re: The Cabin in the Woods. TulaneLSU's 2011-12 movie review thread

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I fully expected to see a 10/10 review for Twilight, but in an epic turn around troll, he bashed the movie

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Twilight: Breaking Dawn Mormonism is the greatest threat to Western Civilization that has ever existed. The faith and reason of the last 3000 years is at stake as Mormon Satanists attack with their propaganda, housing it now in the form of pop-gnostic teenage romance books and films. How better to convert people to your belief than through entertainment, which at surface level appears benign and without intent, but below carries a pungent punch? The NFL has been doing the same for twenty years now.

Behind Twilight's childish romance where an average looking girl is swooned by a fabulously wealthy, powerful, and good looking knight in shining armor, is a sick, sinister plot to poison the minds and hearts of teenage girls throughout the world. The Mormon Satanists know that the way to world dominion is through the female because it is through the female that much of religious belief is passed. Young girls believe they are seeing their dreams come true on a silver screen, but what is being administered is arsenic of the soul. Twilight is nothing more than a capsule lined with a bad story that will appeal to teenage and lonely female masses. But its middle is boric acid. It is deadly and I would suggest you do not let your children see it.

The story is as ridiculous as any I've seen. Unnecessary drama compounds unnecessary drama. A girl wants to marry a pale white vampire, but is torn by her love for a dark dog. She marries the vamp and has a kid with him even though the kid will kill her, they believe. But magic blood and venom from the vamp hubby can bring her back to life. Meanwhile there are dogs fighting dogs and steroided vampires who run around hunting. Beneath the cover of this movie, the theme is hating humanity. Humanity is evil because we are fleshly. The dogs are evil because they are of this world. Humans are evil because they are of this world. The goal of life is to move beyond the physical world and gain a pseudo-eternal life with vampires. Gnosticism has never received a more wide spread audience, nor, in recent times, has the white supremacist doctrine of Mormonism.

I hate this movie more than anything I have ever seen before. I only watched it for the readers of The Arts Board. Accept my sacrifice by not watching this filth. I now must cleanse my body and soul from the ideas of this movie. 0/10

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Conan the Barbarian Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear boldly states, "The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'" Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that Conan was to be a big movie, one of those classics of adventure that come along only once every couple of years. The facts that it opened the week after school began and had not one decent actor should have tipped me off.

If there is anything redeeming about this movie, it's that the lead actress is not butt ugly. Besides that, this movie is nothing more than gore, violence, cheap CGI, and a terrible, terrible script. I don't even know if I should attend to this movie any longer, even if it is to give it a thorough berating. Let's first discuss the scenes. Holy marshmallows and attention deficit disorder. The writer must have intended for this movie to go on for five hours. Mercifully for us, it was chopped down to less than two, but all the scenes in part survive. As a result, we are on a non-stop journey through borrowed scene after borrowed scene. We go from Season of the Witch to Pirates of the Carbs to the Lord of the Rings to Indian Jones within three minutes! Chop, chop, Suey! We travel from kingdom to kingdom like we're changing scenes in Seinfeld. Like being thrown into a genealogy in Genesis, we're flooded with an undue mass of names, legends, and places. And the dialogue, my God, my ears were bleeding. "She must be pretty" - that's all that can be said of the lead lady, whose beauty is supposed to be great. I kid you not.

None of the characters matter. They are all caricatures: Conan: a child man set on revenge. The bad guy with the crown: a man driven by ambition. The witch: a woman who jealously wants to be her mother. Her outfits look like the design department raided the costume aisle at Walmart the day after Halloween. There was the possibility to make her character interesting, but the director, I think, was not intelligent enough to see it. Instead, we get characters that mean nothing. Even in the movie's one sex scene, there is not an iota of emotion. It's wham, bam, thank you sir. And yet the audience is expected to believe that these characters are so bound to each other that they will risk all to save the other! After an interesting opening scene where the character of a boy is building, I could not say a single scene in the rest of the movie mattered in character development. All was vain and empty.

Whoever made this movie, and let's pray he's not allowed to make another movie, must have a fetish for blood because in the end, all this movie is about is revenge and blood. And even the blood scenes are terribly dark and quickened so the viewer cannot see how poorly the scenes are acted and made. A formulaic film that tries to be monumental, it fails on every level. It's easily the worst remake since Russel Crowe's Robin Hood, and likely, a lot worse. Is it the worst action adventure movie ever made? If I said it is, would that mean it isn't? 1/10

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Contagion "The gloom which pervades the stricken cities is indescribable...From the turnings at the various cross streets the dread cavalcades of death are almost constantly filing in [Canal Street]. They turn the corners from every quarter; they wind their long and sinuous way--the silent march of the dead--so many shadowy spectres, beckoning all in their train. The dead are found everywhere...The provision-stores are closed, and the only way to obtain supplies from them is to break them open, which is sometimes done. Even the drug-stores are all closed...there are some cases of inhumanity." The 1878 yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans, a quarter century after another outbreak decimated 10% of the city's population while going unreported by the media thanks to the business community fearing a quarantine, was the occasion for this national news report. And while medical science has advanced, Contagion shows that human nature and behavior do not change. Fear and self-preservation drive us in times of panic. Most of us put ourselves and those "in my life raft," as Fishburne says, ahead of others.

When talking of the end of days, Jesus says, "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars." Jesus recognized that the rumor of war was just as powerful and just as destructive as war itself. Those who have lived through crises have noted the same. Reality is not nearly as bad as rumors are, even in the case of the scourge of a pandemic. Behind the weak performances of a stellar cast and a survey of microbiology for neophytes, what you have in Contagion is a movie about the power of fear and rumors. The actual movie itself plays out like a modern retelling of the Spanish Flu Pandemic or Yellow Fever Epidemics. There is no innovation, no twist, no intrigue. It is an average script adapted from an ever-widening corpus of public health-history-psychological writings influenced by J Barry's The Great Influenza and R Preston's The Hot Zone. What makes these books readable, and this movie watchable, is that they appeal to the paradoxical modern human's desire for fear. For those who are truly fearful and live in a state of fear, it is abhorrent, but for lost people who live for entertainment and rush to avoid life's big questions or ennui, the subject of fear, which for such people is always at arm's length, is a welcome companion. Fear gives the hopeless something to live for. Fear of apocalypse sells: ask morons like John Hagee or the makers of the many 1980s-to present nuclear war movies or the 24-hour news stations.

But as much as fear appeals to the American viewing public, this movie just doesn't go anywhere. The only emotion I felt was a slight bit of anger against the false prophet, Jude Law's character, but even that was tempered by the predictability of his role and his lines. So while this movie is slightly entertaining and never boring, it also does nothing to warrant a second watching or much critical analysis. It is what it is: an average movie about fear and the inevitability of pandemic. 5/10

Country Strong The story could have gone to great heights, but instead stuck to the mud and mire. Paltrow's character is annoying and clearly based on Brittney Spears. Hedlund does a decent job, but his torn love interests makes his character less than credible. More should have been tuned to Paltrow and McGraw's relationship. Good music. 6/10

Courageous Some people will claim that this movie is a Christian movie. It is not. It is a middle-America, middle-class morality movie. It has been less than a day since I watched it, but I am struggling to remember much of anything aside from what is bad about the movie. I recall one quote, something to the effect of "our past matters and we have to make right things we did wrong." Perhaps the authors and adherents of this faux form of Christianity, a brand of religion that values the American Dream far more than anything Jesus ever said, should open their history books and see from whence their religion comes. Partly born from the Reconstruction Era poor white Southern/Mid-Western society, "evangelical" family values religion is a narrow faith of whiteness.

Consider all the bad guys and all the good guys in the movie. The writers and directors had the sensibilities and political correctness not to assign all bad guys with the color black and all good guys with the color. But it's entirely superficial. The only minorities who are noble in the movie are the minorities who throw away their culture and accept American white values. The only whites who are evil are the whites who adopt African American culture. Again, this movie is less about God than it is about how white American culture is vastly superior to African American culture.

The moral lesson of the movie, which appears as often as a Saved by the Bell re-run on TBS, is that fathers need to be accountable and good examples to their families. Admirable yes and it is an important social commentary in a world where fathers are absent. But again, the movie is sorely lacking in Christian understanding, as it makes the traditional American family unit the end-all, be-all of a godly life. The movie becomes so family-centric one wonders how a pastor with a knowledge of the Bible could have written this script, noting that one of the key themes in the Bible is the familyhood of all people, not just four or five people. The movie does not have this scriptural vision of what real family is. Instead, its vision of family is so isolated and self-serving. It's the sort of view that allows great evils like the belief that American blood is more valuable than other blood to proliferate. The implied hierarchy of value, which permeates much of what passes as Christianity in America and certainly the Satanic cult of Mormonism, disgusts me and it should enrage all Christians.

So we have a movie about white culture being superior to all others which makes the basic family unit an idol. Hopefully, there's good film making and acting? No. Even though this movie deals with the big themes of life, it is all done so glibly and with a lack of any real depth. I was not moved in any scene, even in the most tragic of scenes. As high as the directors tried to climb, and as low as they tried to fall, I was stuck at sea-level because it just was not a good movie. 3/10

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The Debt A person who once called himself more than the personification of Truth but Truth herself, in Truth's very being, also said, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you...and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." The movie Debt is a psychological twister which explores the weight of our debt to Truth. What should we do? What do we owe? While the movie spends most of its time superficially bouncing between political espionage, the history of abuses in Nazi medicine, and a triangular love affair that is thrown on tangent by a prisoner, the real issue Debt brings to fore is the fundamental need for humans to honor what is true.

But we have a hard time giving what is owed to Truth. Why? There is a long list of reasons why we lie. Sometimes we lie to hurt others. Other times we lie to gain an advantage. Still others, we lie to please others. Augustine, in his On Lying and Against Lying wrote extensively on what a lie is and why we lie. Is it ever right to lie? Even when it is a matter of justifying an entire people? That is the dilemma the three main characters face. The dilemma in this movie is a difficult one even for the viewer, removed from the story. And it's hard for anyone, IMO, to say what they did was wrong in the moment. Because we all too well know that sometimes what appears to be the right thing at the time is the wrong thing on reflection.

But Truth has a way of catching up and getting her due. We can try our best to put behind us our transgressions against Truth. We can travel the world and seek to circumvent our wrong. We can even build our lies and create a reality based on that lie, our nose growing ever longer, giving forth sprouts, but Truth will catch up and have her final say. That was Plato's belief. That is the Christian belief. In the end, by God's providence, there will be truth, and what was hidden will be made known.

I was impressed by this movie's use of sequencing. Less impressive was the length of time dedicated to the capture. It really played no role in the movie, except in a few scenes to show the sort of monster that was being developed and revealed in one character, which had the impact of making the dilemma more real. Jessica Chastain is the shining star in this film; look for her star to rise. The last scenes with the beautiful aged wonder, Mirren, in which she jumps into her previous life are out there, a bit unbelievable. But they are somehow necessary to the movie's theme, so I don't know how you would escape them, and I think the director faced this problem. The writer clearly built a movie on a theme first, and then wrote a plot based on that theme. It is a bumpy form of writing that yields a bumpy script with potholes. Still, it is an above average flick that should please a wide audience of viewers. And hopefully the message will hit home: that it's not always easy to tell the truth, there is indeed a burden attached to it, but telling a lie creates a far heavier yoke. 7/10

The Dilemma Pretty good romantic comedy. Theme of the movie is honesty. Really good message throughout. Perhaps it tries to touch on too many issues - unfaithfulness, faithfulness, moral dilemmas, gambling, anger, drugs, hard work, ambition, best friends, and marriage. But to make the characters more believable, I'd say erring on the side of too many issues is better than too few issues. Flashbacks in the movie were hilarious. Jennifer Connelly is stunning. She lost probably about ten pounds too much. Still, she is a striking beauty, not as beautiful as the Beloved, but very beautiful. The last scene with her and her man when they are alone made me cry. Literally, I was balling in the theater this morning. Really good ending. A well crafted movie that should be considered a modern classic of the romantic comedy drama, especially considering all the recent dross in that category. 7/10

Dolphin Tale "There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in," writes Canadian Jewish-Buddhist poet, Leonard Cohen. These are important words to consider in our culture, a culture that prizes perfection, usually of a superficial variety. Our world tells us that we should be outgoing, strong, fashionable, friendly, all the accoutrements of an American Dream-styled life. The result often leaves those who are shaped like the perfect vase with guilt that can turn into depression and self-hatred. Child prodigy actor, Nathan Gamble, begins this tale, not as a child ridden with guilt, but a child ridden with angst, the sort of angst only known by those who are abandoned by one of their parents. A life of broken relationships and broken community is the result.

It is only when something as broken as his heart enters his life that he begins to see light. Of course, the salvific thing is a dolphin, and while I am not an animal rights activist or a zoolater, we see here that animals can have a sacred power that is often ignored by ecologically imperialist Christians who see the world to be used rather than loved. I am reminded of the story the Irish monk missionary who helped revitalize Christianity after the fall of Rome. He understood that all of creation yearns for redemption so much that he told his companions, when he was leaving his horse for good, "Leave the horse alone, so that he may pour his grief into my bosom, if he will. For he loves me and is wiser than many men." In another story, Columba tells a fisherman to go to the beach and wait. There, "you will behold, blown by the winds and very weary, a crane...Treat that crane tenderly, and warm it in your bosom, and carry it to some neighboring house." The crane and the horse were more than mere objects. They were beings through which God's grace flowed. For Columba and for the characters in "Dolphin Tale" animals have a crucial role in salvation history: they heal what is broken.

I had no intention of liking this movie: it looked formulaic, sentimental for the masses, and cheaply made at first. But as I continued to watch, I could not help but be swayed by the ebullient performances and the sapid music of the most underrated soundtrack composer in America, Mark Isham. There are very few good family movies being made, but "Dolphin Tale" more that satisfies both children and adults. Kids will love it for the animal scenes and humor. Adults may love it for its positive, feel good story. Of course, snobbish critics may assail it because its style is as Promethean as a peanut butter sandwich, but who cares for such opinions? Such people are only hiding behind their own cracks, afraid to step from the darkness of artificial health. 8/10

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Everything Must Go Everything that Larry Crowne is not, Everything Must Go is. Here is a man many on TD can relate to: an alcoholic; accused of sexual harassment; left by wife for being a cheater; wandering aimlessly through this life. I picture several OT members specifically, though I will not name them. But you know who you are. The gravitas and soul searching left out by Hanks is filled, surprisingly, by Will Ferrell. Many have said this is Ferrell's Bill Murray breakthrough, showing that he can act more than dufus roles. I'm proud of Ferrell because behind his comic appearances, I think there is a Nick Halsey there. The most warming relationship in the movie is the one he shares with the young kid on the bike. Moments of levity spice the movie when the sadness of loss and despondence weigh heavily. 8/10

The Fighter A really enjoyable movie that grows on you the more you think about the performances. It is entirely character driven and the two leads are exceptional. The movie isn't about boxing - it's about family, brothers, conflicting allegiances, and triumph over weakness. The boxing scenes are bad and a waste of time. 9/10

Footloose An adequate remake of a classic about the dangers of parental protection and adolescent rebellion. It tries too hard to make a moral point, even worse than the original. It is, nonetheless, a fun, sing-a-long, tap-your-feet-in-the-aisles romping good time. 5/10

Glee the 3D Movie Concert Earlier this month, three Mandeville teenagers planned an attack on their schoolmates and teachers. The plan was to murder others and then murder themselves. While it is an extreme case, it illustrates a major social problem we face: exclusion which pushes people to do anything for acceptance. Some people act with meanness to gain acceptance by the group, as we saw in socialites in The Help; others turn to vice, such as doing illegal drugs and posting threads that debase women like WOWHI threads. Everyone in this world yearns for acceptance. The Christian doctrine of justification is essentially a description of this deep desire within us to be accepted, not just by others but by God.

Glee 3D is essentially a cheesy pop-culture retelling of that doctrine: a movie of acceptance despite, and perhaps, because of our flaws. In that sense, it was, in this world of such high standards of beauty and talent, quite a refreshing surprise to watch. I had never seen the show before, so I went into the film only knowing it was a concert movie about a TV show about singers. Unlike the J.B. Never Say Never movie where I walked out a full-fledged Belieber, I don't know if I'm ready to count myself part of the Gleek membership. It might be because the producers of Glee 3D essentially stole the Never Say Never movie format and put in their cast instead of J.B.

Although the movie is an emotional high from start to finish, I felt that the stories, while strangely beautiful, were also contrived and manipulative with the audience's emotions. Speaking of manipulative, the guy in the wheelchair doesn't need a wheelchair? What? I just didn't get that sequence or why he was in a wheelchair in the first place. For me, the highlight of the movie was the opening scene: Don't Stop Believe In. From there, the songs were good, but did not match the intensity and fervor of that first song. The 3D was rather unnecessary, with the majority of the 3D being scenes of the crowd to make you feel like there were fans in front of you. I must say, however, that at times I forgot I was in a theater and thought I was at a concert.

The overall message of the movie is positive, if not a little pop-culture, self-help preachy. Essentially it tells us that it's okay to be a loser. We'll love you anyway, indeed, because you are a loser. Very similar to the idea of God accepting us while we are still sinners, and the Church being a collection of sinners. Glee replaces the idea of sinner with the idea of a loser. The Christian understanding is much more realistic because it teaches people that there's something we must do after we realize our sin. Glee teaches that we should be happy to accept being a loser. We are accepted and nothing else matters. There we find the version of hyper-justification: being accepted is all that matters. Life stops with acceptance. In a society of laziness, it's a very tempting alternative to the notion of justification/acceptance giving us meaning and energy to become better. Just because we have flaws, IMO, does not mean we should be content to live with them. Perhaps, though, due to our society that is so exclusionary and turns normal people into monsters who seek acceptance, this hyper-justification has a place. 6/10

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The Help Some movies lend themselves to being watched in specific theaters. The Sound of Music watched at the Salzburger Landestheater or Good Will Hunting at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square come to mind. So when I learned of The Help's release, I knew I would need to watch it at The Prytania. It's not Jackson, MS, but the neighborhood in which The Prytania sits might as well be 1950s Jackson. Even this day, early in the mornings and around four in the afternoon, you will find black workers dressed in maid outfits going to and from work, although, now, many have been replaced by Hispanic workers, who are willing to work for much less.

It's interesting to see how a cinematic jeremiad is received by the crowd the film intends to condemn. And so I trudged off to that old theater. By the roar of laughter during scenes that mocked the ruling class, an objective observer concludes that few at The Prytania are willing to see their faults in movies. How quick people are to condemn those they see without recognizing their own hypocrisy and sin.

What is this movie about? I think it's that people a corrupt society categorizes as good and upstanding are usually neither. Corrupt societies, therefore, need to be rebuked, and the rebuke can only come from heroes, or in this case, heroines who are courageous. Their courage is founded in truth, and in their courageous pursuit of this truth, freedom from the shackles of corruption and brokenness is found. It is a modern retelling of Plato's Allegory of the Cave or Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me [Jesus the Truth] and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple." To step outside the mob's friendship is a dangerous, painful, and sacrificial move, almost always. It's a damn shame that this movie did not make more of the cost of discipleship, or cost of doing what is right. It's a bit fairy-tale-ish in its portrayal of justice fighters as triumphant. The reality is almost always that the children of these people receive the fruits of their labor while the fighters themselves are murdered or rejected. Those who have power never give up their power without violence.

Viola Davis and Emma Stone give the performances of their careers. Their characters are the only ones that break from pack-mob mentality, although the broken, blonde bimbo, Celia Leefolt, whose character I found pitiable but superfluous to the story, could, in a way, fit in this category (but remember, her exclusion is not by choice; if it were her choice, she would join the mob). The rest of the characters are rather pedestrian and used as comic relief or foils of evil.

Most viewers, like the ones with whom I watched this movie, will look at the film as an historical fiction. And they will judge the bad guys. In judging, people feel better about themselves and gain a sense of moral superiority. But as with any jeremiad, the author wants the listener or viewer to look at himself and his own situation. How are we today acting as the bad guys? How are we today treating others in a horrific, cruel, inhuman, yet culturally accepted way? 8/10

Horrible Bosses When your audience laughs hardest because one of its characters is named MFer, you know you've successfully filled the stomachs of the poo-poo-pee-pee-penis-vagina-drugs crowd. Sometimes I wonder if what passes as comedy today isn't written by 14 year old boys the studios recruit off message boards like the OT.

Jennifer Anniston is a pitiable, aging beauty whose acting career is dying, oh wait, was it ever alive? Jason Bateman is a talented actor, but until he realizes his potential, he'll be stuck scraping the bottom of the cheap seats for cheap minds. 3/10

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