Word: scream
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...release of ambitious films at year's end has nothing to do with noel and everything to do with the Dec. 31 deadline for Academy Award qualifiers. While real people flock to Scream 2, movie people begin their homework by seeing Oscar contenders. Most of these films don't open till Christmas, but we can't wait. Here are five shiny baubles for right now. IT'S PULP, BUT IT AIN'T QUITE PULP FICTION...
Williamson grew up along the rural Carolina coastline a few miles from the real Dawson's Creek, a die-hard reader and weekend-matinee freak whose own life has served as a rough cut of the screen dreams that Scream is now enabling. His fisherman father was the visual model for the killer in Last Summer. Mrs. Tingle will be his directorial debut. His struggling L.A. young-adulthood informs his in-development twentynothing TV drama Wasteland. The kid who once sat through six straight showings of Halloween recently met Jamie Lee Curtis for drinks at the Polo Lounge to swap...
...this weekend, as the multiplex masses pour into Scream 2 to learn who's trying to carve up poor Neve this time, Williamson will be poring over the decidedly calmer dailies for Dawson's Creek, a coming-of-age TV series whose adolescent anxieties are resolved not by gleaming cutlery but by awkward, angsty dialogue (though the dead-on post-grunge sound track remains the same). Debuting next month on the WB network, the quiet, thoughtful Dawson is about as far removed from slasherdom as you can get and still have L.A.'s BMW brigade return your calls...
Williamson kids may talk like therapists, but they act like guarded and wounded 15-year-olds whose cell phones and videotapes stand in for a sadly absent adult institutional authority. Scream worked not just because teens reacting to murders in their midst by ironically citing old horror movies was a fresh take on a way-stale tale, but also because their jaded nonchalance felt almost frighteningly cynical...
...These characters have all grown up with the media, and I don't think any of them had a safe upbringing," says Party of Five ingenue and Scream centerpiece Neve Campbell. Her Sidney, a dewy innocent in the original, has morphed in the new film into a quintessentially '90s victim/survivor, achieving a kind of tear-streaked operatic grandeur that, frankly, lends Scream 2 more emotional punch than a slasher sequel really deserves. "Young people have been numbed," she says. "Kevin has a way of capturing that cynicism without being naive...