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

A writer becomes good when she no longer feels the need to use another writer's rules to immure her thought and words.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Christianity stands and falls on one claim: the resurrection. If Christ's resurrection did not happen, Christianity is worthless. If Christ was resurrected, Christianity is absolute truth. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, "If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins." Resurrection is the source of all hope in the Western world, in one way or another. The idea of a resurrection has been molded to fit commercial and political aims, and today, true belief struggles to extricate itself from these friable shadows of true resurrection. Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud lists on a fine line with a writer and director who struggle with faith, but surely have seen a glimpse of the truth because the movie is entirely about resurrection.

What begins as a journey to a chthonic world -- the sixth borough of New York -- continues to an even darker realm. What lies beneath a lost world is a lost boy and a lost love. All that exists in this world are shadows and vestiges of reality. The lords of this domain are guilt, isolation, and fear. In that world guilt is so strong that a boy can only talk to a man who cannot talk back. Isolation is so great that a boy who loves his mother tells her he wishes she were dead just to protect her from his pain. Fear is such an encumbrance and manipulative force that the boy seems to have phobias of every kind, from that of bridges to subways; he may even have triskaidekaphobia.

Every person moves in and out of different worlds throughout his or her life. It's called journey. We never are the same person; we can only hope to advance. And if we don't stop believing, we can advance. If we give up hope, if we take the easy way of cynicism and distrust, we cannot move to where we need to be, our final destination, which is in the arms of our Creator. Philosophically, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is structured similarly to Bonaventure's Mind's Journey to God. For Bonaventure, we are shadows and vestiges of God because we "point to God in some type of causality (and we) point to God as triple cause–efficient, formal, and final cause."

The problem for the young boy, and his grandfather, for that matter, is that he runs away from the cause and runs to the vestige of a vestige: is father's memory. Finally, after much heart ache, he realizes that a journey to a vestige rather than the Cause is a futile, but perhaps necessary, journey. It is then that the scales fall from his eyes and he is able to contemplate on his journey. And at the end of that journey he sees that life is not an empty box or a fall from grace. Life is a fall upward, a flight from fear to courage, a resurrection from the dead. 7/10

quote:

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have you seen Stalker?

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fify

I have not seen Priest, nor have I heard of it.

My list of movies I need to see is at six. I'll put Priest at seven.

I vote that The Devil Inside slide into the 8 slot

The Vow When microbiologists testing for vaccines and remedies to microbial disease want to target a microbe, they often aim for the microbe during its log phase of growth. They do so because it is when microbes are growing exponentially that they are at their most vulnerable. And is it no different with humans? When are we most vulnerable? Most malleable? Most turbid and most gravid with the unknown, for good and bad, redolent with fear and hope and expectation? I believe we enter such times during "moments of impact," as Leo says, moments when we are uprooted from our lives and float, as though gravity has lost its force. They are moments of exponential growth and they leave us, for a time, vulnerable to greatness and to evil, potent and parlous. The path we take during such moments plays a large part in determining who we become.

To take the easy path is to choose what we want, what will keep us where we want to be and who we want to be. In general, humans love novelty, but we also love constancy. Change, real change, the type that causes an uprooting, is painful and we try to avoid it. We become trapped in an illusion of happiness at the cost of true happiness, and for what, comfort? Rachel McAdams faces this choice: comfort and temporal happiness or growth, pain, and true joy. And we wonder, as does the doc, if she wants to know what is real and where the path to happiness leads. Rene Descartes writes of such a time in his Meditations on First Philosophy:

"I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labor when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised."

McAdams' peaceful sleep is found in her old memories and her family, a family looking to propitiate in the most demented of ways. Their motivation of reconciliation is partly noble, but they defalcate McAdams. On the other hand, her hard labor comes in the form of an amative, irresistibly hot guy whose perdurable loyalty is enough to stir the most calloused of hearts. Which will she choose?

I cannot deny that I liked this movie. Its sweet, and sometimes maudlin mood and matter reach into a vulnerable spot in my soul. I think McAdams is the best romance actress ever to see the silver screen. Tatum or whatever his name is is little more than a cute face and a hot bod. Seriously, who gave this guy acting classes? He's terrible. This is his worst performance because it looks like he really is trying to be good, which is quite a dubious accomplishment of fail. Some of the messages in the movie are mixed, but overall, the movie has a redeeming message: whatever pain the labor of truth causes, it is worth it to trek on. We cannot be who we were created to be and become if we live in the darkness of illusion. 4/10

Yes.