As Good as It Gets

 Year:  1998

Director:  James L. Brooks

Screenplay:  Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks

Starring:  Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr., Skeet Ulrich, Shirley Knight

Running Time:  139 minutes

Genre:  Romantic comedy, drama

New York City:  Best-selling romance novelist Melvin Udall (Nicholson) is bigoted, misanthropic and suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.  Every day he eats lunch at the same Manhattan restaurant where he insists on sitting at the table and being served by the same server, Carole Connelly (Hunt), the only one who can tolerate his obnoxious behaviour.  Carole herself is struggling to make ends meet while caring for her ill son.  When Melvin's neighbour, gay artist Simon (Kinnear) is beaten and robbed in his apartment, Melvin is pressured into caring for his pet dog while Simon is in hospital, despite the fact that Melvin frequently bullies Simon and hates the dog.  However, Melvin and the dog end up bonding, and, in spite of himself, he finds himself increasingly drawn into the lives of the people around him.

This is an enjoyable, romantic comedy-drama, in the Woody Allen mould, which doesn't really break much new ground.  Jack Nicholson is ideal as the grouchy, offensive Melvin.  Helen Hunt, who at the time was probably best known for the sitcom Mad About You (1994-1999), won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Carole, and she has real spark as the troubled, but loving Carole who is able to find some kind of humanity in Melvin.  Greg Kinnear is good as the sensitive artist, Simon, who becomes something of a tragic character as his life collapses following his attack.  The film is often uneven in tone, being really quite dark in places, which sometimes sits uneasily with the more broadly comic scenes, and sentiment.  It's also too long, with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, and the conclusion seems very unlikely.  However, the characters are engaging, and there are some great performances and it's often very funny.  There is nothing new here, but it is an engaging and ultimately warm film, although you kind of wonder how happy the characters will be in the long term.  Also, Melvin is so obnoxious and offensive for most of the film it may be hard for some viewers to warm to him at all, even if he's ultimately shown to be warm hearted softy.  

Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets

Scream

Year of Release:  1996
Director:  Wes Craven
Screenplay:  Kevin Williamson
Starring:  Neve Campbell, Drew Barrymore, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy
Running Time:  111 minutes
Genre:  Horror, thriller, comedy

In the small American town of Woodsboro, teenager Casey Becker (Barrymore) is tormented by taunting phone calls from a mysterious masked killer, who brutally murders her when she fails his twisted movie trivia game.  As Woodsboro becomes a media circus, it becomes apparent that the killer is particularly focussing on Sidney Prescott (Campbell), whose mother was killed almost exactly a year before.

Some films seem to perfectly capture a particular time period, and Scream, to me, is one of the definitive films of the late 1990s.  The look, style and music really capture that period.  Horror was pretty much in the doldrums at the time, and slasher films in particular were as dead as if the genre had gone out at night to investigate a strange noise, until Scream brought it back.  The film's great idea is that, unlike most of the slashers that had gone before, the characters here are aware of slasher films, and are fully aware of the conventions of the genre.  Audiences sometimes watch horror films and scream in laughter at the stupidity of the characters, this film second guesses that audience by having the characters on screen do it for them (literally in one scene where a character is watching Halloween (1978) oblivious to the killer looming up behind him, and equally unaware that he is being recorded and watched in a TV news van, where the people watching are shouting the same things that he is saying to Jamie Lee Curtis).  The characters are frequently discussing horror films and enumerate in detail the rules of a slasher film.  However Scream is not just a spoof of horror, it works as a slasher film in it's own right, screenwriter Kevin Williamson  obviously loves and knows horror, and director Wes Craven was one of the great horror directors, cutting his teeth on the controversial The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) before unleashing Freddy Krueger onto the world in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).  In fact Craven had explored similar post-modern territory before with Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), which I still think is the best of the Elm Street series.
The film's most recognisable star, Drew Barrymore, is killed within the first quarter of an hour, in a scene that quickly became iconic.  Star Neve Campbell was known for the TV show Party of Five (1994-2000) and Courteney Cox, who starred as tabloid TV news journalist Gale Weathers, made her name in the hugely popular Friends (1994-2004).  The characters are well-drawn and, crucially, Williamson and Craven seem to genuinely like them, so it is affecting when they are in danger, they are not just there to be sliced 'n' diced.  The fact that the film is not just a gory slasher, but it has humour, teen drama and mystery, meant that it's appeal moved beyond the horror fans.
To date, the film has spawned three sequels, and a TV series.    

Courntey Cox, Jamie Kennedy and Neve Campbell in Scream