The MacGuffin

To describe Drew Goddard’s new film The Cabin in the Woods as David Lynch-ian is putting it mildly. The film takes the premise of a simple slasher film and eschews all the conventions in the process, creating something unlike I have ever seen before. Any comparisons to other films would be stretching it.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

On the big screen

What have I been watching in theaters lately? (I mean, besides Bridesmaids, of course.) Because I couldn’t seem to get it together to see it in a timely fashion, I haven’t yet talked about Source Code here on the site, but I did see that movie, and liked it very much—and not just because of my well-documented girl crush on Michelle Monaghan (I was once within three feet of her and kept my composure!) or my more-traditional-for-a-straight-woman crush on Jake Gyllenhaal. Let me say: if the conceit is fun enough, the actors have enough chemistry, and the execution works, I am never going to be the person who gets stuck on logic details of a sci-fi film. For example, if you start talking to me about time travel paradoxes or some such in relation to, say, Back to the Future, I will zone out. As long as the momentum works, I just do not care. And it really does work here. So eight minutes of one dude’s memory should not a whole detailed world make? So the way information travels from one track of the story to another probably doesn’t make much sense if you think about it? So what? Tension! Banter! Explosions! Pretty people! Enjoy the ride.

Thor (2011) is a film that I walked into wanting to like, I really did. I was hoping to see a slam bang, no holds barred superhero movie with lots of fun action set pieces, and for a while there, that’s exactly what I got. However, I came to realize something as I sat through director Kenneth Branagh’s movie, something that made me feel very discouraged. What I came to realize was: this film actually assumes that its audience is stupid. Believe me, for a film in which a mythic God gets thrown down from the heavens to become stranded on an isolated planet requires just a little suspension of disbelief, but the amount of twists and turns that the characters in this film take is simply baffling. There doesn’t seem to be a thread of continuity anywhere amongst these people; it seems the only reason the actors do what they do is because…well…I’m not so sure.