Defining Greatness

Is The Avengers a great movie? In this day and age, what sets a movie apart from being great and being culturally relevant?

Do you know what a great movie is?

“The Avengers” is not it. If you think it is, I’m starting to think it is not that you are wrong but that you are sadly naïve. Maybe you have a good reason to defend why it is great, why it is worthy of its praise, why it is a cultural landmark, but more likely, you had fun.

It is admirable that you have fun at the movies. A critic’s job should be to encourage the joy of going to a movie theater and watching with an enraptured audience. And fun and entertainment is inseparable from art. This much is obvious.

Hopefully my reason for targeting “The Avengers” is clear too. I don’t mean to attack those who had fun at it specifically. In fact, I did as well. But it’s the movie of the week, and those defending it have somehow convinced the world of its importance. It is not enough that this film is popular and fun, for the audience that loves it most feels it cannot have detractors either. It cannot be seen only as a popcorn movie or as something other than a landmark achievement, and those who dislike it do so because they don’t respect the art of comic books.

I’ve heard Michael Uslan, the producer of every Batman movie ever made, opine twice in person that comic books deserve a place in the canon of American folklore and great art. And yet when you see a movie like “The Avengers” raking in the record weekend high of $207 million domestically alone (it made even more last week overseas), it’s hard to see how any comic book fan can still call their culture neglected. Continue reading “Defining Greatness”

The Cabin in the Woods

Because all of “The Cabin in the Woods” comes as something of a surprise, this horror film’s real twist is that a movie this clever could end up having an ending so outrageous, cheap and dumb.

It sets loose five teenagers into a slasher-film playground and tempts them with sex, booby traps and creepy gas station attendants before unleashing zombies to murder them.

The clever conceit is that this is a game, if not an experiment, by a secret shadow corporation pulling all the strings. The employees have unexpected fun taking bets on how these kids will choose to die, be it ghosts, psychopathic clowns, mermen, zombies or the notably different family of redneck zombies.

The cute realization is that there are Hollywood studios operating just like this, dropping character types into a fish bowl and then spicing up the outcome with a new monster. Continue reading “The Cabin in the Woods”