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. 

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

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. 

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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.)

Hollywood loves competing movie projects. Competing volcanos! Competing end of the world stories! Competing Titanics! (Okay, one was on the small screen.) Competing bug movies! I actually tend to believe that it’s more a case of “something gets into the water” rather than “oh gosh, they have a good idea, let’s get our own.” It’s too hard to make a movie in the first place without someone really being behind it.

So here we have Live Action Snow White #1. (#2, Snow White and the Huntsman, is coming this summer.) Mirror, Mirror starts with the conceit that this is the story of the Evil Stepmother, since she’s played by the biggest star in the movie, Julia Roberts. The Queen is evil, a handsome Prince comes to the kingdom, Snow White runs away to avoid Evil Stepmother Queen’s clutches, she gets rescued by seven dwarves, she fights the Prince, she defeats the Evil Stepmother, she rescues the Prince, the kingdom is saved.

If this is the Evil Stepmother’s story, you may have noticed a problem midway through my recounting this movie.

The movie’s kind of a mess. It doesn’t know who the main character is either.

It’s directed by Tarsem Singh, whose main notable attribute is his gift for visuals. Big splashes of colors! Fantastic scenery! If Tarsem Singh and Zach Snyder could just learn what a story was, they would really have something going. A problem both directors suffer from, however, is that they are more interested in the visual on-screen than in what the hell is going on in the story.

The movie is definitely geared toward kids most of the time — the Prince gets affected by a magical spell that makes him act very silly indeed — although there were a couple of moments for adults that made me say, “Really? Did you have to put that in there?” The seven dwarves are very amusing — I liked them most of the time they were on screen, and they had the best dialogue. My kids mainly talked about the dwarves after the movie was over, so I’m thinking that was their favorite part too. Lily Collins is Snow White, and she’s very sweet and demure, and Julia Roberts eats as much scenery as she dares. Armie Hammer seems to have a pretty good time, despite spending a third of the movie half-naked. (And as I tweeted yesterday: Seriously, what must it be like to look like that? Does he spend most of his waking hours staring at himself in a mirror? Because if I were a guy and I looked like that, I sure would. I don’t even find that type of guy attractive and I would lose my ability to speak around him.)

There’s nothing stunningly original or even funny about this movie though. Maybe if they’d stuck with the Evil-Queen-as-heroine story, or had some other twist in there that would make this original. But mostly it’s a matinee-with-the-kids-’cause-we’ve-seen-everything-else type of movie.

We’re all kind of wondering how Snow White and the Huntsman is going to be.

Jeff (Jason Segal) is a pothead who lives in the basement of his mother’s house and does little except smoke pot, watch informercials, and opine on what in his opinion is the greatest movie of all time, Signs. He believes that signs are everywhere, and if we learn to see them, we will discover our true purpose. He gets a mistaken phone call by someone looking for “Kevin”…and Jeff decides that this is instead an extremely significant sign.

His brother, Pat (Ed Helms), is a paint salesman whose marriage isn’t going so well and who isn’t helping himself out by taking 5 beer lunches at Hooters. He’s also bought a Porsche not only without the approval of his wife…but he might have killed his marriage by doing so. Their mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), is unhappy because she hates her kids and there’s no spark left in her life.

Movies are always about people being in the right place at the right time and benefiting from crazy, impossible coincidences. Jeff, Who Lives At Home out-and-out embraces this conceit. Jeff follows the signs, sometimes with great consequences, sometimes with terrible consequences. Pat doesn’t listen to the signs at all — and comes to believe that maybe Jeff is on to something. And their mom realizes that maybe everyone and everything is exactly where they’re supposed to be in this life.

In addition to being philosophical, believe it or not…this movie is very, very funny.

Okay, not in the rip-roaring “Did I just laugh at that?” way 21 Jump Street was last week. But it’s a comedy of a couple of very strange, and yet very ordinary, people getting through their day in the way that they’ve become accustomed to, and how in one day everything gets wildly shaken up. When Darin looked up the directors on IMDb and saw that they were the ones who did Cyrus, we both said, “Of course.” Those two movies fit together perfectly.

It’s crazy how movies we go to see in the theater really come down to money or art. That’s it. That’s the choice we make every week when we go to see a movie these days. Do yourself a favor and see one that isn’t just about getting the sequel green lighted.

Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a good movie.

It is, however, freakin’ hilarious.

I was in a terrible mood yesterday when we went to the movies — to the point where Darin wasn’t even trying to make conversation with me, I was so monosyllabic — and by the end of 21 Jump Street I was wiping tears from my eyes. (During the previews, I chuckled once, softly, during Men In Black 3 when Josh Brolin evoked Tommy Lee Jones perfectly, and the rest of the time I was like: Wow, what is a bigger waste of time — me trying to cheer up, or these awful, awful, awful looking movies?) I couldn’t believe the good reviews this movie got before I saw it, and now I’m like, Yeah, okay.

Channing Tatum is the good-looking, stupid cop who used to pick on nerdy, brainy Jonah Hill in high school. They both go to the Police Academy, where they help one another through. On their first assignment (as bike cops,in the park), they blow it so badly that Nick Offerman assigns them to undercover work at the high school. “You’re going to 37 Jump Street….Wait, that doesn’t sound right.”

They’re supposed to break up a drug ring at the high school, and they discover that high school has totally changed since they were there, 7 years ago: now everyone two-straps their backpacks, instead of only using one. The smart kids are now the cool kids! Our cops get assigned to the wrong classes! They throw wild parties! They blow up half the city with quite possibly the worst police work in history…but apparently no one notices!

Lots of drug humor. Unbelievably bad language — I think they went out of their way to see how much cursing they could get into this thing. Amazingly, no nudity. Every cliché about bad cop shows and cops working undercover and high school worked in, repeatedly. I had no idea who Channing Tatum was before this but I really liked him: he was hilarious.

We had a really good time at this.

The comedies they advertised before the movie though: ohmygod, they look awful. Why is anyone still hiring Adam Sandler?

You already saw The Hunger Games this weekend. You don’t need my opinion of it.

Okay: it’s really good, it definitely evokes the spirit of the book, Jennifer Lawrence is clearly a little too old to play Katniss but she’s really good and there are few if any 16 year old actresses who could have done this role. All the movie forgot with the ending was the title card: “Coming next summer: Catching Fire.”

You know that movie execs have been prostrate in front of Suzanne Collins all weekend, begging her to add 5 or 15 more books to the Hunger Games trilogy.

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The previews before The Hunger Games were interesting for how the audience reacted:

• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter made the audience laugh. The movie will have to be really good to overcome the audience’s reaction that this idea is too silly for words. The preview is expanded over the initial one, with more explanation of just what in the hell this movie is about.
• The new Spider-Man reminds us that it’s never too soon for a reboot! In fact, I think the reboot of The Hunger Games should be in theaters this fall. Andrew Garfield looks pretty good as Spidey. I have no idea of who the villains are or why they felt it necessary to bring Spidey back again, but I’ll probably be there.
• The Avengers preview I’ve just seen one too many times now. I don’t want to see this again before the movie comes out.
• Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part II… I don’t even know how to gauge the audience reaction on this one. Embarrassed giggles? People talking right through it? Explosive laughter when Kristin Stewart is eyeing the deer as a tasty, tasty snack?