I am becoming very interested in Sucker Punch.
"It's also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch "The King's Speech."
"And buried inside that pastry, deep within the candy-chewy, garters-and-machine-guns center, is a nugget of dark and deadly poison."
I though Watchman was way too mainstream, and Brazil way too cheap & easy. This sounds truly subversive.
This video takes on the important social issue of party douchbaggery, with a bonus gratuitous mention of John Donne.
Bob, are you sure it wasnt this part of the review that made Sucker Punch seem appealing:
"He gives us what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want): Absurdly fetishized women in teeny little skirts, gloriously repetitious fight sequences loaded with plot coupons, pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge. Then he yanks it all back and stabs us through the eyeball."
4:The last sentence, yes, but the *spoiler* hints of the dark ending interested me before I read that.
Another positive review that's more explicit.
An hour ago I wrote a longer comment comparing SP to Ozu that I saved off instead of posting. Shorter:irony is most effective when it is almost invisible, when the reader, in self-conscious agency, must choose an ironic interpretation.
From link in #5
"Alan Moore explored a very similar concept with his trilogy of Lost Girls stories"
Why don't I like Alan Moore?
Zach Snyder is an interesting figure. The two movies by him I've seen were both derived from heavily political works by left wing figures (Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead). In each case he didn't seem particularly interested either way in the political content. Most of the political content came through from the original, but that was almost by chance.
His other big movie is derived from a heavily political work by a fascist twerp. I haven't seen it, but it sounds like the same thing happened with the politics.
way to mess up the html, Di: 8 should link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zADosF3XoQ&sns=em
7: Frank "The Tank" Miller is like a god bro to me, but I concede that he is at his best in conveying the immediate experience of the phenomenology of spirit the obsessed, violent, solitary narcissist, rather than the virtues of collective or communal action.
This thread is making it clear to me exactly how widespread the appeal is.
Frank "The Tank" Miller
Thanks to your puzzling mix of references I was briefly faced with the idea of Frank Miller streaking. NOBODY WANTS THAT, FLIPPANTER.
12: Surely someone must, this being the Internet and all.
3
I also hate italian-american men, in good physical shape, that groom themselves in a specific manner and wear certain types of clothing.
I suppose sometimes the map is the territory.
15: O nose moved to smell, o hungry heart
How can we know the pie from the pie chart?
3, 14: there were some good lines in that tune though.
I think 300 is proof that Frank Miller can also tap into the appeal of obsessive, sexist, violent, narcisistic yet collective action. Which is why the label of fascist isn't unreasonable; fascism is hardly an individualist ethos.
a longer comment comparing SP to Ozu
I didn't even realize SP made films. You should show one at our next meetup, SP!
I think 300 is proof that Frank Miller can also tap into the appeal of obsessive, sexist, violent, narcisistic yet collective action.
I would dispute that. Though I haven't read it in some time, inter alia, the Tank (i) portrays a brutal agoge of Leonidas, from much of which treatment a future king would have been exempt, if memory serves, because he requires an individualized, heroic protagonist, (ii) notoriously draws the Spartans naked as so many red-cloaked jaybirds, when they would have been wearing tons of not-as-heroic-as-nudity armor, and (iii) doesn't spend much time depicting hoplite shield-spear-and-crushing-weight-of-ranks-behind battle in formation -- there's lots of awesome leaping and springing by the Spartans as they lay the smack down, often in single (or almost single) combat. To me that stuff smacks of the heroically individual rather than the collective. This would probably be better informed if someone had recently read the latest on the "Spartan mirage."
notoriously draws the Spartans naked as so many red-cloaked jaybirds, when they would have been wearing tons of not-as-heroic-as-nudity armor
Oh, those heroic dongs! The dongs of victory!
23: Heroisch like unto a jaybird.
Is Mary Kate for some reason considered to be a greater object of ridicule than her twin sister?
No, they appear equally vapid in many episodes. I don't even harbor any dislike of them; I just think these are funny skits.
comparing SP to Ozu
Sucker Punch to Ozu. I won't say Snyder (yet) because I am not sure his style is yet consistent or extreme enough.
This is what I wrote earlier:
Sucker Punch may be off-topic. (I laughed at the embed) Another positive review Negative will be very easy to find.
So I read Donald Ritchie's 100 Years through this weekend, and again, Ritchie, who lived 60 years in Japan and talked to Ozu tells me how conservative Ozu became in the 50s...and Ritchie is wrong. Asshole yes, conservative traditionalist, no.Example relevant to SP. Naruse and Mizoguchi (and others) film many/most of their scenes at angles to the rooms, only going perpendicular to the interior action to make a point, usually about sociality. Ozu also worked that way in the 30s.
In the 50s Ozu was more committed to the perpendicular camera, showing his characters in the boxes within boxes within boxes of Japanese architecture. Ritchie seems to think that means Ozu loved the shoin-zukuri. No, it means he fucking also loathed it. There is a level of psychotic irony where rage and love can become indistinguishable, and irrational faith or love is required to discern the difference.
While running down to Home Depot I thought about Contemplative Cinema. Now, nobody goes all the way, but Bela Tarr, Denis, Tsai, Kore-Eda, Hou, Yang etc methods involve (ya complicated) minimizing plot, character, narrative, dialogue, etc in order to achieve effects more visually and make PoV more distant and non-judgmental (by director, not audience).
Now looking at that above list of tools renounced I asked myself does anything there exclude breakneck action, stylized violence, sex I suppose, fast editing and so on? Could Ozu and Snyder share a purpose, or lack of purpose, for their aesthetic? Snyder seems to forcing his audience into a position where it is hard to judge, thus making the judgment more meaningful.
There are other things, Ozu cast some weaker actors and wouldn't let them act. Snyder cast some of the blandest most insipid young actresses around.
There is a politico-ethical dimension. Once you have decided the world in its current state is Buddha meaningless and without value or purpose you can go sit under a tree with the dogs...or you can burn something down, doesn't matter what. That it doesn't prove or serve anything purifies either choice. Golden Pavilion Enjo is squalid obsession. Mishima's coup was banal parody.
Not that...or anything...just talking about movies, about aesthetics. It's all abstract. Just anarchic fun.
So I watched a couple of these "Very Mary Kates", thinking that they're supposed to funny. It's a lie! I'm up to Vegas part 3, and it ends with the Olsen twins lost in the desert, lying down to die. I didn't bother watching Vegas part 4, because I don't know about you, but I don't get much amusement out of watching vultures pick at their corpses.
