The Dark Knight

    Hello and welcome to part three of The Batman Season here at Now with Numbers. This week: The Dark Knight; a much less awful Batman movie than the one I watched yesterday. I’d go so far as to say I really liked it. Regrettably I may have loved it had it not been for the one that came before, which just left a bad taste in my mouth.

      I preferred this because it finally lightened the hell up. It wasn’t wallowing in grief we – the audience – weren’t given enough reason to care about. It didn’t have a Tibetan cult of ninjas teaching him the ways of having eyes-in-the-back-of-your-head and perfect choreography*.

     The much needed levity of course came from Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. All the way through Arkham Asylum I was more interested in Joker than Batman (even if his taunts became infuriatingly repetitive at the harder bits) because I got little else out of Batman other than his parents were dead and that was sad. Which as I said in the Begins review was nothing I didn’t know before, even as someone uninterested.

      I really mean it when I say this movie didn’t need Begins. Batman at this stage is a cultural artefact that most everyone knows at least a little about. Like Jaws, or Harry Potter or Jack Bauer. People know what you’re referencing when you say “you’re gonna need a bigger boat”. Not to mention I’m a huge fan of starting in the middle – or in medias res, for the more sophisticated. I enjoy picking up a storey and working out what has happened before, occasionally not finding out is more fun. Would it really have made any difference if Bruce chose to clean up the city for the sake of others over doing it because he’d already been burned by the state of affairs. Well actually yes, but my point is you could draw your own conclusions.

      This started off great. With a bank robbery that goes spectacularly well because the robbers kill each other after their usefulness has ended. It’s callous yet elegant and when one of the masked men is revealed as Joker it feels like a real revelation even though you can see it coming a mile off, if you’re paying real good attention. The way it should be.

     Ok so escaping into a row of school busses and nobody notices the rubble falling off your roof is a little bit hard to swallow – all it would take is for the bus behind to take the number plate (I think school busses also have unique numbers on their side and stuff too but I’m not sure) and it could be traced with relative ease – but I was impressed enough to suspend my disbelief.

      I could talk forever about the scenes involving the two ships – how the passengers refusal to play his game surprised me and how tense the whole thing was – but instead I’ll just gush briefly in parenthesis.

     The new (as far as I’m concerned) character of Harvey Dent brought a lot to the movie. He exposed Bruce Wayne as part of the problem in the scene where he accepts a large donation for his campaign – didn’t Gotham get into its mess by being bought and corrupted? Having its politicians and judges on the hooks of richer people? In the pivotal scene where batman is forced to choose between Girl and Dent I was genuinely surprised when he rescued Dent – I figured that, like in most movies, the Girl would make a nice reward for our hero when the job is done. I mean, sure, this could be construed as Batman meagrely protecting an investment but Harvey did have the chance to really change things. The utilitarian view made me like Batman slightly more. (I’ll concede my last review made me seem kind of petulant that murder is always wrong. It’s not, I didn’t care for the criminals any in ‘Begins’ I just hated Bruce/man’s pretentiousness.)

     Sure I felt it was a little bit too sudden when Dent suddenly became a homicidal psychotic but, as Joker said, sometimes all it takes is a little push to descend into madness. And the coin flipping thing was cool, an interesting look into choice and fate, the way I read it.

     I also find it a little incredible how batman can turn every mobile phone into a sonar device and yet nobody can work out who he is, the world of Batman seems to be slightly more technologically advanced than ours – how come nobody can figure out who he is? Surely his daemon summoning voice isn’t enough to cover his identity, all it would take is a picture – from, say, a mobile phone – for someone to map the facial structure and then extrapolate possibilities from various data bases and rich lists. Anonymous would have it nailed by afternoon.   

     I really enjoyed this movie, even if its villains were far more entertaining – even likable – than its irritating hero. I’d watch it again and am even looking forward to the third movie, which is apparently out this year.

*I didn’t mean that to sound like a back-handed compliment. The choreography was meagrely adequate.

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Blog War

     The friend that forced me into the batman universe – on the promise I’d adore it – started his own blog, chiefly it seems, to argue with me. He attacked my opinions with opinions of his own forcing me into the situation where I have to defend my innocent non-fanboy opinions.

     He first quotes the paragraph where I accuse the film of being slow, and where I assume the Joker killed Bruce/man’s parents, as I had heard way back in primary school. He starts his argument by agreeing with me, the film is too slow and then pointing out that the story I’d heard is only applicable in one of the more ancient versions of Batman. So I’m perhaps mistaken on this version’s take on the back story. I apologise. Unreservedly.

     Except I’d like to point out that if Begins isn’t going down that road, it makes it even less relevant. If the beginning of the trilogy isn’t seeding any pay off for the third it makes the trilogy less satisfying.

      So his next point goes exactly like this:

"I’d have been totally behind Bats if I’d known he was enjoying himself. Instead he’s oh so terribly compassionate in that irritating holier-than-thou way that pisses me off to no end."

I think that's the point of a "Super-Hero" it's someone who morally is better than your average mortal. Now I know that you've never been a great fan of the super universe. So it doesn't come as a surprise to me that you feel that way. In any normal film, i'd probably feel the exact same.

    Morality isn’t difficult. It’s about what causes and elevates pain and suffering. With the shading of the greater good. And besides Batman isn’t super. He’s a rich boy with time and money on his side. Sure he’s at the top of his physical fitness and martial arts trained but most armies are made up of thousands of people who can hold their own.

     Spiderman for example can do things nobody else can do and chooses to use that power to help people rather than for personal gain or revenge, simply because it’s the right thing to do. Bat man has ambiguous motivations, either revenge or to win the Girl – she dies but in Begins she presents herself as a reward.  

     

At the point where he blows up the League of Shadows, which I might add, he doesn't do with intent. Unlike the manslaughter.

       Somewhere along the conversation another friend of ours mentioned Batman’s intellect. I’ve no doubt that Bruce is relatively smart and I can’t imagine what he was trying to do if it wasn’t blow the place up. He knows where the explosives are kept. If his goal was simply to flick the burning poker away, that would never have created the diversion he needed. Even if we assume he never intended to kill anyone he knew it was overwhelmingly likely.  

       And I don’t care that he killed the guy in the train at the end. He meant to, he’d planned it, getting Gordon to destroy the bridge and then ripping the train apart himself. It was necessary of course, to stop the vaporising machine. But if he’d wanted to he could have saved that guy. “allowing him the chance to escape” isn’t what happens here.

      As for the hotel scene. I stand by what I say here. His exchange with Rachel could have been done in any number of ways – like if he’d shown some thought he could have gone to his best friend instead of allowing her to think he didn’t care about her after a seven year absence and his declared death. You know? Like a compassionate individual would have done.

     And, Just to finish, your suggestion that I watch this again is quite toxic to me.

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     This is me drawing a line under the debate. I’m sick of Batman.

     Look, that’s a line. Under the Debate. Respect the Line.

     Colon Pee.

Batman Begins

      I watched this because I was told to buy it by the same friend who made me play Arkham Asylum (AA, I’ll need to reference this later and so retroactively put this in as I was much too lazy to type out ‘Arkham Asylum’ again). Even though he’s yet to play Dead Space or read ‘Dog Blood’ and ‘Them or Us’ (by David Moody) the second and third part to the ‘Hater’ trilogy – the best horror thriller story I’ve ever read; a terrifying glimpse into societal breakdown and the following broken society.

      But anyway.

      Let’s talk about the movie; which is perhaps... The best movie of all time ever! Flawless in every way I can’t imagine how any movie could ever be better than this. It’s got Batman in it and Qui-Gon Jinn and NINJAS! It has mother fucking ninjas! And a British butler with a British accent – if I had a uterus I’d father a child from every man involved in its production to ensure a new generation of excellent – and beautiful – film makers.

     Sarcasm (and indeed a weird sort of sexism) aside this movie has problems. Pretentious deep and looks-and-sounds-a-lot-like-Keanu-Reeves-but-I’m-assured-he-isn’t problems.

     The first half of this is pretty slow, which isn’t a bad thing in itself (The Beach is positively glacial at times but doesn’t suffer for it) it’s just slowed by trying to cultivate sympathy by showing us Bruce Wayne’s Parents and then killing them and it, actually, sort of being his fault but not really. I mean even at my most causally aware of Batman I knew that Joker killed his parents which ruins the pay off in either ‘Dark Knight’ or the one after (I am under the impression it’s a trilogy).  Granted the arc of him mastering his fear of bats is interesting and a good theme – but then he uses his mastery of fear to “turn fear against those who prey on the fearful” surely making him someone who preys on the newly fearful who in turn will need someone to scare him?

    Enter scarecrow, played by Cillian Murphy, who uses a gas to create fear and mental breakdown in his victims. A truly cruel villain but I learned nothing about him I didn’t get from AA. I get that they’re separate media but they use the same universe and I feel they should bring new interpretations to an old idea. Isn’t that what fan fiction is about? I mean has every Batman thing that’s ever come out just been more of exactly the same? I can’t judge but that’s the impression I’m starting to get.

     Then there’s the time it takes up trying to square away the fact that batman isn’t descending to the criminal’s level. Taking the law into his own hands and battering and terrorising people who – for the most part – seemed to have been bought under the threat of murder if they don’t take the offer. The irony is I’d have been totally behind Bats if I’d known he was enjoying himself. Instead he’s oh so terribly compassionate in that irritating holier-than-thou way that pisses me off to no end.

     It almost convinced me of his ultra-moral stance but right after I was thinking it might not be as much of a contradiction as all that he burns down the League of Shadows’ training facility that he’s been living in for seven years – killing at least three people and severely injuring others all because they asked him to murder a man who killed a whole family for some extra land. You see my problem here? Then at the end he lets a nemesis die in what can only be described as manslaughter with intent. This isn’t a flawed character it’s a broken one, trying to get you to accept two contradictory sides to him as moral. This would be acceptable – if infuriating – if the doublethink was offered to you by the character alone, but it’s the movie.

     Like I said I’d totally be up for the ride if it weren’t for the fact he was so righteous. If Batman dispensed nosebleeds and brain damage with a sense of pride and enjoyment as he cleaned up the city while slowly becoming the evil he set out to deliver justice to, that’d be fine. Instead he does it dispassionately; which isn’t virtuous it’s psychotic.

     It’s a shame really, vigilantism is a romantic idea – it’s what makes Kick Ass such a fucking brilliant movie – and in the context of a city as utterly corrupt as Gotham, one that may actually work.

    Talking of Gotham I was really impressed with how well defined it was – it felt like its own city while also drawing inspiration from cities like Chicago and London; rather than just being a rehashing of New York or being so generic it wasn’t worth caring about. I was more interested in its storey than Bruce’s.

     I suppose you’re meant to take Batman and Bruce as slightly separate characters – they’re never in the same room together – if that’s the case we could probably add Split-Personality to Psycopathy and Messiah Complex in the list of mental disorders this man has. It would also make him repulsive. In one utterly and irredeemably pointless scene he drives up to an expensive restaurant/hotel thing in a tiny little sports car with a random beautiful woman. When the valet opens the door to let her out it’s revealed she was sitting on top of another woman.

     Is this because money is so irresistible to women that they’re willing to cram themselves into an impractically small vehicle with an ugly man who has a train wreck for a mind? Is it because any woman under fourteen stone doesn’t have enough matter to retain a soul? Seconds after this shocking screenshot, the bitches are diving around naked in the fish pond. The manager admittedly is distressed by this, he’s getting complaints, is a public place, he doesn’t need the trouble. So he goes over to them, smiles awkwardly and says “ok ladies you’ve had your fun but I’d appreciate you getting dressed now or we’ll have to ask you to leave.” to the man they came in with and demands he control his women. To which Bruce whips out his penis – wallet! – and buys the hotel so he can change the rules. Fuck him. The most terrible thing about this scene is it was so colossally unimportant.  

     Perhaps my favourite scene in the movie was at Bruce’s birthday party, his house is full of rich people associates he inherited from his parents, I think, and he learns that they’re about to be killed unless he makes them leave. So he insults them, quite thoroughly and with style. I liked the ambiguity here, yes he’s saving them from dying in a fire, but I did get the sense that he kind of meant it. Which does beg the question why he’s bothering with the city at all if both the rich and desperate are toxic to him.

     I’ll give this a ‘worth watching’: the action-ey bits were generally entertaining and towards the end when the Shadow Proclamation turn up there’s a real sense of threat to the whole city, so you do side with Batman if only because he’s not being genocidally righteous.

Batman Arkham Asylum

     I realise I’m a little late to the game here given that its sequel is out and proud and doing well but I just completed Batman Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360. A friend lent it to me*, enthusiastically batting away my indifference to the Batman universe – insisting “it’s a good game, even if it wasn’t Batman, it’d still be good”; which suggested to me they were too lazy to create something new and instead surfed on the back of something already popular. I’m right about that but, admittedly, it is a quality game.

      The basic premise is that Joker takes over a prison/come asylum in order to create an army of super mutants and take over Gotham City or the world or similar. Spoiler alert. The storey is told well, it’s revealed and foreshadowed and isn’t just expanded in a contrived way like when some games hit six hours they – because that resonates with the zeitgeist – pull some terrorism out of their ass and continue for another pointless four. I really enjoyed it over all and it’s a great example of storey telling in video games.

     On the other hand. The characters, for the most part were a little anaemic. There were a lot of villains in it that were – I assume at least – returning characters like Scarecrow and Killer Croc and Zsasz to which I was introduced and given a sense of but I felt like that was it. There was nothing else to them. Even with the psychiatric recordings littered around the place. I suspect this is just a problem with the source material: comic books. These characters have to survive years and years of re-use so they have to be vague lest they implode like their cousins in soap land. Yes it’s true good characters can be summed up in a sentence (Zzasz: self hating serial killer with a god complex. Killer Croc is a metaphor for the animal in us all and Poison Ivy is a nasty evil naked Greenpeace liberal fag) but with great characters you want to say more. I didn’t.

      But it’s a game. Examples of great characters are a little sparse *cough – Kazooie cough cough*.

     The game play is split into three main parts, rooms of baddies that you have to punch into unconsciousness – the moral alternative to murder – room of baddies to you have to suffocate into unconsciousness one by one causing panic and fear in your future victims – the moral alternative to murder – and very infrequent side scrolling-ish pieces that end up with you shining a light on Scarecrow – the much less effective alternative to murder.

      The crowds of baddies are what make up the majority of the bits of the game, and it’s done well enough. Most of the time it just comes down to hitting X a lot, but as you progress through the game you have to think about what you’re doing a little more some enemies shock you if you attack them head on and some have knives and guns making them higher priority targets. There are some moves you can do after building up a high enough combo but I found that it rarely responded quickly enough and I lost powerful finishing moves. Even the simple counter move didn’t always work – especially later on when there were lots of baddies. You either had to pre-empt the counter prompt or if you’d successfully countered you’d get attacked by someone else which just simply wasn’t fair.

      The predator bit’s were my favourite, you were given a room full of armed guards (in this game bullets kill you dead) and you had to take them out one by one and silently, reminiscent of how you’re ‘meant’ to do things in Assassins Creed. They require a lot of thought and if you fuck up it’s always your fault, not the game’s. They evolve throughout the game, as you get gadgets you can distract guards or blow out walls to take them out. It’s very satisfying to complete one without being caught and to watch the guards get more and more freaked.

       The Side scrolling-ish bits were a nice change of pace. But they never really evolved and I thought they were foreshadowing something bigger as they were linked to Scarecrow but they never followed through.

        Boss battles! I’ve missed playing games that have such things. However these were either at the end of the game or let downs. Killer Croc especially was disappointing, he’d been referenced all the way through and when you got to the sewers all you had to do was slap him back into the water thirty-two times while you were trying to do something else. I get that it was trying to build tension and stuff but it went on so long it became terribly predictable.

      Flaahgra from the Metroid prime games made an appearance towards the end. “How’s it going?” I asked surprised to see her, it’s been a long time. “How’s the family? Are you still eating Vigilantes for a liviaaaaghhh!” Poison Ivy was a fun boss if a little simple. In fact all the bosses in this game are simpler than some of the combat arenas and predator rooms which you will have to retry. But they give the game good pace and stop it being too repetitive.

      I played through on hard mode and once I’d nailed the basics I coasted through a lot of it until about three quarters the way through when I just hit a wall. I was trapped in a tiny room with one huge enemy and like twenty thugs armed with metal pipes for four hours hearing jokers three taunts half a billion times and no doubt in my sleep for the next fortnight. It was difficult to the point of tears. It was the game’s fault. The area so small it was impossible to fight both the mini-boss and jokers devoted minions at the same time. It didn’t seem to want me diving to the right, there was always something to get caught on and diving to the left got you slapped by goons. When I realised that this was actually a puzzle-fight (you have to use the Titan to thin out the crowd of smaller guys) it was better but still frustratingly difficult – enemies were taking more hits than they had in the last room and the game never lets you counter two people at once even when two people are coming at you at once.

        The difficulty spike in the minions seemed really unfair given that the conditions were very different plus you had to neutralise a Titan at the same time. When I finally completed it, it wasn’t as satisfying as some of the other trickier bits – it felt more like I’d gotten lucky.

        Over all though I did enjoy the game. It’s exiting when you get a new gadget to play with it and it opens up areas you were previously locked out of – particularly if you’re hunting down all the Riddler trophies. There are great details too like the chattering teeth that guide your way and your costume deteriorating through a pretty rough night. Things like that can really strengthen a game.

         Like I said I’m late to play it but if you haven’t already, it’s worth picking up – even if you no like Batman.  

      

*The same friend that bullied me into buying the recent Batman films. I assume it’s necessary for them to be Batman lest something as original as a toxic idea escape from the film industry.

Mario

     I was recently in a discussion about the best game of all time, predictably the name Mario was thrown around quite a lot. My friend immediately said Super Mario Bros for one of those consoles from before time and I said – without thinking – Mario 64. As the conversation went on it was revealed that in both cases these were our first games.

     After cooling off and thinking about it, it’s a little ignorant to call any Mario game the best game of all time (that title would probably have to go to Banjo-Tooie or Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – oh or Dead Space!*) but for now I’d like to make the case that Super Mario 64 is at least the best Mario game to date.

     An invitation for cake you say? I’m game for that. I remember when Mario first popped out of the green pipe and I made him hike up the small hill in slight awe as the white walls and red roof of the castle towered before me. I tried to cross the bridge when lakatu on his cloud descended and explained some of the basic controls to me. I read every word. Then, inside, it transpired that there would be no cake and that the princess had been abducted, by someone called Bowser.

     “What now?” I asked, intrigued as I ran around the first floor and up the stairs. “What do these coins do?” – “How do I open these doors?” – “What are stars and where do I get them!?” Eventually I found the painting to Bomb-omb Battlefield – and ignored it! Just a painting – where is everything? What do I DO!?

     I concede the mystery and frustration probably came from the fact I hadn’t played any video games before (except Tetris but does it really count?) but when I finally noticed the wobble in the painting as I tried wall kicking the pay off was huge. I found myself in a battle field – pink bombs versus black bombs (I’ve just noticed some racism there) and some of Bowser’s minions in between. The pink bomb-omb tells me the emperor bomb-omb has gone rouge and employs me to deal with him. Going for my first star immediately felt like an adventure, as you run past chain chomps and squash goombas and dash from safe-spot to safe-spot as huge cannon balls roll slowly towards me. Then, at the top of the mountain, I came face to face with the moustachioed emperor and the battle of facial hair ensued! Throwing him on his ass three times seemed to do the trick and I soon learned that three was indeed the magic number (for every Mario game before or since and a great deal of other games inbetween).

      Then re-entering the painting to collect more stars returned me to the same battle field but with cannons you could launch yourself out of and red coins to collect and Chain Chomps to free. It was a playground where you could explore and even do things out of order. There were fifteen of those spread throughout the castle, plus power-cap levels and secret slides and don’t forget the castle itself! Working your way through that and exploring places had its own rewards – did anybody else discover level six, seven and eight, and wonder where the hell five was? Did anybody else try and catch that fucking basement dwelling rabbit again, just for fun?

       No Mario game has been as involving.

       The old side scrolling games were little more than animated tapestries. You jumped through them avoiding, occasionally eliminating passive enemies. It was little more than a dash to the end. Which is kinda fun to drop in and out of, and I guess you could challenge friends to set a better time than you, but it’s little more than an exercise in caution-over-speed. There’s no immersion. There’s no character.

     If we go to the other end of the spectrum i.e. post Super Mario 64, then I believe we arrive in the region of Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, which for me is a close second. It had a story, I’m sure, even if I can’t remember it. It had unique puzzles involving your flatness and folding thereof. I recall a good sense of humour and a bitch of a difficulty curve. It failed too because of the distinct feeling that it didn’t need to be a Mario game. It could easily have gone the extra mile and brought us some new characters. Imagine for a moment destroying Splicers in Rapture as our moustachioed friend is being manipulated all the while by Bowser...

      Further along Mario’s time line and, via some GBA and DS games and a really ugly remake of 64, we arrive at Super Mario Galaxy. (For those of you who are asking “what about Sunshine?” well there’s a special place in hell for that game and I’ll take you there later).

      In galaxy there was a sort of space platform thing that held the gateways to each System, of which I think there were about six. In each system were a few tiny levels, or annoyingly named Galaxies – Galaxies have solar systems in them not the other way around For fuck’s sake have you never heard of cosmology!? While at first I enjoyed the fact there were more environments you never had to spend long in each one and there was less to do. They were frequently very linear despite its obsession with balls and things cut from balls or balls with bumps or balls erupting lava... Some had some really cool things about them but seemed only to exist for that cool thing. And it had less character than a margin in a school textbook. Mario wuz ‘ere.

     There wasn’t enough to do in each ‘galaxy’ and because you never had to spend much time in each galaxy you never got to know them and so they never gave any lasting impression, unlike, say Tall Tall Mountain or Tick-Tock Clock. The setting often repeated, too. Like Boo Mansion-ish levels and Space War Ship stuff. I can’t help but feel if they’d consolidated these into meaningful arenas they’d have really been on to something with the gravity warping adding some new game-play elements.

      For Galaxy 2 please see the above paragraph – although it was worse: you no longer even had the space platform. You had a floating rock thing that (coincidentally) looked like Mario. Sure as you progressed through the game it’d pick up some new objects and stuff but in order to enter the levels you had to go through a fucking menu screen. And your purple mentor was constantly trying to get you to stop playing – every half hour it tries to get you to take a break – go for a run, meet someone nice and make or find some children to hate this game instead.

     One last game before we go to the seventh circle. Mario Land 3D, for the 3DS (of course because it has “3D” in the fucking title). This manages to take everything that was bad before Mario 64 and everything that was bad after it – completely by passing all the good stuff; like someone buying cheese for all its milky qualities.

      And now for Mario’s sunshine adventure, lamentably the closest thing Mario 64 has ever had to a sequel. I so nearly loved this game. Delephino Plaza was a great hub and the levels that branched off of it, like the hotel, harbour and beach were all huge but they were never complete – they were never all there at once. Instead of being allowed to explore the beach resort rather than kill the caterpillar boss you had to kill the caterpillar boss. Then perhaps you were allowed to explore up the cliffs. Unlike in ‘64 the level loading screen gave you an ultimatum rather than a hint. It was the first backwards step that lead to the cheese of 3D Land. FLUD was kind of a good idea, fun at first. You got to interact with the world in a positive way but then that was all you ended up doing! It hated you doing anything other than squirting water at things until they went away (and if your thinking of telling me about the bits where water Mario stole FLUD to do god knows what with then you can listen up – those pre fabricated jumping bits were nothing other than tricky exercises in caution). The fact that minions could be dealt with from such a range neutered them too and over all it felt like a flaccid, uncaring version of 64.

    

     Super Mario 64 isn’t perfect either. Banjo-Kazooie did everything Mario 64 did except Rare did it 64 times better. I mentioned Banjo-Tooie as one of my favourite games of all time and that is because it looked at its predecessor and made it better. This is what games are good at – unlike other media – and so it infuriates and puzzles me why Mario games have gone so colossally wrong.

* But then everything I liked about Metroid Prime 2 was in Dead Space except Dead Space was scarier and slightly better textured – anyway that’s another essay.

Scre4m

Scream. Nearly my earliest sojourn into the illegal realms of 18 certificate movies and one of my favourites for a long time. It’s witty, relevant and scary (at least when you’re scared of what’s under your bed/you don’t know who the killer(s) is) it’s even educational in its charmingly self-aware way. The characters are interesting, likable and believable, if a little similar to ones from a popular sitcom. The other two parts of the original trilogy (one can only assume a modern trilogy is on the way) had a lot going for them too despite the fact that the conclusion to 3 was a little contrived and didn’t give you enough reason to care.

     But anyway. Witty, relevant and scary; “Scre4m”, as it likes to be called, is perhaps one of those things if you count it as being half of each of the first two.

     I can’t help but liken it to a dinner party, you and your significant other have invited an old friend from high school round because he was in town and you remember he was a really funny guy back in the day (before he disappeared from your lives to go live with wolves or something). You open the door he hands your wife a bottle of self referential wine and cracks an in-joke with you, you laugh he laughs your wife laughs, as you move into the hall he pet’s your dog calling it by name. You arrive in the lounge where he promptly takes out a broken piece of glass and slashes his wrists crying “you did this – YOU!”.  Then you wake up.

       You open the door; he hands your wife some familiar-looking flowers you get an old joke, you, wife, guest, dog all laugh and then he calls in an air-strike levelling your neighbourhood. Then you wake up.

       You walk to the door, not even sure if you want this friend to come round anymore – it’s been a long time and, Christ what do you have to talk about? He was always really into his films right and all you did was read – what if it transpires he voted for the Tories? You open the door he hands your wife a bottle of self referential wine and cracks an in-joke with you, you laugh he laughs your wife laughs, as you move into the hall he pet’s your dog calling it by name. You arrive in the lounge where he... ungh.

       Back to the movie and after the opening false starts and then start, it starts to get bad. The three pillars of Scream – Sidney, Dewey and Monica – have all changed somewhat. They’re not just older and out-of-shape (I don’t mean fat, in Sidney’s case she’s taller and more skeletal and alien looking) but they have less substance and allure than two mini digestives lying on top of each other pretending to be an Oreo. Which I concede must have been the intention as there is a full packet of Oreos in most of the new cast, the new high-school kids. I can’t help but feel they should have just done away with the old three (or at least Dewey and Monica) as they do very little until the end and for most of it just get in the way, like people a head of you in line for the ATM. Perhaps a full reboot, like they do with every second series of Skins. Still the pretty new cast drag you through the first hour or so.

     And I do mean drag. Through broken glass and salt.

     Going back to our suburban dinner party and this time assuming the role of the charismatic guest; after moving to the table the subject of the good old days has been brought up and your laughing and joking about some old teacher and some good feeling has started to stir. Like that rumbling in your guts juts before you let out a wet fart. Everyone pretends not to notice now everyone is smiling as they try not to hurl. You shift your weight around and. Fuck. You’ve followed through a bit, you realise as your ass cheeks slip and slide as they come together. You march on as you tell some of Ye Olde Jokes but the stench doesn’t go away. Your new jokes aren’t flying either as your confidence is all shot up and your aware that this isn’t the first time this has happened – even though you were drunk most other times you can’t help but wonder if this is the thin edge of full faecal incontinence.  

     It’s not a good hour.

     One of the things I really liked about Scream was the way it embraced new technology, mobile phones (which I’m aware were widely available in America since 1902 but when I first watched Scream the concept was as good as science fiction). Before mobiles if you got a death threat via the phone you were safe in the knowledge that the person threatening you was as immobile as you were and that you were probably a car journey away. But Scream brought us the possibility that you were getting a death threat from your porch. Or wardrobe. Or under your bed. So I expected FaceBook and twitter and things to play a bigger role, instead they made cameo appearances and the notion of how much we live and breathe social networking et al was only nudged in our direction, like some leftovers we may want but could always be given to the dog.

     And as we enter the third act of the movie and the third act of this review lets return once more to the dinner party metaphor I’m enjoying entirely too much. We’ll assume the position of the wife, for the sake of symmetry.

     Your guest get’s up slightly shiftily and red faced, explaining he needs the loo and inquires its location.  You tell him and as he shambles towards the door you look at your husband with a raised eyebrow and slight frown. Five to seven minutes later your guest returns, fresher that he’s been since he got in. As he sits down a new passion has returned to the conversation as he tells you about his ability to juggle Molotov cocktails. Naturally your husband issues a challenge and before you know it your favourite piece of imitation art is in cinders the walls are bleeding and Fido is meowing in the corner. Then you wake up.

      I didn’t hate this movie. My main obstruction to loving it though was the ‘main’ characters – but I was conflicted; I didn’t want the ghost to kill them I just didn’t want them there. The fact that it was so relentlessly self-aware and self-conscious was a huge problem too – it seemed like every conversation was about slasher movies and characters were aware that they were going to be murdered as opposed to meagrely entertaining the idea.

     The thing that really annoys me about it is it seems to have this internal debate with itself; it can’t decide if it’s perpetuating serial killer violence (it’s not) or if cinema violence is just harmless fun (it is). Fair play raising the pointless discussion but then squirming around about it just gets in the way of all the bloody fun.

     And that’s the thing. The good parts of this movie are fun – it’s entertaining, playing with its audience – which we love really – and surprising us. It’s just a shame that all that good stuff doesn’t really start until it’s almost over.

     Then you wake up.