What’s Aged the Worst?
Cell phone reception as a murder prop; the Arquette and Cox courtship given their later divorce; David Arquette's Dewey; the Henry Winkler scenes
In the discussion (10)
Approx. transcript time · 00:32:18Read transcript
- Landlines lead into what aged worst: after twenty-one years one host is not convinced any 1996 cell phone was good enough to be a murder prop in wine country around Sonoma, with trees and driveways and nobody near anybody.
- A secret favorite part: Drew Barrymore's character says she will call the cops, the killer says they are too far away, and she accepts it even though her boyfriend is bleeding.
- A counterpoint cites Michael Douglas's gigantic cell phone on the beach in Wall Street: phones then were for doctors and rich people and may have worked better for that elite group; the hosts wonder whether Wall Street had the first cell phone in a major movie, followed by Zach Morris.
- Asked how the movie would be received in the outrage culture era, the hosts expect outrage at two guys killing the mother and calling her a whore before people swung around to its tongue-in-cheek intent; one does not find the movie problematic at all and calls everything problematic about it hilarious.
- The sexualized staging of Rose McGowan's death is read as a deliberate joke on the bimbo-who-dies trope; per IMDb trivia she could have fit through the opening and escaped, and she flips the killer like a pro wrestler, part of a slapstick way of fighting the villain that exposes the killers as high school kids getting beaten by teenage girls and makes Ghostface very vulnerable.
- The seeds of David Arquette and Courtney Cox falling in love, knowing it ended badly and she went on to date Will Arnett, make their marriage what aged worst, though it is pure in the movie.
- Part two is that David Arquette is really terrible, playing Dewey as if brain damaged, and it is unclear why he became a phenomenon afterwards; a defender says Dewey is supposed to be extra dumb and is charming, though his 'I was 24 for a whole year' line is too good for such a character.
- The Henry Winkler scenes had more impact at the time because of his fame; the principal putting two fingers on Sidney's chin would be a real problem today, and together with his scissors threat to the two kids in masks suggests a background worth checking.
- If Scream were made now, the Winkler equivalent would have to be one of the five biggest TV stars: George Clooney is proposed, Zach Morris rejected as not famous enough, and Kelsey Grammer, David Schwimmer and Don Johnson floated.
- A Ross tangent: People vs. OJ helped one host like David Schwimmer, but Ross is blamed for turning Friends from a great first season into a rom-com, and another protests that Ross was just a character, a human being sometimes.