are you even listening to me? THE CABIN IN THE WOODS thread (WARNING: SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILEROS! SPOILIDAD!)

i don't think 'the fool' archetype is meant to be limited to drunks or stoners, like, what about the autistic savant in CUBE

Also, one of my fave jokes is that none of them adhere to their type: the Fool is smart/perceptive, the Virgin is not, the jock bro is on academic scholarship, the Whore is basically slipped a mickey ...

Dammit, I liked this one. Why are all the backlash reviews making me nod my head in agreement?

http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/cabinlockout.htm

bc it's a movie like dark knight or inception. high-concept popcorn movie that has broad appeal. backlashes to such films are even more transparently about status signaling + class than most backlashes. contrast with high-concept highbrow movies like tree of life.

that reviewer is 7 different kinds of butthurt

The thing is, it's not the tightest of films, so if you go in expecting both halves of its conceit - the horror movie half and the meta-commentary half - it doesn't all work, to be honest. No, it's not particularly scary, well-shot, acted, etc. But all those things can be overlooked once you focus on the other half of the set-up, which that above review pretends (incorrectly) is just 20% of the movie.

True, I relished the backlash against The Tree of Life. Made me feel special.

i'll admit if this film isn't funny to you it's probably offensively pretentious/judgmental/whatever is putting a bug up some horror enthusiasts' asses

bc it's a movie like dark knight or inception. high-concept popcorn movie that has broad appeal.

Likely the intent but:

6. The Cabin In The Woods (Lionsgate) Week 2 [2,811 Theaters] R
Friday $2.4M, Saturday $3.3M, Weekend $7.7M (-47%), Cume $26.9M

Needed more pencils in eyes.

I love all the moments where this filmfreak guy basically says "the only people who will like this movie are the kind of people who will like it!"

The film doesn't care (neither do its fans), but wasn't there a better way out of the puzzle besides...that? Especially in a movie all about being clever--unless the fact that it's so stupid that only a backwards idiot would accept it at face value is its clever poke. At you. At us.

It's a joke for the filmmakers and their buddies and the "Firefly" fanclub--a big, wet circle-jerk. The Cabin in the Woods will get you off, is what I'm saying, but only if you're into that sort of thing.

well, yeah - doesn't mean it's successful at doing that, but that'll clearly be the context of the backlash. the term 'backlash' suggests that you're responding to something that has already gotten positive spin. if cabin in the woods was a direct to video release without joss whedon's involvement it would just be some cool netflix watch instantly movie you found and there'd be no pressure to outline all of its problems. (this was totally the context i saw Cube in - had never heard of it before and if ppl had been raving about it before i saw it i probably would've been more put off - instead i really enjoyed it.) so clearly what you're backlashing against is the ppl who like it, not the movie itself (nested in the crit is: 'this movie does not deserve the praise you're giving it' not 'this movie deserves no praise').

why is it fans of the the most socially transgressive genres are often the most sensitive to mockery?

afaic, if you can find absolutely no pleasure in this movie (and really in whedon'dom in general) you're probably getting more pleasure out of not finding any pleasure in it. in which case, live + be well, who am i to tell someone not to enjoy their curmudgeonliness?

oh kiss my ass

It's just weird to me the extent to which it's pissing off a certain demo of horror fans. At worst, it's a stupid movie, not "anti art," like I saw someone charge it with on FB.

you're such a weirdo xp

haha whoops, mordy sorry. For some reason I thought you were saying there was no pleasure in whedon'dom except the absence of pleasure. totally misread you!

i thought the whole conceit of the archetypes was only partly a riff on conventions of the horror genre, but also how adults (the old ones) stereotype and marginalize young people

Oh noes. Liking this movie = lol ur old

(Which would explain the mockery of the "I learned it from watching you, dad." bit in review above.)

i saw a long article about that on philly blog this week (about how the film is about marginalizing millennials) but as ideas go it only needs a sentence or two to exhaust its possibilities and this post gave it like 2000 words:
http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2012/04/19/millennials-cabin-woods-boomers/

Kind of a new high in self-defeating early-onset self-obsolescence to reason that one's "getting" the joke when the kids don't means it's lame and irrelevant.

i mean i don't really think the ultimate aim was to gut the horror genre, but it played with genre conventions to make a larger point about youth culture, even if that point didn't really resonate for me in the end

Man, that FFF review is touchy. The bullies picking on the nerdy horror kids? Is there anything nerdier than Whedon fans? They go to conventions in brown dusters, FFS.

i thought they kept it scary enough that ppl who don't like horror movies would not like this either. i kinda half-tricked my wife (who hates horror movies) into seeing this and she was covering her eyes for the first half of the movie and threatening to walk out (i know, this makes me the worst person ever) but was laughing throughout the entire second half and said she was happy we saw it bc it so successfully dismantled the horror present in the first half. (tbh, i didn't think the first half was scary since it seemed undermined by the ppl in the lab from the get-go, but i like horror movies)

it kinda fits into buffy's complicated view on teenagers, who have real troubles, are complex and contradictory and precocious -- in CITW we get a brief glimpse of three-dimensional characters who are quickly flattened into paper dolls to be torn apart for malicious sport

milo otm, calling whedonites 'heathers'? smdh

Dude who wrote that also "adored" CLOVERFIELD so.

I just figured "Cloverfield" was improvised.

It's kinda sad because the monster's best takes were left on the cutting room floor

This was a blast. Really wasn't expecting the broad-brush satire, the trailers had made the whole meta aspect pretty clear but not the comedy so that was a nice surprise.

Scariest moment for me was maybe the pull-out reveal on all the monster cages with our protagonists trapped in the middle. Just for a moment I had the chilling thought that the film would end there, abandoning them in that maze of horrors. (Where did they all come from anyway? All the ghosts and monsters and aliens and witches. This is obviously some Alan Moore type metafictional world where all horror figures are real, must have been a herculean effort to catch and cage them all.)

Slightly disappointed with the giant stubby-fingered humanoid hand at the end. Wasn't aware that the elder gods were in the habit of making people in their own image.

nb the actual scariest moment was when there was a lot of thumping on the back of my (otherwise empty) row of seats and I looked round and saw, three seats away, a bare foot protruding through from the row behind.

Slightly disappointed with the giant stubby-fingered humanoid hand at the end. Wasn't aware that the elder gods were in the habit of making people in their own image.

Agree with you, but it was obviously there as a nod to the many classic horror callback with the hand emerging from a grave

oh aye, i suppose.

I'm glad you could understand that sentence, cos reading it back it's pretty garbled

did anybody else wish the end credits had rolled over a montage of the only ones completely annihilating the world. like with "holiday road" or something instead of nine inch nails? cuz i sure did.

― BEMORE SUPER FABBY (contenderizer), Sunday, April 15, 2012 12:08 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just want to say that this would be the greatest ending to every movie ever made. Can we kickstarter the shit out of this?

thought an interesting almost throw away line @ the end was "i dont even think Curt has a cousin"

I thought this line was really weird... If it was meant to be a joke, it wasn't a particularly funny one. And if it wasn't, wouldn't it imply Curt knew what the cabin really was? Because why would he be talking about his cousin's cabin, if there was no cousin? But if he knew they were set up, why didn't he ever mention it, even at the point where his girlfriend had been beheaded and he was about to get killed as well? That was just a weird line.

Dammit, I liked this one. Why are all the backlash reviews making me nod my head in agreement?

http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/cabinlockout.htm

― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Monday, April 23, 2012 10:41 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark

walter chaw's a pretty good critic

i like this (somewhat negative) review too: http://outlawvern.com/2012/04/17/the-cabin-in-the-woods/

Outlaw Vern is so great. I bought his book.

which one? seagalogy's second edition was just released!

http://i.imgur.com/XcRd7.jpg

Nah, his broader collection. Not into Seagal enough to invest in the other one.

I have to say, while I enjoyed the film, I thought it's idea of the formula that the Old Ones (i.e. horror movie viewers) crave for felt out-of-date. Wasn't all this horror movie archetype stuff (final girl/virgin survives, lustful girl/whore dies first, the jock is punished for being a bully, etc) already effectively deconstructed 15 years ago in Scream? I'm not a big horror movie buff, but all the post-scream American horror movies I've seen have either twisted that formula in one way or another, or scrapped it altogether. So basically it felt like TCitW was criticizing horror movie fans for expecting a formula that no one actually expects these days.

Because of the above, until the very of the movie I thought there would be an extra twist that would be more in line with what horror movies of today are. After the corporate people had been killed by the various monsters, I actually expected the Director to explain that all this was part of the show, that nowadays Old Ones don't care for the classic horror formula but expect the story to have shocking twist (this would've also been an effectice criticism of the post-6th Sense fad of adding a twist ending to every horror movie) and even more bloodshed. So the massacre ending would've been part of the Old Ones' entertainment (this would've explained the more corny bits in the finale, like the Big Red Button or the complex's lack of proper security); the corporate people would've been just the second level of the show instead of the ones who run it, and there would've been an even larger group of employees manipulating them.

Maybe this solution would've been too complicated, but as such I felt the ending was kinda weak, as all it did was have Sigourney Weaver "reveal" things that the audience could quite easily guess halfway into the movie, the first time the Old Ones and the sacrifice were mentioned.

thought an interesting almost throw away line @ the end was "i dont even think Curt has a cousin"

I thought this line was really weird... If it was meant to be a joke, it wasn't a particularly funny one. And if it wasn't, wouldn't it imply Curt knew what the cabin really was? Because why would he be talking about his cousin's cabin, if there was no cousin? But if he knew they were set up, why didn't he ever mention it, even at the point where his girlfriend had been beheaded and he was about to get killed as well? That was just a weird line.

― Tuomas, Friday, April 27, 2012 5:45 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

presumably he forgot he didn't actually have a cousin, for the same reasons he forgot he wasn't actually a dumb jock

xp i like that idea! but yes it would perhaps be tricky to pull off.

I actually expected the Director to explain that all this was part of the show, that nowadays Old Ones don't care for the classic horror formula but expect the story to have shocking twist (this would've also been an effectice criticism of the post-6th Sense fad of adding a twist ending to every horror movie) and even more bloodshed. So the massacre ending would've been part of the Old Ones' entertainment (this would've explained the more corny bits in the finale, like the Big Red Button or the complex's lack of proper security); the corporate people would've been just the second level of the show instead of the ones who run it, and there would've been an even larger group of employees manipulating them.

I'm really glad they didn't make a particularly pointed ending, like saying "oh audiences really love a twist" or having there be no apocalypse because the audience doesn't REALLY give a shit about cliches, just the industry. They just had the world blow up cuz that's way more fun an ending than trying to make a critical point overt.

i didn't see it as a "critique" of anything, just as play with signs and symbols, meta referentiality

the new tagline should be "to keep from being butthurt, just keep telling yourself...it's only a comedy. it's only a comedy."

i didn't see it as a "critique" of anything, just as play with signs and symbols, meta referentiality

Regardless, I thought they could've taken that play further. Because now they were playing with rather old-fashioned concepts of horror, and once you figured out what the game was about, there weren't too many surprises left in the second half of the movie. (Except for the monster rush, which I didn't expect, and which was admittedly awesome.)