The Cabin in the Woods

How much should you know about The Cabin in the Woods before you see it? Ideally, nothing-- so if you click away from this review now, I understand. But interest is high enough in the horror film from first-time director Drew Goddard and his co-writer, Joss Whedon, that plenty of people have already seen the trailer, in which we're told explicitly that this story of college kids in a creepy cabin has quite the twist, and that the generic title gives way to a complete deconstruction of the horror genre. Believe it or not, it's OK to know that-- that's the premise of the film, not a spoiler.

But from that premise The Cabin in the Woods sets up a high-energy and electric game of chess with its audience, setting up every trope of its creepy-house genre, tearing it apart, and then going even deeper into a central mystery that only gets more satisfying as it goes. Goddard and Whedon's script functions both as a haunted-house movie-- there are great moments of tension throughout-- and a spirited romp right past the genre, held together by an impeccable sense of humor and a constant ability to surprise. The central characters aren't quite as interesting as they ought to be, and the story wraps up with a little more whimper than bang, but those are minor tradeoffs for a movie that's otherwise such a ball.

Even when the story sticks firmly in standard horror territory, this particular group of attractive kids is especially fun to spend time with. Our bookish heroine (Kristen Connolly) sets up a nice rapport with her blond bestie (Anna Hutchison), who in turn quickly establishes a believable relationship with her jock boyfriend (Chris Hemsworth). Add in a bookish guy love interest (Jesse Williams) and a stoner dork (Fran Kranz) and you've got a deliberate assortment of horror movie stereotypes, but the actors commit nicely even as Goddard and Whedon's clever writing pushes it all just over the edge into satire.

What happens from there? You'll have to see it, and you really have to see it if you love horror, hate horror, or have any interest in seeing how the genre can function as a playground for something completely fresh. Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are involved, though in roles that are more fun to discover as you go along-- they do get a lot of the best jokes, though, and their scenes show a lot of Goddard's skill in handling the rhythm of a scene. He does plenty of showing off elsewhere, though, making a really elegant transition from writer to director by handling the narrative of every scene, dishing out scares and laughs and even dramatic heft by knowing where to take the audience at every turn.

The Cabin in the Woods is a genre exercise at heart, and though it has the potential for real greatness-- at certain points you might think Goddard could take this story anywhere-- it settles for ultimate audience satisfaction, which is pretty close to greatness anyway. It's so, so much fun to watch with an audience-- any audience, anywhere-- and to revel in that experience of being perfectly manipulated by a director and writer who know every button to push.

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Darling Companion

Darling Companion, the new film from director Lawrence Kasdan, has one of the greatest ensembles you?ll ever see. From its central players to the supporting cast, almost every role is played by someone fantastic. Unfortunately, it also proves that you can have the greatest group of performers in the world, but it?s meaningless if they aren?t working from an even halfway decent script.

The story begins when Beth (Diane Keaton) and her daughter, Grace (Elisabeth Moss), discover a stray dog on the side of the highway. Despite protests from Grace?s husband, Joseph (Kevin Kline), who is too preoccupied with his surgical career to have time for his wife, Beth adopts the dog, names it Freeway, and they grow to become best friends. One year later, the entire family, including Joseph?s sister Penny (Dianne Wiest), her boyfriend, Russell (Richard Jenkins) and Penny?s son, Bryan (Mark Duplass), get together for Grace?s wedding in the Rocky mountains. Following the reception, however, Joseph goes for a walk with the dog and accidentally loses him. Distressed about losing her animal pal, Beth gets everyone to stay and try to find Freeway. Guided by the cabin caretaker (Ayelet Zurer), who may or may not be a psychic gypsy, the group splits off into groups to go search for the missing mutt.

While any pet owner can relate to the title of Darling Companion, a more apt name for the film would be White People Problems: The Movie. Living in a very different world that the average American, the characters in the story don?t act overly pretentious, but it?s clear that none of them have worried about anything important in decades. There are casual references to the need to return home and go to work, but it?s never more than a throwaway suggestion and nobody actually goes through with it. As distressing as the idea of losing a pet is, the edge is taken off when it feels like the family could afford to hire the New York Yankees to help them in their search.

Writers Lawrence and Meg Kasdan clearly have no idea what to do with their characters, switching up the search parties to try to give all the actors some one-on-one time with each other, but scattering the narrative so it seems more focused on establishing funny situations than building relationships or furthering the plot. Bryan and Russell, who have an awkward rapport due to the fact that Russell is sleeping with Bryan?s mother, are teamed up at one point, but instead of having them actually deal with a real situation they are instead forced to go up against a smelly crazy guy in the ?woods who collects stray dogs. The Kasdans confuse time spent together with emotional growth, leaving the audience with no connection to the characters and no reason to care about what happens to them.

In addition to failing as a drama, Darling Companion is also groan-worthy as a comedy. Jenkins gets the worst of it, and though he has proven time and time again that with a great script he can work wonders, there wasn?t a good script to be found on the set of this movie. Russell talks frankly about his sexual relationship with Penny and dreams of opening a British-style pub in Omaha, Nebraska, but the movie confuses awkwardness for humor and the results are eye-roll worthy.

Nice as it is to see so many great actors occupying the same screen, that charm quickly wears off as the film drags on. Darling Companion feels like a movie compiled from old favors, each actor owing something to the writers, producers or each other. How else could so many immensely talented people end up being involved with such a terrible project?

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The Three Stooges

Like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, the Three Stooges are bigger than any one movie. They?re bigger than any one villain they?ve interacted with or any one moment of lasting greatness they?ve given us. We fondly remember them not for the specifics but for the broad personalities. More than sixty years after Curly Howard?s stroke ripped apart the classic line-up, nothing about the way they see the world has changed, and there?s something wonderful about that timelessness.

The Farrelly Brothers? take on the Stooges is more of a karaoke performance than anything else, but then again, so were all the best Three Stooges shorts. Moe, Curly and Larry never worked because they invented original premises or met unique human beings. The comedians took the old tropes seen everywhere else and threw their creations in the middle to gouge eyes, stub toes and nyuk it up. In doing so, they commented on the changing world around them through their beloved characters that never changed. During World War II, the Stooges got a steady dose of dictators and soldiers. It only makes sense they?d now be given reality television personalities to slap around, as well as a classic orphans-save-the-orphanage premise.

The orphanage this time around is run by Mother Superior (Jane Lynch) and Sister Mary-Mengele (Larry David), and the orphans are, of course, Moe (Chris Diamantopoulos), Larry (Sean Hayes) and Curly (Will Sasso). They?re thrown onto the doorsteps as infants, and decades later without having achieved their dream of a family, our heroes are forced to leave the nest to raise more than eight hundred thousand dollars to save their home. The specifics involve rising health care costs, but ultimately, they don?t matter.

What does matter is what they end up finding, or more specifically, the many who?s they meet. The first is the deceitful Lydia (Sofia Vergara), who offers the guys the orphanage money to kill her sick husband. The second, a reality television producer, offers one a job on his hit show, and the third is an orphan named Teddy (Kirby Heyborne) who got out years earlier and became a lawyer. Through misidentifications, sledge hammer blows, inappropriate farts, shotgun blasts and pissing babies, our heroes find redemption, the villains find their comeuppance and everyone heads to CVS for ice packs.

If that all sounds a bit convenient, wacky and low brow, I assure you it is. Clearly enormous fans of the source material, the Farrelly Brothers go to great lengths to prevent anyone from learning any lessons and to prevent the script from getting too intellectual. It?s nothing but rapid fire pratfalls, slaps and puns for ninety-two minutes. Hayes, Diamantopoulos and Sasso all turn in wonderful performances as the three main characters most of us know by heart, and the directors do a fine enough job of coordinating the action in a way that feels like the timing and pacing of the originals. It comes off less like a tribute and more like a slightly below-average episode we might stumble across on television, which is actually kind of impressive.

Unfortunately, all that success doesn?t necessarily make the movie incredibly watchable. The Stooges always worked a bit better in small doses, and not everyone they meet serves as an appropriate foil here. The gags have a nice way of sliding into one another, but after too much screen time, they also have a way of feeling a bit monotonous. Ultimately, without the presence of any brilliant moments, there?s really nothing tangible to take away, except the general warmth and comfort offered by seeing loveable characters. As a friendly bit of nostalgia and an impressive recreation, the film is worth seeing. As a flat-out comedy, it?s mediocre. Three stars sounds about right. Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk.

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Pirates! Band of Misfits

Pay no attention to the generic, dumbed-down-for-Americans title or the trailers that offer the flimsy story of a captain angling for the Pirate of the Year award. Pirates! Band of Misfits (known as The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists) is the latest sublime adventure from the endlessly mischievous gang at Aardman Animation, once again beautifully animated with stop-motion and crammed so tightly full of jokes and pratfalls that a dead simple plot is pretty much all there's room for. The goofy energy ought to appeal to the silly side of every age group, but with Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria as major characters and cameos from The Elephant Man and Jane Austen, there's also surprising amount of historical texture for something so nutty.

Even the choices of voice actors feel just oddball enough to be perfect, starting with dapper Hugh Grant as the luxuriant-bearded, not particularly successful Pirate Captain, then extending to Martin Freeman as his first mate (the one character who looks exactly like his human counterpart), David Tennant as Darwin, Jeremy Piven as the smug pirate Black Bellamy, and Imelda Staunton as a very energetic, pirate-hating Queen Victoria. We meet The Pirate Captain when he and his crew roll into Blood Island with the hopes of entering the Pirate of the Year competition, only to be shamed by the richer, showier, smack-talking pirates like Bellamy and the shapely Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek). On a mission to steal enough booty to win the prize, The Pirate Captain accidentally winds up on board the Beagle with Darwin, who discovers the Captain's portly parrot Polly isn't a parrot at all, but the last living dodo.

Darwin, who's motivated as much by science as a desire to finally get a girlfriend, convinces the pirates to bring Polly to a scientific exhibit in London, where they inevitably wind up in the crosshairs of Queen Victoria, who hates pirates so much she's on a sign warning them away at the entrance to the Thames. Adventure and silliness ensues, along with a few lessons to learn but more importantly endless, endless jokes and sight gags and tossed-off asides that constantly surprise. Pay attention to the signage in the aptly named Dodgy Alley in London, or the many different reactions of all the shocked scientists at the exhibition, or the weird artifacts in Darwin's house-- as always, the attention to detail is astonishing, and the varying elaborate settings in Pirates! allow the Aardman team to show off in nearly every scene.

And because all of these worlds are real, every character and setting actually built by hand on a studio stage, the obligatory 3D feels valuable here, further plunging you into this detailed world and allowing for the silly sight gags-- like an extra-special pirate flag with googly eyes-- to pop a little more. Happily, the 3D is the only evidence that Aardman is bowing to the tide of the times, and with company co-founder Peter Lord in the director's chair, Pirates! feels perfectly of a piece with everything else the studio has made-- daffy, self-assured, willing to try pretty much anything, and utterly unique.

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The Lucky One

Nicholas Sparks knows exactly who his audience is and, as exclusive as that may be, he knows he can find success writing directly to them. His books aren?t filled with brilliant ideas or commentary, just simple fantasy and romance that people can get lost in and then immediately forget. That said, it would be a surprise if even his most loyal fans could find something to love in the adaptation of his novel The Lucky One.

The story begins with a marine named Logan (Zac Efron) serving in the Iraq War. The morning after a night raid, he finds a picture of what just so happens to be a beautiful young woman buried in the dirt. When he stands and walks over to inspect it, an explosion erupts from the place where he was sitting and he takes it as a sign. Upon returning home, Logan goes on a search for the woman (Taylor Schilling), whom he learns is named Beth, but after meeting her has a mysteriously hard time telling her the truth. Instead, he lies for absolutely no reason and takes a job working at her family-run kennel. As months pass they grow closer and begin a relationship, but he still can?t tell her about the photo that he found in the desert.

You may now be asking yourself, ?Why wouldn?t he just tell her about the picture?? but it's a mystery that leads to the film's biggest issue: there?s no conflict driving the story. When Logan and Beth first meet he is about to tell her the truth, but when she interrupts him the message is dropped completely and doesn?t return as an issue until the third act. The movie tries to compensate for this gaping void by giving Beth an asshole ex-husband (who is as generic as they come) that Logan has to deal with, but it only serves as a distraction from the main point. Unfortunately, it?s such a dumb ploy that I doubt even the youngest members of the audience will fall for it.

While it?s no secret that Nicholas Sparks has been churning out the same story for years now, The Lucky One is actually insulting in how manufactured it is. As a character, Logan is constructed as the ultimate female fantasy: he looks like Zac Efron, is sensitive but never over-emotional, he plays the piano, enjoys long walks, and dogs, grandmothers and children all adore him. Logan is so perfect that it actually borders on parody. And it doesn?t stop there. Every character, be it the aforementioned asshole ex, the sassy grandma, or the precocious child, has been seen in thousands of other stories and not a single bit of originality is brought into the mix here.

Disastrous as the script is, The Lucky One does have a palatable aesthetic that meshes well with the tone. Much like a Thomas Kinkade painting, Scott Hicks?s direction is simplistic, making the movie nice to look at, but lacks any kind of real depth or creativity. Taking advantage of Louisiana?s natural beauty, sequences where Logan wanders around with his dog are plentiful and meaningless to the story, but are made tolerable thanks to the pleasing scenery. Abundance of soft focus aside ? which works well for the nature shots but only serves to further enhance the strange ?flawlessness? of the main character ? the film is generic in its look, but also quite pretty.

The Lucky One doesn?t have anything going for it that would make it worth the price of admission. If Nicholas Sparks? career has been dedicated to creating the most bland, generic, pointless romance that he can, then he?s successfully done it with his latest title. Perhaps now he?ll consider retirement.

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The Raven

Over the years it?s become easy to figure out which movies John Cusack does for the pleasure and fulfillment of being an actor and which ones he does for the paycheck. James McTeigue?s The Raven clearly falls in the latter category, as it?s impossible to believe that an actor as smart and talented as Cusack would actually be passionate about such an awful movie.

The story begins when the police discover the murdered bodies of a woman and her young daughter ? the mother?s throat slit from ear to ear with a razor and the girl?s body shoved up the chimney. To one of the detectives (Luke Evans), the scene is familiar: it?s taken directly from Edgar Allan Poe?s ?The Murders in the Rue Morgue?. After bringing in the writer (Cusack) for questioning, the police find another body killed in the fashion of ?The Pit and the Pendulum?. Bringing along Poe as a consultant, they work to try and hunt the serial killer down, but things get personal when Poe?s girlfriend (Alice Eve) is kidnapped and the author must race against the clock to find her.

Doing his best impression of Nicolas Cage, John Cusack spends the entirety of The Raven chewing on the scenery, and it?s actually hard to watch. There?s hardly a single line of his that isn?t shouted, whether he?s in a bar trying to win himself a free drink by proving his notoriety or in his editor?s office finding out that one of his critiques hasn?t been published. In addition to being laughable, it actually winds up hurting the movie when it tries to create any kind of tension. Knowing how much Poe loves to scream at the top of his lungs, it?s hard to take him seriously, even when he?s shouting his beloved?s name trying to find where she has been kidnapped to.

Stylistically, everything about the film feels exaggerated and overdone. Even when it adds nothing to the story or tone, The Raven?s violence is bloody and unyielding. In the ?Pit and the Pendulum? scene, for example, McTeigue doesn?t choose to capitalize on the incredible tension and fear that Poe originally imagined when thinking about a giant swinging blade slowly lowering towards a man?s strapped down body. Instead, it falls quickly and we watch as it saws through the victim?s body multiple times for no apparent reason other than violence for violence?s sake. The movie imagines itself as dark and edgy, but it comes across as being stupid and gratuitous.

The script, written by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, is an utter disaster. It?s not hard to appreciate the idea behind the story ? Poe is one of the greatest writers who ever lived and deserves to have his stories on the big screen ? but the execution is miserable. Poe?s stories that are used as part of the plot feel like they were picked out of a hat and then haphazardly thrown into the script like a misshapen puzzle piece. The structure and pacing is choppy at best, constantly shifting gears and changing stories, and the ending is so out-of-left-field that you actually find yourself wondering if you may have dozed off at some point. I suppose the best thing to say about it is that it?s not predictable, but in the grand scheme that?s not much of a compliment.

The Raven is a hard movie to watch, and not just in the sense of its brutality. There?s so much wasted potential at play, from the nugget of an idea at the center of the story to the great cast. Unfortunately, there?s nothing to the execution and the result is a loud, over-done piece of noise and nonsense.

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More to Come Soon

More to Come Soon!