What Does Cannes Have Against Women Directors?

Thelma Adams is a New York Film Critics Circle member and the author of "Playdate," a novel.No one ever claimed that women had bridged the director's-chair gender gap, but it's a complete kick in the can that this year's Cannes Film Festival has not a single female-directed film among the 23 in competition.

I love contenders like David Cronenberg, whose Cosmopolis -- starring Robert Pattinson -- has been welcomed into the competition, and who headed the Cannes jury in 1999. I was a champion of his cerebral period drama A Dangerous Method, which had a terrific star turn by Keira Knightley. But, really, not a single film by a woman? I'm just gobsmacked.

It is, however, a good year to be a North American male: In addition to Cronenberg, Lee Daniels (The Paperboy), Jeff Nichols (Mud), and Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom) will premiere at what is considered the most prestigious film festival on the planet. The other 51 percent be damned.

There won't be any shortage of sexy female actresses in evening gowns to attract paparazzi -- so why does the female-director shortage matter? To paraphrase: It's the sexism, stupid. Despite some recent indications to the contrary, women have yet to gain substantial ground in cinema's most powerful positions. And beyond its inherent prestige, Cannes is significant because it's at the forefront of the awards season. Last year, for example, The Artist debuted at Cannes, where Jean Dujardin won best actor honors, and went on to sweep the Oscars.

Half-full thinkers can still hope that there will be a bounty of female-helmed movies at the early fall Toronto-Telluride-Venice nexus. Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow has her as-year-unfinished Osama bin Laden film, Zero Dark Thirty (horrible title alert!), slated for the holiday season.

And, in a pleasant surprise, the Tribeca Film Festival, which is currently in full swing, overflows with female-directed films of all stripes. Among the most prominent are Sarah Polley's quirky dramedy Take This Waltz, featuring Michelle Williams as a straying Toronto wife; Julie Delpy's shrewd kooky relationship comedy 2 Days in New York, which pairs the actress with Chris Rock; and Lynn Shelton's sexy sibling rivalry drama with Emily Blunt, Your Sister's Sister. While not all movies are Oscar-bait, Tribeca presents a bounty of promising women filmmakers, including Tanya Wexler (Hysteria), Malgorzata Szumowska (Elles), Julia Dyer (The Playroom), Sharon Bar-Ziv (Room 514), Lucy Malloy (Una Noche), Kat Cairo (While We Were Here), and Beth Murphy (The List).
It's unconscionable that the Cannes selection committee, which received in the neighborhood of 1,800 movie submissions, considers this artistic bias a non-issue. It's up to bold filmmakers who are part of the boys' club -- Cronenberg, Daniels, and Anderson among them -- to squawk about the inequity. We love them; now it's time for them to return the love.

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The Moth Diaries

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

Perhaps it's time to put the vampire to rest, cinematically speaking. Romance has rotted the once vital movie monster to the point where ridiculous coming of age claptrap like The Moth Diaries can be passed off as full-on fright fodder. Instead, it's a slightly Sapphic excursion into that hub of unrequited lesbian love, the all-girls boarding school. Adapted from -- you guessed it -- a popular young adult novel, our main narrative centers around a rivalry between dour gal Rebecca (Sara Bolger) and eerie Goth interloper Ernessa (Lily Cole). When the latter arrives at the exclusive Brangwyn College, she is a pasty faced fascination among the various rich witch cliques. Before long, she is presumably draining the lifeblood out of everything -- including this dull excuse for entertainment.

You see, Rebecca sees school as her sanctuary, still haunted by the memory of coming across the body of her dead father (he slit his wrists in the bathtub). With the help of her best bud Lucy (Sarah Gordon), she hopes to move on with her life. Of course, when Ernessa shows up, she takes an instant liking to Becca's BFF -- and the feeling is more than mutual. Then odd things start happening. Lucy appears frail and is literally wasting away. Other students meet untimely, off screen ends. Soon, Rebecca starts to suspect that Ernessa is a bloodsucking vampire, returning to the location as part of some supernatural vendetta. Or maybe it's all in her impressionable head, the pubescent ravings of an unsure girl spoon-fed macabre tales by a macho male literature teacher (Scott Speedman). Or maybe Rebecca is just crazy.

Fact is, we don't care either way. The Moth Diaries (apparently, Ernessa's odd smelling room attracts the fabric eating insects) is neither scary nor sexy. It doesn't do enough with its teen terror parallels nor can it cough up a single sequence of actual adolescent lust. Instead, director Mary Harron (American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol) falls for the premise's Stephanie Meyer on Midol leanings, removing any bit of irony, emotion, or interest. While Ms. Bolger and Ms. Cole collect the required angst-ridden tokens, the rest of the movie lumbers like a semi-animated corpse. The storyline has some potential. The follow-through fails.

More importantly, The Moth Diaries is not the least bit frightening. It's the antithesis of thrilling. It remains static when it should be suspenseful and believes dread can be determined by the amount of blood let per scene. Since we aren't quite sure what Ernessa is up to (though that name should be a 'dead' giveaway), Harron hammers home her possible paranormal state. Shots suggesting hallucinogenic fantasies fail to generate much awe, while the lack of creature feature cliche renders the narrative inert. In a film like Fright Night, the vampire mythos was re-imagined for a prepped post-modern audience. Here, by trying to avoid formula, this reinvention of the neck-biter disintegrates. Even the obvious ending underachieves.

Yet for some baffling business model reason, faux Harlequin horror like the ones promised in The Moth Diaries continue to clog up the Cineplex. Even its purposed links to the classic 1872 novella Carmilla can't save it. As fans, we expect more from Harron. Her obvious skill set seems to have vanished along with any motive or meaning to this empty, erotic-less folderol. Back at the beginning of cinema, Nosferatu and his iconic Bela Lugosi brethren knew how to send shivers up and down your spine. A century later, the monster has been made meaningless. Sex, blood, and death may be the givens of any Dracula-inspired fright film. The Moth Diaries skimps on all three.

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Prognosticating the Summer Scifi Films

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.The Summer Movie Season used to begin with Memorial Day weekend, but as more and more blockbusters began to crowd the schedule, the season's start date has moved further back. This year, every weekend in May is jam-packed with summer films getting a head start. So now is a perfect time to look at the science fiction films on the summer schedule and whether I suspect they will be hits or misses.

The Avengers (May 4)
Stars: Robert Downey, Jr., Scarlett Johansson, and the Chrises Evans and Helmsworth
Concept: All the superheroes from those other Marvel-based films get together to save the world. As they do. Plus Über-Geek Joss Whedon writes and directs.
Hit or Miss: If this doesn't make at least $300 million, I will eat my hat. The tough, chewy one, not the hat I have that is made of cookie.

Battleship (May 18)
Stars: Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, Liam Neeson
Concept: Humans on naval exercises meet unfriendly aliens. Lots of special effects ensue from that point. Think: Transformers, but wet.
Hit or Miss: It's already a hit because it's been released elsewhere in the world, has grossed $129 million in two weeks to date, and will probably have $200+ million in the bank before it gets here, making how it does in the U.S. pure gravy. And here? It'll do just fine.

Men in Black 3 (May 25)
Stars: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin
Concept: Agent J (Smith) has to go back in time to find out what happened to his partner K (Jones first, and then Brolin in his younger version).
Hit or Miss: A hit, I think, which is more than it would have been if it had been released a couple of years after the lackluster MiB 2. But it is vulnerable if it is not, you know, actually funny. Also a referendum on whether Will Smith has still got it in terms of being an A-lister.

Prometheus (June 5)
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace
Concept: Explorers searching for clues of an unknown race unwittingly endanger all of humanity, while director Ridley Scott pours on the atmosphere in this sort-of prequel to Alien.
Hit or Miss: For serious science fiction fans, this is the summer film they are waiting for. The comic book films will gross more, but if this clicks with fans, it's still got the potential for $200 million.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (June 29)
Stars: Channing Tatum, Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis
Concept: COBRA attacks the Joes, leaving only a few alive to seek vengeance!
Hit or Miss: Oh, man. I was sort of agog when the first film succeeded. This one drops in Johnson, who seems to have a magical ability to boost mediocre franchises (see: Fast Five), and 12-year-old boys still exist in this world, so, sure, it'll probably be as successful as the first film, may God forgive us all.

The Amazing Spider-Man (July 3)
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans
Concept: The Spider-Man franchise gets rebooted with new stars and a slightly different origin story.
Hit or Miss: I think it will be a hit, but I'm going to go ahead and be skeptical that it's going to be a huge hit, mostly because I think five years is too soon for a reboot, and I think a lot of the fan excitement for this film has transferred to The Avengers. So: $100 million? Sure. $200 million? Maybe not.

The Dark Knight Rises (July 20)
Stars: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway
Concept: The presumably final Batman film by Christopher Nolan has the Caped Crusader going up against hulking anarchy in the form of Hardy's Bane.
Hit or Miss: It's almost impossible that this will not be a hit in the $300 million range; the question is whether it will best The Avengers to be the summer's biggest film. It might be slightly too dark to prevail. We will see.

Total Recall (August 3)
Stars: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel
Concept: This remake of the '80s Schwarzenegger hit apparently never gets its ass to Mars but does still have Quaid (Farrell) imagining that he might be a super-spy after taking a "vacation" inside his head.
Hit or Miss: I was going to write it off as a miss, but then I saw the trailer, and you know what? It didn't totally suck. I'm not a huge fan of director Len Wiseman, who is more flash than substance, but I suspect this will bring in what Wiseman's Underworld films do ($60 million, give or take) and possibly flirt with $100 million if it gets a little momentum.

Overall? Looks like it's going to be a pretty good summer for science fiction, especially when it overlaps with comic books. We'll see how it all pans out, starting in just a couple of weeks.

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Chimpanzee

Winner of several imaginary literary and filmmaking awards.

Chimpanzee is the latest in Disneynature's continuing series of kid-friendly wildlife documentaries that began with 2009's Earth and has continued every year on Earth Day with Oceans and African Cats. The concept is simple: take a basic Discovery Channel doc and affix a cutesy storybook narrative to its cuddly animal "protagonists." Such a fusion often breeds a semi-uncomfortable blend of irrepressible manufactured cuteness and stark real-life survival-of-the-fittest brutality. Kids will alternately swell with happiness and recoil in horror.

Most interesting about Chimpanzee is just how deeply it immerses itself in the jungle of family entertainment. While its Disneynature forebears certainly personified its animal characters and formulated narratives that were easy for kids to engage with, Chimpanzee is essentially a full-tilt kiddie flick, with a narration that would easily fill the pages of an illustrated children's book at the public library. And yet the film's "illustrations" are gorgeous, every frame populated with breathtaking wildlife photography and staggering aerial footage of  the Ivory Coast that is so pristine it almost looks animated.

Tim Allen narrates the film, which focuses on the adventures of Oscar, a three-year-old chimpanzee living with his tribe in West Africa. It seems no accident that Oscar is not merely the youngest of these primates but also the cutest, which automatically makes us all root for him. He follows the tribe as they climb branches, search for food, crack nuts open with rocks, and guard their territory against rival tribes. His mimicry of the older chimpanzees is true documentary gold, capturing the innocence and impressionable nature of a young primate coming of age. But young Oscar is still young enough to stick closely with his mother, who is his primary -- often only -- source of protection and food.

Students of nature documentaries are well aware that life in the wild is dangerous. Students of Disney films possess the acute knowledge that mother figures often must die in order to usher in the male hero's character arc. Obviously living in the jungle is treacherous and the lives of these survivalist creatures can shift on a dime, but I offer a humble observation that it seems convenient that Disneynature stumbled on a real-life scenario that so closely resembles Bambi. Nevertheless, the beauty of documentary is occasionally encountering extraordinary snapshots of real life, and in this case Oscar's mother vanishes, the likely victim of an invading rival tribe, and the young chimpanzee is left alone at a time when his mother is vital to his survival.

Unfortunate but inevitable is the film's tendency to pit one faction of animal against the other; the story revolves around this cute little chimp, and therefore his tribe is "good" while their jungle counterparts are deemed "evil." The tribe's leader is named Scar. They even have their own dastardly orchestra piece on the soundtrack. And yet, in reality, Scar is just trying to lead his tribe, and they are just trying to find food to survive. The deliberate shaping of this wildlife narrative is nothing new, but is amplified to storybook proportions in Chimpanzee. Allen's narration fits like a glove, his occasional injections of humor befitting this very kid-friendly story. But "kid-friendly" is also a virtue, providing a cinematic diversion for young children that isn't subversive or mind-numbing, and offers some truly stunning nature imagery. Like all Disneynature films, Chimpanzee is a mixed bag, but it fulfills its role in the natural selection of the Hollywood box-office.

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Goodbye First Love

Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.

There are few filmmakers working today with the ability to both drill deep into primal emotions and maintain an artful perspective on their wracking turmoil; France's Mia Hansen-Løve is one of them. In Goodbye, First Love, her ode to the foolish obstinacy of young love, writer/director Hansen-Løve shows -- in bright colors and dark, gusting squalls -- what it is like to be swept away by overwhelming, and often unrealistic, feelings. Certainly, her teenagers and young adults here flirt not just with each other but with extreme ridiculousness. But it's a ridiculousness that's universally understood.

Lola Créton plays Camille, a teenager adrift in life like most any others. Then she meets Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), and the two embark on one of those unstoppable and unreasonable romances that brighten and mar so many adolescences. No matter how much Camille's mother cautions her against throwing so headlong into anything, she plunges on ahead, pledging her life to little more than being with Sullivan. For his part, Sullivan is harder to read. He's not precisely uncaring, but his relationship with Camille certainly seems to be less of a necessity for his life than it is for her. This becomes patently clear when Sullivan, who is slightly older, announces with finality that he is heading off to South America with a couple of friends. Camille, of course, asks to come with. Nothing doing.

So off Sullivan goes on his gap-year excursion. His letters back to Camille are treated like rare treasure, leading her to stick pins in a map showing his progress. But as the inevitable happens (fewer letters, the unraveling of his interest), Camille dives into a profound depression. Seeing the careful manner in which Hansen-Løve treats Camille's deep blue funk is a reminder of just how casually most romances handle this kind of thing. So often the jilting of an ex-lover is treated on screen as a brief aberration, even comical -- something better handled in a quick montage before the right one shows up. But in Goodbye, First Love, the possibility is actually presented that Camille may never in fact get over Sullivan. Hansen-Løve stacks the deck, of course, by having treated the couple's time together as some kind of paradisical dream (the color-drenched cinematography by Stéphane Fontane of A Prophet certainly helps). But Camille's mother expresses the beliefs of many audience members ultimately when she expresses disbelief that her daughter is throwing herself down the drain for a guy who seems ... okay, but really pretty much a jerk. It's that central contradiction of a generally well put-together girl deciding her life isn't worth living because her idiot boyfriend jets off to South America which gives the film (for all its lavish Gallic romanticism) its real-life grit. Hansen-Løve started out as an actress for Olivier Assayas, and so treats her performers here with great care. This was necessary for the film to work at all, since her screenplay is so impressionistic, and leaves so many gaps open for her leads to dance in and out of each other's space, sparring and tilting with wants and needs. However, there are times when it would have been helpful for the filmmaker to push her performers. Créton and Urzendowsky are both possessed of a kind of sun-dappled beauty that's perfectly made for romping about in wide-open fields (they do a lot of that). Also, their scenes with each other are knit together with a quietly fierce romanticism. But left on their own, and interacting with some of the other performers, the two have a tendency to fall flat. This is particularly evident in Créton's scenes with Magne-Håvard Brekke (playing a substantially older man whom Camille starts a relationship with later in the film), a much more seasoned performer who never appears to be acting in the way that Créton strives for.The unseasoned quality of these lead performances hamper the film, no matter how much finely-wrought and realistic passion Hansen-Løve can bring to the screen. She did much better in her last film, the understated small masterpiece Father of My Children, which handled grief with as much rending emotion as she does young love here, only with a tighter cadre of seasoned actors. Still, Goodbye, First Love is a beautiful, painful, baffling romance that never pretends to fully understand the passions at work in its raptorous images, and is all the better for it.

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Damsels in Distress

Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.

It's been a long time since the toga-wrapped revolution of Animal House and the whole National Lampoon "slobs vs. snobs" gauntlet toss. Long enough that in Whit Stillman's long-awaited collegiate farce Damsels in Distress, his lead damsel can intone darkly about how at elite Seven Oaks college, "an atmosphere of male barbarism predominates," and we are meant to think the better of her for saying it. It's not that Stillman is trying to get away with some dire, Tom Wolfe-ian jeremiad about declining standards. Instead, he seems to want to upend the school-set comedy with his own brand of highly literate, quasi-conservative thoughtfulness (characters intoning about how much more interesting homosexuality used to be before wider societal acceptance, and so on) and splice it with a crisp and pastel-hued surrealism. It's Dadaism for the preppie set.

In this universe, TV and smartphones are nonexistent (once you notice their absence, it's as though there's more air in the scene) and everybody talks as though they're unaware anyone is listening. The campus is an idyll of columned buildings and tree-canopied quads, dotted with women in sweater sets and the occasional rampaging fraternity oaf (though even those tend to wear shirts and ties, rumpled though they may be). The leader of the film's botanically-named damsels is Violet (Greta Gerwig), a saucer-eyed and crook-mouthed undergrad who helps run (in spectacularly terrible fashion, it would seem) the campus suicide prevention center, just one of many good deeds she imagines herself doing throughout the day.

Violet has an elaborately structured philosophy of life that she imparts to the new girl on campus, Lily (Analeigh Tipton), with a gravity thoroughly at odds with her brightly colored outfits and puppies-and-sunshine optimism. Having ushered Lily into her group -- dumber-than-rocks Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and prissy Brit-snob Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) -- Violet lectures for much of the film's first fifteen minutes on everything from the spiritual importance of smells to her belief that women should always date men less attractive and stupider than they are. It just makes things less complicated. Lily isn't so sure, as she's juggling the attentions of a smart young businessman (Adam Brody) and a too-suave Frenchman (Hugo Becker), and Lily's boyfriend is stupid enough not to know what color his eyes are. But that's the film's outlook in general: fratboy dunderheads who would be vilified or heroicized elsewhere are here seen as little more than children; poor, polo-shirted rubes who need to be protected from themselves. Like The Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan, Stillman is more in tune with how his characters relate to each other and their surroundings than to the bare vestiges of plot that the screenplay scatters around (particularly carelessly, this time out). Unlike any of his earlier work, which specialized in an Edith Wharton-esque anthropological attention to societal detail, Damsels in Distress is neatly cleaved from reality. It's as though the cast of some wretched teens-gone-wild TV show (and indeed there are many bright-eyed alums of 90210, The O.C. and such in the cast) popped through into an alternate dimension where fraternities were named with Roman instead of Greek letters and students follow the long-dead heretical tradition of Catharism. There's little wrong with this on the surface. Gerwig, pert and perky yet somehow Eeyore-like, is as perfect a muse for Stillman's deadpan quips as he's found since working with Chris Eigeman. Witnesses the scenes where Violet discusses the correct plural of "doufus" is "doufuses" or "doufi" or declaims the importance of tap dancing as a suicide-prevention therapy. But while Stillman hasn't lost much of his spark for crisp rejoinders in the 14 years since his last film, he doesn't seem to have figured out what vessel to package them in. The film froths and bubbles with a sublimely skewed wit, but feels jammed together and arbitrary. Scenes fail to play out, subplots loaded with potential -- such as In the Loop's Zach Woods playing a preening, faux-cynical journalism student who initially seems to be a perfect foil for Violet's crackpot optimism -- fizzle out or are simply dropped. Meanwhile, the three dance scenes that end the film one after the other drain the conclusion of its zing. Stillman was close, very close to crafting a truly weird, pleasurable comedy of manners and madness where snobs don't battle the slobs, but rather minister to them. Damsels in Distress might not be the film it could have been, but it's certainly close enough. 

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Think Like a Man

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

As part of his transition from an original King of Comedy to a satiric self-help guru, Steve Harvey has done the unthinkable. He's exposed the secrets to successful communication with men via undermining the overriding machismo of our paternalistic society...or something like that. His bestselling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man taught a nation of tired women how to work their belligerent beloveds, navigating the unsettled waters of commitment, consideration, and carousing. Now director Tim Story (Fantastic Four) and screenwriters Keith Marryman and David A. Newman (Friends with Benefits) have translated the tome into a randy RomCom featuring an all-star African-American cast. Far more fun than the awful He's Just Not That Into You, this feather-light confection may lack true insights, but it does offer a lot of heart -- and humor.

We meet five men, each with female trouble. Cedric (Kevin Hart) can't wait for his divorce to be final. Dominic (Michael Ealy) can't find someone who supports his often passionate pipe dreams. Zeke (Romany Malco) just wants the physical -- read: sex -- while Michael (Terrence J) is a weak-kneed momma's boy. And then there is Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara) who's locked in a state of perpetual arrested adolescence. When the latter's long-suffering girlfriend Kristen (Gabrielle Union) stumbles across Harvey's book, she sees a way to make her fun-loving frat boy grow up. Suddenly, all the ladies in these men's lives -- the high powered COO Lauren (Taraji P. Henson), the single mother Candace (Regina Hall), and the reluctant beauty Mya (Meagan Good) -- are using the advice within its pages. When the guys find out what's happening, they decide to fight fire with fire.

Think Like a Man is not some minor masterpiece. It's not a work of art that stands with the best the genre has to offer. Instead, it's a casual, comfortable romp which borrows heavily from both sides of the cultural divide. As with many movies geared toward the urban demographic, there is a tweaked Tyler Perry approach to the material, a clever combination of merriment and melodrama that's more hit than miss. We buy into the characters, are willing to watch as they fumble through their situations, and feel a bit misty when it looks like life will reward them accordingly. But Story and his scribes also understand the draw outside ethnicity, and that's where Hart comes in. A seasoned stand-up, he's a one man riffing machine, lacing every scene he's in with a kind of off the wall wackiness that turns even tired punchlines powerful.

But it's the gals who really shine here, each one arguing for a complexity Think Like a Man may not have anticipated. While the narrative is geared toward the guys (they have the major arcs), Union, Henson, Hall, and Good generate the necessary empathy. We can understand their frustrations, their individual failings and false hopes. By the time their men figure out that Harvey's book is to blame, we're invested. That makes the last act all the more potent. Even when we can see the plot machinations churning away, we wonder if happiness will find these deserving divas.

Alas, there are problematic points here and there. Terrence J's attachment to his mother is routine and ridiculous while an intriguing subplot involving Malco's previous career as a wannabe R&B singer is pushed aside unceremoniously. Still, for the sudden arrival of some unexpected sports cameos alone, the movie earns back a bit of its magic. In the complicated world of man/woman relationships, Harvey argues that he has all the answers. Luckily, the movie made from his ideas seems to confirm his comic point of view.   

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The Lucky One

Winner of several imaginary literary and filmmaking awards.

Rest easy: in spite of similarities in both theme and appearance, The Lucky One is actually not Charlie St. Cloud 2. The specter of deceased loved ones does linger over the proceedings, but it's done in a very amorphous mannet. And yes, there is a harrowing waterbound rescue sequence, but it is essentially a deus ex machina, so the screenplay can conveniently pass judgment on the its less-than-wholesome characters. Plus, there is the small matter that The Lucky One, unlike Charlie St. Cloud, doesn't entirely suck. There is certainly enough eye-rolling, teeth-gnashing plot machinations to make the sentient film lover's stomach churn, but the film is at least good-natured and occasionally charming, less flagrantly offensive than many recent tear-jerkers. Yes, I am damning with faint praise.

After The Vow convinced us all it was a Nicholas Sparks adaptation only to turn out to have been based on a true story, The Lucky One arrives in theaters as The Real Deal: a bonafide Sparks adaptation, complete with pristine Southern setting, exaggerated emotional conflicts, an odd blending of conservative ideals and do-gooder liberal values, and characters broadly drawn as saintly or villainous. Sparks doesn't work in subtlety and he uses tragic irony as a prerequisite for all his works. The Lucky One is no different -- it's a transparent, predictable soap opera -- and yet its earnestness makes it ever-so-slightly more palatable than literally all previous Sparks movies. Indeed, Hollywood may have discovered the secret to upgrading Sparks adaptations from execrable to merely mediocre.

Zac Efron stars as Logan Thibault (given the film's love for down-home values, I'm surprised they didn't dump the original spelling and just call him "Tebow"), a U.S. Marine who, after three tours of duty in Iraq, goes in search of an angel. To explain: Logan finds a picture in the rubble -- a picture of a blond, sun-kissed beauty. He carries it with him for the duration of his tour, searching in vain for its owner, and believing it to be his protector, his guardian. This is the basis for the entire story, and yet I've spent more time writing about it than the film spends establishing it.

Logan returns home, suffers a five-minute bout of post traumatic stress, and then decides to go find the angelic woman in the picture. He travels to North Carolina and takes a job at a local dog-grooming business that, as it turns out, is run by the angel herself. Beth (Taylor Schilling) is a fiercely independent single mother who runs the business, raises her young son (Riley Thomas Stewart), and finds time to go on long, creekside jogs. We first glimpse Beth as she emerges like an ethereal nymph, but she is battling her own inner demons -- the first is an entitled pig ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson) who refuses to stay out of her life, and the second is her brother, who died in combat. Like Logan, he was a Marine, and from there you can connect the dots.

The story wrings every last coincidence out of the plot, and the characters chart predictable paths from guarded courtship to ravishing romance, always looking over their shoulder as the villainous ex-husband lurks in the shadows. Plus, Logan continually harbors his "secret" picture, but telling his new girlfriend that he found her picture in Iraq is hardly a point of conflict, try as the screenplay might to use it as the faux conflict to carry the film into its third act.

For all his brooding beauty, Efron is actually a talented actor, and he is serviceable here despite leaning on some of his more grating affectations from time to time. Schilling is good, too -- so engaging that she often upstages all other characters and takes center stage even though the film is really Efron's story. The romance works in its very conventional way, and director Scott Hicks (Shine) lends some visual complexity that occasionally obscures the story's trite melodrama. So surprisingly effective is the acting and filmmaking that The Lucky One nearly seems palatable until it reaches is stormy, treacherous climax, which smothers us in all kinds of Nicholas Sparks until we can barely breathe. It is hardly laudable that a lugubrious romantic drama survives by being less excruciating than its predecessors, but in the case of this film, it is at least a tentative step forward into mild acceptability.

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Awful Scifi Films, Smart "Battleship" Moves, Evil Jedi: To the Mailbag!

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.This week I am going to answer reader questions AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME (unless you're my editor. In which case: Hi. Please don't fire me).

To the mailbag!

First question:

"Last week you listed the science fiction movies you'd show aliens to avoid us being annihilated. Which ones would you show if you wanted us all to die?"

What a horrible and morbid question. And, of course, I immediately thought of several. In no particular order:

Battlefield Earth
Recently crowned the worst science fiction film of all time by the readers of io9, and rightly so. I think the aliens would be offended both at the portrayal of the Psychlos and the idea that an F-16 would still be flyable after centuries of disuse.

Highlander II: The Quickening
A film so bad that adding "The Quickening" to anything you say signals its horribleness ("Transformers: The Quickening," "My 18-Hour Flight to Australia in a Coach Seat: The Quickening," "Your Face: The Quickening") and so incomprehensible that the filmmakers had to make two separate "Special Editions" of the film just to have it make sense.

Either Alien vs. Predator film, but especially the second one
Just in case the aliens wanted a primer on how to murder us in murky conditions.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Could also be used as an argument to save us, as we could tell them that we were smart enough to stay away from this film in droves, making it one of the biggest flops of all time.

Mac and Me
The gag-worthy knockoff of E.T. featuring a dance number with Ronald McDonald. We deserve annihilation for allowing this film to come into being.

There are of course many others. But these are the ones I'd show.

Next question:

"The film Battleship won't be out until May in the U.S., but it's already in theaters overseas. What's the thinking there?"

First, a necessary disclosure: One of the the producers of Battleship, Scott Stuber, is also the producer of the upcoming film of my novel Old Man's War.

Second, it's not entirely unusual to have films release overseas ahead of a U.S. release, especially if the film has more appeal elsewhere. A fine recent example of this is The Adventures of Tintin, whose lead character is far better known in Europe than he is here, which is why the film grossed well over $200 million there and elsewhere before landing on our shores, and why 80 percent of its overall $373 million theatrical gross was from outside the U.S.

In Battleship's case, however, the title doesn't have any particular cachet outside the U.S. (it's very glancingly based on the popular board game), so that doesn't apply. But it's an action-packed science fiction film, a genre which typically does very well internationally: The last Transformers, a series which this movie at least superficially resembles, did two-thirds of its business elsewhere. It's also facing a hugely competitive box office scenario here at home: The Avengers releases two weeks before it, Dark Shadows one week ahead of it, and Men in Black 3 a week after. These films will also likely show up in most major overseas markets on or near their U.S. release dates.

So in this case, it looks like the Battleship folks are taking a film they already expect to make a large percentage of its money abroad and positioning it well ahead of other predicted action/science fiction juggernauts so it doesn't have to compete directly with them. It's also a potential hedge against its competition in the U.S.; if the film rolls into the U.S. with much of its $200 million production budget already covered, then it's going to weather the Avengers/Dark Shadows/MiB3 storm a lot better than it would otherwise.

As the film opened with a strong $58 million overseas and at the top of the box office in 24 countries, it looks like it was a pretty smart movie to launch this ship ahead of the summer overseas.

Third question:

"In your 'Evil or Misunderstood?' column, you appeared to suggest that you think Star Wars' Jedi knights were actually the evil ones, not the stormtroopers. Really?"

I don't think I said I think the Jedi are evil, but I do think there's a very good argument that the Jedi were autocratic to the point of being morally compromised, and they certainly engage in activities we would find questionable, like, for example, taking infants from their homes to be raised in training cloisters, shut off from the rest of the universe, leaving only to be assistants (i.e., something close to a slave) for older Jedi on highly questionable missions. The entire Jedi Council could be locked up on child endangerment charges, and that's just the start.

The real interesting question is whether the Jedi moral ambiguity is there because George Lucas is a genius and wanted to show the complexity of the Star Wars universe, with all its shades of gray, or because Lucas is a sloppy writer and didn't think through the implications of his "good guys." I think one of these answers is more likely than the other, but at this point enough hands have stirred the Star Wars story stew that there will never be a clear answer. Just like real life!

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That's Not Funny! Why Comedy Is Different for Men and Women

Thelma Adams is a New York Film Critics Circle member and the author of "Playdate," a novel.Am I too dumb, or too over-educated, or just not wired the right way to get The Three Stooges? I can never remember the trio's first names, even though I could identify the Pep Boys (Manny, Moe, & Jack) and all the Marx Brothers, even Zeppo. I never found the Stooges funny. All that aggressive slapstick made me wince. Is it a girl thing?

My husband, on the other hand, joins those men (including Mel Gibson, who produced the 2000 TV Stooges movie) who revere the Stooges. He can repeat routines, make the clicking-clucking noises, and do the hand gestures. When I curl my lip, he looks at me, the professional film critic, as if I were someone who doesn't get basic addition, or couldn't spell Mississippi.
My colleague Nell Minow suggested that there may be physiological roots for the difference in our senses of humor. She referred me to a study published in Nature in which neuroscientists studied empathy responses using magnetic resonance imaging. The results suggested that men and women are wired differently in this key area: Women respond to seeing someone they dislike suffering pain with empathy, and men with pleasure at another's misfortune. In other words, women empathize with the victim of violence (hence the wincing every time Moe pulls Curly's hair out by the roots), while men experience schadenfreude when folks get their comeuppance. Men enjoy watching someone get whacked -- as long as it isn't them. Maybe it's because every time someone else gets picked on, they get a reprieve.

It may simply be that women see pain where men see pratfalls.

The science remains pretty iffy but, while women are less likely to laugh at the physical misfortune of others, there's still a lot of comedy out there that satisfies, and not just prefab romcoms. A comedy like The Devil Wears Prada appeals to women because they can identify with Anne Hathaway's naive college graduate and happily witness the comeuppance of her vicious editrix boss, played by Meryl Streep. And yet what really made that movie work was that even the villain had a moment of grace where we saw behind her carefully constructed mask. It's the humor of social, rather than physical, discomfort that makes women laugh.

That doesn't mean that women don't enjoy slapstick, or pratfalls; it's the relentless nature of these comic tools that extract the joy from certain styles of male comedies.

It's no surprise that the Farrelly Brothers (Dumb & Dumber) have made a Three Stooges movie that appeals to their core, predominantly male, audience. The Stooges' trademark routine is preverbal -- a bully and his victims tied to him by blows of attention, the schoolyard trinity. The movie captures these moments, and I wish my laughter hadn't been grudging at the sight of Larry climbing a ladder armed with a buzz saw, knowing that it would cut the ladder in half and there would be a world of pain for all involved, including pompous innocent victims in nun habits. OK, I laughed. I got it. And so did the nuns.

My problem was that I couldn't identify with the trio to begin with. I just don't find the stooges deeply funny, or worth reviving. Whereas I enjoyed the male-driven The Hangover because it was a comic assault on so many fronts: sight gags (a tiger in the bathroom!), social conflict (outcast Zach Galifianakis' desperate attempts to assimilate), unexpected plot twists (the night from hell told backwards), and sexual misunderstandings -- alongside comic putdowns and pratfalls.

The enormous success of The Hangover and bawdy buddy films like Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin have ushered in the dawn of the age of female-driven comedies because that relatively complex formula works equally well with women and men. The Apatow-produced Bridesmaids proved that there is a big market for the techniques of these witty, sexual, and social comedies with female story lines. What I loved about Bridesmaids was the zany comic interplay between the women, like the slapstick view of sex from a woman's point of view that opened the movie. The comedy is every bit as antic, but the physical gags aren't as relentless or violent. In part, it may be because when women want to do damage, they use their tongues. The flat-out flatulence and poop comedy was less amusing, to me at least, even when it was a woman in a wedding dress who lost control of her bowels on a busy street.

The funniest movie I've seen recently is part of New York's Tribeca Film Festival this week, and opens theatrically in August. Written, directed, and starring Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), 2 Days in New York is a hilarious cosmopolitan comedy that combines awkward nudity, sausage smuggling, and sex-act jests with the kind of light farce and snappy dialog of early-career Woody Allen. (Featuring a terrific Chris Rock as Delpy's live-in, and her French father playing a cracked version of himself.) And the jokes don't hit the viewer on the head with a hammer, rubber or otherwise.

Every woman who's sat around a Scrabble board, or bellied up to the bar with her girlfriends, or swapped stories about swaddling babies, knows that our laughter bonds us. We have a sense of humor, thank you very much. And an appetite for funny movies that reflect our real experience beyond the Velveeta Cheese of prepackaged romcoms. There's room for the bawdy jokes of Bridesmaids, and the kooky cosmopolitan humor of 2 Days in New York, and the unexpected domestic comedy of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right.

We certainly have a lot to laugh about, and an abundance of potential story lines -- as Bridesmaids proved so well. Just don't expect us to howl at The Three Stooges, OK?

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5 Great Breakup Songs in Movies

Nina Hämmerling Smith is Filmcritic.com's features editor.Who says breaking up is hard to do? Everyone knows you just need the right soundtrack to you get you through it.

Whether you're feeling desperate or defiant, there's a song for that. Here are five great breakup songs from the movies ... 

Vanilla Sky: "Can We Still Be Friends," Todd Rundgren
It's one of the worst kiss-off lines ever ("Let's admit we made a mistake, but can we still be friends?") and it helps to score the creepiest movie scene on our list (totally NSFW) -- it's not so much a breakup as, well, a "way out." Stuck in a nightmarish not-quite-reality that has him doubting everything, David (Tom Cruise) smothers Julie (Cameron Diaz) -- who he thought was already dead -- with a pillow. While they're having sex.  

Man on the Moon; Men in Black II; In & Out;
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; et. al.:
"I Will Survive," Gloria Gaynor
Perhaps the ultimate defiant breakup anthem, "I Will Survive" has made its way into no fewer than half a dozen movies. Some of the best renditions came from ... three fabulous drag queens in the outback (Priscilla); a singing pooch (MiB II: "And so you're back from outer space" -- get it?!); a small-town English teacher trying to convince himself he isn't gay (In & Out); and a post-Andy Kaufman Tony Clifton (Man on the Moon).

Bridget Jones's Diary: "All by Myself,"  
Jamie O'Neal
Lonesome, drinking wine in her PJs, watching Frasier and checking her voicemail in vain, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is having one heckuva depressing New Year's Eve. But she manages to give herself a little cheer (and set the scene for her determined self-transformation) when she gets all riled up lip-synching to "All by Myself."

Full Metal Jacket: "These Boots Are Made for Walkin',"
Nancy Sinatra
Coming right after the chilling, gruesome final moments of Gomer Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio), Nancy Sinatra's girl-power classic "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" scores a much-needed comic interlude as Joker (Matthew Modine) and Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard) are solicited by a sharp-tongued prostitute. ("Me so horny! Me love you longtime!") 

Dreamgirls: "And I Am Telling You," Jennifer Hudson
It's the "I will not let you break up with me" breakup song. "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" is one powerhouse of a ballad, performed by a powerhouse singer. And while it's certainly true that we love Jennifer Hudson's Effie, her plaintive pleas fall on deaf ears: She may be staying, but her man is long gone.

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Detention

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

With the brilliant The Cabin in the Woods opening on the same weekend, you'd think the hyperactive horror comedy Detention from Torque director Joseph Kahn would suffer by comparison. After all, this is also a movie that micromanages the genre mandates in the same surreal fashion, throwing in its own internal references (The Breakfast Club, Scream) and quirks along the way. But ever since it hit festivals last year, this weird combination of wholly stylized storytelling and slasher film generics has had audiences in stitches -- that is, when they aren't screaming with fear. While the terror tropes presented have been begging for a comic reprimand for years, only Kahn seems to understand how to present them to a post-modern demo. The results may reek of advanced ADHD, but they're a lot of fun, nonetheless.

It's the typical teen experience for the students at Grizzly Lake High. Awkward outsider Riley Jones (Shanley Caswell) just doesn't fit in, and to make matters worse, she has a major league crush on resident cool breeze Clapton Davis (Josh Hutcherson). Of course, he couldn't care less, nursing an equally obsessive lust for choice cheerleader Ione (Spencer Locke). As with all adolescent angst, thoughts of death fill Riley's waking hours. Unfortunately, an actual serial killer known as Cinderhella is willing to make that desire an actual possibility. As he (or she) carves up members of the student body, Principal Verge (Dane Cook) decides that the murderer is actually one of the kids. So he locks them in all day detention, hoping to avoid a prom night tragedy and trap the fiend, once and for all.

If head scratching were a sign of cinematic brilliance, Detention would knock off Citizen Kane as arguably The Best Film of All Time. It's like Donnie Darko as re-imagined by Edgar Wright circa Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It's bound to become a lightning rod within critical circles, earning the kind of love/hate/huh that freak show spectacles like this tend to warrant. No doubt that Kahn sees himself as a cracking social commentator, his approach taking on most aspects of our short attention span culture. From aliens to time travel, high tech accessories to low tech life lessons, his effort is like a primer for personal irony. And with its rapid- fire delivery, nonstop forward momentum, and blink-and-you'll-miss-it manipulations, it's like Crank's Neveldine/Taylor without the Ritalin.

All outside elements aside, the internal process of Detention is as fresh and inventive as the aforementioned Whedon/Goddard meta-monster movie. We see flashes of our own past -- either personal or entertainment-wise -- in the film's nuclear narrative, as well as elements wholly owned by Kahn and his co-writer Mark Palermo. By never giving the viewer a chance to breathe, the duo hope to overcome a few plot holes and personality flaws, and for the most part, they succeed. We don't really mind how vacant Ione is, or how sappy Riley becomes. Instead, we marvel at a motion picture which plays so loosely with the precepts of the medium before readily reconfiguring the artform.   

Perhaps most importantly, Detention is a lot of fun. It's so jam-packed with references and shout-outs that a drinking game could be devised from the many insightful homages. Sure, things spin wildly out of control at times and we do grow a bit tired of all the flashback/flash-forward switch-ups. Still, for its power to propel us through our own individual educational experience, either in front of a teacher or in front of a VCR-fitted television, Detention is terrific. It's also a test of one's movie mantle, with only the most vacant viewer unable to earn a passing grade.

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Lockout

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

John Carpenter needs to have his head examined. The reason? French film factory Luc Besson clearly has an idea bug planted in the horror maestro's brain. With Lockout, the latest from the man responsible for numerous flash-trash action efforts, the logical third part of the Snake Plissken sci-fi series has finally hit cinemas everywhere -- not that Carpenter had anything to do with this blatant rip-off. Like Escape from New York in space, we are witness to a President's high-minded daughter (Maggie Grace) being pulled into a prison riot on an off-planet facility. Naturally, the government needs an ace to swoop in and save her, and that's where ex-CIA agent Snow (Guy Pearce) comes in. Loaded with an elaborate spy skill set and a wealth of one-liners, this gruff action man is poised to pull off the impossible. Unfortunately, his battle with 500 insane convicts is rote and uninvolving.

It's 2079 and our hero has just been framed for the murder of a buddy. While delivering the contents of a briefcase to his secret connection, Mace (Tim Plester), Snow is captured by the head of the Secret Service (Peter Stormare) and charged with treason. When First Daughter Emilie Warnock gets trapped on the orbiting prison MS-1, there is a need for someone to step in and rescue her. Snow is chosen, and going it alone, must confront the psycho siblings -- Alex (Vincent Regan) and his insane younger brother Hydell (Joseph Gilgun) -- who are in charge of the unplanned uprising. With the help of his own wits and some specialized help on the outside...in the persona of pal Shaw (Lennie James), he has vowed to pull this off, or crack wise trying.

With its shivering, shaky-cam action sequences and plethora of groan-inducing punchlines, Lockout is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be. This is no reinvention of the genre or attempt at something artistic. Instead, the benefactor Besson brings on a couple more untried talents -- writers/directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger -- and gives them a guidebook on making middling guilty pleasure fare. If this were 1992, you'd see Dolph Lundgren or Jean-Claude Van Damme's name above the direct-to-DVD cover credits. Instead Pearce plays it up, accenting the half-baked humor in the script while downplaying anything else that could be considered brave or bravura. Lockout is a movie about fun, not fancy special effects or deep meaningful messages. It's all patina and no power.

About the only interesting element here is the performance by UK actor Gilgun. With a head that looks like it was shaved by an epileptic monkey and an indecipherable accent, he's all lean mean jailhouse tattoos and stark raving redolence. He's so unhinged, so lost in his own interpretation of the babbling crackpot criminal that he threatens to upstage the rest of the film. No one can compete with him -- not Pearce, not Stormare, not even his supposedly more level headed slow burn brother Regan. It's a one man clinic on crazy, and Gilgun is one helluva instructor.

As for the rest of the movie, it's flawed fast food, the cinematic equivalent of a bacon-wrapped taco loaded with pink slime meat byproduct and corn syrup. It's not necessarily good for you, but it probably won't kill you, either. In truth, there is nothing wrong with a mindless, over-the-top action romp. Just look at the deadly duo Neveldine/Taylor and their terrific Jason Statham Crank efforts. Lockout could have been on par with that freak show franchise. Instead, by borrowing a bit too liberally, it ends up drowning in its own demented designs.

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The Three Stooges

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

Die hard Stooge fanatics need not worry. After a casting carousel which saw two Oscar winners -- Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn -- and one former big screen superstar funnyman -- Jim Carrey -- considered for the roles of Moe, Larry, and Curly respectively, Peter and Bobby Farrelly decided to go in a different direction. Securing the talents of TV journeymen Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, and Will Sasso, the filmmaking team behind There's Something About Mary and Hall Pass promised to be respectful to the source as well as 'updating' the trio's classic physical shtick. One thing's for sure, they hired the right actors. All three do a good job of capturing the spirit of Howard, Fine, and Howard. Sadly, the Farrellys give them, and this piffle of a film, little else.

Moe (Diamantopoulos), Larry (Hayes), Curly (Sasso) have been living in an orphanage ever since they were abandoned there as babies. They've come to be loved by the doting Mother Superior (Jane Lynch) and loathed by the angry, acerbic Sister Mary-Mengele (Larry David). When they discover that the nuns need over $800,000 to save their childhood home, the boys decide to go out into the real world and try to earn the money. There, they run into a wealthy woman (Sofia Vergara) who wants her husband killed. Reluctantly agreeing, these 'stooges' mess up the murder. Soon, they are reconnected with an old pal (Kirby Heyborne), his lawyer dad (Stephen Collins) and...the cast of Jersey Shore?!? Indeed, they will all play a part in helping these chowderheads get the cash they need.

Aimed directly at the under-10 demographic (there's even a weird 'do not try this at home' warning offered at the end) and not much further up the fan base, The Three Stooges is innocuous. It is also pointless, drab, and lacking in legitimate humor. Unlike the classic Columbia shorts of the '30s and '40s, the lingo-slinging halfwits with a propensity toward eye pokes and face slaps have been brought into the 21st century, and the transition just doesn't take. Every time our heroes open their pie holes to speak, it's like watching the Dead End Kids on Demerol. Diamantopoulos, Hayes, and Sasso are good (especially the last two) but they just don't fit into the post-modern world. The Stooges were always creatures of their own unique universe and throwing them in with talentless twonks like Snooki and 'The Situation' does nobody any favors.

In fact, the Farrellys' decision to place such stuck-in-time personalities within the contemporary settings of our modern mayhem is beyond stupid. We keep waiting for a Vernon Dent or a Bud Jamison to walk in and act as contrast. Instead, the guys just goof around, mimicking the iconic slapstick choreography that generations grew up with and obsessed over, and little else. In fact, all the framework storylines are dull, indicative of a lack of imagination and interest. As suggested by their last few outings, the Farrellys have forgotten the basics of comedy. Even the reliability of a Stooges routine can't cure them of their fondness for gross-out gags (a mid-movie 'fight' with infants in the hospital is just horrible).

Still, this is not the insult the trailers promised, nor is it a revelation ready to reinvent the Stooges for a new audience. Instead, this is a strange combination of homage and hack-job that never rises above its otherwise obvious intentions. Somewhere in the motion picture ephemera is the version of this project as it was originally intended, award-winning actors and all. This take on the Three Stooges is nothing more than a victim of its own sloppy circumstances.

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The Cabin in the Woods

Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

When a film has been shelved for any significant time, it's usually a bad sign. Studios don't usually sit on material they believe will make them money. So when the Josh Whedon/Drew Goddard collaboration The Cabin in the Woods went from next big dread epic to casualty of the MGM bankruptcy, fans feared the worst. Well, worry no longer, lovers of all things monster and macabre. This brilliant deconstruction of the genre,  presented as both a revitalization and a critique of same, shows what intelligence and invention can bring to the otherwise middling scary movie. Though it's unconventional in many ways, it also embraces the very things that made many of us love horror in the first place.

A group of young adults -- the whorish Jules (Anna Hutchinson), her jock boyfriend Curt (Chris Hemsworth), their virginal pal Dana (Kristen Connolly), stoner buddy Marty (Fran Kranz), and a newcomer to the clique, Holden (Jesse Williams) -- decide to take some time off from college and spend the weekend partying at a remote cabin in the woods. Little do they know that they will become part of an experiment run by a couple of buttoned-down bureaucrats (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), the purpose of which has roots in ancient rituals. As the 'characters' in this remote location start dying off, one by one, at the hands of some hideous zombies, no one quite understands what is happening. When the truth is finally revealed, it's beyond shocking.

The Cabin in the Woods is the cinematic equivalent of a fright film geek's goofiest free associations. It's a terrific puzzle box that just gets better and better as the narrative twists and turns. While the ads have given away much of the premise (our leads are indeed part of some surreal controlled sacrifice), they have kept the main plot twist -- and the sensational last act -- a secret. Now, the cynical should be warned. It is a make or break kind of denouement, a revelation that will have you either smiling with glee or groaning with displeasure. Of course, Whedon and Goddard understand this, and offer a set-piece that brings together every great franchise reference they can with enough blood to satisfy even the biggest gorehound.

But there is more to this movie that body parts and slasher cliches. Because they are both steeped in the mythology of monster movies, because each has excelled in taking the old formulas and reconfiguring them for a post-modern generation, Whedon and Goddard are like the Tarantinos of terror. The Cabin in the Woods is loaded with in-jokes, some obvious (the outright homage to Evil Dead), some buried beneath obvious rights issues and studio restrictions (love the Hellraiser shout out, however). They also understand the needs of the seasoned horror movie buff, using a Scream-like acknowledgement of the format's flaws before tweaking them enough create a kind of self-fulfilling satire.

This is indeed a very funny film. We laugh at the cruel way our overseers react to what has happened (the death pool idea is hilarious) as well as our own personal recognition of what was clearly a youth spent in front of one too many direct-to-video chillers. About the only thing missing is legitimate shivers - and one imagines that this is exactly how Whedon and Goddard would want it. In fact, nothing about The Cabin in the Woods stays strictly within the preset motion picture mandates. If two years on the shelf results in something this fun and refreshing, then all movies should be left to age. This one has matured magnificently.

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5 Scifi Films to Help Us Avoid Alien Annihilation

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.Quick! Aliens have landed and are threatening to blow up the Earth (you know, as they do) unless you can show them five science fiction films that prove humanity is worth saving! Which ones do you show them?

While you are all thinking about this deeply important question, here are the five films I would choose and why.

Metropolis
I would show this one for several reasons. One, even 85 years later, it still looks fantastic, and the aliens, if they are observant, will see the visual echoes of this film resonating down into modern (usually dystopic) science fiction cinema. Two, it's also got intriguing social commentary about the idyllic lives of the haves and the grubby, mindless lives of the have-nots, which again is a thread that goes through all of science fiction. Watch a double feature of Metropolis and The Hunger Games and you might be surprised at the points of social conflict consanguinity. Different plots but a lot of common ground. The film makes the point that science fiction has always been a place where social themes have played a role -- and thus, that humanity, flawed though it is, is not blind to those very flaws.

2001: A Space Odyssey
I strongly suspect that Stanley Kubrick is the closest we've come to having a genuine alien intelligence directing a major science fiction film, which is  an accomplishment when you consider that David Lynch directed Dune. 2001, aside from being a landmark film in a general sense, and the right film at the right cultural time, is also one of the least human-accessible films ever made by a major film studio. That's not to say one can't appreciate it or be enthralled by it -- people do and are -- but it's not interested in connecting to people the way films do (and most entertainment does), through emotional channels. It's a film for the brain, not the heart, and perhaps that would appeal to the aliens.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
The film track record of humans meeting aliens is not, shall we say, spectacular: The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, The Thing, Independence Day, Starship Troopers ... not exactly a set of films that roll out the welcome wagon. At the same time, there's no point pretending that humans wouldn't feel anxiety about aliens, even if they ultimately meant us no harm, or even wanted to be friends. E.T. is the film that captures both sides of that equation: The government chases E.T. through the woods and into suburbia, and then searches methodically and unemotionally for him -- and at the same time he's befriended by a child who senses that E.T. is lost and scared and needs someone to help him. It's both sides of the human coin, and I think that's probably going to be a useful thing for the aliens to see.

Creator
This is my wildcard in the hand, since it's not an especially well-known or particularly well-regarded science fiction film, and indeed some people might not call it science fiction at all (despite the fact that it's about a scientist trying to clone his dead wife in his garage). Here's why I include it: Science fiction films often cover the hubris of science gone wrong, from Frankenstein to 28 Days Later, but very few of them do so on purely human terms. It's usually the end of the world or nothing. In Creator, there's definitely hubris -- a Nobel Prize-winner almost casually going about resurrecting his dead wife -- but the stakes are personal, not global. I think the aliens might appreciate having that perspective.

Avatar
One, it's pretty and action-packed and I don't want the aliens thinking that every film has to be homework; maybe sometimes they just want to have a special effects-laden roller coaster ride, just like we do. That being said, the other advantage the film brings to the table is that it makes the humans the bad guys -- i.e., we're far enough along in our societal development that we're OK with not having to be the heroes every single time (yes, yes, the actual hero is a human wearing an alien body. You hush now). I think the willingness to say that maybe it's the other species that's got things right might indicate to the aliens that we're willing to consider them as potential partners and not just a threat (uh, so long as they're looking at what James Cameron is doing as writer-director, and not what he's having his humans do). Maybe that will be the one thing they need not to preemptively wipe us out. We'll have to see.

Your turn: Any films besides the ones I've mentioned that you would offer up to stave off alien annihilation?

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"Captain America 2" Is a Go -- What Villain Will He Face?

Nick Nadel is a comedy writer and blogger living in Brooklyn, NYWhile The Avengers has yet to be released, Captain America fans can rest easy: The Star-Spangled Avenger will return to theaters in a second solo outing on April 4, 2014. (For those keeping score, Iron Man 3 will hit on May 3, 2013, while Thor 2 bows November 15, 2013.) Of course, this announcement brings several questions. (Like, why is what was presumably a summer movie being released in early April?) All we know so far is that the story will continue from The Avengers with Cap still out of place in the modern world. (Presumably there will be World War II-era flashbacks, but nothing has been confirmed yet.) Chris Evans will return as Steve Rogers, but beyond that, casting is up in the air. With Red Skull having been disintegrated by the mystical Tesseract at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, it's anyone's guess whether he'll return for the sequel. So who should get the brunt of Cap's shield? Check out some possible villain contenders for Captain America 2 ...
Outside of Red Skull, Nazi scientist Dr. Heinrich Zemo may be Captain America's most dangerous villain. Capable of building bizarre weapons of mass destruction, Zemo fled Germany after the war and ended up leading the Masters of Evil, a Legion of Doom-style villain alternative to the Avengers. In recent years, his son has taken up the mantle of world-conquering supremacy. Zemo would be a good addition to the movie storyline, as he shares a World War II background with Cap. Maybe he was also cryogenically frozen and is awaiting a world where he can get revenge on Captain America and also find a hat that matches that purple ski mask over his head.  You may think that Captain America's plucky sidekick Bucky (played by Sebastian Stan) perished in the first movie. But, of course, no one ever really dies in comics. Bucky returned to the Captain America comics a few years back after being presumed dead for decades. This time, he was different, having been transformed into the killer assassin Winter Soldier by Russian general Alkesander Lukin. (He later took over the Captain America mantle when Steve Rogers died. Don't worry -- Rogers got better.) Introducing Winter Soldier into the mix along with some World War II flashbacks could be a good way of giving the underutilized Bucky (and Stan) more to do in the sequel. Plus, what's cooler than a sniper with a robotic arm?   Mercenary. Henchman to Red Skull. The guy who killed Captain America (in the comics). The gun-toting, masked baddie known as Crossbones has been a fan favorite ever since his first appearance way back in 1989's Captain America #359. A ruthless terrorist in the mold of Batman's Bane, the muscle-bound Crossbones could easily up the sequel's action quotient. (And also its bodycount.) As a mercenary, Crossbones works for the highest bidder, meaning you never really know whose side he's on. (Though it's usually his own.) Plus, there could be some scenes featuring Taskmaster, another skull-faced bad guy who trained Crossbones in the ways of head-smashing. And speaking of smashing ... Yes, he has an incredibly dumb name. But when you're a hero who wears the American flag on your chest, chances are a villain will come along who wants to smash said flag. And in recent years, ace Captain America scribe Ed Brubaker and other writers have turned Flag-Smasher into an anti-nationalist terrorist who leads ULTIMATUM (Underground Liberated Totally Integrated Mobile Army to Unite Mankind), a group that was at one point funded by none other than the Red Skull. Having Captain America face off against villains with an anti-American sentiment could help make the sequel feel topical and relevant. The multifaceted terrorist organization Hydra was already established in Captain America: The First Avenger. So why not introduce its sultry modern-day leader as a way of injecting some spice into the sequel? Madame Hydra (a.k.a. Viper) could provide an opportunity to cast another actress to face off against Hayley Atwell, should she return as Peggy Carter's niece (and SHIELD agent) Sharon Carter. Since Red Skull is established as the leader of Hydra in the first film, it could be fun to see Red and Madame Hydra butting heads for control. Plus, where Hydra goes, SHIELD is sure to follow. Fun fact: Viper has appeared in a Marvel movie before -- she was played by Sandra Hess in the 1998 Nick Fury TV movie starring David Hasselhoff.  In Ed Brubaker's acclaimed Captain America series, Soviet general Lukin is responsible for killing the Red Skull and bringing back Bucky as the deadly Winter Soldier. However, being a crafty fellow, Skull transferred his mind into Lukin's body via the Cosmic Cube (a.k.a. the Tessaract in the movie) in order to continue his dastardly deeds. Using Lukin (and adapting Brubaker's story) could help to explain how Bucky and Red Skull join Cap in the modern-day world. And if Red Skull returns, perhaps his insane daughter Sin (who has become a prominent villain in the Marvel Universe thanks to her role in the Fear Itself crossover series) could join her pop in terrorizing Captain America.

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Keyhole

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Trailers & Video Coming to Theaters In Theaters New on DVD Trailers by Genre Trailers by Decade In Theaters Keyhole Reviewed by Chris Cabin on Apr 5 2012 Rated by critic: Rated by users: Rated by you: Chris Cabin Beloved by Ebert. full bio of Chris Cabin

Over the last two decades or so, Guy Maddin has cut out an interesting niche for himself, a very careful mixture of filmic nostalgia and personal memory tempered with an oddly modern perversity. Working entirely in black and white and shooting almost entirely on Super 8, Maddin's aesthetic leans (arguably too hard) on a sense of buried discovery; each of his films feels and looks lost, as if found in the ruins of some subterranian kingdom of dirt.

Keyhole, Maddin's first full-length film since his stunning quasi-doc My Winnipeg, constitutes what could charitably be called a transitional picture but is also remarkably close to a catastrophe. Shot on digital, it loses that discovery which gave Maddin's batshit narratives the quality of a fever dream, from the island of misfits in Brand Upon the Brain! to the hallucinatory gothic twitches of Cowards Bend the Knee and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary. The look is clean and clear, devoid of that sumptuous layer of grain, and suddenly Maddin's material is imbued with a unsettling newness; it's the first fully narrative film from the Canadian auteur that feels as if it's of this decade.

Isabella Rossellini, Maddin's eternal muse, however, remains, playing Hyacinth, the specter of a long departed, tellingly named wife who haunts the home she shared with her gangster husband. Jason Patric, who is likely the most popularized actor to show up in any Maddin movie to date, plays the husband, Ulysses Pick, who shows up carrying a woman who believes she has at once drowned or is in the midst of drowning. With the law at their door, Ulysses and his gang decide to hide out in the home where Ulysses and Hyacinth once lived, a home now haunted and riddled with furious, dangerous memories capable of overtaking any living being and bringing them into the eternal otherworld.

The film is something of a voyage through time, through the past that Ulysses has neglected or forgotten -- Ulysses has taken his own son as a hostage and communicates with his dead wife through the titular opening for most of the film. At once excitedly hallucinatory, narratively congested and aesthetically laborious, Keyhole suggests a move forward for Maddin in terms of influence, from the creative madness of Melies, Murnau, and Pabst to the more feverish noirs of Duvivier, Preminger and Aldrich. But the director's storytelling style, prone as it is to grotesque asides and warped subplots, is anything but economical, and Maddin's haunted house, though often unpredictable and unsettling on occasion, feels more like a kitchen sink for his narrative invention than any consistent expression of Ulysses or Maddin's repressed, frustrated memory.

So, as Maddin keeps three narrative streams going -- Hyacinth's ghost world, Ulysses's voyage, and the quickly dwindling group of lackeys on the first level -- we spin further into the director's style and further away from anything resembling ideas or concise craft. It's a pestering, baffling, and exhausting experience, a nightmare of auteurism taken to its most radical lengths where semblance remains only as a bare, single thread employed only to allow Maddin, who wrote the script with regular co-scripter George Toles, to keep his creation moving.

Patric, a talented performer, looks the part of a sullen, haunted criminal lost in memory but Maddin's script takes the viewpoint of the house and its ghosts above Ulysses, making him just another crazed machine of unregulated oddness rather than the film's anchor. He is a mere slave to the Eisensteinian onslaught of Maddin's home on haunted hill. While all of the filmmaker's prior films have involved flights of fancy, Keyhole offers no promise of landing on solid ground or breaking through the atmosphere. It's a perpetual acid-trip comedown.

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