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

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Does not have an english accent.

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He did in Life of Brian.

Here's why that was a completely inadequate review:

1) 47% of your write-up is the introductory paragraph. The percentage is fine, I guess, but the problem is its substance. The introduction is the most crucial piece of writing, yet you don't even mention The Adventures of Tintin in it at all. To paraphrase the great John McPhee, who says of intros: your thesis should shine like a flashlight down a dark tunnel. In other words it should be 100% relevant to the body of your text. Yet your Anglophobia barely scrapes the surface of relevance to the film outside of character accent, the slightest of veneers that comprise its substance.

2) "a rather predictable blood lineage story that's a little bit Pirates of the Carbs, part Goonies, part Sherlock Holmes"

You realize the comic series was written before 2 out of those 3? And Sir Author Conan Doyle certainly has no copyright on detective mysteries. Because it appears to you a cobbling together of 3 previous works is just a lazy dismissal on your part, because you project your own experience over dissecting what is possibly "predictable" about it.

3) "and dress it up with some fancy CGI"

CGI is not the same as motion capture technology

4) "not to mention the centrality of alcohol"

Which is ultimately portrayed in a negative light. Captain Haddock's secondary arc is his defeat of alcoholism. Nonetheless, thats your puritanical perception clouding what was mostly a sight gag-cum-Alcoholism PSA

5) The numerous violent scenes and the gruesome nature of one scene

gruesome? there's very little blood portrayed, possibly none. there's gunfire and explosions, but their effects are for sensory shock, not meant to key in on physical trauma. again that probably just relates to your religious guilt and dogmatic imprisonment.

grammatical problems:
- "despotic hegemony" - unnecessary adjective. hegemony is a good enough description. adjectives and adverbs should be used sparingly. nouns and verbs are the real meat of good writing.
- The English pillaging - awk phrasing
- corporal colonialism - I'm sure you meant corporate colinialism, but either way you need to self-edit better.

Misc. disagreements:
- "invest, do no work, take advantage of those who have no power, and profit" - you're talking like a college freshman that just read about Marxism. To say that all corporations are unethical is dishonest. not to mention: what in the hell does this have to do with Tintin?
- modus operandi - why not just say "intent," or "purpose"
- "And what makes England so great? Nothing in my opinion." Well, that's just laughable hyperbole. Given your track record for being humorless it's hard to see you being ironic about this.

Conclusion:
You have a massive problem with writing up big walls of introduction that no one cares about. You drift off into soliloquies that are inspired but unengaging, substantial but feckless.

Equally as troubling is your lack of illustration for any of your points. You make declarations but provide no support. That's lazy.

Finally, moral judgments such as the rating of a movie should be secondary to its quality. Rating, or mis-rating should not dictate your evaluation of a movie's effectiveness.

That's true. And I should have included that in the review. But that doesn't take away from the message: that the story, which in the previews was heralded as one of the greatest stories of our time, isn't very good or interesting.

Wow, your worst review yet, and thats saying something. How has this not been anchored yet or been banned yet? If DanMullenIsOurMan got banned, then why the hell hasn't TulaneLSU gotten banned?

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How has this not been anchored yet or been banned yet?

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Because TulaneLSU is a Chicken alter. And he gets his jollies from trolling this board.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Few places in the world capture my imagination as much as Bond Street, London. Walking atop its enchanting cobblestones, it is easy to skip, click your heels together, and sing with Mr. Banks, "It's great to be an Englishman in 1910," or 2010 for that matter. As I recently wrote, I have little favor for the demonym for those living in England, but I do have a certain affinity for the land. Land is a sacred thing, its ability to conjure memory, ideas, and loyalty has no equal. It is on those rare perambulations on Bond Street that I take those trysts of fancy, imaging myself as Mr. Holmes, fresh out of Taylor's with a fresh shave, hearing the click clack of a pair of Ghillies from John Lobb's impregnating the silence and calm of an early winter afternoon's darkness, seeing in a discarded Smythson's receipt plans for some malignant autocrat to overtake the world.

I have many reasons to like Sherlock Holmes. I love the setting. I love the stories. I love the adventure. I love the deduction. I love the details. But this film doesn't capture all of those things as well as I had hoped. It doesn't help that same people who cast Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are likely to invent a pizza with oysters and Reeses peanut butter cups as toppings. Has a decent movie ever been as poorly cast as Sherlock Holmes?, is a question worth pondering.

What works? The story is decently entertaining, a bit reminiscent of the plot in the recent box office failure Jonah Hex. I really enjoyed the action scenes, its slow motion and turret view reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's camera shots in Requiem for a Dream. But those strengths do not overcome its far-too-quick pace, which, like the recent Conan the Barbarian shifts from scene to scene far too quickly and too often. As a result, its length grows cumbersome, and I was quite ready for the film to be finished twenty minutes before it actually did. Sherlock isn't average because it is has flashes of brilliance, as well as lulls of dullness which are a counterweight, bringing an otherwise decent movie down to a forgettable popcorn thriller. 5/10

You are a worthless faux intellectual poster to me until you watch Stalker

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As I recently wrote, I have little favor for the demonym for those living in England, but I do have a certain affinity for the land.

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Right you like the geography just not it's citizens or their accents.

We Bought a Zoo: The Daily Bible Study group has recently been using prayers of Evagrius to open our studies. Evagrius is unknown to most, but his influence is still felt today. The Seven Deadly Sins derive from his thought, being a revision of Evagrius's eight deadly thoughts. One of the deadly thoughts is acedia, which is sometimes defined as discouragement, but it is far more than just discouragement. It is the debilitating state which "makes it seem that the sun hardly moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long." It is a deep sadness, a pervasive grief, a destructive sense of loss or failure that makes hope impossible. Acedia is everywhere in We Bought a Zoo, and in the beginning, it appears that weltschmerz will rule the day.

Anger, another of Evagrius's deadly thoughts, is a strong force in the movie as well. Anger overwhelms one character, so that every movement, action, thought, his entire being is controlled by anger's procellous grip. I felt his pain. While the writer doesn't direct his anger at God, to whom else is life's miscarriage directed? God gives and God takes away, but does that make our loss any easier? The blanket of God's will does not in the moment always give us comfort when the house of our reality has been burned to the ground. So we have two characters, both struggling with their own spiritual crises.

It's very interesting to me that in order to escape their crises of faith and these deadly thoughts, the two protagonists do what any 4th century dessert monastic would do: move to the weald. The move away from people isn't a move many in kef would make. It's precisely this reason, I believe, that Jesus warns his followers against lives of comfort and pleasure. Comfort and pleasure are for later. This life is for adventure, discovery, and, most importantly, service. To nature the Desert Fathers turned, and God came to them in the silence, in the absence of the city's busyness. And like many medieval monastics, God also becomes present in the community which is built through work. Both people and animals have an important role in healing the wound of losing the beloved.

The movie is overly saccharine, and honestly, I did not feel extremely moved for much of the movie. There are four scenes which are rather powerful, none more powerful than the scene in which the reflection of the past is visible in the lenses of Matt Damon. It was one of the most beautiful scenes from 2011. But for as much good that is in this movie, it is unduly long and predictable. I feel the writer often appealed to the lowest common denominator of Hollywood feel goodism, and so, it comes across as a less preachy Evangelical-made movie. It's not great cinema, but it is a decent watch and an enjoyable family movie which hits on some major themes of human existence. 7/10