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

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The King's Speech A great triumph of cinematic docu-drama. It brings history and drama together like never before. You will leave this movie identifying with at least one character at least at some point in your life. The soundtrack is almost as marvelous as the performances. 9/10

Larry Crowne You know what, Hanks and Roberts have a real chemistry in this movie, but it's not romantic. It's more like the relationship Hanks has with that toy exec chick in Big. They try to force the romance angle, but it's acute and eventually it closes as a straight line. While I appreciate Hanks' positive, go-get-em attitude, it doesn't come off as very sincere and fails to plumb the depths of human disappointment. Are there people who are so look-on-the-bright-side in this world? Perhaps, but movies about them aren't good theater. 4/10

Little Fockers Meet the Parents should have stopped with the original. This movie does nothing new and repeats the same, tired jokes again and again. Do comic writers think audiences are so unfunny? I didn't chuckle once and found every character to be annoying. Alba is terrible. 3/10

Margin Call Several years ago, unbeknownst to me at the time, I had lunch with one of the foremost investors of the 20th century. When one of my friends had seen with whom I had lunch, he rushed to ask me questions, specifically about money. "Did he tell you how to invest?" and so forth. "No, no he didn't. Money did not enter our conversation once." One might say that the conversation had been on spirituality. Specifically, we talked about what we can know about God and what can be learned about God through many religions. Money for this man, in my brief encounter with him, was not why he lived. At least not at that point in his life.

In an important conversation near the end of Margin Call, the cormorant owner of this investment group has these words to a disillusioned, surly stock pusher, a man who felt, in the words of Hugo, "the perpetual plaint of a soul in agony": "It's just money; it's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It's not wrong." His words ring as truth, a thought uttered by many of the saints of the world: money is nothing. And those who devote their lives to it become nothing. That much is consistent with all the world's major religions. But his words also ring as platitudinous, for that man had clambered all his life for money and there was no regret or turning from this idol. This man and the man with whom I shared lunch were not of the same ilk.

Margin Call, like Wall Street II and Company Men, is placed in the troublesome days of early Autumn, 2008 when the world's economic bubble was ready to burst. Each of these movies has tried to capture the greed that led up to the financial collapse, but none has been as successful as Margin Call. Why? Precisely because in the other two movies, we are given characters that the hoi polloi, the occupant 99%, are supposed to hate. The motivation with their main characters is personal greed. Margin Call is not so simplistic, and so, much more believable. The film is at its finest when developing the complex characters involved in this fictitious histo-drama. We get to know seven characters very well, a feat in itself for a movie of this length. And for each, our initial impressions are not our final impressions. The movie, in that sense, is shocking. A man we believe to be a terrible villain in the opening scenes, we will come to pity at the end. Because at the end, we see that the Jewish vision of labor has triumphed over the Roman view, which has since been adopted by the West, sadly, and to the detriment of culture and charity. This character brings us there, the place where button pushing is replaced by heart-breaking, back-breaking work. The entire cast is formidable and impressive except Demi Moore. She gives an encore performance to Disclosure, which is equally as bad. She doesn't deserve to be in another film.

Is this a movie about money? Only in form. In substance, it is a movie about our own motivations in life. By examining the motivation of others, their raison d'être, reason for being, it gives each of us a good opportunity to re-examine what motivates us. And I hope we will be able to move past money, obviously, but even past building bridges and digging holes. Our reason is far greater than our work of this sort. Only when our work is solely a work of love has our reason become exalted and pleasing. 8/10

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The Mechanic the best thing about this movie is it's filmed in New Orleans. Watching it, I was more attuned to figuring out which building or where in the city they were set. The movie has way too much blood and violence to recommend. The story is interesting enough and Straham or whatever his name plays the role well, but the movie has no message except killing. Hard to recommend a movie like that. It moves fast and is tightly knit, but the lack of a worthwhile theme makes this a bust. 3/10

Megamind It's been a couple of months since seeing this, but thought it was decent. I'm glad they reduced the role of Brad Pitt. Even though it's animation, it is a romance movie, not a kid's movie. The love Megamind has for Ms. Palin is admirable and I came to feel for the guy. 6/10

Moneyball If you think you're going to see a movie about baseball, think again. The baseball scenes are sparse and not good. This movie is about one thing and one thing only: faith despite the evidence and tradition. 3,000 or so years ago, or maybe never, a man named Abram lived. And God approached this man, telling him that if he were to leave his home, God would bless him with a new land and many descendants, despite his wife's old age and barrenness. At the time, it looked like a ridiculous commitment only a fool would make. There was no evidence that hinted that the decision would pay dividends. But Abram packed his bags and headed out, probably to the consternation and ridicule of all his neighbors who mocked him as a mad man. Faith for Abram, Karl Barth, and possibly Billy Beane was believing in something despite all the evidence, and standing back, and watching all the evidence change.

In that way, this movie is much more about a Copernican Revolution, a Abrahamic Revolution, really, than it is about baseball. Without question, this writer was influenced by Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which has deservedly become reading for college freshmen across the disciplines, so much so that the paradigm shifts it discusses have almost become cliche' in conversation. In the book, Kuhn uses history to show how normal science is governed by faith, even if its followers claim a lack of faith. Faith in a system and a method, faith in a certain ordering of ideas, is how each school of science becomes dominant, and the assumptions of that school become dogmatic, which is not meant to be used in a pejorative sense. But every system of belief has flaws and will face stalemate. Eventually, a revolutionary questions the assumptions of science to create a new form of science. This is the revolution, the paradigm shift.

Moneyball seeks through the superficial relationship between the plenipotentiary general manager of the A's, Brad Pitt, (Billy Beane) and his head scout and head coach to show a revolutionary butting heads with tradition. But the interplay doesn't work because from the get-go, the old guard is cast in a mocking way. We're never given time or reason to support anyone but Pitt and his way of thinking. Thanks to the overly revealing trailer, we know all the smart lines and ending before the beginning. Pitt is the hero and the movie is agitprop to build the hero. In that sense, the movie is one-faced, simple, and doesn't give justice to the other side, which a good drama demands. The scenes from Pitt's past don't add anything to the character or story, though the director tries to force an interpretation down our throats, but to no avail. Even more superfluous and useless is the weak attempt to bring Pitt's family into the movie. Pitt is not well cast here; his strength is shown when he plays the bad guy with the good heart, not the innovator. His relationship to Jonah Hill, whose me'tier is numbers, is clumsy. Hill is the real hero in the story, yet he is cast to the side as a troll. The only thing that really works is the message: that in order to bring real change, you need a faith in something higher than yourself because the ridicule and rejection the prophet faces is too much for one person to carry alone. Too bad Pitt's character is left as a shadow and the audience in the dark about why he believes the new system will work. 4/10

Monte Carlo I felt my soul being destroyed by this cooked u,p sentimental life-is-better with-what-you-have snoozer. It's all a crock. The message makes no sense in the movie's backdrop.

How do these girls pretend to be pleased with what they already have? For instance, Selena, she finds happiness after returning to Europe??? How does a five dollar an hour waitress afford to go back to Europe just weeks after her first trip to Europe? And her clothes? Sorry, but when you're making what she does, you're happy to have a place to sleep at night.

The other girl, the one from The Roommate, who by the way is not attractive at all, she lets go of all her pain by traveling around the world for a few months with some ex rugby player who has chicken legs, so unbelievable. How does she afford that? And how is travel throughout the world consistent with be happy with what you have? Does the producer have any clue how expensive it is to do what she did at the end? She's nothing but a hitched Julie Roberts from Eat Pray Love. She'll get tired of her new found boy, have an epiphany, and even though she's in great debt from her college education that she doesn't use for a job, she'll continue to travel.

And that last blonde, the real skanky one who cheats on her boyfriend by going out on date after date in Europe. Do we really buy that it's only through cheating that we find who we truly love? If I were her boyfriend and found those flowers, I would have kicked her skank arse to the curb. Damn whore. So what if that French guy on the boat hadn't been a jerk? Does that mean she would have fallen in love with him?

This movie is a kid's version of Eat Pray Love and totally contradicting to itself. I could have written a better script in 30 minutes. 2/10

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Redemption Road What happens when you throw those holy of holies ingredients white Alba truffles, Almas Beluga caviar, Wagyu steak, Matsutake mushrooms and saffron into a gumbo pot and let it cook for on medium for a couple of hours? A nasty, smelly, yucky mess, that's what. And so it is with the overtly evangelical Redemption Road. Thrown haphazardly into this plot are the profound, holy themes of sin, forgiveness, love, freedom, and redemption.

In a not so novel approach to the modern journey genre, we hit the road, not the interstate, for what can be learned on an interstate other than which exit has the next Subway or Exxon?, but on a series of local, backwoods highways. The assumption being that we have to slow down and get lost before we can find where we're going. Along this journey we're spoon fed in excruciatingly boring and predictable detail the regrets of a life not so well lived. All the while, with preachy platitudes sprinkled here and there, the storyteller is giving away the end of the story.

This movie will likely appeal to hipster Christians who think they've discovered some great secrets and thoughts earlier Christians have not. It will also be applauded by those abecedarian Christians who make their testimony into a tale of grave sin, trying to outdo others on the depth of their sin. If one person says, "I smoked 10 pounds of crack and then Jesus saved me," the next guy in line will say, "I smoked twenty pounds of crack! and then Jesus saved me." It will appeal to them because that's what it's about: sinners who, at times, seem to be bragging about how bad they used to be.

This movie offers little new to the genre of the journey from sin to redemption. The producers were clearly thrilled when the black guy from Green Mile and Dillon from 90210 agreed to do the film. But seldom has typecasting had such little effect. The main character, whose name I'm not going to bother looking up, is flat and modern caricature of Johnny Cash. Even in the climatic scene of Pyrrhic victory, I didn't care. The harder he and the director tried to pull the chords of my emotions, the more I was put off and the less I cared because it was so very predictable, so very, very inauthentic.

Are there any positives? There is one good scene at sunset. It truly is a beautiful scene. For large stretches the cinematography is less than inspiring, but there are a few diamonds, if you look for them. Tom Skerritt does an admirable job with the limited potential given to him. And the main message of the movie, that the inability to forgive weighs us down and that only love can free us, is a good message, which is a lot more than can be said for many movies today. The takeaway from this movie is that just because you are dealing with great themes does not mean that you will come up with a great movie. 3/10

The Roommate Watching several cardboard actors following as predictable a script as they come gave me time to wonder how ratings have changed so much in the last decade. How was this movie given a PG-13 rating? The movie is little more than violence and a shallow, dangerous look at mental illnesses. It's a movie that demonizes people who have mental illness. I can't imagine the budget of this film was much more than $5 million. From FPOBA's use of The University of Los Angeles to props made out of paper to a script I could have written in two hours, this is about as cheap a movie as can be made. In fact, as the opening credits came on, I thought I was watching a bad Lifetime movie. My biggest complaint though was that all the characters didn't die in a giant conflagration within five minutes of the movie's start. Then I wouldn't have wasted so much time. 1/10

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Season of the Witch I read a few scathing reviews and went to see this just to see how bad a movie Cage was willing to sign to. I was surpised that this movie wasn't nearly as bad as the critics said. The large scale battle scenes are bad and the CGI for the most part about a decade behind, but the story was a bit interesting, and actually surprised me. At first, I thought this was just another attack on the Church of the Middle Ages, but it was actually, in a weird way, a defense of it. The movie was always entertaining and moved very quickly, so you won't be bored. 5/10

Seven Days in Utopia Before watching it, I did something I usually don't: I had a peak at the numerical grades the critics gave this movie. I was not that surprised when I saw the grades were low. It's not unusual for critics to pan an overtly religious movie. Some people, either for personal or intellectual reasons, hate religion. Anything that discusses religion in a positive light is bad to some of these people. I hoped that this was the reason for the low scores because who has seen more bad movies in the theater this year than I have?

The movie is a series of parables in which a budding golf star learns lessons by having his focus unfocused. All his life, the golfer, whose acting rivals the quality of acting on MTV's Real World, has focused on direct lessons from a father who is exacting, goal-driven, vicarious, and relentless. But when that world is torn, he is led to another father figure, played by the philtrum-stached Robert Duvall. Through a series of trials and parables, Duvall's character teaches the young man virtues of middle American religion: conviction, temperance, and detachment.

The messages are well and good for a nominally Christian and unrooted society that has a need for morality lessons, but the teachings of Seven Days are, like so many of the "Christian" movies coming out since Hollywood realized it could make bank after seeing the cash flow after Mel Gibson's The Passion, more suited for a society that is concerned with self first. The movie's theme is less about Christian virtues than it is about the virtues of modern American psychology cloaked in the language of Christianity. The movie's not about finding one's place in the world as a servant; it's about finding oneself. It's not about reconciling after real fractures; it's about superficial hugs and submission: case in point: the golfer's dad in the ridiculous golf scenes that close the movie. There was nothing real in their ostensible reconciliation. The dad's character is merely destroyed, his soul simply disappears after the two supposedly reconcile. And as a result of this phantom redivivus, the character and the relationship he has with the son are incredulous. And as bad as that relationship portrayal is, it's only half as bad as the young man's love interest and her family. Did the director really feel it necessary to include a shadow family?

Apart from giving a nominally Christian self-help message, the movie fails as a work of cinematic art because it has bad acting and no drama. There are no elements of suspense; every bit of this movie is predicated on folk family religion in the most predictable of ways. Whereas the profound lessons of a good work of art come to us in a susurrus, as do the lessons in a movie like A River Runs Through It, this movie is for an uncritical, unthinking audience who needs lessons pasted on billboards and blared on bullhorns. Even with all the bad, the movie moves quickly, and is over before you know it. But the next time I see Melissa Leo in Whole Foods, I will confront her. "Melissa," I will say, "Why did someone of your pedigree agree to do a bad movie? I've seen enough of them this year." 3/10.

Smurfs 3D There is an emerging study of color in contemporary philosophy. Much of it derives from psychological and linguistic theories, but it is annoyingly and fruitlessly emerging in philosophy. While we can objectively differentiate colors based on the spectrum of visible light, the new studies of color are more often than not based on an anthropocentric rather than physical understanding of color. As such, colors are colors in so much as they can create an emotional response. Artists have long known this; why it took philosophers so long to figure out, you figure out. Entering the movie I loved the color blue. Exiting the movie, I detest the color blue.

How can a movie create such a metanoia in opinion? Consider why many children do not like the lima beans. I believe it is not the legume's taste, it the legume's color: similar to the color of children's vomit. Smurfs is no more than vomit on the big screen. And it made me want to vomit. I wish I had listened to the lady in the preview of the Never Say Never copycat, Glee 3D, when she said, "This movie sucks. Get your money back." But we cannot change the past; we cannot undo what we have seen, and what I saw in Smurfs was a raping of my soul by none other than Papa Smurf, whose voice sounds eerily similar to the Larry King voice in those Xtranormal self-make movies.

It was an Indecent Proposal. How else can you explain any actor or actress agreeing to lend their face or voice to this movie? I can see the directors going to Doogie Howser: "Here's $2 mill, will you do it?" If Doogie had actually taken the Hippocratic Oath, he couldn't. I guess moral character is not expected from an actor who does a cameo in a movie about White Castle burgers and semen in a car's backseat. I'm surprised we didn't see any White Castle burgers in the movie. At every turn of the camera angle, there was one more advertisement for some company. Yes, Smurfs is nothing more than a series of infomercials painted blue. The directors then slapped on a five cent sitcom story about being a dad and a few crude jokes, that I hope went over the kids' heads. The sad part is that all that blue turned to green at the box office. Satan is red in my eyes no longer. 0/10

The Social Network Tight writing, great story, and moves at a pace that is irresistible. I haven't sat through two hours that went by more quickly than when watching this one. No performance sticks out; it's just a solid movie all the way around. 9/10

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Transformers 3 It was slightly better than the second one, but the story of Omega Prime isn't well told. I think if they had gone a little more in depth with the character of Omega, the movie might have gone somewhere, but Bay knew the public wanted to see bang bang pow pow, transform, die Decepticons! than actually develop a character or a story with any depth. It's a shame because all the animation would have buttressed an interesting story. 3/10

The Tree of Life To watch The Tree of Life is to stand before the expanse of the ocean or the heavens, knowing that every little thing you see has meaning, even if you don't understand what the meaning of each thing is. A day removed from watching this film, I feel like Christopher Columbus upon his landing in the new world or Frederick Cook. There is a mysterious infinity of faith and love in The Tree of Life.

Mr. Malick does not want to confuse people. He wants to open their eyes to faith and to the huge questions of faith, questions that are often reduced by fundamentalists of every stripe. For the fundamentalists who claim faith, faith is reduced to certainty. For the fundamentalists who assail faith, faith is a remnant of evolution gone awry. Faith is something to be jettisoned as baggage that has no worth in the modern world. But Mr. Malick sees and believes right through both forms of the same arrogant idolatry. So when Malick begins the film with an epigraph from Job, the divine question in response to Job's creaturely theodical question: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth...when the morning stars sang together?" we are to view the movie through that passage in Job more than the Genesis creation account(s). This movie, like Job, is one person's, Malick, attempt to reconcile his faith in a good God that brings life to be with the God who allowed his brother to die at an early age. The movie is an an honest prayer, a supplication of integrity to God: God, why did you allow my brother to die? How can you say you are good and how can you ask me to be good, if you, God, are not good?

I think this question, uttered in a soft whisper, as all the movie's direct communication with God is done, is what drives the movie. But the movie begins with the answer: a beautiful sweep of history from the electron to DNA to the dinosaur to destruction to the specific story of one family, all are the work of the God who freely moves as a gaseous spirit of fire, the loving, birthing, consuming fire. We have the question of divine goodness and power within the boundaries of goodness in the beginning and goodness at the end. Thus, I think, it is Malick's way of saying, God, I know you are good. I know you are good, but why? Why? I know you are good. God's goodness is not known in the acetonic assurances of Mrs. O’Brien's mother, who cites scripture, just as Job's friends did. No one, not even God, who does not dwell in the depths of despair with another has the right to do such things. And that is why this movie only can make sense in a Christian worldview, a lens that sees the Creator as the Suffering Servant, the one who bore our iniquities and carried our sorrows. Only this God has the right to answer Job's question with another question: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Only the God who knows suffering of the most real sort can understand Job or Jack O'Brien or Terrence Malick or you or me.

Doorways play such a huge role in this movie. But the most significant doorway is that at the end, when the grown Jack cautiously walks through, or boldly leaps through the door. This is the Kierkegaardian leap of faith. "Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep," says Jesus. And it is only after taking that leap into a new existence that the question of why falls to the wayside and he is reunited in a prelapsarian, or rather, post-redemptive paradise, reunited with his family, transported to a place where every tear has been wiped away, every imperfection made pure. Near the end, Mrs. O'Brien says, "The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by." This is the way, the truth, and the life of grace with which the movie opens. And the message is this, I think: That until we leap into the Christ, who was with God in the beginning and who suffered with and for us, and who loved us to the ultimate distance, unless we are bound to that Christ, we will have no love. Without love our lives wither and fade, and death is the end. But with love, with Jesus, we live forevermore in the valley where the tree of life bears fruit for us forevermore.

There is so much more to say about this movie, and perhaps I will one day say it. But I believe this movie to be an inspired work of God. It is a true masterpiece against which all works of art should be compared. It is the greatest movie that has ever been made. 10/10.

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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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