it looks fantastic doing so

Throughout, though, Scream 4 hints at even bigger thematic fish to fry. Community star Alison Brie appears as Sidney’s publicist, a spotlight chaser whose interest in booking high-profile junk-media appearances supersedes reading even a page of her client’s wrenching book Prada Sunglasses. Webcams unavailable 15 years ago are now worn on heads, carried in hands and stowed in all-night Stab-athon screenings, documenting young Woodsboro’s cavalier attitude toward life and death. Wanna talk like Ghostface? There’s an app for that. “One generation’s tragedy is the next one’s joke,” Dewey laments to a comely young deputy who may or may not have a heavily mediated Sidney fixation of her own Louis Vuitton Sunglasses. See where this is going? Ultimately, explaining the film’s real ambition risks spoiling not only its third act but all of its dumb, self-loathing, post-millennial fury — an upshot that, unlike those of its more innocently ironic franchise predecessors, may be the only reason to subject oneself to yet another Scream film. It didn’t have to be this way, either: The cast is game, with early cameos fitting in place like snug, doomed nesting dolls and Anthony Anderson of all people delivering one of the more affecting, darkly humorous bit parts in the Scream canon Replica Oakley Sunglasses. Ace cinematographer Peter Deming dazzles as usual, bending raw shadows into mask-like illusions and painting the Stab-athon sequence with shades of red more intoxicating than any of the gallons of blood spilled in front of his camera. At least when the movie falls apart, it looks fantastic doing so.