The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012)

[Warning: Contains mild first-act spoilers after the jump]

Drew Goddard made his feature debut with 2008's Cloverfield, penning the film's ambitious but misguided script that sought to comment on modern mindsets regarding the documentation of our lives via the kaiju film genre. His idea, clever on paper, was that a group of privileged New York yuppies contending with 9/11-esque frenzy would nevertheless ensure that their bewilderment and horror was caught on video for posterity, or at least for YouTube hits. Unfortunately for Goddard, director Matt Reeves' muddled direction and some dire acting performances sapped whatever potential the script contained, resulting in a lifeless film that only occasionally hinted at just how far it wanted to go with its metaphor.

By teaming up with his old Buffy and Angel boss Joss Whedon, however, Goddard got a second chance to say something with horror, and The Cabin in the Woods truly delivers on his promise. At times recalling Sam Raimi's 2009 return-to-form Drag Me to Hell, The Cabin in the Woods differs from that film, and other self-aware horror movies, by not merely calling attention to horror tropes but breaking them down, working out how they apply to the genre, as well as how filmmakers (and participatory audiences) apply them to it. To oversimplify it into a pitch, where movies such as Drag Me to Hell or the Scream series are about horror films, The Cabin in the Woods is about horror itself.

Unlike the first-person perspective satire of Cloverfield, Cabin in the Woods pulls back to get a fuller picture of its subject. The two do, however, share an inversion of expectations in their narrative focus. Cloverfield's overwhelmed shaky-cam cared less for the monster than the characters. Awful, wafer-thin characters, sure, but there was something radical about this shift in attention. Likewise, The Cabin in the Woods, named after a subgenre in which young people find themselves trapped in the middle of nowhere as monsters thin their ranks, does not even open with the group of undergrads traveling to the titular, doomed getaway. Instead, it begins with two middle-aged officials (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) in some mysterious, vast compound. It's a bewildering start, but one that instantly lets the audience know that something is up, which is confirmed when the film then moves to its quintet of young people prepping for their weekend trip and the camera quickly pulls back to reveal that the kids are being closely monitored. With Cloverfield, Goddard made an epic subgenre intimate; with this, he makes a visceral subgenre analytical and observant.

The omniscient third-person suits him. Goddard and Whedon waste no time poking fun at conventions, presenting the thick-headed jock (Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth) as a kind, intelligent person and gradually suggesting the the tag-along stoner (Fran Kanz, more at home here than as a similarly snide character on Dollhouse) is more aware of the situation than his sober pals. The events that happen to these people at the cabin are also handled humorously, using both subtle visualization and open reference to call out some of the sillier aspects of this kind of movie. Had the film remained on this level, its cheek would have been funny, but hardly revelatory. By taking in a larger picture, Goddard can move beyond lazy reflexive humor into true metatextual insight.

I wouldn't dare spoil what's really going on at that cabin or the reason for people spying on the youths trapped in it, other than to say that the Rex Reed is entirely off-base when he asserts the film is about people paying to watch death. (Did he get it confused with The Hunger Games? Who the fuck knows, it's Rex Reed.) Yet from a certain point of view, I can almost see where he's coming from: watching Whitford and Jenkins watch the kids makes them a part of the audience. Their alternating attachment to what happens oscillates between a bloodthirsty desire to see their deaths, a desensitized lack of response to those deaths when they come, and even a certain affection for the characters. But they also resemble Hollywood producers, some of their actions giving the impression that they want to put on a good show. At one point, Whitford rhetorically complains, "Remember when you could just throw a girl in a volano?"as if pining for a simpler time of orchestrated killing. Come to think of it, The Cabin in the Woods wouldn't make an awful double-bill with The Hunger Games, even if Cabin's aims go well beyond the unfocused social commentary of 2012's first mega-hit.

I once read somewhere that the main storytelling genres (action, comedy, drama, and horror) are all means of dealing with human fears and anxieties. Drama allows us to assess that fear, action to “conquer” it, and comedy to mock it. But horror is the purest visceral experience of those fears, which are magnified and personified and, most often, triumphant over the people they affect. If action allows us to vicariously defeat our terror, horror allows the inverse, the safe experience of being consumed by our demons. It is that element of punishment of the self through others that drives to Cabin in the Woods, and its ultimate twist reveal uses a primal justification for its terrors to suggest why people go to horror movies in the first place. As openly critical of certain aspects of the genre as the film is, this unexpected poignancy serves as a better love-letter than most broad pastiches, as it pinpoints where the affection for the genre comes from.

I have minor quibbles with Cabin in the Woods. Goddard's direction can be overly murky in its nighttime shots outside the cabin, obscuring the action and sapping the tension already lowered by audience foreknowledge of what's going to happen. And when the film opens up in its final act, it ironically seems to lose the thread of its commentary, moving instead to the setup of a punchline that makes a wry joke of the films's more probing thoughts on the necessity of scares and monsters in our lives. It's a clever way to undermine any lecturing tone, but I wonder if Goddard and Whedon didn't simply give in to their id and just go crazy. Given that the film critiques popular trends in horror, I also wish it had more to say about the new crop of found-footage horror, though as the film was shot in 2009 and shelved during MGM's bankruptcy dealings, I suppose it just managed to miss the post-Paranormal Activity explosion of cheap, tacky supernatural scares.

Nevertheless, The Cabin in the Woods manages to live up to its hype, which was so pervasive I'm amazed I managed not to read a single thing about it, even unwittingly, before seeing it. Buoyed by strong, game performances (and check out Angel's Amy Acker in small but engaging supporting role!) and sharp writing, it's simply a blast to sit and experience. A late sequence in which all hell breaks loose is bound to be one of the best setpieces of the year, a chaotic but controlled free-for-all that unleashes a flood of nightmares in carnage that is as deliberately ridiculous as it is disturbing. Beyond its surface-level pleasures, however, this is also one of the few pieces of film-as-criticism in contemporary American cinema, alongside Gamer and Speed Racer. Granted, it's the most obvious and easily digestible of the bunch, but if Rex Reed's review is anything to go by, Goddard's film is still sly enough to throw at least one buffoon.

The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson, 2011)

Seeing Bruce Robinson attached to The Rum Diary made me want to see the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's novel far more than even Johnny Depp's return as the writer's stand-in. The writer-director made the greatest movie yet made about the bleak (and bleakly comic) effects of spiraling alcoholism, Withnail and I, making him theoretically perfect to bring the early days of Thompson to life. However, not five minutes passed before I instantly realized he was precisely the wrong person for this film, and the rest of the film only proved me right.

The Rum Diary, Thompson's fictionalized account of his time in Puerto Rico as a struggling writer, itself embodies a sense of emergence in the author. Imperfect as the book is, it shows Thompson on the cusp of finding himself, precisely through the substances that would later derail him. It is in Thompson's most booze-soaked, tongue-loosened moments that The Rum Diary foretells the man who would win infamy by spilling out his chemically rotted brain with each article. But Robinson's depiction of the cult hero's excess carries a sense of foreboding irony that would make him the perfect choice to survey the writer's late career, not the birth of his inspiration.

Robinson's Diary opens on the bloodshot eye of Thompson's ersatz self Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) awakening to his first morning in Puerto Rico, where a circling biplane outside his hotel already spoils his view of the natural beach. We've just started and already it feels like the end of the party, and Paul hasn't even figured out how to get into the room fridge yet for the booze! Thompson hasn't even fully discovered drink, much less drugs, and Robinson is already wringing his hands over where it will lead.

Paul stumbles into work at his new gig at the San Juan Star, an English-language paper for the tourists who come to the American territory and never leave the hotel. The real Thompson was so green at the time that he couldn't even work at this place, and it's hard to imagine him doing so even if he could. Robinson doesn't resort to a montage to get the point across, instead letting a single scene of Paul interviewing a brain-dead bowler so rotund he resembles the cartoon humans of Wall•E and his xenophobic wife speak volumes about the insipid capitalist oblivion being sold to these sheltered white people. Outside hotel walls, Puerto Ricans live in extreme poverty, and the paper's editor (Richard Jenkins) dismisses any attempt to write about that hard truth. He says the paper exists to sell the visitors on the idea that they're living the American Dream, a term he uses so insistently and ironically it comes to resemble Milo's mantra of everyone having "a share" in his syndicate in Catch-22.

That open disdain for corrupting capitalism buoys the film, though its human embodiment, Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), eventually drags down the narrative. On his own, Sanderson is a brilliant caricature, such a sell-out that his senses bypass normal perception for greed. He looks out over a crisp blue ocean and sees only money, planning to insert hotels and marinas that will soon turn those waters to polluted sludge and prevent the actual natives from ever seeing the ocean again, locked as they'll be behind private property fences.

Tied to his girlfriend Chenault (Amber Heard), however, Sanderson's avarice comes to offend Paul for petty reasons of jealousy rather than political disgust. Sanderson is already everything Thompson hates, so to define him primarily by his relationship to Paul's love interest cheapens the character's impact. Furthermore, the chauvinism Sanderson displays toward Chenault is meaningless considering the sexist light in which Thompson cast her, a problem Robinson fails to rectify.

Thompson's formulating political stances thus softened, it falls to his tentative discovery of the more dangerous side of substance abuse to float the film. But, as has already been said, Robinson's direction is simply too sober for what The Rum Diary needs to be. His dimmed, earthen-toned lighting resembles that of a Hopper painting, communicating a sense of loneliness and despair that clashes with the fiery indignation slowly rising in Thompson/Paul's throat like booze he hasn't yet figured how to keep down. It's the same oaken palette as Withnail and I despite showing a far more colorful location and story, transplanting the open-casket-reception tone of the former into an incongruous situation.

The Rum Diary occasionally works, even within its vaguely moralizing aesthetic premise. Giovanni Ribisi is hilarious as the half-decipherable Moberg, whose slurring shuffle and exaggeratedly bum-like appearance works as a makeshift Ghost of Christmas Future for our good Raoul Duke. Depp's impression is coherent here, revealing the presence of brain cells not yet eradicated by a cocaine- and bourbon-fueled genocide, but Ribisi shadows him with promises of mumbles and mood swings to come. To clarify, Robinson does not disserve the film by hinting at the dark road upon which drugs and alcohol will place Thompson. If anything, this film lacks the power of Withnail and I in demonizing hollow, joyless hedonism. That film ripped off crusted scabs while also finding the humor in its hopelessness; this just feels like a demented after-school special. The Rum Diary is a story that openly builds to the optimism of substance use, and Robinson can't square that with his (admittedly more mature) hindsight. It just doesn't work, robbing an already scattershot work of its flashes of power, insight, and groundwork laying.

Let Me In

For the foreseeable future, I will be contributing regular pieces for my friend Sasha James' blog The Final Girl Project. Compared to the more long-winded posts here, these pieces will be more concise, a full review, excluding a brief plot summary placed in its own section, will only run about 400-500 words. For any movie I've not yet reviewed, I plan to cross-post here with a longer article...eventually (I've still not gotten around to supplementing my Jackie Brown review).

However, I'm linking my review for Matt Reeves' unexpectedly wonderful remake of the haunting Let the Right One In, one of my favorite films of the preceding decade, because I don't think I have much to add to it. Much of what I wrote in my review of Tomas Alfredson's original applies to Reeves' film as well, but key differences make them divergent and equally worthy in their own ways. I did not care for Reeves' Cloverfield despite the valid excuses for its paper-thin writing, bludgeoning post-9/11 culture commentary and infuriating direction, but this movie is as far as you can get from that glorified mess. The clear link that bonds the two is, of course, a love of monster movies, but where Cloverfield was about the monster in blatantly symbolic terms, Let Me In connects with the monster, tries to understand it. In the process, it sees the evil in all of us. I still prefer Let the Right One In, but I was pleasantly surprised by this movie and look forward to revisiting it often.

So, please, check out my review at Final Girl Project, and also take a look at Matthew Zoller Seitz's spot-on praise for the best sequence of the film, and one of the best of any 2010 movie.