Which is pretty amazing when you stop and think about the billion opportunities it had to go horribly wrong. It should’ve collapsed under the weight of its own hype — this is a movie that hasn’t just been getting buzz since a Comic-Con trailer; it’s been building up across post-credit sequences for years. But while I’ve never been a fan of The Avengers in any incarnation, I have seen and really enjoyed almost all of the lead-up movies (I passed on both attempts to make The Hulk interesting on his own), so I wasn’t able to sufficiently lower my expectations. And still, I loved it. I’m considering myself lucky that I wasn’t a fan of the comics, because I’m not sure how I would’ve handled it otherwise.

It could’ve fallen victim to Spider-Man 3 syndrome, desperately trying to cram so many characters into one summer blockbuster that they all get lost in the noise, and the whole thing falls apart. I was already concerned about that going in, so it was alarming to see them come right out of the gate with Robin Sherbatsky as another character I’m supposed to get semi-attached to. And yet, it’s near-perfectly balanced: it’s not just that characters aren’t overlooked; each character actually gets the chance to steal a scene. The most obvious danger was having the two “underpowered” characters become completely overwhelmed by everything else, but Black Widow and Hawkeye each get multiple opportunities for bad-assery. The movie hits exactly the right tone there: acknowledging that they’re humans fighting alongside super-humans, but not dwelling on it.

At almost two and a half hours, it could’ve very well turned into either tedium or numbing spectacle. But as I was watching it, it seemed like the perfect length. In fact, there were several points during the movie (Black Widow’s initial interrogation scene, and the assembled group arguing on board the S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft carrier) where I found myself wanting it to be an ongoing television series, immediately. “I don’t want to stop watching this. I want it to last at least another 20 hours.”

And of course, it’s written and directed by Joss Whedon, which means that it could’ve easily ended up teetering on the knife’s edge between brilliant and insufferable. The dialogue could’ve been self-consciously clever; instead, the script seems to transition effortlessly between the romantic comedy banter of Iron Man, the ostentatious monologuing of Thor, the naive pulp comic conversations of Captain America, and (what I imagine to be) the tortured-and-haunted-genius dialogue of The Incredible Hulk. Then it seamlessly blends them all together.

It’s even got several of the what-have-now-come-to-be-expected Whedonisms, but they don’t feel like gimmicks or directorial tics. There’s one line of dialogue that sums that up perfectly: “They needed something to avenge.” We never hear the last word, because we don’t need to; we already know how it goes. The line has to be in there, because that’s just how these things work. But finishing it would’ve been too over-the-top. It’s exactly the right level of restraint. In all the breathless reviews and comments I’ve read online, I’ve seen multiple people say, “This is the movie that Joss Whedon’s entire career has been building up to.” I don’t think it’s that much of an exaggeration.

In fact, I think that the aspects of Whedon’s other projects that had me so skeptical — the self-conscious dialogue and the self-satisfied “look how much I just subverted that stereotype” — are what made him perfect for this movie. You can’t build a career out of subverting expectations without first understanding how traditional stories work and how audiences interpret them. When Whedon turns off the irony and lets the earnest Marvel comics fan take over, the result is an innate understanding of how to bring together movie fans, comic book fans, and fans of these characters in particular.

The perfect example of that is the way The Hulk is handled. Everybody in the audience knows the character; there’s nothing to be gained by pretending that it’s a mystery, or that there’s the need for an origin story. Most attempts at handling the character have either been too shallow — he’s just a big, stupid, unstoppable force — or way, way, way too maudlin — a tragic figure desperately looking for a cure for the beast he can’t control and also he’s psychologically damaged by child abuse. Whedon understands that neither of those are going to work, and the most clever bit of all is that he actually winds up getting both.

For the entire first half of the movie, he builds up this aura of foreboding around the Hulk. We see Black Widow, immediately after establishing herself as a bad-ass super spy, react with dread at the thought of having to run up against him. People, including Banner himself, are reluctant to mention him by name. We see brief flashes of his attacks on video screens. He’s established as the one thing powerful enough to tear apart the entire group. The movie doesn’t take it too far — Tony Stark’s there to make it clear that we all know who and what The Hulk is, it’s not like we’re supposed to be genuinely surprised. And then The Hulk’s first appearance turns out to be as horribly destructive as we’d been led to expect; it’s not Hulk as super-hero but Hulk as super-werewolf. But after giving us all of that build-up and the requisite pay-off, then the movie can deliver one final twist on the character: characters have been asking Banner repeatedly how he maintains control, and he’s been reluctant to answer. It’s not just a case of Dr. Jekyll desperately suppressing his Mr. Hyde; it’s not a completely separate personality, but something he has some degree of control over. Hulk as super-werewolf and super-hero.

The nearest I can come to a complaint: there is one gag that’s used repeatedly — one character gets interrupted as another suddenly comes in and knocks him off-screen. And yet somehow, it never stopped working.

Ever since Iron Man took me completely by surprise, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why Marvel’s had so much more success translating super-heroes to film than DC has. Sure, Daredevil and Elektra were abominations, and I’m still waiting for them to make a third X-Men movie (hopefully it’ll come out before they make a sequel to Aliens). But it’s not just that they’ve avoided a string of disasters like Tim Burton’s and Joel Schumacher’s desecration of the Batman franchise. (If you still think that Tim Burton’s first Batman movie wasn’t that bad, then I suggest you haven’t seen it recently enough). They’ve actually managed to produce a string of good-to-outstanding movies. I’ve never been interested in Marvel comics but have loved DC, while with the movies, it’s the opposite. I even liked Thor.

I’ve speculated on why that is, exactly: for one thing, pairing directors with the franchises they’re ideally suited to handle, and letting them put their unique mark on each one. But watching The Avengers finally made it clear. It comes down to the oldest and most obvious observation you can make about the comics: it’s New York City vs. Metropolis and Gotham City. DC’s characters have always been inherently fantastic and larger than life, and their adventures are in fictional cities. Marvel deliberately made its characters human and flawed and placed them in real-world settings, so they’d be more relatable to angst-ridden teens. DC heroes are the ones you aspire to be, Marvel heroes are the ones you identify with.

That’s why Christopher Nolan’s interpretations of Batman are fine as movies but simply don’t work for me as Batman stories, and why The Avengers is the perfect capstone to Marvel’s string of successes. (It’s also why DC works better in animated formats than Marvel tends to). It’s because translating Batman (or Superman) to the real world inevitably drains them of something. Translating Marvel’s characters to film makes them come alive. They’re already designed to be real humans placed into fantastic situations. No matter how bizarre their stories get — and Marvel’s had some of the most bizarre and convoluted continuity imaginable — there’s still something tethering them to the real world. Even Thor’s got family issues and an annoying kid brother.

So you can have a moment like a $10 bet between Nick Fury, one-eyed commander of the paramilitary spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain America, the super soldier who fought Nazis and the Red Skull in WWII before being frozen under the ocean for 70 years, that he’s about to see something he’s never seen before. And it’s a moment that actually works.

Actually, in this case, the old rule about New Yorker cartoons applies even more. “Christ, what an asshole.”

It’s fun for those of us prone to internet rage to get tossed a slow pitch every once in a while. Occasionally a response can knock it out of the park. Instead of having to think about actual issues that really are controversial and require a careful deliberation of the merits of both sides, we can all stand behind the idea that you’re a selfish jackass if you insist on turning on a bright light in a dark room full of people who paid to be there and aren’t cursed with your own irreparably shattered attention span.

In my day, we understood how light works!

Well, most of us can stand behind that, anyway. The only thing that’s worth commenting on at all is the lengths people will go to in order to rationalize bad behavior. Here’s an article about a similar proposal, this time in regards to the legitimate theatertheatre, that tries to pin the blame on the invention of the electric light and then make the claim that being an inconsiderate asshole is a time-honored tradition stretching back to the earliest days of live performance.

I remain disappointed that they didn’t take this to its logical conclusion, and propose that all concessions be replaced with maggot-laden legs of roast mutton.

After all, aren’t we being awfully short-sighted? How can we possibly expect a 17-year-old raised in the age of interactive entertainment to stay focused on the ponderous, Terence Malick-esque existential ramblings of the 21 Jump Street remake? In a world where teens and young adults have constant access to social media, isn’t it just selfish of us in the less-lucrative demographics to just demand that we can escape that for 90 minutes? When people have instant, personalized access to virtually every movie ever made, with the ability to start and stop it at will, while simultaneously updating IM, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, doesn’t it just make good financial sense for theaters to remove the only remaining aspect of their experience that makes them unique?

We’ve already learned that in the brave new world of digital distribution, the whole notion of “being paid enough money to keep producing content that people want to watch” is laughably outdated. As soon as all of us old farts still clinging to 20th century notions of propriety will die off already, the old concepts of “stealing” and “not behaving like an over-entitled shit stain” and “showing a basic level of respect for your fellow humans” will be revealed as the anachronistic, imaginary fantasies that they are. The one surviving multi-national media conglomerate will show $500 million productions free of charge, and audiences of the New Generation will talk to each other and send text messages to people not in the theater as a beautiful display of communal engagement and interactivity. And it will be glorious.

When the new security guy comments that the monsters are “what nightmares come from,” Amy Acker’s character says that it’s the opposite: the monsters in the cells are more like our nightmares made real. At the end of the movie, when the Director is explaining the background of the ritual, she concedes that the whole process is horrible. But she says that before the ritual, when the ancient ones ruled, it was much worse.

It’s obvious from the opening credits sequence — a sequence I still think should’ve been omitted, since it was so obvious that it undermined most of the subsequent reveals — and then made explicit several times over: horror stories fulfill the same role for modern societies that human sacrifices did in the earliest societies. What’s clever is the idea of what that role is, exactly. It’s to make us believe we have control over the uncontrollable.

The complex contains all of our nightmares, safely contained in their own individual cells, ready to be released whenever we need them. The ritual is what we’ve developed to reassure ourselves that we understand how our nightmares work: if we’re smart enough to know to yell “don’t go into the cellar!” or “don’t go into that room alone,” then we’re smart enough to avoid whatever horrible fate comes to the people up on the screen.

Watching young people getting ritualistically murdered is nothing compared to the horror of not knowing, never being able to predict exactly when and how terrible things will happen to us. It’s the difference between modern horror and Lovecraftian horror, which is why calling them “the ancient ones” is even more appropriate.

If you need evidence, just look at how much the Lovecraft mythos has been trivialized and commercialized — turned into board games, video games, bumper stickers, plush toys, and generally turned into an off-hand reference. The recurring theme of Lovecraft’s stories was the idea of the horror that comes from not knowing — something infinitely powerful but never seen, lurking just outside the realm of what we can control and civilize. Something so horrible that even to look at it is to go insane. So of course, we turn Cthulhu into dolls and jokes. We have to give The Nameless One a name.

There’s one thing we still can’t figure out, though: I can’t remember the exact dialogue, but during the party scene in the control room, part of the crew insists that the lack of a cave-in wasn’t a “glitch.” They say that it “came from upstairs.” Does the movie ever explain that?

Obviously, any time I find myself having an even more knee-jerk feminist reaction than a blog post on ThinkProgress, I become alarmed. After re-reading and then re-re-reading Rosenberg’s article, I think it comes down to an over-simplification of what the movie’s trying to do, and a stereotype that (like some plucky young college students) just refuses to die.

How Horror Movies Work

Rosenberg includes an extended quote from an interview with Joss Whedon on Vulture:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people.

The mechanics of slasher movies and horror movies in general are well-worn introduction-to-cinema-studies material, and one of the best aspects of Cabin in the Woods is how it exposes and criticizes those mechanics without being too obvious or too self-referential. (As Whedon says earlier in that interview, “A nod is fine, but a wink is not.”)

The screens in the control room remind us that both the filmmakers and we in the audience are voyeurs complicit in the suffering of these characters. When a slasher movie has the pretty blonde bare her breasts and then immediately afterwards be “punished” by the killer, it allows the filmmakers and the audience to get both the titillation of sex and the rush of violence, without having to feel guilty because we can claim both that it’s a primal study of basic morality and also that she had it coming to her for doing something wrong. Congratulations, here’s your B+, for next week deliver an essay on the use of window frames as movies-within-movies in Rear Window.

Whedon’s quote is in response to a question about including an exploitative scene in a movie that’s supposed to be skewering such exploitative scenes. And his response is, essentially, “Yes, it’s gross, but that’s how horror movies work.” (But worded much better than that, because he’s Joss Whedon).

How Not to Be a Whore

But instead of asking the questions the movie wants you to ask — Why do horror movies work like that? What is it really saying about us when we accept that that’s how they work? — Rosenberg (along with the Vulture interviewer) objects to unequal representation in subverting the stereotypes:

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I’ve got several problems with this, but what first set off my alarm is just how much the language Rosenberg uses here — the language, if not the overt intent — sounds like, “Did you see the way she was dressed? She was asking for it.”

Just from an Internet Feminist perspective — which I think is fair, since the article has the “feminism” tag attached to it — the argument sends a weird message. It’s enough to convince the audience that the big, ridiculously good-looking, football-tossing, letter jacket-wearing Curt isn’t just the giant jock, simply by having another character say “he’s a sociology major” and having him make a reference to a book that Dana is reading. But somehow, we don’t know enough about beautiful, dyed-blonde, short shorts-wearing pre-med student Jules to be properly convinced that she’s not just some whore.

For some reason, we don’t need to know Curt’s GPA to believe he’s not a dumb jock, but we do need to establish Jules’s base-line behavior before we can accept her as a positive representation of young women. We can assume that she and Curt are totally doin’ it, but is that supposed to make a difference? At the beginning of the movie, Jules isn’t “bugging Dana to be less of a prude,” she’s trying to convince Dana to get over an unhealthy, unreciprocated, and explicitly sexual relationship with one of her teachers. And yes, Jules is setting Dana up for some potential action in the woods — but with a smart, good-looking, and nice young man her own age, instead of fostering a misguided crush on an authority figure.

In what passes for morality in traditional slasher movies, all pre-marital sex (and illegal drug use) is bad and deserves to be punished. The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t devote much time to overt moralizing — if anything, it’s more interested in criticizing that over-simplistic “morality” — but it does distinguish between healthy sex and unhealthy sex. Sex is great! Just have some common sense about it.

Which leads to the game of truth-or-dare and the wolf make-out. In the update to her post, Rosenberg says that “both the sexy dance and the wolf makeouts read to me like plausible weekend away showing off, not wildly aberrant, since I had no sense at all of her prior personality.” Each viewer is going to have his or her own interpretation of a scene, of course, but I have to say I’m baffled as to how anyone could interpret that scene as a simple case of naughty girl’s night out.

The scene is tense, degrading, and creepy, even more than the murder that followed. The murder, we could all see coming, and it followed the standard rules of the Slasher Movie First Murder Template. But the make-out scene was a clear, even accusatory, condemnation of the Slasher Movie Titillation Scene. What we have is Whedon’s “perfectly nice and funny” young woman writhing about the room in front of her friends, making inappropriate come-ons that no one is comfortable with, and slowly — almost agonizingly slowly — french-kissing a decades-old stuffed and mounted wolf’s head. The camera cuts between the wolf’s snarling expression, its sharp teeth (is it going to suddenly come alive and attack?), the horrified expressions of Jules’s friends. And it ends with her tongue touching the dead wolf’s tongue. I thought it couldn’t be more clear what the filmmakers were saying: “You want a sexy, sexy drunk wild-girl make-out scene? How about she frenches a gross dead wolf head? How does that turn you on?”

Even if my prudishness is somehow showing, and the overall grossness of that scene weren’t enough of an indication that this was “wildly aberrant,” then how about the fact that each of the characters explicitly says that this is wildly aberrant? Or the scene that delivers the blatant punch-line, where Amy Acker’s character in the compound explicitly says that it’s chemicals in the blonde hair dye that are affecting Jules’s brain.

Rosenberg says that Whedon seemed “kind of irritated” when she raised her concerns at the movie’s screening at SXSW, but I’m not convinced she entirely understands the source of the irritation. Her post has an accusatory undercurrent to it, as does the question posed in the Vulture interview. To paraphrase: “You are one of the most vocal proponents of the positive portrayal of strong women in pop culture. But isn’t The Cabin in the Woods guilty of doing the exact kind of exploitation it supposedly criticizes? If the movie is intended to satirize the objectification and shaming of women in slasher movies, isn’t that undermined by having the sexy blonde bare her breasts and then immediately be punished for being a whore?”

But the question isn’t “Why didn’t the movie do more to show us that Jules wasn’t a whore?” The question is “Why would anyone in the audience assume that she was?” Horror movies work by playing off of the audience’s preconceptions; how much of your own preconceptions are you bringing to the movie?

Contrast the character of Jules, the kind and funny pre-med student, with Rose McGowan’s character in Scream, who played up the role of “blonde sexpot” from scene one (as she was supposed to). Or for that matter, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s non-Buffy role of the superficial ex beauty queen in I Know What You Did Last Summer. They have absolutely nothing in common apart from being pretty, blonde, and the friend of the non-blonde protagonist. Why did the people in the control room — and by extension, we in the audience — so quickly label Jules as “the whore” and not, say, “the scholar?”

It’s not particularly subtle that the control room assigns roles to the men based on their personalities and capabilities — athlete, fool, scholar — but assigns roles to the women based solely on their sexual history — virgin, whore. The message is clear: assigning value to a woman based solely on her sexual history is outdated and stupid.

Rosenberg never says exactly what the question was that she posed to Whedon, but regardless, I think his response is still very telling: “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb.” It’s clear where his priorities lie: Acker’s character says that the hair dye chemicals are affecting her brain by lowering her intelligence. In the Whedon universe, being stupid is the most unforgivable offense, not being sexy.

The question people should be asking isn’t whether or not Jules was sufficiently shown to be promiscuous or not in her “real life.” The question is why anyone should even care.

Being Like Buffy

Focusing on Cabin in the Woods as if it were an overtly feminist work misses the much larger point that the movie was overtly trying to make: what does it say about us in the audience that we’ll happily pay to watch characters suffer as long as they fit into simplified, well-defined roles?

Rosenberg says that the movie is in some ways a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because that series took the traditional horror- and action-movie stereotypes and subverted them.

…a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show is. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

But Buffy wasn’t about debunking simple tropes. It rarely, if ever (it’s been a while since I’ve watched any of it), took the American Beauty route of substituting one stereotype with a different, slightly less obvious one and passing that off as “depth.” “I’m not like this, I’m like that.” Instead, it said that its characters adhered to stereotypes, but weren’t limited to them. “I’m like this and also like that.”

At least for the first few seasons, Buffy remained sarcastic, flippant, and more interested in fashion than in schoolwork. She still wanted to be popular, and if I remember correctly, tried to get back on the cheerleading squad. Willow remained shy, bookish, and nerdy for most of the series. Xander stayed goofy and kind of dense. Giles was predominantly reserved and stuffy. Cordelia remained bitchy and self-absorbed. The show’s formula was to take familiar teen angst and not subvert it, but heighten it: slacking off on your studies could mean The End Of The World. Your mom dating a new guy could mean The End of the World. Losing your virginity could mean The End of the World.

It’s true that, as Rosenberg points out, Buffy had much more time to flesh out its characters. But it’s not the case that The Cabin of the Woods just made the best of what little time it had. It was trying to do something entirely different. Cabin isn’t a regression from Buffy; in a lot of ways, it’s a rejection of Buffy. Instead of showing the audience that there’s more to its characters than the most obvious stereotypes, it asks the audience why its characters need to be stereotyped at all.

To put it more simply: why should a perfectly smart and funny, beautiful young woman have to be a superhero before we’re willing to take her seriously?

The Black One

Criticizing the movie for not doing enough to subvert the audience’s own preconceptions is as much a case of reverse-stereotyping as, say, singling out the movie’s treatment of characters based solely on their race. As Rosenberg says: “(Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached).” But the only black man in the control room is the conscience of the entire group; he’s the only one who shows any sign of trepidation over what they’re doing. He’s the one character meant to represent the audience’s better nature! And he even gets his John Shaft moment when the control room is overrun.

And the only way that Holden doesn’t get a fair shake is that he’s never allowed to fit squarely into any of the predefined roles he’s supposed to fit in. He’s not The Black One, since he survives pretty late into the movie, and he’s the only one who’s presented as a suitable love interest for the white protagonist. He’s not The Action Man, since he yields that to Curt for most of the movie and spends most of the time afterwards just trying to get away. And he’s not The Scholar, both because Marty and Dana are the only characters who actually figure anything out, and because for all the trepidation over Jules taking off her shirt, Holden is the only character that the movie genuinely objectifies.

In the only overtly sexy scene that takes place in movie reality, as opposed to artificially manipulated control room reality, Dana watches as Holden takes off all his clothes, and the camera cuts between her should-I-look-or-shouldn’t-I naughtiness and his ridiculously perfect abs. Keep in mind that he’s stripping immediately after finding out that there’s a one-way mirror installed between the rooms, and he’s supposed to be The Smart One. And for that matter, The Virgin and The Scholar are the only characters who demonstrate any non-chemically-enhanced interest in sex.

And if it were the movie’s intention simply to subvert stereotypes, it did a far worse job with Curt and Marty. For most of the movie, Curt really is the group’s equivalent of Fred Jones, and Marty is the group’s Shaggy. One was the jock, right down to his final motorcycle leap over a canyon; the other was the group’s comic relief throughout. I’d be a lot more disappointed in their treatment, if I actually thought that they were trying to convince me that “but he’s a sociology major” and “but his conspiracy theories turned out to be true” were in any way insightful.

For most of the final act, I was absolutely convinced that I’d figured out the final plot twist. I just knew that the ritual was going to backfire once it was revealed that nerdy stoner Marty was the real virgin of the group, not Dana. And I’m so glad they didn’t go that route, because not only would it have been unforgivably stupid and obvious, it would’ve undermined the entire theme of the movie.

Give the People What They Want

Earlier I said that the group in the control room represented the audience. For most of the movie, that’s the case: just like them, we’re intently watching the carnage play out on a screen in front of us. We’re not invested in the lives of the people we’re spying on, but instead curious about how the spectacle is going to play out. We’re placing bets (figuratively) on what exactly the monster’s going to be, who’s going to die first, which of the characters will survive until the end. When we see a young woman get brutally murdered, we’ll make a token show of remorse, and then get right back to watching the rest of the story play out.

The Cabin in the Woods has been compared to Scream a lot, although they don’t intend to do the same thing at all. What’s clever about Scream (which is still a movie I like!) is that it calls out each of the familiar tropes of horror movies, and then carries them out while still getting a visceral reaction out of them. What’s clever about Cabin in the Woods is that it says, “Yeah, Scream, that’s cute and all, but it’s ultimately meaningless.” And it does so without being pedantic, and it actually manages to be funnier and more clever, although never quite as scary.

By the end of The Cabin in the Woods, we learn that the audience isn’t represented by the people in the control room — if anything, they represent the filmmakers. No, we in the audience are the horrible, never-seen monsters that live beneath. The ones who demand that the filmmakers put innocents through hell for our entertainment. We’re the ones who must be placated.

I don’t believe that Jules is the character we see suffer the most, as Rosenberg claims. In fact, I’d say that Jules’s death is the only one that the movie cinematically treats with anything approaching genuine compassion — it’s the most overtly horrific, and it’s the only one that shows us the reactions of the people in the control room. It’s the only one for which the movie seems to tell us: This is bad. You should feel bad about this.

I didn’t have my stopwatch handy, but I got the impression that the attack on Dana was much longer, more brutal, and more drawn out. We see her knocked to the ground over and over again, trying to crawl for help before being pulled back, coughing up blood, and repeatedly beaten.

The difference is that Jules’s death is filmed in the traditional slasher movie style, with all the ghoulishly mixed messages that implies: here’s the two-for-one tits and violence that you paid to see! Are you not entertained? The attack on Dana, however, is relegated to the background. It never leaves the frame, of course — we did pay good money to see this young girl get tortured, after all, and we’d better get our money’s worth! — but it’s not given the focus, since the people in the control room have stopped caring.

Because the rule is clear: the virgin can survive, but she doesn’t have to. The people in the control room have already broken out the champagne, because their job is done, and they’ve once again satisfied the demands of their masters. (Us, in case we’ve forgotten).

In other words: all the talk about the “rules” of horror movies, and all the attempts to describe them as modernized morality plays, are complete bullshit. It’s not about punishing the sinful or rewarding the pure, because ultimately, we don’t really care. The idea that these characters are being punished for something they did wrong is bogus; that’s just one of the ways that we distance ourselves from the realization that we want to watch them suffer.

And it’s why the characters have to be forced into a predefined set of stereotyped roles, even if those roles don’t fit. It’s so that we can remind ourselves that this isn’t real, these aren’t people, but types. That way, we don’t have to spend any time thinking about what is real: no matter whether the movie’s a masterwork of modern horror or a cheesy slasher flick, no matter how good we say we are at separating fiction from reality, the one thing that’s undeniably real is that we’ve demanded to be entertained by the sight of young people being tortured and murdered.

That’s why the suggestion of giving just a little more detail to Jules or Holden’s characters is ultimately ghoulish. Why would it be any more or less sad to see Jules being snared by a bear trap if only we knew whether she was a smart independent young woman or a promiscuous party girl? What does it matter whether she’s a positive representation of women in popular media when we know that she’s going to get slaughtered either way, because that’s what we came here to see? Why can’t we feel “real pain in the loss” of Holden getting a spike through the throat unless he gets more dialogue? How do we rationalize the idea that sex, race, or even whether we’ve gotten to like a character, makes their senseless murder any more or less poignant?

When Dana and Marty release all the monsters, that’s when the movie makes it explicit how much the “rules” actually matter. There aren’t any rules to any of this; it’s pure chaos. We laugh at it because it can’t hurt us, and we enjoy it because it’s movie justice — the bad guys are finally getting what’s been coming to them. But that sense of over-simplified morality is shown to be every bit as false here as it was above ground: the “conscience” of the control room is one of the first to get killed. And the monsters take out Amy Acker’s character just as easily, without stopping to think about whether or not she’s smart and how much sex she’s had. And more significantly, without stopping to consider whether she’s been complicit in all this.

The best horror stories are the ones that don’t make any half-assed attempt to justify what they do with a set of “rules,” or try to establish a safe distance between the audience and the characters. Real horror comes from the realization that horrible stuff happens for no reason at all. It’s not because you got drunk or stoned, or because you had sex, or because you’re a woman, or because you’re a minority, or because you’re the selfish guy who ran away from the rest of the group, or even because you’re particularly good or evil. Those are the things we tell ourselves, to reassure us we have some control over it. But we have absolutely no control over it. The catharsis we get from horror stories doesn’t come from seeing people being punished for bad behavior, it’s from seeing horrible things happen to people who aren’t us.

That, in itself, is pretty horrible. Which is why we’ll go to great lengths to keep from having to think about it.

Like Rosenberg, I went away from The Cabin in the Woods believing that the ending was something of a nihilistic cop-out — maybe this world isn’t worth saving. But after thinking about the movie (and writing what has become a novella about it), I now believe that’s too simplistic an interpretation. Obviously, the movie is an indictment of horror movie cliches — not the cliches themselves, but the need for them at all.

The message isn’t that life in a world like this isn’t worth living. The message, if anything, is that life is precious. None of the characters did anything to deserve having their identities stripped away from them so that they could be systematically murdered. And Dana refuses to kill Marty even though all of the “rules” of storytelling tell her she’d be justified in doing so. Sure, the monsters are going to be upset that they didn’t get the logical, expected outcome of their story, but satisfying that just isn’t worth the cost. It’s better for the virgin who slept with her teacher to sit and have a joint with the illegal drug user, while the outdated and morally bankrupt notion that there’s a just and proper method of murdering people crumbles around them.

• I absolutely loved it.
• The official trailer seems like it spoils the entire premise of the movie, but I’ll assure you that it doesn’t.
• This is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that genuinely kept me guessing, so avoid watching or reading anything else about it before you see it.

Because Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s names are on the movie, it’s pretty much guaranteed an audience from fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Cloverfield. I hope it goes even wider than that, though, because it’s really smart and a hell of a lot of fun. It reminded me a little bit of Drag Me to Hell — a fairly slick Hollywood production that somehow retains the swagger of a low-budget indie.

So yeah, don’t watch or read anything about it, starting NOW.

For anyone who’s already seen it — or anyone who for whatever reason still needs to be convinced — my take on it is after the spoiler safety jump.

Even more than Drag Me to Hell, the tone of the movie reminded me of Angel. No big surprise there, of course, since Goddard directed and co-wrote it with Whedon. But what did surprise me is how they finally managed to make the schtick work.

Because I tried over and over to get into Angel, and I always went away disappointed. The concept was solid enough: taking the monsters of fantasy, religion, and folklore, and setting them against not just modern technology, but modern sensibilities. The problem was that they seemed so pleased with themselves for coming up with the concept, they never bothered to do anything with it. It was most often reduced to a clumsy joke: “you think demons are scary? You’ve never dealt with Hollywood lawyers!”

The Cabin in the Woods takes the idea that Whedon’s tried so many times (including with an entire season of Buffy) and finally gets it right: jaded members of a centuries-old shadow organization with advanced technology, pitted against a group of self-aware young people.

Even better, it’s not too self-aware. It hits a lot of the same points as Scream, but it’s almost casual about it: no explicit declarations of “Look how much life is imitating art because we have become characters in a horror movie.” Instead, the movie just assumes throughout that we’re all part of the same pop culture, we’ve all seen the same movies and TV shows, and the audience is plenty aware of what’s going on.

And after saying all this, I haven’t even spoiled the movie yet. I’d gone in convinced that I was smarter than the dopes advertising this movie, the big premise had already been revealed by the trailer, and I knew exactly how it was all going to play out. But instead of starting with the slow burn of college kids gearing up for spring break, we get two awesome character actors riding a golf cart through some kind of industrial complex. It’s like the movie is telling us from the first frame: “Yeah, we know exactly what you thought this was going to be. It’s not. Shut up and watch.”

And then, to drive the point home, a perfect B-movie title card.

The movie defied my expectations over and over again, giving a twist where I hadn’t expected one or denying one where I was sure I had it figured out. At no point did I feel like I could figure out how the movie was going to end.

And I get the sense that they couldn’t, either, since it just kind of peters out. Also, I got the impression that the big guest star reveal towards the end was supposed to have more weight than it did. (Especially since Paul already did the exact same thing, and it didn’t pay off there like they expected it to, either).

But that’s all I’ve got to complain about. It was genuinely scary in places, genuinely funny throughout. It finally delivered on the premise of Post Modern Horror Movie without sacrificing too much of the horror movie or being insufferably self-aware in the post-modernism. And best of all, it’s finally a fun horror movie that treats the characters and the audience as if we’re all at least as smart as the filmmakers.

Why is the existence of a completely unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary remake so interesting to me? It’s because I’m preternaturally sensitive to marketing, but I still had absolutely no idea that this movie was coming out. Thinking back over the past couple of weeks, I can now remember seeing posters at bus stops, a billboard, and 15-second blipverts for the movie on television. But I thought every one of them was advertising the DVD or Blu-Ray release of the Clash of the Titans movie.

Logically, that doesn’t make sense; that movie came out two years ago. I already suffered through its ad campaign, and probably already lived through the campaign for the pay-per-view and DVD release.

But the fact that the ads for the sequel are so similar to the ads for Clash of the Titans — not to mention that the titles are so similar — along with my assumption that the last one tanked at the box office — it didn’t; according to IMDB it made more than twice its budget in theatrical release alone — combined to make me believe that the new movie just didn’t exist.

It’s like the experiment on change blindness above, or another widely-imitated study on change blindness by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin, or the well-known experiment of selective attention by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (the one with the basketball players).

My brain simply refused to accept the existence of a sequel to Clash of the Titans.

Also Immortals is apparently not a part of this franchise, but it is getting its DVD release ad campaign right now.

A few weeks ago I was given a run-down of all the Fast and the Furious movies, in order, with the (supposedly) distinguishing feature of each. Those movies seem to break every rule of marketing, not just by assuming people can tell the difference between “Fast and Furious” and “The Fast and The Furious” but also by assuming people can tell the difference between Jason Statham, Paul Walker, and The Rock. I’m amazed that it works at all, much less that it makes tons and tons of money.

I just have to gawk at it in wonder, as it defies everything I know about the universe. I also have to wonder why they needed to retitle The Avengers to Avengers Assemble in the UK, fearing comparisons to the British TV series (or the execrable movie), when it’s clear that distinctive titles don’t mean a damn thing anymore.

Another interesting, impossible-to-believe fact: YouTube comments can sometimes be helpful. I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise that Professor Simons in the above video changes his shirt color as he’s being interviewed.

A former Confederate soldier, now prospecting in the west and on the run from Apaches, stumbles into a cave. He’s mysteriously transported to Mars, where he’s captured by a tribe of Martians and kept as a pet. He earns the respect of the Martians, rescues and falls in love with a beautiful princess, and then leads his former captors in battle to save the princess’s people. After his victory, he’s unwillingly transported back to Earth and forced to find a way back.

That’s gold. It’s what’s kept a story relevant enough to want to film it almost one hundred years later. It’s what inspired a direct rip-off character that has itself become a classic. I’d pay to see that story. In fact, I did pay to see that story.

What I got, though, was: an airship battle between warring city-states, interrupted by a trio of weird god-like men with a magic weapon. Then a tedious and unnecessary narration. Then a spy chase through the streets of 19th century Manhattan. Then a needlessly drawn-out version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s original framing story. Followed by an extended sequence that over-complicates the set-up of Carter’s trip to Mars, which I’m guessing was intended to introduce Carter as some type of post-Civil-War bad-ass.

When we finally get to Mars, the rest of the movie is an attempt to combine A Princess of Mars with its sequel, The Gods of Mars. That means introducing the Tharks, infighting and family intrigue among the Tharks, a friendly dog, an ongoing war between Zodanga and Helium (the spray-tan humanoid species of Mars, distinguished only by red or blue flags), the Therns, the goddess Issus and the river Is, blue light, white apes, arena battles, airships, a wedding, and a final bit of subterfuge at Carter’s tomb.

And since that wasn’t quite enough, they added a bit of backstory in the form of Cowboys and Aliens-style flashbacks to Carter’s wife and daughter.

I’ve read reviews that called it “confusing” and “incoherent.” It’s not really confusing, since the story’s easy enough to follow once it settles down into a linear narrative. It’s just that so much of it is unnecessary. It tries to tell too much story, which results in none of the story having enough time to make a significant impact.

In A Princess of Mars, the lack of explanation for how Carter traveled from Earth to Mars made it intriguing, and it made his relationship with the princess Dejah Thoris and his new homeworld of Barsoom more poignant. Using characters from the sequel to try and explain it just takes all the mystery out of it, turning it into a typical hero vs. villain story.

In the original, there’s a real sense of discovery as Carter adjusts to life on Mars and his new “powers” there. Carter proves himself a hero for learning the ways of his captors, not just for being able to jump really high on account of the reduced gravity. He learns their language. The green Martians Tars Tarkas and Sola become genuine characters with interesting relationships. The movie, though, just skims over all the development of the green Martians, jumping from one moment to the next as if to get back to the Gods of Mars as quickly as possible. Because, I guess, a bunch of bald white guys in silver suits are more interesting than 15-foot-tall, six-limbed green aliens? Later, though, the movie presents what are supposed to be dramatic moments of resolution with the green Martians, but they all feel hollow since none of them were earned.

Also most of Rome is in the cast, for some reason. I suppose casting Caesar and Mark Antony made practical sense, since we already knew they looked good in Roman military uniforms. (I’m guessing that Posca came along as a cast-two-get-one-free deal). All it did for me was remind me how well Rome was able to compress so much history into a miniseries and still have the dramatic moments feel meaningful.

I’m not sure why filmmakers would take a pulp story or comic as their source material and then attempt to change up the narrative. Embellish it, streamline it, or make it more contemporary, sure. But these stories are long-lasting because they work as narratives, not just as concepts or jumping-off points.

And incidentally: I’d like to plead with filmmakers to stop using narration already! If you have to have someone narrating the setting and premise of your story, then that’s a sure sign you’re just not telling the story well. It always does more harm than good — even if you don’t trust your audience to follow what’s going on, how can you possibly expect 60 seconds of a guy talking about Barsoom, Zodanga, and Helium is going to help?

I hate being dismissive of John Carter. It doesn’t deserve the beating it’s getting from critics, many of whom are going in biased against a pulp story. And it definitely has its moments. The arena scene is impressive, as is Carter’s battle against an army of green Martians. Every scene with the dog is fantastic. There’s genuine humor throughout. The costume and set design are extremely well done. The creature CG is believable, even though none of Carter’s jumping shots work. The airships are impressive, and there are moments of genuine excitement in a couple of the battles as Carter leaps from one ship to the next. And the finale is a satisfying reversal that improves on the original.

In fact, there are enough scenes in John Carter to make a couple of really good movies. The problem comes from trying to mash them all together into one. I’m guessing that they wanted to beef up the story with enough action and battle scenes to launch the franchise with a bang. The problem is that by trying to mash together Princess of Mars and Gods of Mars into one movie, instead of letting them play out as sequels, they’ve all but guaranteed that a sequel won’t get traction.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success, it was in a double feature with Ace in the Hole, and it was such a perfect pairing it became one of those transformative movie-going experiences for me. Both are dark, nasty movies with big performances and some of the best dialogue ever delivered in a movie. One of Ace in the Hole‘s standout lines: “I’ve met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you… you’re twenty minutes!”

(Both Sweet Smell of Success and Ace in the Hole have Criterion editions that are highly recommended).

I spent the first half of The Duellists looking for anything it could have in common, thematically, cinematically, contextually, or otherwise, before I just gave up. Then I started trying to think of all the ways the two movies are the opposite of each other, and gave up because there are too many to list.

Apart from “both run at 24 frames per second” and “both have music,” the most charitable thread of connection I could come up with was that both are very much movies of their time. (I do actually know the real reason they ran together: they showed Sweet Smell of Success because it’s a classic to lead into the upcoming Noir City run, and they got a 35 mm print of Ridley Scott’s first film and they really wanted to show it off. But I’m trying to make a point here).

I wouldn’t say that The Duellists is a bad movie; it actually has its moments, and to an extent I can appreciate its attempts at authenticity. But it is overwhelmingly a 70s movie. It’s packed full of 70s cinema tics and cliches; it proclaims itself as a product of its time as loudly as David Fincher’s movies scream “1990s movie.” (Or more accurately, say “1990s movie” in text scratched onto magnetic tape with Nine Inch Nails music playing and bugs crawling over it).

It’s especially remarkable how much The Duellists conveys the 1970s when you consider that it’s a period piece, set in Europe and Russia in the early 1800s. The color of the film, the languid pacing, the scenes that have two lines of dialogue before ending abruptly, the smoke and fog piped in from just off screen, the presence of Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine and Tom Conti, the “realistic” lighting — all of it date the movie squarely in a narrow window between about 1973 and 1982. No one who’s ever seen a movie or television show from the 1970s would believe that The Duellists was in the era of Napoleon and not the era of Jimmy Carter.

That’s probably my most useful takeaway from the movie — finally I can identify what it is that’s always bugged me about movies from the 1970s, why I find them all (except Star Wars and Annie Hall) creepy, unsettling, and unpleasant. So many of them try for a kind of neo-realism, making a point to reject the glamor and over-production of pre-60s Hollywood and the experimentation of the 60s, and instead just be straightforward and tell it like it is. But it resulted in its own language of mannerisms and flourishes that today seem even more artificial than the most conventional Hollywood movie. For all of its effort to stay true to the costumes, hair styles, historical accuracy, and locations of 19th-century Europe, it’s telling that all of the stylistic flourishes of The Duellists end up being even more dated and distracting than casting Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine as French military men.

There’s no question that Sweet Smell of Success was made in 1955: it’s in grainy black and white, newspapers not only exist but are important, jazz quintets play in nightclubs, and the plot’s biggest scandal involves marijuana and allegations of communist sympathies. And yet once the bombastic opening music dies down, it never once feels dated. Instead, much like His Girl Friday, it feels as if it’s been pulled from an alternate universe where time doesn’t exist, everything happens in a perpetual now, and everything everyone says is really cool.

The first time I saw Sweet Smell of Success was much like my first time seeing Miller’s Crossing; I was so swept up in the dialogue that I was barely able to process anything else. (“Hey Falco, come down here so I can chastise ya.”) Each time I’ve seen it since then, I’ve noticed something new. This time:

• There’s more subtlety to Tony Curtis’s performance than I ever gave him credit for. (And I already thought it was a great performance just for being able to deliver all those lines and make them sound natural). It’s made explicit that he’s an unscrupulous social climber who’ll do anything to get back into J.J.’s good graces. It’s even made explicit that he’s so duplicitous that even the people who know he’s lying to them can’t tell when he’s lying. But what I’d never noticed is how quickly and subtly Curtis had to shift gears from scene to scene and often within the same scene.

  Whenever one of Falco’s schemes goes awry, you can see the flashes of expression change on his face: a moment of panic, a recalculation, and then he snaps back into character. Sometimes, when it’s crucial to the plot (like when he’s trying to blackmail a columnist, or when he’s trying to trick a hack comedian into becoming a client), the change in expression is almost silent-movie obvious. But he’s doing it constantly — trying one tack, panicking, reconsidering, and then popping into a new character. One of the best is when Falco’s confronted by Steve in his office, and Falco is simultaneously posturing and trying to play all of the characters against each other.

• The scene in which J.J. is finally introduced, at a dinner table with a senator and Falco trying to get back into J.J.’s good graces, is one of the movie’s most famous. And with good reason: there’s a ton of nasty dialogue showing just how ruthless Hunsecker is, and it’s Burt Lancaster’s chance to establish just how dominant his character is. But Curtis is still doing his whole range of Falco’s dramatic shifts in mood, desperately looking for an opportunity in anything that’s been said, trying to measure how much he can get away with, and scavenging like a hyena for any information he could possibly use to his advantage.

  And he has to do it all from his carefully-staged lap dog position behind Lancaster’s right shoulder, and all without taking any of the attention away from Lancaster. For all of its good points, Sweet Smell of Success is not a movie you go away from thinking, “Man, that was subtle!” But Curtis’s performance in that scene does so much, while seated, in the background.

• The still above, taken from that scene, is a great example of what I’m talking about. Curtis has that expression through most of his interaction with Lancaster’s character: Falco absolutely despises Hunsecker, but at the same time worships him as an example of someone who’s achieved everything that Falco wants for himself. That expression combined with his body language are a perfect combination of hatred mixed with admiration and fealty.

  The best illustration of that dynamic, however, isn’t subtle at all. It’s a fantastic moment from later in the movie, when Hunsecker tells Susie and Steve that he wouldn’t hesitate to take a baseball bat and break it over Falco’s head. He then raises a cigarette, and Falco immediately jumps up with a lighter to light it for him.

• Curtis also gave Sidney Falco a tic to show that he’s in a perpetual panic for fear of losing everything: in the moments where he’s most desperate, he bites his fingernails. He doesn’t do it constantly, and he doesn’t make a big show of it, but it’s a clear signal that everything is about to fall apart unless he thinks quickly.
• To really appreciate what a balancing act it is to pull off subtlety in a movie whose style and dialogue require such broad performances, contrast Tony Curtis’s performance with Gabriel Byrne’s in Miller’s Crossing. Both are playing characters who are playing both ends against the middle, and both are having to deliver fantastic dialogue in a way that makes it sound, if not natural, then at least plausible. But the character of Tommy in Miller’s Crossing has to be not just cool, but completely impenetrable. We can’t ever know what he’s really thinking, or else the entire movie falls apart into nothing more than snappy dialogue, cinematic flourishes, and a really cool gunfight in a burning building. The only indication we ever get that Tommy is anything other than cool and composed is when he loses his hat.

  Curtis, on the other hand, has to play a despicable, obsequious, and ruthless character and make him sympathetic. Otherwise, his crisis of conscience makes no sense. And the only dialogue he gets to convey that with is his speech to his secretary at the beginning of the movie (and even then, he’s having to posture as a world-weary tough guy). So we need to see his expression changing throughout, for it to read as desperation instead of cold-bloodedness.

• I wouldn’t call the movie a noir, exactly, but the high contrast and the lighting sure do make a solid case for it. In particular, the shadows from Burt Lancaster’s glasses frames perfectly complement his I’m-boring-deep-into-your-soul squint, making him look more evil and intimidating than any stage makeup would have.
• It’s easy to believe that everybody in Sweet Smell of Success speaks in the same otherworldly, impossibly hip banter. But there’s a clear class divide separating the “normals” from the people who’ve immersed themselves in the world of newspaper columns and press agents. Even the older couple that Falco tries to blackmail use the same expressions, as if they’ve been in that world too long to stop talking like that. But Steve and Susie are the couple we’re supposed to root for, the ones who are free of all that corruption, so they talk more or less like normal people. (Even though Steve’s the leader of the jazz quintet, he’s supposed to be the least hip).

  Contrast that with His Girl Friday, where Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s banter establishes them not only as a couple, but as a couple fully immersed in the news world. Ralph Bellamy’s more straightforward dialogue makes him not just a dullard, but an outsider.

  And again, contrast it with Miller’s Crossing, where everyone speaks in deliberate Coen-ese. In that movie, the dialogue isn’t supposed to establish character so much as build a fantastic world where everybody’s corrupt. (And still, Garbriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Harden’s characters get the best lines because they’re the smartest).

• All that said, I do wish the character of Susie in Sweet Smell of Success had been given more to work with. You can’t fault the actress, since it’s clear she was portraying a character who’d been all-but-broken by her creepy relationship with her domineering brother. She just wasn’t given enough dialogue other than “Steve…” to be able to make her character seem anything but insipid. Every time I see the movie, I forget how it ends, because I can never read what exactly her character is thinking during the final scenes. That’s partly because as in the rest of the movie, she has almost nothing interesting to say during her final scenes.

After going into cinema studies student mode for that long, I’ve realized that Sweet Smell of Success and Miller’s Crossing would be another excellent double feature. Look into your heart, Castro Theater!

When I was younger, I used to wonder why the Muppets’ movies always started with them getting together or back together. They all met in The Muppet Movie — I saw it! — so why were they acting like strangers in The Great Muppet Caper, and why did The Muppets Take Manhattan need to have them singing about how great it was to be Together Again?

I’m sure there are all kinds of screenplay-driven justifications: setting up a conflict for the first act, making sure each character gets an entrance, giving room for a song about friendship. But after seeing the version in The Muppets, I suspect there’s more to it than that. It’s to let all of us shed the parts of ourselves that are self-conscious and mired in cynicism and irony, and let us get reacquainted with the parts of ourselves that just want to be joyously goofy.

The Muppets is joyously goofy, and it’s unabashedly a love letter to the Muppets themselves. A cynic could say that it’s nothing more than a feature-length advertisement for the franchise, but lucky for us, cynicism stopped being a thing years ago.

The movie follows the basic template of The Muppet Movie, but the gang isn’t starting out as unknowns working for their big break; they’re already famous. Recognized by everyone, but still actually loved only by obsessed weirdos. When they find Kermit, he’s living alone in his Bel Air home having lost touch with the rest of the gang — in an interview for the press kit, the director mentions the setup as like Sunset Boulevard, which is a brilliant connection I hadn’t picked up on. The Muppets stayed big; it’s everyone’s hearts that got small.

The problem for the Muppets in this movie isn’t recognition but relevance. Everyone loved the Muppets as a kid, but there’s no audience for them anymore. The world’s outgrown them. Normally, basing so much of your story’s premise on the idea that your characters are no longer relevant would cross the line of “self-aware” and go straight to “defensive.” But The Muppets treats the issue just like everything else: by saying it’s silly.

So many attempts to make family entertainment make the mistake of targeting parents by taking children’s material and making it more adult. But who wants that? It’s far better to make something that lets adults remember how awesome it is to be a kid? The movie shows that the Muppets’ hipper, edgier counterparts seem laughably dated, and it’s the decades-old, shamelessly earnest original Muppet Movie that’s had the real staying power.

Those of us who dismiss the 70s as a painfully un-self-aware dark age in which someone as schmaltzy as Paul Williams could become a bona fide trans-media celebrity: this isn’t the movie for us. It’s mode for those of us who still cry at the final chorus to “Rainbow Connection.” And if you don’t tear up during The Muppets‘s version when Animal finally loses it, then you’re made of cold, hard stuff.

But then, I had tears in my eyes for the whole thing, from the short (which was a brilliant, unexpected surprise) all the way to the end. It’s at the same time a celebration of being silly, and it’s a reminder that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be silly all the time. (Speaking of being silly, I never would’ve realized how Muppet-like the Flight of the Conchords already are without seeing Bret Mckenzie’s songs performed Muppet-style. I was skeptical that it would fit without being jarring, but the songs are the best part of the movie).

When the Castro Theater did a special presentation of Labyrinth, they had a great Q&A with Dave Goelz (far too unassuming a guy for someone with his history) and Karen Prell (who has the most amazing resume of any living human). For me, it was kind of a reality check: “I’ve loved you people for years and hadn’t even realized it!” The outpouring of love from the audience made it clear that the Muppets never stopped being relevant; most of us just let ourselves forget how miserably grown-up we’ve gotten.

And everybody should go in as unspoiled as possible, so skip the rest of this if you haven’t yet seen the movie. What happens at a me party stays at a me party. Or, the first rule of The Muppets is not to spoil any of the enjoyment of The Muppets.

I think even if we didn’t know the story of how Jason Segel got to be involved with the project, it’d still be clear that the movie was made by unabashed fans. Forgetting Sarah Marshall turned out to be basically forgettable, but the one memorable part was Segel’s opera about Dracula with puppets. It was such a bizarrely brave non-sequitur. Refreshing to see someone who didn’t feel the need to make excuses or qualifications, and just be weird.

And that’s what makes the Gary-Mary-Walter triangle, not the let’s-save-the-theater storyline, the main story of The Muppets. It’s hard not to see it as a Fight Club situation, especially after the “Man or Muppet” song. There’s the lifelong Muppets fan who never felt like he fit in anywhere else, and then there’s the part who has to grow up and behave like an adult.

It’s cleverly done, since it keeps the message from being as trite as “be yourself” or “never lose your sense of childlike joy,” both fine lessons to keep in mind, but both too simple to mean anything on their own. The lesson is how to be self-aware without being self-conscious, and how to retain your childhood without being a manchild. Even Kermit has to learn it’s not enough to be loved by everyone if you end up alone. He has to get over himself and his commitment issues, and finally acknowledge who’s important to him.

Surprisingly grown-up for a movie with fart shoes. (Which are still hilarious no matter how old you are).

One of the best moments in the movie is when Walter’s trying to find out how he can contribute, what exactly it is he’s good at. He tells Kermit, “You’re all so talented,” right as Fozzie shows up with his fart shoes. Kermit’s reaction says more than any actor with an articulated face could. The appeal of The Muppets isn’t that they’re talented, but that they put themselves out there to bring us all the world’s third greatest gift.

And that’s really the only complaint I can dredge up about the movie. Everything else is pretty great. Essentially it’s the movie I wanted The Rocketeer to be, way back when. It feels as though instead of cranking out another franchise movie, they started with the idea of making a solid, old-fashioned WWII-inspired movie. And applying the hundreds of millions of dollars that come from a popular franchise to that idea.

There’s absolutely no doubt that this movie had an obscene budget; I can’t recall a single scene that didn’t have some kind of visual effect going on. The first thirty minutes or so have the star’s face CGed onto a stand-in’s body. (I was thinking that the casting in The First Avenger ruled out the possibility of any Captain America/Fantastic Four crossovers, but there was already so much CG in the movie that I guess anything’s possible). But that’s the best example of why the movie works so well without being overpowered by its visual effects budget: the effects are rarely intended to be the focus, but to be seamless and to further the story.

But when they are intended to be the focus, they deliver. There’s an amazing version of the World’s Fair (pushed ahead a couple decades to WWII) that’s exactly what I want to see in a movie like this. Plus train chases and super ray guns and submarines and dogfights with gyrocopters, not to mention the Red Skull’s totally bad-ass car. Everything’s got a heightened comic book surrealism to it, but it remains part of the aesthetic, instead of taking the lazy route of resorting to “comic book” storytelling. (The Busby Berkeley-like propaganda montage was also fantastic).

It’s a great reminder that fantastic visuals don’t mean the story has to be stupid. It delivered everything I wanted in a movie like, say, Sucker Punch, without my wanting to bludgeon everyone on-screen about the head and neck repeatedly for hours.

Marvel has done such a great job defining what the “comic book movie” can be, I’m starting to feel bad for DC. (And I’ve always been a DC guy). The Marvel movies definitely aren’t all perfect: Iron Man 2 was disappointing, both of the Hulk movies were tedious, Wolverine did everything wrong it possibly could, and the third X-Men movie was such an abomination that everybody on-screen looked like they wanted to be anywhere else. But when they get it right, it’s terrific.

I’m skeptical about The Avengers. Everything that makes the individual movies work so well — focusing on a single character, a single villain, and a simple origin story — doesn’t apply when you’ve got so many characters (and movie stars) fighting for screen time. I loved the first two X-Men movies, but that was primarily because they focused on Wolverine and Rogue, or Jean Grey and Nightcrawler. Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men was pretty good, but that’s because it was essentially Kitty Pride as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

On the other hand, part of how the best of Marvel’s super-hero movies have worked where others have failed is that they’ve matched really talented directors with characters that make sense for them. Sam Raimi did Spider-Man 2 (the best in the series) as campy comedy/horror. Jon Favreau did Iron Man 2 as romantic comedy — essentially Vince Vaughn’s character from Swingers in a power suit. Kenneth Branagh did Thor as ostentatious mythic drama. Bryan Singer latched onto the band-of-misfits/what-does-it-mean-to-be-”normal” parable of the X-Men. And Joe Johnston made an aesthetically beautiful WWII propaganda movie inspired by old serials. The only question for The Avengers is which characters Joss Whedon is going to be allowed to kill off.