Cabin in the Woods is a horror film co-written by Joss Whedon that reinvents…err, reinterprets…uh, gives a new spin on the familiar summer horror movie. College kids go to a remote area in the woods, where they are picked off one by one by evil, possibly supernatural bad guys. Who will live? More importantly, who will die, and in which order?

The movie tells you right off the bat that Something Else Is Going On: it opens in a scientific facility somewhere, where three white-collar types have the world’s most boring and most content-free conversation in the history of cinema, signaling that they’re talking about Something Else, something that will be made clear later on. The conversation is so ridiculously non-specific that I can’t, in fact, even remember what it is they talked about. 

Cabin in the Woods has some very funny things in it, and some very clever things in it, and it has one thing in it that bugs the ever-loving crap out of me, to the point where I think I’m more irritated by this movie than I am amused by it. All Sunday night and early Monday morning I happened to spend sick as a dog, and the whole time I spent vomiting or laying awake waiting for the next time I was going to start vomiting the single biggest annoying thing in this movie kept repeating on me, much like the previous night’s dinner.

Since I can’t talk say anything about this movie without using a gigantic SPOILER ALERT consider yourself warned: here there be major freaking spoilers. 

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER

The main thing that bugs me about this movie is the use of the word “whore.” 

[Read more…]

Darin and I watched Jiro Dreams Of Sushi right before we left for vacation and Being Elmo in the hotel room. (One of the dangerous things about being on vacation: normal TV! New and different shows appearing on the TV screen at all hours!) Both documentaries pursue the same subject: a single individual devoting his life to the pursuit of his art: in one case, being a master sushi chef, and in the other, being a master puppeteer. 

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is about Jiro Ono, a master sushi chef who runs a 10-seat sushi bar in the Ginza subway stop in Tokyo and whose dedication to his art has paid off handsomely with rewards such a three-star Michelin rating. He works with his son, Yoshikazu, every day in the cramped little restaurant — his younger son, Takashi, runs the restaurant’s second location at Roppongi Hills. He is 85 and keeps going, and you can see the determination in his desire to get every aspect of making a piece of sushi right. He is so dedicated to his art he even dreams of new creations. 

(Spoiler alert: if you see Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, the last food on Earth you will want to eat afterward is sushi. Because what would be the point? Wherever you go, no matter how good, the food is going to be crap compared to what you’ve just seen in the movie.)

Being Elmo is the story of Kevin Clash, the voice behind Elmo, the most wildly successful Muppet since Kermit and Miss Piggy. Clash, a tall and imposing black man (not your typical puppeteer) discovered his love of puppetry early on and threw himself into it so completely that when he graduated high school he went directly to New York City to work professionally, eventually getting to work for his mentor and idol, Jim Henson, and creating one of the most famous characters ever. 

Both movies are, in their own unique ways, both inspirational. And both are as depressing as hell. 

Here is the story of both movies: a young guy, for whatever reason, discovers his art at a fairly young age. He pursues this, no matter what the consequences. He would rather do this art than just about anything else, and he devotes hours and hours (and days and years) to it. He becomes an expert, worthy of teaching others, none of whom will probably ever reach his level. And no matter how good he gets at his art, he works at it just as hard every day, trying to get that much better at it. First one to the playing field, last one off. Jiro still crisps the nori on the brazier outside of his restaurant, Clash still puts together his Muppets by hand, trying to find new characters to work with.

Both stories are very inspirational. If you follow your dream and if you pursue your art and if you put in the hours to become great and if you keep working at it just as hard on Day 5000 as you did on Day 1, you will become a Master. All that spiritual, self-actualization bullshit we’ve always heard? It’s all right here. Like, neither one of these guys started out with any of the variables rolling their way, and neither let their circumstances stand in their way.

Jiro’s father abandoned the family, he started work at age 9, and, you know, World War II and all. (Spoiler: doesn’t turn out well for the Japanese.) But still he kept at his passion: getting better at his craft, showing up every day, creating his own restaurant, and eventually creating what most critics agree is the best sushi restaurant in the world. 

Clash grew up in a poor family in Baltimore in the 1960s, with few resources at his disposal. He created his first puppet by ripping up the lining of his Dad’s raincoat. In high school the other kids teased him for playing with dolls. And yet he kept putting on shows for kids, eventually getting hired at a local TV station to work on a kid’s show. He sought out the mentorship of Kermit Love, Muppet-builder to Jim Henson, and after high school went to work on Captain Kangaroo and The Great Space Coaster. He moved on to working for Jim Henson, and for Sesame Street. And there, after a master puppeteer named Richard Hunt threw the puppet at Clash and said, “What can you do with this?” Clash created Elmo. He’s now an executive producer at Sesame Street, in addition to a performer and teacher and international celebrity. For working with, you know, dolls. 

The dedication and artistry shown are both breathtaking. I mean, like, how hard is it to put a piece of fish on a block of rice, right? But then you see how they check the temperature of the rice until it is perfect. How they stir the egg to make tamago. How Jiro created the masterful sushi dinner he serves to customers, with different movements like a symphony. The meal’s expensive, but Jiro’s clearly not in it for the money: the restaurant’s the size of a closet and he has three MIchelin stars, he could quadruple the size of the place if he wanted to and sell out every night, no problem. But he stays with what works for him. 

Here’s the downside of mastery shown by both movies: they show us that our worst fears about pursuing our dreams, about giving 100% to our art and craft can be just as damaging personally as we’ve always suspected it would be. According to both movies, you cannot, in fact, have it all. 

Jiro comes off as something of a complete asshole. He’s 85 and he’s crotchety as hell. We know this isn’t because of his success — there’s a segment in which he meets up with school chums from 75 years ago in which they all reminisce about how Jiro was a bully back then, too. He talks about how his sons didn’t see him while they were growing up, because he left first thing in the morning and returned after they were asleep at night. (Mrs. Ono is never referred to — let alone seen — in this movie.) Instead of sending them to college he had his sons come apprentice for him at his restaurant, where of course he was harder on them than he was on the others because they were his sons and he couldn’t be lenient. His son Yoshikazu, who will take over the famed three-star restaurant, has been working for his father for almost 40 years and even though he reportedly is as good a sushi chef as his father (there’s an anecdote about Yoshikazu being the chef for the Michelin committee), everyone expects him to fail after Jiro leaves.

Kevin Clash is much different: he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and he seems to have always been that way. Like Jiro Ono, Clash’s personal life isn’t dealt with much in the movie either, other than that he’s divorced and he has a daughter. A couple of times, while doing promotions around the world for rooms full of screaming, enthusiastic children he would realize that his own daughter was the age of these kids and he was with them, not her. There’s a small segment with his daughter’s 16th birthday that makes you realize that Clash isn’t like other fathers: he brings in his daughter’s 16th birthday cake…and there’s a small Elmo on it.

What. The. Hell.

He is never without Elmo. 

It’s clear in the doc that he’s brought as much to Elmo and puppetry as they’ve brought to him, and it’s wonderful to see. On the other hand, his personal life is crap. 

§

When thinking about these movies I was reminded of a quote I read from Steve Jobs as to why he wanted to do a biography: “I wanted my kids to know me.”

Dude, I can think of a much better way to accomplish that than a book created by someone else. 

But maybe that’s the lesson. If you want to pursue something single-mindedly, everything else falls away. And are you willing to do this anyhow? 

(I won’t even get into “If a woman behaves like that, her partner won’t put up with it and it makes her a bad mommy.” But now that I’ve said that, I’ll let you go there.)