So I bolted out of work yesterday to take the spouse to the 4:15 showing of  The Avengers at the El Con theater. The last time I’d been there was to watch Cabin in the Woods, which I raved glowingly about in my last post. This is the first time I’ve been to the movies twice in a month since before the advent of the Internet, and thinking about it, it’s worth examining why.

Joss Whedon, that’s why.

Mr. Whedon, who feels like a personal friend of mine even though I will never ever be so lucky to be sitting next to him on a plane anywhere, has always mixed his sweeping arcs of storytelling with wryness that nods to the fan-base. Honestly, I’ve watched the Buffy seasons (all seven) so many times that I actually recognized shots he was plagiarizing from himself. The crater caused by the tesseract bomb at the beginning of The Avengers? Completely klepto’d from the finale of season seven of Buffy. The younger cop of the duo bantering with our heroes before the big set battle-piece? Enver Gjokaj, who played Victor in Dollhouse. The focus techniques and shaky camerawork during the flight shots in the same battle? Straight out of Serenity. There was even one point at which one of the Avengers (I think it was the Cap, but the second viewing will help with that one) gave me  a frisson of dialogue deja vu back to Firefly. Mr Whedon has no fear of his infinite variety going stale, even when he uses leftovers (which we all know are better after some time in the fridge, anyway).

What gratified me as I was walking out is that Mr. Whedon can now take his place in the modern canonical lists of truly great directors. We have Spielberg, who stopped being fun after the second Indiana Jones outing (and who should just be smacked for that Crystal Skull nonsense),  we have Cameron, who is going to pump out Avatar for at least two, if not three more outings with those dopey blue aliens, and we have Christopher Nolan, who will be finishing his Batman oeuvre this summer.

Whedon, who has been held proprietorially to the collective chest of his fan base for years, has now drawn attention to himself globally. No longer can we who’ve dwelt in the Whedonverse claim him as the best-kept secret in tv/moviedom any longer. Now we have to share.

This man's brain is SO SEXY it burnt off all his hair.

Having seen Cabin in the Woods not once but twice this week, I am going to come out and say that it is a beautiful love-letter of a film. Whedon & Goddard created something that was for their own joy, and it brought something simple and pure to the screen. While the film itself is neither simple, nor pure, the Saturday-morning cartoon feeling of complete transportation absolutely is. I may not be able to knock back a box of Sugar-Frosted Choco-Bombs and a quart of milk the way my seven-year-old self could, but I can still achieve tantric suspension of disbelief.

While Whedon has certainly earned his chops on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, et. al., he’s never been given top shelf professional gravitas in his industry. This film, in the can by 2009, languished on the shelves due to studio/money hideousness, was made in concurrence to Dollhouse. Much has been made of Whedon’s rabid fan base keeping cancelled-in-the bud shows alive, but I can only imagine that adoration doesn’t give off the same warm glow as adoration and success. Those in the know despaired of ever seeing the film on screen. It’s out now, though, and just in time for Whedon to have the year of his life, since he directs The Avengers.

• The first reason this is a love letter: He openly references the history of horror cinema, and in every possible way. From the design choice of the title card, to the basement where the teens seal their doom, to the teenagers themselves, the video monitors which will require the Special Dork HD Edition DVD for me to fully appreciate, almost everything was referential to the finest horror films that have come before. I hereby freely acknowledge that “finest” is specifically defined here in terms of the horror genre.
• Joss Loves His People: Casting Fran Kranz as the stoner oracle was no kind of stretch- Kranz was the agoraphobic genius programmer of Dollhouse, and the shift merely required a bag of weed. He didn’t even need to change his clothes or cut his hair. But this happens all over the place in the Whedonverse. It’s the fact that he loves to work with the people he loves to work with that makes such a term as “Whedonverse” even possible.
• The special effects are astonishing, but not because they’re a technological breakthrough. In fact they’re nothing special at all, per se; it’s their use and blending that makes them lovely. It actually is the same grab-bag of CGI and prosthetics that made Buffy such a hoot- cheese is delivered with just that soupçon of irony that puts the audience in on the joke. While self-reverential humour is nothing new, Whedon’s voice unmistakably puts his heart on his sleeve. All one needs to see is the whiteboard to know that.

OK, so I’m a huge nerdfan whose shame is barely theoretical. Whedon’s love of Story makes mine look like a piddling little note under the windshield of my car, while his looks like a great big cinematic funride on the screen. So?

So I think you should go to the theater, sit down in one of the stadium seats at the El Con, and catch this while it’s still being shown large enough to blow your socks off. Don’t forget the popcorn. Even if you get the mondo-large artery-busting size with extra grease, you’ll still have less corny fun than Whedon had making this movie.

The Whiteboard from Cabin in the Woods