A breezy 'Much Ado' in Santa Monica

A happy summer diversion brings Shakespeare to life in contemporary garb.

Director Joss Whedon may not be a lightweight, but he's sure light on his feet.

Known for a popular television series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and for equally mainstream big-screen entertainments such as Marvel's The Avengers), Whedon demonstrates an engagingly nimble touch in his filmed version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

Whedon's Much Ado -- filmed in black-and-white during 10 days at his Santa Monica home -- serves as a welcome tonic in a summer already laden with booming explosions and numbing helpings of CGI.

A strong cast gives Shakespeare's language a comfortable American accent, and Whedon is keenly alert to the clownish possibilities in Shakespeare's play about a group of nobles searching for love -- or, in some cases, professing a desire to avoid it at any cost.

Employing an agile camera, Whedon swaddles Shakespeare's play in an atmosphere of contemporary affluence. A Santa Monica setting projects a sense of worldly accomplishment and personal well-being. Whedon may not entirely convince us of the appropriateness of this location for Shakespeare's nobles, but he obtains fine and diverting performances from a cast composed of actors with whom he has worked during his television career.

Love and possibilities for marriage fill the air, tempered -- of course -- by intrigue and the kind of abundant misunderstanding that results from wanton eavesdropping.

Here's my very sketchy plot summary: Claudio (Fran Kranz) becomes engaged to Hero (Jillian Morgese), daughter of Leonato (Clark Gregg). The wedding is to take place under the rule of Don Pedro of Messina (Reed Diamond).

Meanwhile, Don Pedro's duplicitous brother Don John (Sean Maher) schemes to break up the lovers at their wedding, where one of Don John's henchmen will slander Hero's virtue.

And then there's Beatrice (a luminous and smart Amy Acker), who expresses nothing but disdain for love, as does the cynical Benedick (Alexis Denisof). Reversals abound, so it's a sure bet that the love-averse posturing of Benedick and Beatrice will push them together.

Substantial comic relief is provided by Nathan Fillon, familiar from lots of TV and from the movie Serenity), which Whedon wrote and directed. Fillon's Dogberry functions as Messina's top cop.

Whedon's Much Ado may not change your life, but it should bring a welcome smile to your face: The movie transpires in an atmosphere of informality and fun -- and, of course, benefits from the enrichment provided by Shakespeare's language. The Bard never saw a movie, but he knew more about creating an image than most writers before or since.

Small surprise, then, that when Much Ado is clicking -- which is often -- it's a genuinely superior amusement.

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.