Sucker Punch - the movie (Don't moan - It's an awesome film)

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**Ahtman**

azazel the cat wrote:
I get that you liked Inception, but how clever can a film adaptation of a Ducktales comic be?

As about as clever as anything based on anything else could be, which is basically everything ever written or filmed in the last 100 years. Just kidding, people being influenced by other stories goes back even further than that. Uncle Scrooge (it wasn't Ducktales, which is the cartoon years later) is generally regarded as being a fairly deft, influential comic in general, so I suppose that is a bit like saying "It was influenced by Ben Hur, so how good can it be?". I agree that it may have been a bit over-hyped, but you also have to contextualize that there hadn't been a big budget action film in a while that actually had ambition, and so I think it surprised people, which often goes hand-in-hand with people becoming highly enthusiastic about a bit.

Or, how insightful can a person be if all they are doing is repeating an article from Cracked?

**Ahtman**

Savageconvoy wrote:
You have completely missed the point to the point where it's not even funny.

Or, in reality, Snyder had a very muddled message with poor execution, creating simultaneously a story about sexual abuse while sexualizing the characters. Nathin Rabin I think summed it up best.

Sucker Punch would be a lot more palatable as cultural and social commentary if it were satirical, but there isn’t a satirical bone in Sucker Punch’s lithe, toned, and scantily clad body. Starship Troopers this isn’t. Fanboy sexism is a wonderful subject for satire, but the tone here is less wickedly satirical than ponderous and portentous. It also feels far too personal to register as cultural commentary. It’s telling that in the above quote about the audience for Sucker Punch being the same audience for the protagonist’s dance, Snyder includes himself.

So is Synder implicating himself as well as the audience in denying women agency, dignity, and free will by seeing them only as action figures and tools of seduction? I suspect the answer is yes, but in this case, the medium (big-budget sci-fi fanboy action) defeats the message. I respect Snyder’s aspirations, but it would be hard to imagine a scenario where they were less successfully or more confusingly realized. Depending on whom you ask, Snyder set out to make either the ultimate sexist masturbatory fanboy fantasy or the ultimate critique of sexist masturbatory fanboy fantasies. He failed spectacularly on both counts, but in true Fiasco form, there’s something fascinating and even strangely majestic about that failure.

I also liked this:

Sucker Punch is essentially pornography without the money shot. It’s PG-13 porn, a lascivious exploration of the most dazzlingly erotic dancer ever to bewitch a gentleman patron that’s almost completely devoid of erotic dancing (in the rated, theatrical version I watched, at least). It’s like a schizophrenic Coyote Ugly that secretly believes it’s a distaff Fight Club.

**Ahtman**

pretre wrote:
Maybe the best way to approach this thread is to give Selym ideas for more movies to watch to broaden the ol' cinematic horizons...?

Twilight, of course.

**Ahtman**

azazel the cat wrote:
However, this quote entirely misses the mark.

I agree, I just thought it was an interesting phrasing.

**Ahtman**

I guess I am lucky, my wife hates Twilight, thought Titanic was boring , and really enjoyed Dredd.

**Ahtman**

Necroshea wrote:
1. The portrayal of vampires from monsters battling eternal thirst to teenage heart throbs.

There was an interesting article I read once that was all about how vampires are portrayed in film, and documented their steady change through the decades from monster (Nosferatu), to older European gentleman (Dracula), to younger less European Gentleman, to young man, to teen heartthrob. In each successive generation the representation of vampires has slowly been defanged and more and more romanticized to the point where this is the start:

to this: