A slow and overlong 'Nightmare Alley'

     It’s no surprise that director Guillermo del Toro has remade Nightmare Alley,  a 1947 noir movie starring Tyrone Power in a role intended to challenge the actor's glamor-boy image. 

     The material, from a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham,  seems well-suited for Guillermo (Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water), a director who often draws in dark, bizarre strokes.

     Beginning in the world of low-rent carnivals,  the 1947 movie delved into the world of fraud and exploitation, spreading its story across two environments, one seedy, the other more decorous. The leap suggested that greed and ambition knew no borders.

    More than 70 years later, del Toro has taken the original 111-minute movie and turned it into a 140-minute trip into sideshow culture.

    The difference in length can be taken as emblematic of the way that cult or noir creations have muscled their way into the mainstream. Black-and-white photography turns to color in the hands of cinematographer Dan Lausten, and following his usual bent, del Toro creates images that are both detailed and bizarre.

    De Toro gives his movies their own worlds and Nightmare Alley is no exception -- which is not to say that the movie can be taken as an unalloyed success. More on that later.

    The story twists its way through a variety of complications. Lost and on the run, Stan Carlisle (BradleyCooper) stumbles into a carnival presided over by Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe). Hoatley specializes in displaying deformed fetuses he preserves in alcohol. His favorite: a three-eyed baby he calls Enoch. 

     Stan learns the carnival trade when he meets Pete Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his wife Zeena (Toni Collette). Zeena quickly seduces Stan, who immediately senses opportunity in a special code Pete devised to create the illusion of mind-reading.

     Money and fame, the twin engines of American dreaming, loom.

     Needing a helpmate for his career, Stan takes up with Molly (Rooney Mara), a carnival worker with a grotesque occupation. She makes her living surviving electrocutions as part of the carnival’s sideshow repertoire.  

     Mary falls for Stan’s charms and the two head for Chicago. Stan ignores the warnings of strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman) who sees himself as Mary's protector. Bruno threatens harm should Mary be hurt.

     Unfazed, Stan trades his carney clothes for a tuxedo; he headlines a popular nightclub act as a premier mentalist.

    One of the movie’s running themes centers sin and hellfire or their metaphoric equivalents as found in 1930s America. 

     Consider “the Geek,” the most desperate of souls, a pitiful fellow who carnie bosses steer into the lowliest of employments, hooking them with drink and addictive drugs. A filthy caged man, the Geek bites the heads off live chickens, an act shown by del Toro but never seen in the original. 

    The Geek becomes a symbol of condemnation; he represents the hideous fate of sinners and Stan provides plenty of reason for us to consider him a sinner.

    In Chicago, the movie adopts a new look, displaying fabulous Art Deco interiors and upscale hotel rooms where Stan and Mary are living the good life. It also begins to drag — albeit with a bright spot.

    Stan encounters Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a sophisticated Chicago therapist who tapes her sessions with her clients. Stand suggests a partnership in which the tapes will help him bilk the wealthy, notably a rich man (Richard Jenkins) who’s guilt-ridden about the death of his wife.

    Note: Is there anything Blanchett can’t do. She makes a great femme fatale.

    You needn’t be a mind reader to see where all of this is headed, but the film has less to do with story than with ambiance, seedy carnival life juxtaposed against the sleek world to which Stan aspires. Cooper makes it clear that Stan's ambition quickly can slide into desperation.

    Del Toro’s screenplay gives Stan a motivational backstory but it allows scenes to play out to the point where impatience sets in. 

    Now, I’m going to get to the hub of things, belatedly I suppose, probably because I respect del Toro's talent and commitment to cinema. 

   Nightmare Alley limps its way through a story that needed to move quickly, vanquishing the opportunity for second thoughts or over-evaluation.

    At times, del Toro’s images seem frozen in their dark beauty. Del Toro has made a noir movie in which ugliness is aestheticized. A carnival becomes a lurid dreamscape and the Deco interiors of Chicago are airless, so highly designed they can feel sterile.

     Slow and dawn-out, Del Toro's version sometimes suffocates under the director's lavish treatment. Nightmare Alley is less a neo-noir outing than a brilliant display of lighting and production design. 

    Noir had the high-contrast sheen of lurid pulp. Del Toro’s version inflates the atmosphere and deflates the movie as a result. By the end, he almost turns Nightmare Alley into something I wouldn't have thought possible, noir as coffee-table book.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/25/20 -- "Kajillionaire" and "The Artist's Wife'

 Kajillionaire

     Kajillionaire is like almost every other movie about con artists except for two things: the monetary stakes are pitifully low and the aspiring felons are strikingly weird. 

     How low? Well, these con artists steal from post-office boxes, dodge landlords, and try their best to avoid being caught on security cameras. If they had a motto, it might be, "The family that cons together has no choice but to stay together."

      And how weird are they?  The Dyne family consists of Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins), who are the parents of a daughter named Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). Mom and dad basically exploit their daughter by having her carry out their larcenous schemes.

     Mom tends to be quiet but not entirely without menace. Dad makes claims at knowledgeability and the family's daughter is so obviously depressed and withdrawn that her long stringy hair looks as if it might be weeping. They’re all nervous wrecks.

     Now, I said the stakes were small -- but I was talking only about money. Emotionally, the stakes are plenty high, revolving around a daughter who never has gotten what she needs from her conniving parents.

     I don't know of actors other than Winger, Jenkins and Wood who could have pulled off director Miranda July's foray into the world of Los Angeles down-and-outers, people who live in an apartment adjoining a bubble factory.

     The movie takes a new direction when Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) shows up. Self-assured and as ethically dubious as the Dynes, Melanie is Old Dolio's polar opposite. (And, yes, the movie offers an explanation of how Old Dolio got her name. Let's just say the name alone speaks to unspeakably bad parenting.)

   Every movie about con artists needs a good final twist and Kajillionare has one, but July (Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future) infuses genuine pathos into the lives of characters who live in a world in which everything's slightly askew. 

     And weirdness aside, you may even find yourself feeling something for Old Dolio, a young woman who can’t con anyone out of what she really needs: Love and acceptance.

The Artist's Wife

     Lena Olin joins Bruce Dern in a story triggered by an aging artist's slide into dementia. 

      In part, The Artist's Wife paints a portrait of a cantankerous, egotistical painter who abuses his students and takes the long-standing devotions of his wife for granted. 

      An abstract painter of some repute, Dern's Richard Smythson lives comfortably in the Hamptons with Olin’s Claire. Richard may be long past the starving artist phase, but he's definitely losing his grip. 

     As the story unfolds, Claire increasingly takes over the movie’s center: Claire -- as Richard says -- creates everything about the couple's life, except the art. She’s the engine that keeps their lives running. 

      Claire, of course, paid a price for her marital choice: Living in Richard's shadow meant sacrificing her own career as painter. We're told she had promise.

     Fearing the moment when Richard entirely fades, Claire tries to reconcile Richard with his estranged adult daughter (Juliet Rylance) from an earlier marriage. Richard knows little about the life of his grown gay daughter who has a six-year-old son (Ravi Cabot-Conyers). 

     Although The Artist's Wife creates interest as a piece of adult-oriented entertainment, the movie doesn't click. Claire's brief interest in a younger man (Avan Jogia) seems forced, dementia has been handled better elsewhere and the arc that Claire's story follows proves dismayingly predictable.

     In sum: a quietly disappointing effort.

     

A fairy tale from Guillermo del Toro

The Shape of Water, a romantic fantasy about a cleaner and a "monster.''

Guillermo del Toro chases dreams, attempting (and often succeeding) in mixing horror and romanticism as he allows his ample imagination to invade reality. In his great 2006 movie, Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro produced a dark fantasy about Franco's Spain. Now in The Shape of Water, del Toro turns to American shores, for a fairy tale about the love between a mute woman (Sally Hawkins) and a creature who has been brought from the depths of the Amazon to the US by government officials who see him as a threat.

The second half of del Toro's conception -- the part involving an attempt by a government agent (Michael Shannon) to destroy the creature -- might be the weakest part of the movie, flirting with cliches about the way officialdom inevitably becomes the enemy of beauty and mystery.

But this creature is different. Called Amphibian Man in the credits (Doug Jones under a ton of make-up), the creature has the physique of a man but also has scales and the ability to be fierce when threatened. In the Amazon, natives thought Amphibian Man was a god. Rather than trying to trample his strangeness, they elevated it.

Perhaps never quite as poetic as its wonderful title, The Shape of Water nonetheless allows del Toro to give full vent to an imagination into which movies flow, cinematic tributaries that fuel his sense of invention. It's not coincidental that Hawkins' Elisa lives above a theater called the Orpheum where The Story of Ruth is playing or that her neighbor (a gay artist played by Richard Jenkins) obsessively watches old movies, preferring them to the news of the day.

Set in Baltimore during the 1960s, the movie alternates between two major locations: Elisa's apartment and her place of employment, a government installation where Amphibian man is being held prisoner.

Elisa and her co-worker (a down-to-earth Octavia Spencer) learn that the creature is being tormented by Shannon's character. An authoritarian jerk, Shannon's Strickland becomes the real monster, a self-justifying sadist disguised as a "normal" man. Shannon's Strickland lives in suburbia, indulges himself by buying a Cadillac and pounds away (literally) during sex with his mildly libidinous wife.

Michael Stuhlbarg makes an appearance as a scientist who wants to preserve the creature. He believes that it would be a crime to destroy Amphibian Man. Stuhlbarg's Bob has a double identity. It's not much of a spoiler to tell you that Bob is also a Russian spy and that the Russians have their eye on this creature. They, too, would like to harness its powers.

Hawkins excels in her performance as a silent woman who gradually reveals her strengths. From the beginning, del Toro establishes Elisa's affinity for water. For Elisa, water and sexuality are intimately connected. And, yes, Elisa not only has a romantic interest in the creature; she has sex with him. She explains to Spencer's curious Zelda how this union is possible in one of the movie's giggly joking moments.

Del Toro delivers on the promise of the title. There's a lot of water in The Shape of Water, arriving in the form of flooded rooms, downpours and the tank in which Amphibian Man languishes. Water is life and, as such, can't always be contained.

The movie's romanticism extends to its elements that in the 1960s might have been considered "subversive," a woman who can't speak, a gay man, and a black woman. It falls to these outsiders to appreciate Amphibian Man in all his scaly glory. It is only in union with Amphibian Man that Elisa finds her true identity. She's finally complete.

Those familiar with del Toro's work won't be surprised at the movie's visual mastery, greatly aided by the cinematography of Dan Lausten and the production design of Paul D. Austerberry; they help the movie live in a world all its own.

The Shape of Water doesn't quite reach the magical heights at which del Toro must have been aiming, but it stands as a work in which sweet and sour tones bump against one another with del Toro insisting that only in the full embrace of those we deem alien do we find our deepest humanity -- or maybe he's just telling a small story about a woman who deserves more than life has given her.

Either way, The Shape of Water brims with strange charm.

Dysfunctional family, dysfunctional movie

Somewhere in the movie called The Hollars, a good family story might be hiding. Unfortunately, director John Krasinski, who also plays the lead role, didn't find it. This story of a dysfunctional Ohio family centers on the discovery that Mom (Margo Martingale) has a brain tumor. Dad (Richard Jenkins) can't stop weeping. One of the family's grown sons (Sharlto Copley) is mired in on-going tension with Dad, whose heating business verges on bankruptcy. Krasinksi plays the family's other son, the kid who left town to establish himself as an artist in the big city. Lest any stone of complication be left unturned, Krasinski's John Hollar and his girlfriend (Anna Kendrick) are expecting a baby. Sincere in its sentiments and including a few touching scenes, The Hollars nonetheless presents a symphony of false notes that even a cast featuring the wonderful Martingale and Jenkins can't bring into tune.

The 'White House' under siege -- again

To say White House Down is dumb doesn't do justice to the movie's rampant preposterousness.

After the mind-numbing and wildly irresponsible Olympus Has Fallen, a movie in which a disgraced Secret Service agent saved the president from North Korean terrorists, comes White House Down, an action movie in which a wannabe Secret Service agent (Tatum Channing) saves another president -- this one played by Jamie Foxx. The danger: A cabal composed of right-wing crazies, disillusioned military types and greedy corporations, some of whom want to wreak havoc with the nation's nukes.

First, a bit of housekeeping: This latest helping of mayhem from director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) boasts a stronger than usual cast -- at least for a movie that's hellbent on dishing out overheated destruction. Included are Maggie Gyllenhall (as a Secret Service agent), Richard Jenkins (as Speaker of the House); and James Woods (as the retiring head of the Secret Service).

I wish I could say that the presence of these veteran actors enriched a movie that begins credibly enough but quickly collapses into the debris of a ravaged White House.

The plot of this violent PG-13 pig-out exists in a realm beyond stupidity and preposterousness; it can't be described without spoilers, so I'll simply say that trying to connect this movie to anything resembling reality is like trying to anchor an oceanliner with a thimble.

The movie, I've read, is supposed to resemble Die Hard: It places violent action within the closed-space of the White House where Tatum's John Cale -- his daughter (Joey King) in tow -- arrives for a job interview.

King's Emily is upset that her divorced dad missed her talent show, but she's also totally immersed in White House trivia. She seems to know everything about the place.

When the terrorist invasion begins, we learn more about President James Sawyer, who's connected -- via blatant suggestions -- to President Obama. President Sawyer chews nicotine gum to combat his cigarette addiction and has lots of basketball sneakers in his closet, along with the obligatory black shoes. He owns a pair of Jordans.

The major character disclosures are all fairly predictable, and it doesn't take long for Emmerich to make it clear that he's planning not only to stretch credibility but to torture it to the point where it's screaming for mercy: A wild car-chase sequence on the White House lawn stands as a prime example, an attempt to mix action and laughs.

Amid the explosions, you'll find a budding bromance between Tatum and Foxx, who are thrown together as Tatum's Cale tries to protect the president and rescue his own daughter. The girl happened to be in the bathroom when para-military fiends took control of the White House, entering as workmen hired to overhaul the sound system in the White House theater.

Although Emmerich occasionally shifts the action to the plane on which the vice president (Michael Murphy) has been spirited away or to a headquarters outpost in the Pentagon, he sets about wrecking the White House with all the enthusiasm that derelict rock groups once brought to classy hotel rooms.

Look, I have no problem with irreverence when it comes to the presidency or the White House, but I do have a problem with a movie in which we watch thugs put a gun to a child's head and in which political ideas are tossed around as if they were nothing more than one-liners.

Some of the actors take their work seriously; others, less so; and White House Down emerges as an atonal mess that seems to have invested a lot of energy into accurately recreating the White House -- only for the purpose of ripping it to shreds.

Another foray into gangster rot

It's pungent, but Killing Them Softly feels weary and familiar.

Given the mall-culture perkiness that dominates so much of American culture, it's hardly surprising that filmmakers are attracted to downbeat stories about criminals and crime. Working in the criminal milieu can relieve filmmakers of the pressure to make moral judgments about characters -- or even to fret about how vicious they might become.

In Killing Them Softly, director Andrew Dominik looks for nourishment in the low-life world created by the late George V. Higgins, a novelist who specialized in Boston-based tales from the low end. Director Peter Yates adapted Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle for the big-screen in 1973, giving the great Robert Mitchum one his best roles -- and that's saying something.

Now, Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has updated Cogan's Trade, a 1974 novel by Higgins. Setting the story at the tail-end of the 2008 presidential campaign and in the middle of the fiscal meltdown that's still shaking the economy, Dominik moves Higgins's characters to the shabbiest parts of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Dominik's adaptation also tries to mount a critique of American capitalism, complete with a riff about the hypocrisy of a slave-owning Thomas Jefferson and the audacity of politicians (in this case, President Obama and John McCain) who try to portray the U.S. as a community of folks pulling together in common cause.

Bullshit, says Dominik's movie -- and it says it loudly.

In fact, Dominik delivers the message so directly that watching the movie might put you in mind of reading a book that's already been underlined by the time you get hold of it.

Hey, I'm as open to capitalism bashing as the next guy, but Domink's attempts to link the fiscal crisis to mob mores -- or the lack of them -- struck me as simplistic and hollow. The idea, I suppose, is to find some sort of equivalence between the big-time mainstream economy and the brutal shadow economy in which small-time criminals operate.

Drably shot and evoking the storytelling structure of Quentin Tarantino (particularly Pulp Fiction), Killing Them Softly punctuates its gangster talkfest with bursts of violence as the various characters betray one another in plot twists based as much on how people perceive reality as on what's actually real, another theme the movie explicitly states.

Stories such as this don't really need much by way of stylistic embellishment, but Dominik puts his stamp on the material anyway. A slow-motion assassination is set to the strains of Love Letter Straight From the Heart, not the last time that music is used to create an ironic counterpoint to the action. Same goes for a steady stream of TV and radio newscasts that become as monotonous and annoying as yellowing wallpaper in a cheap hotel room.

The story begins when a former felon (Vincent Curatola who played Johnny Sac in HBO's The Sopranos) devises a scheme in which a couple of dim-witted thugs (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) are asked to rob a card game run by Markie Trottman (Ray Liotta). Markie once arranged to have one of his own games robbed, but made the mistake of boasting about it. Curatola's Johnny Amato believes that Markie automatically will be blamed for the heist, thus providing a risk-free opportunity for enrichment.

The robbery -- one of the slowest and most protracted I've seen on screen -- sets off a string of gangster machinations that center around a white-collar mob rep (Richard Jenkins) who asks a cunning hit man (Brad Pitt) to clean up a variety of messes caused by the robbery.

Pitt's Jackie Cogan decides he can't do all the dirty work by himself, so he calls for help in the person of Mickey (James Gandolfini), a hit man who's not at the top of his game. Instead of taking care of business, Mickey spends his time drinking and whoring or telling stories about problems with the wife who keeps serving him with divorce papers.

There are funny, pungent touches here, including a bit about dognapping. Too bad, that oddball crime turned up earlier this year in Seven Psychopaths, but still...
Look, Pitt has de-glamorized himself before. Gandolfini has a nifty monologue, but putting him in any mob movie can't help but evoke memories of Tony Soprano. In general, the actors seem committed in a dreary sort of way that fits the movie's bleak settings.

Although Higgins arrived early on the low-life scene, his successors have made this kind downbeat approach a little too familiar, and it might have been nice had Dominik generated a little suspense about what was going to happen next.

From the moment Johnny Amato proposes robbing Markie's card game, it's apparent that nothing good is likely to result. And by the time, Pitt's character delivers the final bit of dialogue -- the bitter pill the movie has been waiting for us to swallow -- it feels more like a punchline than a dramatic conclusion.

Surviving a campus romance

Jesse (Josh Radner), an admissions officer for a New York city college, is 35-years-old and perhaps a trifle bored with his life. Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen), a student at a Ohio university, is 19 and full of vigor. Jesse returns to that Ohio school -- his alma mater -- to honor a retiring English teacher (Richard Jenkins), a man he considered his mentor. Immersed in the hopeful environment of his youth, Jesse soon finds himself attracted to Zibby, who's bright, attractive and unusually comfortable with herself for a teen-ager. Written and directed by Radner, Liberal Arts may not graduate with honors, but it's by no means last in its class, either. Radner finds telling moments in a story that unfolds with easy-going sensitivity. An example: After retiring, Jenkins's character realizes that he's going to have a difficult time adjusting to a life of leisure. He asks the head of the English department to re-hire him, but discovers that he's already been replaced. It's not a major thrust of the story, but Jenkins shows us the pain felt by someone who's essentially surrendering his identity along with his job. Rounding out the cast are Zac Efron, as the kind of loose-canon figure who seems to turn up on every college campus, and John Magaro, as a bookish young student Jesse befriends. As Jesse wanders around his old college, he also remembers what it was like to be a student enamored of the romantic poets and awed by the teacher (Allison Janney) who taught him about them. Ultimately, Radner -- familiar from the sitcom How I Met Your Mother -- is interested in characters who are too smart to be jammed into a formula movie, but fit nicely into a low-key story that leaves you hoping everyone in it comes out unscathed.

When bad movies happen to good people

Great cast -- and not much else in Darling Companion.

I hate when this happens.

About a month ago, writer/director Lawrence Kasdan visited Denver with his wife Meg. They were on the road promoting Kasdan’s independently produced Darling Companion, which they co-wrote, which Kasdan directed and which opened the Boulder International Film Festival. (See interview below.)

Kasdan, of course, has had an estimable career, co-writing the screenplays for great populist fare such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and distinguishing himself on smaller movies such as Body Heat and The Big Chill.

So what’s to hate about any of this?

Only this: I liked Kasdan and enjoyed meeting him, which makes it all the more difficult to report that his latest movie struck me as thoroughly mediocre.

See what I mean? I hate when I like the filmmaker, but not the movie. But in the case of Darling Companion, that's what I'm stuck with.

Put another way, if a director has a cast that includes Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Richard Jenkins, and Dianne Wiest and still comes up short, it’s a good bet that the material is to blame.

Darling Companion isn’t funny when it wants to be, and it's not dramatic enough to be taken seriously as a sobering look at family frictions. It's strictly middle of the road.

Kline and Keaton play Joseph and Beth, a Denver-based husband and wife mired in a stale marriage. After their second daughter (Elizabeth Moss) marries at the couple's mountain retreat, the family hangs around for a little R&R.

Beth and Joseph are joined by Joseph's sister Penny (Wiest) and her obnoxiously friendly boyfriend (Jenkins). Penny's son Bryan (Mark Duplass) serves as a youthful add-on. Like Joseph, he's a doctor.

A lost dog puts the story in motion. Freeway -- so named because Beth found him on the side of a road -- races off, creating relationship tension between Joseph and Beth and setting off a variety of searches, one of them prompted by the family’s supposedly clairvoyant housekeeper, a preposterous character played by Ayelet Zurer.

Kasdan allows our perceptions about at least one of the characters to change as the movie progresses. Jenkins' character, whose life-transforming idea involves opening a British pub in Omaha, turns out to be less horrible than he initially seems.

Look, Darling Companion is small potatoes, a pallid misfire from Kasdan and his stellar cast.

Enough. I think you can tell where I'm coming from. I had more fun talking to the Kasdans than I did watching their movie. And I hope the fact that Darling Companion hasn't exactly been lighting critical fires -- as of this writing, the movie had earned an unfortunate 15 on Rotten Tomatoes -- doesn't dissuade them from trying another small, personal drama -- only one that works.

A horror film about horror films

Cabin in the Woods has received lots of early buzz, but its meta musings left this reviewer cold.

The Cabin In the Woods made quite a splash at last month's South by Southwest Film Festival, and it's easy to see why. The movie, which reportedly had been languishing unseen for more than two years before Lionsgate rescued it, seems to have been designed for auditoriums full of giddy fanboys who enjoy watching a director subvert a genre and then put pedal to the metal with an all-out-assault on Hollywood's attraction to effects-laden finales. If Cabin in the Woods can be seen with the right kind of audience, it might provide a contagious sort of fun.

This time, though, I find myself in disagreement with my film-geek friends. I responded to Cabin in the Woods without either fear or laughter, even as director Drew Goddard -- who wrote the movie Cloverfield -- knowingly played with all manner of horror cliches, the most prominent of them involving a stereotypical group of college students who head off to an isolated forest cabin for a weekend of fun.

Of course, we know trouble will follow. Our hapless students will soon encounter the expected horrors, but -- and here's the movie's gimmick -- we also learn that the environment in which these kids find themselves is being manipulated by cynical corporate types who operate out of a high-tech control room and make bets on what's likely to transpire.

Goddard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joss Whedon, introduces us to a prototypically standard group of movie kids: a handsome jock (Chris Hemsworth), a slutty girl (Anna Hutchison) and a pot-smoking druggie (Fran Kranz). You don't need to know the rest of the characters because, by the very nature of Goddard's semi-playful enterprise, they're not really worth knowing. They're types that more often than not are fed into big-screen slaughter machines. Oh, all right, the other two kids are played by Jesse Williams and Kristen Connolly.

Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford play the main techies in the control room. This cynical duo manipulates just about everything that happens in and around the cabin through some sort of unexplained machinations involving lots of electronics. Need a bit of libidinous stimulation? Release the pheromone mist.

It's impossible not to compare these two wise-cracking techies to movie directors who pull the levers that guide audiences through familiar funhouses of horror in which characters act stupidly (heading alone into darkened basements) or fight off relentless monsters (indefatigable redneck zombies).

Cabin in the Woods even boasts a far-fetched explanation for everything we've seen. I suppose we need this explanation because Cabin's major intrigue revolves around one question: Why are Jenkins and Whitford, as characters who appear to be working for a large company, carrying out this cruel scheme.

It's not possible to tell more without including a ton of spoilers. Know, though, that some viewers will regard the movie's finale as surprising and enjoyably preposterous.

I found it mostly preposterous without much amusement. Cabin in the Woods may have wanted to say something smart about horror movies that too often display a strained, synthetic quality and no real convictions. But what convictions does Cabin have? Here's the problem: If you spend a whole movie subverting a genre, you run the risk of being left with nothing to stand on but air.

This 'Cabin' is built from a certain kind of smart-alecky cleverness about movies and not much else.