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I'm getting woefully behind with writing up proper movie reviews. Several films have come and gone before me with nary a whisper - I haven't been particularly inspired enough by any of them to force words out of myself... but I should. Force myself, that is. So I'm gonna lop out a few thoughts on several films in one go. Let's see what happens! This is so exciting!
The Devil's Double - A weirdly airless film that can't decide how far it can push the Scarface movie it wants to be without, you know, exploiting the real-world atrocities it's documenting as gangsta cred. It would've been better off going one way or the other - and I would've had it go straight off the deep end, honestly - but as is there's not much tension to be had. Good Dominic Cooper stays good and Evil Dominic Cooper stays evil, and they just kind of sit there and watch each other be respectively good and be respectively evil for two hours. All that said, this tweet contains immense truth that made the viewing experience occasionally dizzying. Good god this movie will do well in The Great Gratuities of 2011.
Cowboys & Aliens - I tweeted an echo of the tweet I just linked to in honor of the spectacle that was Daniel Craig posing in chaps, and that remains my most vivid memory of the flick here less than two days later. What else was there? I mean, besides the same goddamned boring creature design that I railed against a few weeks ago? Slapping some goopy "Benny from Total Recall" arms into their guts does not alleviate the fact that these were basically the same things we saw in District 9 and Super 8 and every damned alien movie forever now. I suppose lamenting the state of creativity in Hollywood is skull-fucking a dead horse at this point but it's especially exhausting when it comes to the monster makers. I want good monsters, people! There's a universe of insane concepts out thereand I keep getting stupid bug-men!
Otherwise C&A wasn't offensively bad - Harrison Ford actually appeared to be sober and paying attention this time! And the film took its time and had people actually talking about things to each other, which somehow seems an extraordinary accomplishment these days. But you know how Daniel Craig's jangly little bracelet would light up to warn them whenever an alien was nearby? All that made me think of was the pulsing alien detector in James Cameron's Aliens, you know the one - "They're all around us, man! Jesus!" - and oh how this movie suffered in comparison.
Crazy Stupid Love - I know I'm not the only person who came out of this movie wishing the entire thing had been about Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's characters but good god did those two have sparks or what? Everything else going on I just kept wanting to get back to them. That island of time in the middle where Ryan's shirtless and Emma's being her goofy spazz self was a little slice of heaven. I didn't mind the storyline with the teenagers - I appreciated it's non-ballistic point of view towards teen sexuality (kids masturbate and take dirty pictures of themselves and it's not the end of the world!). But I kind of thought everything having to do with Steve Carell and Julianne Moore and Marisa Tomei was way off-key.
Sucker Punch - I was sort of mortified about halfway through Sucker Punch to realize that yup, once again I was finding myself, despite my own sanity begging me not to, mostly liking a Zach Snyder movie. There's a clarity to the way he shoots action that I deeply admire - I hear people scoffing at his patented speed-up slow-down way of shooting and focusing in on movement but I love it. Do we prefer Michael Bay throwing our eyeballs into a blender? Snyder's camera pulls way way out so you can see everything - and some of the scenes he fills the frame with here are ridiculously eye-pleasing - or it swoops through the action fascinated by the ballet of it. And I liked that it wasn't slavishly obsessed with prattling on about the rules of the fantasy world either (cough Inception cough) - it set out a couple of ridiculously basic video-game goals (find the map!) and then let the visuals rip from that, and it knew that sometimes ya just gotta throw in Gwar-outfitted orcs for good measure.
But well-shot action aside, Sucker Punch suffers an exceptional lot for its PG-13 rating. Like The Devil's Double it's afraid to go where it needs to to be the movie it needs to be. Where it needs to be has lots of blood and lots of nipples and lots of lesbian heavy-petting, in case you were wondering. It has the imagination but its balls, if not exactly cut off, have kinda shrunk up inside its body. Plus nobody on-screen is even a tenth as compelling as Carla Gugino is as the lost Russian instructor from the Suspiria dance school in a latticed bustier and spackled-on beauty mark. I vant to suck your movie out from underneath you, she cries. Just let her, Zach!
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3 comments:
I'm just mad that the all the subtext in Sucker Punch went over everyone's heads. It's actually quite intelligent and has something to say about the relationship between movies and the movie-goer. But, as usual, when people don't understand something, they fault it rather than acknowledge their limited insight.
This was a very entertaining write-up. Thanks!
I'm actually surprised it took you this long to watch Sucker Punch. But then again, I initialy avoided it because all the critics said it was bad. With that in mind, I thourougly enjoyed it. Yes, it would have been better if it had balls and blood and a little more kick. But I was happy with what I got out of it. An entertaining, pretty movie.
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