Film Review: Your Place or Mine (dir by Aline Brosh McKenna)

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Your Place or Mine asks the eternal question: Can a woman and man be best friends without also being lovers?

The answer to that is that of course they can. It happens all the time. The more important question is whether or not to physically attractive people can be friends without eventually falling love. The answer there is of course not. Being the most attractive person in your social circle means that you eventually have no choice but to pursue a relationship with the second most attractive person around. That’s just the way it works.

Your Place or Mine opens in 2003, with two attractive 20 somethings named Peter and Debbie having sex for the first and what they initially believe will be the final time. The action than jumps forward to 2023. Peter (Ashton Kutcher) lives in New York City and has seemingly given up his dream of being a writer. Instead, he makes a lot of money doing …. well, I’m not really sure what Peter’s job was. It had something to do with banking and it allowed him to afford a really big apartment. Meanwhile, Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) lives in Los Angeles. Recently divorced, she is the overprotective mother of 13 year-old Jack (Wesley Kimmel) and she is a teacher. Apparently she’s not supposed to be as rich as Jack but, for a teacher, she has a surprisingly big house. She also has eccentric neighbor, played by Steve Zahn and an eccentric co-worker played by Tig Notaro. Everyone was so eccentric that it made me miss the days when the lockdowns gave me an excuse not to talk to anyone.

Peter and Debbie are still best friends, even though they haven’t actually been in the same room together since 2008. Still, that’s about to change. Debbie’s coming to New York so that she can complete an accounting program and get a better job. (Ha! Take that, teachers!) However, when her eccentric babysitter is cast in a movie, it looks like Debbie will have to cancel because there won’t be anyone around to keep Jack from accidentally eating something with nuts in it. Peter, who has recently been dumped by his eccentric girlfriend and who is having a bit of a midlife crisis, volunteers to come to Los Angeles to look after Jack while Debbie goes to New York and stays in his apartment while taking her super-exciting accounting class.

Okay, let’s pause while I catch my breath. This is one of those comedies where it takes way too long to set up the central premise. Sometimes, it’s best to keep things simple.

Anyway, Peter bonds with Jack and helps him to find some confidence. Living in Debbie’s house, Peter realizes that he has always loved Debbie. Meanwhile, Debbie goes to New York, bonds with Peter’s eccentric ex-girlfriend (Zoe Chao), and discovers that Peter has written a novel! Debbie takes it upon herself to read the novel. She takes manuscript out of Peter’s apartment and is seen reading it at various New York locations. I found myself cringing as I worried that a sudden gust of wind would blow the pages away or maybe someone would spill coffee on it. (For all of Debbie’s happiness to discover that Peter is still writing, she’s not particularly careful with his manuscript.) Without talking to Peter, Debbie gives the manuscript to an eccentric publisher named Theo Martin (Jesse Williams) and explains that the story is about a 13 year-old boy who can’t go out in the sun. It sounds like an extremely dreary read but Theo is impressed with both the manuscript and with Debbie.

I usually enjoy romantic comedies and I like Reese Whitherspoon and I’m coming around on accepting the idea of Ashton Kutcher being a movie star (especially after his excellent performance in Vengeance) so I was really hoping that I would enjoy Your Place or Mine. Unfortunately, the film itself suffered from what I call the Apatow Syndrome, in that every character had to be quirky, every joke had to be repeated ad nauseum, and there was a deliberate awkwardness to the dialogue that got old pretty quickly. As individuals, Witherspoon and Kutcher were likable but I never really bought them as lifelong friends, much less a romantic couple. They just didn’t have the right spark. Unfortunately, Your Place or Mine just didn’t work for me.

Spoilers Review of The Cabin In The Woods

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Viktor VonGlum

Originally I wasn’t going watch this because of pathological hatred of Zucking Fombies. Fortunately, Arleigh told me that it was more than those wretched Zucking Fombies. The Cabin In The Woods is sheer brilliance because Whedon and Goddard turned the tired and cliched horror formula on its ear. Their collaboration freed us from the oppression of torture porn and loathsome gore for the sake of gory credo.

**Spoilers begin here**

In this film world, every horror film nightmare creature from the shambling zombies to snarling werewolf to a Cenobite analogue to Lovecraftian elder gods exist. As a fan of Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer series, I couldn’t help but see similarities between the TCITW’s world and the world of the Slayer. So the description, “It’s like an episode of Buffy with gore, cussing, and naughty bits, but no Buffy Summers” is pretty accurate. The presence of Amy Acker (Winifred “Fred” Burkle) from Angel fame cemented this opinion. The film cast could easily be stand-ins for the Scoobies with Marty playing Xander Harris, David as Riley, Dana as Willow, etc. The mysterious shadow organization could easily be division of Wolfram & Hart and the slumbering elder gods could replace the Senior Partners as well as Buffy’s Big Bad. I found it interesting and clever that the token victims served as the required sacrifice to appease slumbering boogie men because it explained why the fool, the virgin, the scholar, the jock, and the party girl are always the victims of horror movies. I also loved that the grumpy old man that cryptically warns the kids also served a purpose.

The film is also reminiscent of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe in the sense that the evil and violence had a higher purpose. The nightmare creatures could easily be Ogrdu Hem carrying out the will of their parents, the Ogdru Jahad. The secret organization had the dual role of the BPRD and Rasputin. They were like the BPRD in the sense they prevented the end of the world and captured/contained/employed the things that go bump in the night. They were like Rasputin because they reverenced the elder beings and paid them annual tribute.

Found the following things interesting:

The plot to keep the elder gods happy was a global one (other nations like Japan were involved).
The wide range of monsters that the organization captured (made me wonder how they were able to capture the most lethal ones like the Cenobite wannabe, werewolf, soul stealing ghost, etc).
The causal office vibe the organization had despite their morbid mission.
The elder gods represented the audience/horror audience (an interesting point brought to my attention by a friend)

Quickie Review: The Cabin in The Woods (dir. by Drew Goddard)

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Arleigh

“If you hear a strange sound outside… have sex.”

If there was one thing the meltdown and subsequent bankruptcy of MGM ended doing it was shelving the Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon horror film The Cabin in The Woods for almost three years. The film was directed by Goddard who also helped co-write the screenplay with Joss Whedon and what we get is one of the smartest and most innovative horror films to come in over a decade. For fans of the tv shows Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel (not to mention Dollhouse) this horror film just reinforces the notion that Joss Whedon knows how to write smart dialogue and premises without ever getting too self-referential and deconstructionist (I’m looking at you Kevin Williamson) or too smart-talky (a stank-eye at you Aaron Sorkin).

There’s really no way to properly review The Cabin in The Woods without spoiling the films many different surprises and twists and turns. I will say that the film does a peculiar opening that focuses not on the five college students headed to the cabin in the woods of the film’s title, but on two men (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) in your typical office attire doing the walk and talk about family home life and the like. We see that they’re technicians in an unnamed industrial facility that wouldn’t look out of place in one of the many governmental facilities we often see in film. The film will return to these two men and their facilities and other people working within often in addition to telling the story of the five college students and the growing danger they find themselves in as night falls in the woods.

To say anymore would definitely be a spoiler.

I will continue on and say that for a horror film written to self-reference other horror film conventions and tropes what Goddard and Whedon have ultimately done was celebrate the genre itself and how much of an impact it has had in society. Unlike films like the Scream franchise, The Cabin in the Woods doesn’t knowingly wink at the audience about how cool it is for pointing out all the horror cliches and stereotypes we’ve come to expect in the horror genre. Instead the film actually treats its audience to be smart enough to see the homage to past horror films both good and bad without ever drawing attention to the fact that they’re pointed out.

Another thing which makes this film so fun to watch is how much every character in the film comes across as fully realized individuals. Even the college students who we first think of as your typical horror film stereotypes (the jock, the slut, the virgin, the brain and the stoner) end up being more than we’re led to believe. All of this actually occurs right in the beginning and this helps the audience join in on the fun that both Goddard and Whedon are having in turning the horror genre on its head right up to it’s surprising conclusion. It helps that the cast did quite a great job realizing their characters. As the film progresses we even begin to get a sense that who the villains in the film may or may not be who we think.

There’s a sense of fun and the darkly comic to the film as well. Every one-liner and comedic beats we get throughout the film doesn’t have a sense of the cynical to them. It comes across through dialogue and actions by both groups in the film in such a natural way that they never make those saying the lines break the fourth wall. Most films that try to deconstruct genre films tend to get too cutesy with the breaking the fourth wall gimmick that the audience can’t help but be pulled out of the suspension of disbelief they’ve put themselves in. This has a way of making such genre films less fun and celebratory and more of making fun of the people who enjoy such things.

The Cabin in The Woods manages that rare accomplishment of being a horror film that retains not just the horrific aspect of the genre but also add such a darkly comic sense to the whole proceeding with such a deft touch from Goddard and Whedon that we don’t know whether to call it straight horror or a horror-comedy. Some might even see the film as an entertaining treatise on the nature of the horror film genre of the last quarter-century. Both Goddard and Whedon have already called this film as their answer to the current trend of the “torture porn” that was popularized with the help of such recent horror franchises like Hostel, Saw and those made by Rob Zombie. Where those films celebrated the concept of inflicting pain not just on the characters on the screen but those who watch them with The Cabin in The Woods we finally get a reminder why we love the horror films of the past. It’s through the sense of that adrenaline rush that a tension build-up leading to a horror money shot but without becoming overly gratuitious and reveling in the pain of the horror.

Some have said that The Cabin in The Woods is the best horror film of 2012. I won’t even argue with that statement since it is true. I will put it out there that Cabin in The Woods might just be one of the best films of 2012. The film is just that fun, smart and, overall, just plain awesome.

[I usually attach a trailer to reviews but this time doing it could spoil some of the surprises in the film]