Quick Reviews: Scream 4, Your Highness

I don't like to combine movie posts into one, but it's been a little while since I've seen these and I need to get this out of the way, and with the Flyers game starting in an hour, I'm pressed for time. Maybe that's what I need to motivate me to write: deadlines.

Nah.

Anyhoo, one of these is already gone from theaters and the other won't be far behind.

"Scream 4" brings back original stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette and a bunch of new kids to be slaughtered by the latest Ghostface killer, who gets to killing when Campbell's Sidney Prescott returns to town on her book tour. The movie is most notable because the real-life martial issues of Cox and Arquette are eerily played out on screen -- their characters, now married, are having some issues of their own. While the film tries, after an 11-year gap, to reinvent itself for the digital era, it never really does. There's lots of talk of being "meta" but not enough that's actually meta-something. My grade: C-plus.

"Your Highness" had very few laughs. I never got invested in the plot, involving a medieval kingdom and the quest of two brothers (James Franco and Danny McBride) to save a fair maiden from an evil wizard, and...face it, the plot doesn't matter. This felt like an excuse to run around in costumes and make juvenile sex and drug jokes and curse almost constantly. Most of it fell flat, although I never was annoyed enough to think about walking out of the theater. Maybe that was because I enjoy staring at James Franco. My grade: C-minus.