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re: The Cabin in the Woods. TulaneLSU's 2011-12 movie review thread
Posted on 11/16/11 at 7:33 am to TulaneLSU
Posted on 11/16/11 at 7:33 am to TulaneLSU
What's Your Number? When the revivalist preacher, Charles Finney, was in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, he preached these words: "Sin consists in a known and voluntary neglect to know and obey God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves...True confession implies that we cease from all known sin, of either omission, or commission. Also, that we cease from all excuses or apologies for sin." It wasn't unusual for Finney and other camp revivalists to preach for hours on the meaning of sin. Their practices helped form a lot of the sin-centric preaching of modern day revivalist preaching. Never before appreciated, however, is how Finney and his contemporaries have implicitly shaped a new genre of Hollywood movies: the Sinner morality play.
What I mean by Sinner morality play is that it focuses for the vast majority of its length on the sin of people and society. But unlike the revivalists, the movie almost promotes this lifestyle as normal. In What's Your Number? the sin is promiscuous sex. Gone are the mores of sex for marriage. In their places we learn that it's normal, even encouraged, for the unmarried to have sex, just so long as you don't have sex with more people than some imaginary moral number (10 is given in this movie). All the while, we are taught to believe in the movie that there's nothing wrong with unfettered sex, but at the very end, just as in Finney's preaching, there is a come to Jesus moment. There is a moment when the characters realize that sin is wrong, undesirable, and has caused all their hurt and dissatisfaction with life. Granted, there is no Jesus: the savior in this movie, like in much of American culture, even what passes as Christian culture, is self-realization. What causes conversion in this movie is the movement from pleasing others to pleasing the self. This, of course, does not fit into the Christian model, where we are to please God and it is God's grace that brings us to conversion, not self-realization.
There are many movies being made today that share this pattern of sin, sin, sin, sin, self-realization, conversion, rejection of sin. Sadly, a majority of the romantic comedies, movies like No Strings Attached and One Day, and even movies like The Hangover have a similar structure. Revel in the bad for the first 95 minutes. Then hit a moral point in the last five minutes of the movie. Personally, while I like ending on a positive note, I find it patronizing. Americans always want to end on a positive note, but the real take home message in such movies is the morality the movie implies for the majority of the movie, usually one of debauchery and devilishness. I'm not easily fooled.
There are several hilarious scenes; my favorite was the darts scene, and I like the final message of the film. However, I cannot give a high rating to a movie that plays in the mud all day long only to take a shower at midnight. 4/10
What I mean by Sinner morality play is that it focuses for the vast majority of its length on the sin of people and society. But unlike the revivalists, the movie almost promotes this lifestyle as normal. In What's Your Number? the sin is promiscuous sex. Gone are the mores of sex for marriage. In their places we learn that it's normal, even encouraged, for the unmarried to have sex, just so long as you don't have sex with more people than some imaginary moral number (10 is given in this movie). All the while, we are taught to believe in the movie that there's nothing wrong with unfettered sex, but at the very end, just as in Finney's preaching, there is a come to Jesus moment. There is a moment when the characters realize that sin is wrong, undesirable, and has caused all their hurt and dissatisfaction with life. Granted, there is no Jesus: the savior in this movie, like in much of American culture, even what passes as Christian culture, is self-realization. What causes conversion in this movie is the movement from pleasing others to pleasing the self. This, of course, does not fit into the Christian model, where we are to please God and it is God's grace that brings us to conversion, not self-realization.
There are many movies being made today that share this pattern of sin, sin, sin, sin, self-realization, conversion, rejection of sin. Sadly, a majority of the romantic comedies, movies like No Strings Attached and One Day, and even movies like The Hangover have a similar structure. Revel in the bad for the first 95 minutes. Then hit a moral point in the last five minutes of the movie. Personally, while I like ending on a positive note, I find it patronizing. Americans always want to end on a positive note, but the real take home message in such movies is the morality the movie implies for the majority of the movie, usually one of debauchery and devilishness. I'm not easily fooled.
There are several hilarious scenes; my favorite was the darts scene, and I like the final message of the film. However, I cannot give a high rating to a movie that plays in the mud all day long only to take a shower at midnight. 4/10
This post was edited on 11/16/11 at 7:35 am
2
Posted on 11/16/11 at 7:34 am to TulaneLSU
Winnie the Pooh Should I preface this by saying spoilers? Is it possible to spoil what is already spoiled? Let's start from the end and work forward. The credits said...."There were no stuffed animals harmed in the making of this movie".....O Bother. If only the movie had been about Winnie getting terminal cancer. Then I might have felt some emotion.
Instead, it was a stupid adventure story about misinterpretation. But Hermes' ruh-tarded dog could have given a better illustration of hermeneutics. A simple problem. A complex, at least for a five year old, adventure. A quick and clean solution. It's the stuff of twenty minute cartoons you see on the Disney channel. There was no business making this into a 60 minute film. Thank God it was only 60 minutes. I fell asleep in the theater for the first time in my life today. Right about the part where Winnie (who names their male bear Winnie? Isn't Winnie the girl in Wonder Years?) is swimming in the honey. STFU ABOUT HONEY, POOH! I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FRICK. I wanted to burn some Pooh stuffed animals after seeing this maudlin malady. Even the kids in the relatively full theater were whining and crying throughout. They could stand it as much as I could.
It was a cheap and poor product Disney threw at his fans, and I don't think such an abomination of film has been put out by Disney since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. No talent was needed or used in this film, and I would recommend Disney bury the WTP franchise forever or at least keep it confined to 20 minute shorts.
The best part of the experience was the trailer for Lion King, which by the way, will be re-released in 3D. On franchises, EVERY single one of the five movies advertised in the previews is a franchise. Why is the public putting up with Hollywood's insulting unoriginality? Recycling our garbage STOP! This is the worst movie I have ever seen. Ever. Do not see it. Your kids will forever hate you if you do. 0/10
Instead, it was a stupid adventure story about misinterpretation. But Hermes' ruh-tarded dog could have given a better illustration of hermeneutics. A simple problem. A complex, at least for a five year old, adventure. A quick and clean solution. It's the stuff of twenty minute cartoons you see on the Disney channel. There was no business making this into a 60 minute film. Thank God it was only 60 minutes. I fell asleep in the theater for the first time in my life today. Right about the part where Winnie (who names their male bear Winnie? Isn't Winnie the girl in Wonder Years?) is swimming in the honey. STFU ABOUT HONEY, POOH! I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FRICK. I wanted to burn some Pooh stuffed animals after seeing this maudlin malady. Even the kids in the relatively full theater were whining and crying throughout. They could stand it as much as I could.
It was a cheap and poor product Disney threw at his fans, and I don't think such an abomination of film has been put out by Disney since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. No talent was needed or used in this film, and I would recommend Disney bury the WTP franchise forever or at least keep it confined to 20 minute shorts.
The best part of the experience was the trailer for Lion King, which by the way, will be re-released in 3D. On franchises, EVERY single one of the five movies advertised in the previews is a franchise. Why is the public putting up with Hollywood's insulting unoriginality? Recycling our garbage STOP! This is the worst movie I have ever seen. Ever. Do not see it. Your kids will forever hate you if you do. 0/10
This post was edited on 11/16/11 at 7:35 am
Posted on 12/13/11 at 1:01 pm to TulaneLSU
quote:
What's Your Number? When the revivalist preacher, Charles Finney, was in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, he preached these words: "Sin consists in a known and voluntary neglect to know and obey God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves...True confession implies that we cease from all known sin, of either omission, or commission. Also, that we cease from all excuses or apologies for sin." It wasn't unusual for Finney and other camp revivalists to preach for hours on the meaning of sin. Their practices helped form a lot of the sin-centric preaching of modern day revivalist preaching. Never before appreciated, however, is how Finney and his contemporaries have implicitly shaped a new genre of Hollywood movies: the Sinner morality play.
What I mean by Sinner morality play is that it focuses for the vast majority of its length on the sin of people and society. But unlike the revivalists, the movie almost promotes this lifestyle as normal. In What's Your Number? the sin is promiscuous sex. Gone are the mores of sex for marriage. In their places we learn that it's normal, even encouraged, for the unmarried to have sex, just so long as you don't have sex with more people than some imaginary moral number (10 is given in this movie). All the while, we are taught to believe in the movie that there's nothing wrong with unfettered sex, but at the very end, just as in Finney's preaching, there is a come to Jesus moment. There is a moment when the characters realize that sin is wrong, undesirable, and has caused all their hurt and dissatisfaction with life. Granted, there is no Jesus: the savior in this movie, like in much of American culture, even what passes as Christian culture, is self-realization. What causes conversion in this movie is the movement from pleasing others to pleasing the self. This, of course, does not fit into the Christian model, where we are to please God and it is God's grace that brings us to conversion, not self-realization.
There are many movies being made today that share this pattern of sin, sin, sin, sin, self-realization, conversion, rejection of sin. Sadly, a majority of the romantic comedies, movies like No Strings Attached and One Day, and even movies like The Hangover have a similar structure. Revel in the bad for the first 95 minutes. Then hit a moral point in the last five minutes of the movie. Personally, while I like ending on a positive note, I find it patronizing. Americans always want to end on a positive note, but the real take home message in such movies is the morality the movie implies for the majority of the movie, usually one of debauchery and devilishness. I'm not easily fooled.
There are several hilarious scenes; my favorite was the darts scene, and I like the final message of the film. However, I cannot give a high rating to a movie that plays in the mud all day long only to take a shower at midnight. 4/10
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