Anyone who uses the word “scream” or “screaming” in any context or circumstance, I regard askance. As in “he was screaming at me” or “screaming at the flight attendant” or whatever. Because people, in fact, almost never actually “scream.”
Millions of people get upset and angry about stuff every day, but very few of them scream like baboons or chimps or rhesus monkeys. Babies and little kids scream, of course, but adolescents, teens and adults merely get loud.
Screaming is primal and half-animalistic — it’s what Faye Wray did when King Kong approached or what scream-queens do in horror films. I’ve raised my voice or shouted or snarled or bellowed in heated arguments, sure, but I’ve never screamed at anyone, and I’ve never once claimed that anyone I’ve heard shouting or hollering or howling has screamed. Not once.
Here’s the part that gets me in trouble: I’ve heard the term used over and over, but in my experience it’s more favored among women.
Fair warning: Don’t say the “s” word if you can help it. Try to avoid it altogether. It’s used by people who tend to exaggerate, and it’s better to keep your distance from that sort.
Which sounds decent or semi-acceptable (it’s taken from Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone“) until it hits you that Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home (’05), a landmark doc about Dylan, also took its title from “Like A Rolling Stone” and in fact from the same chorus — “How does it feel, how does it feel? / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”
In short, Mangold’s title sounds lazy. His Dylan biopic is already covering the same territory as Scorsese’s film (the early ’60s folky troubadour years, ending with the 1966 motorcycle accident). He clearly needs to poach another Dylan lyric, but which?
HE suggestions: (a) The Ghost of Electricity (obvious allusion to the original title), (b) Darkness At The Break of Noon, (c) Shelter From The Storm, (d) All Along The Watchtower, (e) Simple Twist of Fate, (f) My Weariness Amazes Me.
Any of these six would make for a fascinating, catchy title — the only problem is that they might seem a bit too poetic for the dumbasses. Other suggestions? Remember that the title has to suggest something about the difficulty of change and finding a new direction.
Seriously, my favorite is The Ghost of Electricity followed by My Weariness Amazes Me.
HE correspondent “KJ” has hit upon something. Everything Everywhere All At Once is either a direct descendant or a very close relation of Scott Pilgrimvs.The World (‘10). Edgar Wright and theDaniels are similar nerd birds, all right. Invested in cyber mythology, alternate realities, VFX realms. A notion that dull, deflated, frustrating lives have an amazing imaginary flipside.
HEtoKJ: “You’ve hit upon something…EEAAO is distinctly related to and perhaps influenced by Edgar Wright’s SCOTT PILGRIM.VS. THE WORLD — obviously a different ball of wax, but also a Marvel-forecasting, cyber-nerd fantasy slash bullshit comic-book film that I despised back then & will despise for the rest of my life.”
EEAAO is a slightly better film than Scott Pilgrim — the final scene is the clincher — and yet it made me feel a similar kind of revulsion. Both films have triggered brief suicide fantasies.
“Pilgrim Reckoning,” posted on 8.12.10: Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is obviously a nervy, fairly bright and moderately gifted director — seriously, no jive — and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, even though it seems to be putting out a kind of aesthetic nerve gas, is some kind of cool-ass, smarty-pants, richly stylized…uhm, waste of time?
It’s kind of nifty if you want to feel connected to a movie that under-30 moviegoers are responding to. It’s empty and strained and regimented, but…you know, cool and funny and clever, heh-heh. It has wit and vigor and smart music, and it gradually makes you want to run outside and take an elevator to the top of a tall building and jump off.
Did I just say that? I mean that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. That sounds facile, doesn’t it? I think I might actually mean that Scott Pilgrim is a seminal and semi-vital thing to experience right now. My kids set me straight on this. Call me unstable or impressionable but I’ve also come to think that Michael Cera might be a fresh permutation of a new kind of messianic Movie God — a candy-assed Gary Cooper for the 21st Century.
No, seriously, it’s not too bad. I mean, you know…just kill me.
I was sustained, at times, by the meaning of the seven ex-boyfriends. They’re metaphors for the bad or unresolved stuff in Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s life. If you’re going to really love and care for someone, you have to accept and try to deal with everything in their heads and their pasts, and not just the intoxicating easy stuff. Scott has to defeat these guys in the same way that any boyfriend or husband has to defeat or at least quell the disturbances in his girlfriend’s or wife’s head. That’s how I took it, at least.
I’m not doubting that Cera has been a Scott Pilgrim graphic novel fan for years, but the movie, I think, came out of his wanting to transform into a tougher, studlier guy in movies by becoming a kind of ninja warrior fighting the ex-boyfriends in a Matrix-y videogame way. I really don’t think it was anything more than that. Seriously.
“No offense, Michael, but the world thinks you’re a wuss,” Cera’s agent said one day on the phone. “They see you as a slender reed, a worthless piece of shit girlyman with a deer-in-the-headlights expression and a little peep-peep voice. Somehow we need to toughen you up, and having you fight a bunch of guys, even if it’s in a fantasy realm, is certainly one way to do that.”
I didn’t want to kill myself while watching Scott Pilgrim vs The World. That notion or impulse came later. I know that if movies are in fact going to be moving more and more in the direction of Scott Pilgrim in the coming years — video-game inspirations, glib dialogue, wimpy girlymen in lead roles, bullshit video-game fight scenes, laid-back gay guys engaged in threesomes in shitty basement apartments — then I really would rather die. Because movies as I’ve known them all my life would in fact be dead, and there’d be nothing to live for.
Then again I really liked the music that Scott’s band plays. It throbs and churns with a wowser bass line — not at all like the gay music my two sons seem to prefer these days. And I liked Kieran Culkin, who plays Scott’s gay roommate, and at the same time I wanted to see him cut in half (or into several pieces) with a chainsaw. And I liked the little lovesick Asian girl (Ellen Wong) who has a crush on Scott, and I despised Scott for not being able to summon the puny amount of courage it would have taken to simply lay it on the line and tell her he’s fallen in love with someone else. But…you know, as Scott says early on, “That’s haaaaard.” What a guy.
