You have to appreciate Zack Snyder’s ambition for at least trying to tell a story. The man has proven himself in many regard, and with “Sucker Punch” he tries his best to deliver crowd pleasing entertainment that won’t polarize his fan base. The problem is, he never lets us in on the fact that deep down “Sucker Punch” is just a teenage melodrama disguised as a genre film. Sure it’s a journey of the self, and the mission of a group of young women to take on robots and monsters, but they’re all just metaphors.
Tag Archives: Drama
Scream 2 (1997)
With “Scream 2” you can pretty much sense Craven and writer Williamson struggling to create a sense of atmosphere that they did with the original. And the movie series that claims to dodge the slasher clichés while also mocking them, eventually became so clustered with attempts to bring audiences a new experience they pretty much relied on clichés and a formula they streamlined in the original. We have someone offed in the beginning, we introduce the old cast, we get to meet a new cast of characters, someone is killing the cast members, Sydney has to find out who or whom is doing the killings, a load of red herrings are thrown at the audience, there’s the obligatory thought that perhaps one of the original three cast members are behind it, and then there is the grand stand off in the climax where we’re given a bunch of “gotchas!” Officers and all authorities are also immensely useless.
Obsolescence (2011)
I really wish I could have enjoyed Jacob Bilinski’s short film about reality shifting and perceptions of romance in the end, but with the run time and premise often foggy both in its intent and ability to deliver its hook, “Obsolescence” often feels instead like a practice in monologue reading than it does an actual short film. From minute one I found myself fairly unimpressed by the line reading that occurs as “Obsolescence” is much more focused on the hook that leads in to the final confrontations than it does actually telling its story about a romance that may or may not have been pre-orchestrated to fit a goal for its characters to focus on.
Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
In the past three years there has been a boom in versus films. And that’s primarily attributed to the boom of the direct to DVD industry that relies solely on gimmicks and plagiarism to fuel its economy and one of the primary cash cows of the market is the versus gimmick. We’ve seen every monster fight every warrior this side of folklore and what we see with “Battle Los Angeles” is pretty much soldiers versus aliens. In fact with less money and star power, Jonathan Liebesman’s film could very well have been titled “Aliens vs. Soldiers,” a roughneck balls to the wall action science fiction film that just doesn’t try too hard to bring us in close to its characters.
Scalene (2011)
Margo Martindale is amazing. That was my first reaction upon viewing her portrayal as the mentally anguished mother Janice Trimble in Zack Parker’s brutally demented and compelling revenge drama “Scalene,” a movie about points of view and how sometimes our own is all we need to get us through the night. Martindale commands an ingenious movie about the end of a tragedy and the beginning of lunacy where mom Janice Trimble is forced to confront many issues in the run time of the film. One of which is the possibility that her mentally disabled son brutally raped a college girl.
Rubber (2010)
Robert is a tire. Robert is in the ground. Robert gains a consciousness and decides he doesn’t want to be rubble. Robert gets up and starts rolling down the road. He blows things up with its will. It squashes bugs. Now that it’s caught the eye (?) of a gorgeous young traveler, Robert is rolling down after her and is intent on garnering her attention.
Why? No reason.
Does there have to be a reason?
Xero: Two Disc Edition (2010)
Director Jack the Zipper’s “Xero” is one of the most artistically inclined bits of girl on girl porno ever conceived, it’s a masterful and visually brilliant pornographic film that is clearly just about the girl on girl sequences, but also has something to say with its depiction of sex scenes. Clocking in at an hour long, “Xero” is an endless stream of women going down on one another and engaging in heavy cunnilingus but this is all depicted in a single barn setting through the eyes of a dark haired woman. This dark haired woman is being tormented by an appetite for women that’s insatiable.