'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
When hoping for a dramatic change in your life, be careful what you wish for.
Maggie Grace had a scary moment during a recent matinee of "Picnic" on Broadway.
It will be cold, but Ellen Burstyn and Elizabeth Marvel are still planning a picnic on Broadway this winter.
If I have learned anything from watching the two "Taken" films, it's this: Never go on an international vacation with Liam Neeson.
Planning to pay out good money to see "Taken 2"? To paraphrase Liam Neeson, you're about to be taken.
"The Cabin in the Woods" _ Stop reading this review right now. Go see the movie, then come back and we can have a conversation about it. The less you know going into it, the better. We can say this much: The hype is justified. And that's saying something when we're talking about geek god Joss Whedon, who produced and co-wrote the script with director Drew Goddard, a veteran of such revered TV shows as "Lost" and Whedon's own "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Goddard makes his directing debut with this long-awaited film but he keeps all the moving parts humming along with thrilling fluidity and ease. "The Cabin in the Woods" walks a very difficult line and manages to find the right tone pretty much the entire time. Anyone can spoof and parody and wink at the camera in making fun of a specific genre, especially one like horror in which the conventions are so deeply ingrained and staying a couple steps ahead of the characters is part of the fun. But the trick is to avoid going overboard and to play it somewhat straight. "Cabin" affectionately toys with the familiarity of certain types and plot points but it also dares to take a step back and examine why we need to return to these sorts of films, why we love to laugh and jump, why we hunger for carnage and thirst for blood. It pays homage to the kinds of frights horror fans know and love while managing to provide surprises and twists, layers upon layers, over and over again. It's humorously self-aware without being smugly sarcastic. Five friends go away for the weekend to a remote cabin by a lake. Clearly, they won't all make it out alive. R for strong bloody horror, violence and gore, language, drug use and some sexuality/nudity. 95 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
"I wrote it on my New Year's list every year," says Grace. "I definitely wanted to come back to the stage. It's kind of how I fell in love with this whole crazy world of playing pretend for a living."
Of the playwright, she says: "Inge was never a master at innovation.
