasn't. 

I guess I feel like movies are finished products when they are cut, printed and released, and tinkering should be kept to a minimum. (George Lucas' FX meddling being one of the more obvious examples.) If Lana and Lily Wachowski are still credited as Andy and Larry Wachowski in streaming copies of Bound and The Matrix, despite a far more justifiable rationale for retrofitting their credits, Hayek should just live with her decision not to annex her husband's last name.  

Thematically appropriate

It was not lost on me how similar the things that were happening in Grown Ups were to what was going on in my house right now. The movie is about a gathering of old friends and their children at a lake house, the children having to get to know each other and become comfortable with each other, and that's what was going on for a single night that night. It even takes place at the same time, though in quite different seasons. They're celebrating 4th of July in the movie, and we just, well, ignored it last week, given what's going on with the corrupt Supreme Court.

Our kids know each other better than these kids do, but just like the characters in this movie, I was worried about whether everyone would get along okay and do something fun together, rather than just being glued to their phones. 

In fact, they did do that. We had that campfire in the back yard, and not only did the kids sit around and join the conversation, but they had fun burning marshmallows to a crisp and eating the other s'mores components we had gathered, whether they actually put them together into proper s'mores or not. Making s'mores is kind of the antithesis to phones, isn't it? 

Funnily enough, the characters in Grown Ups also toast marshmallows while drinking at one point. And even the ratio of drinkers to non-drinkers was about the same, since two of the three visiting adults at my gathering were drivers, so they had to go easy. In fact, we were probably crazier than the movie characters in that none of the characters had to drive anywhere, and yet they were still drinking only a single beer or coffee, a detail designed to illustrate the changes that accompany parenthood and middle age. 

Making s'mores was not the only "go out and experience the world" thing the three teenagers at my house did. (My younger son never has any age appropriate mates in this group, and mostly kept to himself, excepting when making s'mores. He was on screens most of the night, but I suppose you can't have everything.) 

In fact, the three left my house after 9 p.m. to walk down to the pier, a ten-minute walk from the house. I did worry a little bit about it, but also, you're supposed to worry a little about your kids putting themselves out there on adventures. But our parents pushed us out the door back in the 1980s, and we were the better for it.

I have no idea if they got up to any misadventures down at the pier or were just on their phones the whole time, but they did come back in one piece. 

And seeming just a wee bit better for the experience.

Now I'm the one contributing to delinquencies, and other Scream VI thoughts

I've written at various times in the past about the movies my kids have been exposed to before we thought they were ready. I think I mentioned the time my older son sat in on a viewing of The Suicide Squad -- the really violent James Gunn one from two years ago -- when we were over for a dinner party in my wife's friend group, where each of the families has a child around my son's age, though in their case it's the youngest son while ours is the oldest. I know I didn't mention, because it only happened about a month ago, when he watched American Psycho under the same circumstances.

Well, we had a dinner party at our house on Saturday night, so I thought it was my chance to return the favor.

Of course the four 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted something aspirational, and it was clear my usual recommendation of a handful of Marvel movies was getting no traction. It was my own son, though, who was fixated on the idea of Scream VI.

Even though he's never seen a Scream movie, my son does have a history with the franchise. We came into possession of a Ghostface mask, and he's worn it on multiple Halloweens. Then last year on our trip to America, he sat next to me as I watched last year's Scream reboot on the plane. He asked questions and I'm sure saw selected images from it, and I know it lived on in his curiosity, fascination and probably deep-seated fears.

Having already planted the seed myself, through both the plane viewing and the mask purchase, it was obvious I was going to comply with his request -- especially since getting a kid to agree on a movie when his friends are over is a victory in and of itself.

Plus in the back of my head I had the fact that my younger son, who is still only nine, has friends who have told him they've seen The Exorcist, which is far more graphic than the umpteenth Scream movie. 

None of them stumbled out of the garage two hours later with any apparent scars, and I'm guessing the other three, who all have older siblings, have already seen a lot worse. (One could argue that both The Suicide Squad and American Psycho are a lot worse, and those are only the ones I know they've seen.) 

My own son seemed fine too. He acknowledged it was violent but he reminded me "I've seen American Psycho." 

When I watched it myself later, the rental having promoted it to the top of my viewing queue when otherwise I might not have seen it until October for Halloween, I was trying to figure out which there are more of: f-bombs or stab wounds. 

Did I watch movies like this when I was 12? I don't think so. I was not naturally drawn to horror as a younger viewer. By 12 I might have been trying to see R-rated movies that had boobs -- I can't remember exactly when that started -- but teenagers being chopped up was not a priority for me. Unless, maybe, they showed their boobs before being chopped up, which was much more of a thing back then. 

Every parent knows that today's kids grow up faster than they did, and whether that's actually true or not, there's no doubt we believe it. Even my wife, who tends to be a bit more careful with things like this, sort of shrugged when I told her our son wanted to watch Scream VI. She later told me it was because she considered it more horror comedy, which I don't think the Scream series really is -- at least not anymore. Sure they try to get a laugh here and there, but it feels more like typical serial killer drudgery to me nowadays. Which brings me to my next point ...

Scream and Saw are basically the same thing

Now that we have six Scream movies, it is becoming more evident that this series has quite a lot in common with the most enduring horror series of the 21st century, the Saw movies. I believe there are nine of those, though if it was double digits I wouldn't be surprised.

Consider:

1) Both series have an incredibly serpentine mythology that continues to revisit characters from earlier in the series who are presumed dead, or even if they actually are dead they still loom large over the proceedings.

2) Both series are founded on the idea of copycats continuing to carry on the work of the original killer(s).

3) Both series have an idea of who "deserves" to be killed based on some previous crimes of which they are guilty. 

4) In both series, the original killer is known for the sound of his voice in either pre-recorded messages or live telephone calls, and the exact timbre, vocal ticks, favorite turns of phrase or indications of sadism of the voice can be reproduced by multiple copycats despite them possibly never having heard the original voice, because most of the people who did hear that voice ended up dead.

5) Both series are utterly exhausted at this point. Having liked the reboot of Scream last year -- or "requel," as the characters in this film refer to it -- I felt pretty put off by Scream VI. No, I definitely do not think it's clever any more the way these films are relentlessly self aware, and try to give us credit by winking to us about what they're doing and then doing that very thing. At this point this is really just pandering, and I'm tired of it. In a way, Saw at least has a certain purity in that it presents the material more straightforwardly, without the equivalent of Murtaugh saying "I'm too old for this shit" in all the Lethal Weapon movies. Scream is basically nothing but that.

Perfect pauses: Scream VI

SPOILER ALERT if you care about who the killer was in Screams 1 through 5. 

In one of the many times I paused the movie -- which were a lot, since I was tired and a little drunk after the aforementioned dinner party, meaning I finished the movie Sunday afternoon -- I happened to randomly catch the exact screen shot to show who the killer was in every previous Scream movie.

I've warned you once, now I will warn you again: Don't continue reading or looking down this page if you want to be kept ignorant of this information.

Here was the perfect pause in question:

Now, this was actually a spoiler for me since I haven't seen Scream 3 or Scream 4 -- and in a way, since I remember so little about Scream 2. 

At first I was annoyed, and thought that if I hadn't paused it at this exact moment, the information might have gone in one ear and out the other and I might have just been able to ignore it. They continue to talk about all these past killers, but hearing their names wouldn't have been something I would have remembered on a potential future viewing of Scream 3 or Scream 4. The faces are the things that stick with me, especially if you recognize them. (Hello, Scott Foley -- it's been a while.)

But then I thought: Given how over this series I am, what are the chances I am going to go back and watch Scream 3 or 4 -- ever?

Yeah, we know my stated goal is to watch every movie that's ever been made. But just between you and me, I doubt that's ever actually going to happen. 

In Scream, no one can see your Roman numerals

Flush with confidence after last year's Scream reboot was considered a success, the studio is already back with another Scream movie this March.

The title is right there in that poster, but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't notice it. 

See Paramount Pictures didn't go the extremely confusing route that Rob Zombie's Halloween reboot series went, where not only was the reboot also named Halloween, just like the original, but the sequel was also named Halloween 2, just like the original sequel.

They did manage to confuse things a bit though.

Instead of doing what the more recent Halloween reboot series did, calling the movies things like Scream Kills or Scream Rises or Scream Goes to the Bathroom, the Scream movies have picked up with the original numbering of the series -- even though there was never a Scream 5.

Scream VI is a direct sequel to last year's Scream reboot, which was effectively if not actually Scream 5, and it is indeed the sixth movie in the series, but keeping everything else straight may be a tall task.

And for young people who haven't seen a lot of movies that use to a Roman numeral to denote the sequel number, they might not even see the bloody VI in this poster.

So there's at least a chance that some people will think that the sequel to Scream is also called Scream.

I kind of think the only reason they chose this title was because someone had the brainwave that they could fit a Roman numeral six into the letter M. That's pretty flimsy if you ask me.

Oh and the Alien reference in the subject of this post isn't just random. I got a promotional email about the release of Scream VI in which they use a tagline "In a city of millions, no one hears you scream." (See it's set in New York. Okay, something new at least.)

This is pretty lame -- either they fucked up the reference by using "no one hears" rather than "no one can hear," or they deliberately avoided it to steer clear of a lawsuit, in which case, they should have just gone with something else entirely.

I was one of those who thought the Scream reboot was pretty good, so I guess I'll probably see Scream VI as well. Ghostface chasing a victim to the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch is going to be epic.