The Recap: A Scream Boondoggle, Prosthetic Buttholes, and Predator Loves Android

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In case you missed the news, Scream 7 is coming out this weekend. In case you double missed the news, Scream 7 was a bit of a boondoggle. In case you triple dog-reverse missed the news, yep, they have now made seven Scream movies. What a world, eh?

Anyway, to briefly recap, Melissa Barrera, who starred in the last two Scream movies (presumably 5ream and Scr6am, but I’m not going to look this up), got fired after accusing, or shall we say, correctly observing Israel of doing genocide and ethnic cleansing. According to Variety, this was partly the result of a pressure campaign from the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, who called out the industry for Anti-Semitism during a talk he gave at super agency WME. That’s the same ADL, by the way, who famously also defended Elon Musk’s very obvious Hitler salute as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm,” but if I get bogged down in every tertiary hypocrisy in this story we’ll be here all day.

Once Barrera was out, her co-star Jenna Ortega then also left, over “scheduling conflicts,” and then director Christopher Landon left, over the heat he was getting over Barrera’s firing (which he says wasn’t at all his decision, which is probably true).

Missing two stars and a director, the studio (Paramount and Spyglass) naturally hired a new director, and backed up the Brinks truck for Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox ($7 mil for Campbell, $2 mil for Cox), so that they could come back for beefed-up roles in a now-even-more-nostalgia based sequel.

And so, here we are. Neve and Courtney (and I guess Ethan!) get the whole screamy gang back together this weekend. Suffice it to say, I did not see this film.

While I’d love to say that I boycotted for political reasons (they sure didn’t hurt), it’s equally true that I haven’t seen the last two (three? four?) Scream movies, which let’s be honest weren’t that great in the first place. And anyway, if I wanted to watch some actors from the 90s reprising their famous roles I could just watch basically any Super Bowl commercial from the last three years. Hey, what if Kevin from the Office had a bunch of friends who were also Kevin from the Office? I love it when participating in a boycott is incredibly easy.

FRANKLY, this wasn’t even the most interesting movie news of the week. For that, I’m calling it a tie between Amanda Seyfried revealing that she wore a prosthetic butthole for The Testament of Ann Lee (my review) and the ongoing fallout from the guy with Tourette’s Syndrome shouting the N-word while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were onstage at the BAFTAs.

Prosthetic buttholes? Prosthetic buttholes, dude.

“This movie, it needed to be graphic,” Amanda said of the scene’s tone during a Feb. 25 appearance on BBC Radio 2. “So, like, I had a prosthetic butthole.” […]

“I was pregnant and naked, but I wasn’t naked at all,” she continued, “and at the end of the movie, I’m standing in front of a burning building with just a merkin. I felt so free.” [E!]

Cool story. Even if a big part of me is spiritually opposed to artificial buttholes, as an unconscionable escalation of Hollywood’s already egregious rampant merkin usage. Fake pubes?? Bogus! You need real pubes, I can get you some real pubes, dude. I’ll get you a winter sweater’s worth of genuine pubes by 3 pm. Trust me.

If this is going to be a news story, Seyfried should at least have to bring the fake butthole along as a prop. Maybe she could interviews her own fake butthole. Ooh, great idea for next year’s Super Bowl ads. (Also, if anyone knows the guy or gal who designed Amanda Seyfried’s prosthetic butthole, I would love to interview her or him).

Elsewhere, there was BAFTA-gate. Which was either a conspiracy by white guys trying to figure out the last remaining acceptable N-word loophole (Hey, Grok… ), or a conspiracy by the BBC to try to shoehorn an N-word onto the broadcast for ratings reason, depending on whom you asked. To be fair, there was some material for just about every conspiracy here. Still, the article-heads really outdid themselves finding new angles for what initially seemed like a pretty straightforward unfortunate incident.

For the record, the Tourette’s guy himself says he also yelled homophobic slurs at Alan Cumming and called Paddington Bear a pedophile during the same telecast, but those actually got edited out of the broadcast.

In an interview, Davidson explained to Variety that, during one segment, Cumming made a joke about taking Paddington Bear home with him, saying “it wouldn’t be the first time I have taken a hairy Peruvian bear home with me.”

“This resulted in homophobic tics from me and led to a shout of ‘pedophile’ that was likely triggered because Paddington Bear is a children’s character,” Davidson said. […]

* Pushing glasses up nose, nodding thoughtfully, hurriedly writing on notepad *

“I would appreciate reports of the event explaining that I ticked perhaps 10 different offensive words on the night of the awards,” Davidson added. “The N-word was one of these, and I completely understand its significance in history and in the modern world, but most articles are giving the impression I shouted one single slur on Sunday.” [Them]

“My Tourette’s is like South Park in that way, it forces me to shout uncontrollable slurs to all sides equally.”

Another thing that got edited out of the broadcast, incidentally, was, surprise surprise, a different award winner saying “free Palestine” during his acceptance speech.

Akinola Davies Jr, who was awarded outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer for his film My Father’s Shadow, ended his acceptance speech on Sunday with words of solidarity to “those under occupation, dictatorship, persecution and those experiencing genocide”.

“To those watching at home, archive your loved ones, archive your stories yesterday, today and forever. For Nigeria, for London, Congo, Sudan, Free Palestine,” he said.

The remarks were absent when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired the event on a two-hour delay, prompting accusations of censorship from some viewers and advocacy groups. [Al Jazeera]

Anyone surprised that the BBC figured out exactly where the mute button was during that one?

By the way, is it just me, or does it ever seem like world events are more unstuck from public sentiment than at any other point in our lifetimes? No one even bothers manufacturing consent anymore. Everyone in control of the government or the economy seems committed to doing the least popular thing possible, whether it’s clamoring for regime change in Iran or Venezuela, supporting a genocide (annexing Greenland, etc etc), or cramming AI, unprompted, into every possible nook and crevice of our lives. Everyone in a rare position of power (and only those in rare positions of power) seem dead set on shoving some new, even shittier paradigm down our throats no matter how many times we tell them we hate it and it sucks. Jack Dorsey just laid off 4,000 employees from his company just to brag to shareholders about how well he was using AI. Things CEOs used to at least pretend to be ashamed of they now crow about in press releases. How long can this go on? Does no one fear the mob anymore?

Oopsy, sorry to digress, just trying not to lose my mind over here. I briefly forgot that this was supposed to be a media column.

On that note, what did I actually watch this week? (Aka, the stuff I write about to try avoid losing my mind).

TV: Neighbors and Industry

Aside from our ongoing Mad Men rewatch for Mad Yourself A Man (I honestly don’t know what I’d do without a prestige TV rewatch to give some semblance of order to my viewing) this week was mostly a toss-up between Neighbors, the new Josh Safdie-produced docuseries about American neighbor feuds, and trying to catch up on Industry (note: I am nowhere near caught up on Industry).

Neighbors is in some ways my ideal concept. One peculiarly American Thing is that, as a society, we’ve mostly traded the idea of communal spaces and a public good for the dream that we can all own our own little private chunk of paradise, if only the dang government would just stay out of the way and let us be self-sufficient or whatever.

Why can’t we just be 300 million seperate good little yeoman farmers?? I love that we all still secretly harbor this dopey manifest destiny dream (and I’m not entirely immune to it myself, ask me about my backyard garden some time) no matter how many times it collides with reality: that it rests entirely on a competent central authority powerful enough to adjudicate 150 million separate inevitably intractable neighbor feuds. Bro, your tiny yeoman paradise is fucking up my tiny yeoman paradise!

Thus, the neighbor feud is kind of like the essential single unit of the libertarian dream, as it collides with all of the ignored infrastructure and assumptions that make that dream possible. Give me all of the failed libertarian paradise documentaries. I could watch them dissolve into sex scandals and cartel murders a million times.

Neighbors does a decent job scratching that itch, and the absurd characters they managed to find so far occasionally approach Lance Oppenheim levels of docu-comedy brilliance. The first episode profiles two feuds. The first is between two families in Montana (one comically tall and skinny, the other comically short and stout, all radically libertarian) who have fallen out over a locked gate on a country road. One guy says he needs the gate open so he can check on his horses, the other guy says the gate is on his property and he needs it to keep out his neighbor’s horses. (Why he moved to an open prairie if he hates horses is something of an open question, though we do eventually learn that he’s some kind of popular Lord of the Rings influencer online).

The second feud involves a few key players in a battle over a stretch of beach in Florida. All of them are extremely fractious and sunburned.

All of which is to say… great premise! A neat little summary of the American brain disease.