-vs.-
Over the weekend I watched two movies I'd been looking forward to since first seeing their respective trailers. One was awesome, the other was ehh.
Sucker Punch (the awesome one) is the movie Zack Snyder has been waiting his entire life to make. I guarantee you that, at the age of 11 or thereabouts, little Zack was drawing pictures of and writing stories about the characters in this film. It's pure male adolescent fantasy, but such a gorgeous realization of pure male adolescent fantasy that I am compelled to cut it a lot of slack (not least because I had a very similar male adolescent fantasy as a kid).
It's interesting to note that Snyder went to art school with Michael Bay (director of the Transformers films) and Tarsem (director of The Cell and The Fall). I've not seen Snyder's other movies* but, based on Sucker Punch alone, I'd put Snyder's filmmaking skills somewhere between these other two directors, with Bay on the low end (representing all CGI brawn and no brains) and Tarsem on the high end (representing style and substance in near-perfect harmony).
Style is definitely Snyder's strong suit and, though Sucker Punch suffers from what Todd Miro calls the "teal-and-orange virus", it is beautifully visualized. The costumes, the sets, and the computer-generated environments were exquisitely designed, and the actors were perfectly chosen, from Emily Browning as Baby Doll on down to Malcolm Scott as the Mr. Creosote-sized cook.
But what about the story? In a sentence or two it's about a young woman whose douchebag stepfather commits her to a mental institution after she prevents him from raping her little sister, who is killed in the struggle. Once in the institution, the young woman attempts to escape. To achieve this she plunges first into a fantasy world in which the institution is a brothel, and then into a subset of video-game-style fantasy worlds in which she and four of her fellow inmates must battle giant samurai, zombie Nazis, a dragon, and robots to obtain the keys to their escape.
In more than a sentence or two, Sucker Punch is arguably about much more than its surface action. Snyder works to explore a few ideas beyond the obvious "sexy girl power" themes of crappier films like Tomb Raider, Underworld, Ultraviolet, Barb Wire, etc. One of things I found most interesting about the film is that the video game subworlds are a metaphorical substitute, onscreen, for Baby Doll's dance performances within the brothel fantasy world through which she and her fellow inmates obtain the keys to their escape. Apparently this pissed off a lot of male viewers who felt gypped because they didn't get to see what the characters in the film describe as extremely titillating dances. However, one could argue that replacing the dances (which Baby Doll is being forced to perform by Blue, the tyrannical brothel owner) with elaborate battle scenes illustrates how some women in this situation might perceive it (i.e., dancing for money is not sexy but a fight for survival).
Then again, maybe that's all bullshit and I'm inventing rationalizations for a movie that's simply about a cute blond in a schoolgirl uniform slashing up giant samurai robots. Because even if Snynder wants his film to be about more, it's hard to see past the way in which he's chosen to tell his story. (As A.V. Club columnist Nathan Rabin noted, "the medium (big-budget sci-fi fanboy action) defeats the message.") Nonetheless, this movie made me think, and at this stage in my life I'm not usually swayed by T&A if that's all a movie has to offer. (See my reaction to The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak if you don't believe me.)
Bottom line, it's a polarizing film for obvious reasons. But I've enjoyed reading what others have to say about it (starting first and foremost with the above-mentioned Nathan Rabin, whose column about terrible movies is always worth reading). Marco Sumayao liked it, as did Craig Skinner, who points out that "In exploring the action and exploitation genre Snyder also eschews any simple answers, choosing not to preach to the audience a simple message, such as female empowerment comes through ass kicking action or that ass kicking action in a short skirt destroys any idea of female empowerment – two concepts that seem the only options in many critic’s minds. He instead chooses not to offer a narrow minded polemic but further problematises the debate, making it all the more interesting."
Luis, on the other hand, hated it. And the Film Connoisseur enjoyed it, kind of, but not really. I can appreciate their problems with the film, but Sucker Punch's shortcomings didn't detract from my enthusiastic enjoyment of it.
Hobo with a Shotgun, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. Not being a fan of anything Quentin Tarantino's directed since Jackie Brown, I didn't even bother to see Grindhouse, and thus I hadn't heard a thing about this movie until its trailer assaulted me on YouTube one day. The trailer, as a standalone work of art, is flawless:
And the primary thing this trailer promises is fully delivered in the film, so I really have no reason to complain (but I will anyway). What works as a two-minute trailer did not, for me, work as an 86-minute movie. Which is to say it was too much of the primary thing being advertised, without enough of the secondary thing being advertised. All the spurting blood, dismemberment, gore, screaming, and over-the-top sadistic violence became monotonous after the first half hour; beyond that, the more environmental (for lack of a better word) homage to the ultraviolent films of the '70s, like Death Wish and I Drink Your Blood, that I was expecting wasn't as present as I'd hoped it would be. Perhaps the distinct aura of those thirty-year-old films is hard to recreate, despite their low-budget origins. But it can be done. For example:
The biggest surprise of 2009 was Ti West's ingenious The House of the Devil, a film straight out of 1983. Not just in the costumes, hair styles, and props, but in the decade- and genre-specific story and film techniques West used as well. Whereas Hobo with a Shotgun is a cursory pastiche of '70s vigilante films with an emphasis on gore as humor, The House of the Devil is a well-crafted homage to a style of filmmaking long gone. But I digress....
What I did enjoy in Hobo with a Shotgun were the more subtle and creative bits of quiet humor that in no way relied on red corn syrup or prosthetic entrails. As when the hobo tells Abby about his American Dream, which is to start his own lawn-mowing business. He even has his slogan picked out: "You grow it, we'll cut it." (A brilliant bit of wordplay fail, akin to Biff Tannen's "Why don't you make like a tree and get out of here.") Or during Abby's rousing, climactic speech to a mob of armed hobo-hunters, in which she makes the argument that, because hobos live on the streets, we are invading their homes whenever we leave ours. Something to think about, isn't it?
*You couldn't pay me to watch a film adaptation of Watchmen--even if Terry Gilliam himself had succeeding in doing so all those years ago. And, based on the trailer anyway, 300 looks completely stupid. (Besides, my relationship with Frank Miller's post-Daredevil work is fraught to say the least.)
No comments:
Post a Comment