all fictions
I hate you! (it's not against the rules!)
- Location
- Mons Regius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wizards of Waverly Place.
Project Ludovico
- Thread starter Athene
- Start date
-
- Tags
- athenemas film media movie review
Number6
Unrepentant Like Addict
- Location
- The Village, Scotland
Is there anything further we can do?
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
Crowdfund like a motherfucker
I've got like 120 followers on tumblr and I just wrote up a blog post advertising The Project so we'll see if that gets some new supporters, in the meantime I'd suggest sharing it across multiple social media networks so that the law of averages will pull in as many Patreon backers as possible.
On that note, if any subscribers want to submit a request to have this page appear as an ad banner on the main site that would be awesome way to pull traffic as well.
CompassJimbo
Where’s Your North?
- Location
- The former Rubber Capital of the World
It goes to show how much we care about you, Athene. You're easily one of the strongest people on the board, and we'd hate to see you suffer like this.
Last edited:
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Does this have anything to do with that report of a armored car being hijacked out in Oregon?
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sucker Punch is what you would get if Inception was written by the Ambien Walrus. It's 4 ideas the director had, held together inside a fantasy, inside a story that doesn't matter. I'll defend a lot of Zach Snyder's work for reasons that escape me right now, but this is actually a movie that made me more angry when I rewatched it. I saw this movie twice in the same day when it was released and I must have been out of my god damn mind. People like to throw around a quote from a certain Scottish Play about life but this movie fits the bill: Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But like the movie, lets unnecessarily roll things back.
Now to start off, this is the theatrical version we're reviewing here, not the "extended edition". There are two reasons behind this: The Extended Edition is not labeled as a Directors Cut and this isn't Blade Runner. Your movie wasn't butchered by other people, you cut up your own movie to avoid an R rating and so I have no obligation to see anything but what you put forth in the theater. Your movie wasn't called "Sucker Punch: Trust me its going to be better on Blu-Ray", and this is a trend that I really fucking hate as someone who prefers to see movies in a theater, even if I can't currently do that financially. So, we're going to review the one you put forth as your best effort.
Sucker Punch begins well enough, with a wordless sequence that will be better than anything in the rest of the movie. In it we are introduced to Baby Doll: Her mother dies leaving her and her sister in the care of her abusive step-father. She attempts to intervene to protect her sister from his predation, but in the struggle she accidentally kills her and is committed to an asylum. This part of the movie works because its completely dialogue free and Baby Doll hasn't been ruined by the narrative yet. When forced to rely on his visual chops, Snyder succeeds. However after this point, Baby Doll in the "real" world goes full "Little Mermaid" as Garfunkle and Oates call it, which is the single biggest plot hole in this mess.
See, at the asylum, her step-father bribes an orderly to forge a signature in order to have her lobotomized by Don Draper so that he won't have to answer any tough questions vis a vis that whole attempted rape and physical abuse brouhaha. They discuss this right behind Baby Doll and she hears them. She's not restrained from talking in any way, we see her talking, we see her talking to the psychiatrist whose signature will be forged, she could literally prevent the entire movie right here. It goes all the way up to the point of Lobotomization, with her having the absolute power to stop any and all of this. She could tell Dr Gorsky, she can yell to the Specialist that its been fixed. They're going to come back to this scene later and the movie going to shoot itself in the dick with this entire plot point.
Artists Representation
So at the point of Lobotomization, it snaps back to a fantasy world at the time of her arrival. In this framing device they're all whores, because apparently Frank Miller is contagious. Dr Gorsky is now a Madam and the Orderly is now Blue, the owner of the club because woah there, we almost had a woman in charge. Zach Snyder has claimed this movie is feminist BTW, so have that rattling around as I describe things. In this version of events, the High Roller is going to come to town and take her away, and she tries to get the other girls to join her in an escape.
This is where we meet the actual main character and protagonist Sweet Pea. Oh we're not going to find out that fact until the last five minutes and as a result we're going to learn nothing about her as we go along. It's actually her story but she doesn't have any effect on the narrative in an effort to conceal this fact. This is the twist of the movie, and I think M Night Shyamalan had he been involved would have quietly taken Snyder aside and asked if this movie really needed a twist. "I think it might be a bit much" he'd say, pushing Zach Snyder's hand away from the script. "This isn't going to satisfy anyone."
Baby Doll's plan is the framing device for the four unconnected vignettes that make up the core of the movies efforts. What happens to cause these is, whenever she dances, she dances so well that everyone is transfixed and time literally slows down, and she creates these whole other worlds with her dancing. What little glances we see of the dancing or at least leading up to the dance, show it as a Janky mess. It's like a bad American Idol contestant suffering a stroke while trying to do an impression of a dashboard hula dancer. It's like someone rocked the footage of the awkward dancing of Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies to remove the bits where she's sexy. Baby Doll is in fact dangerously unsexy. She owns thirty five acres of land inside the uncanny valley the whole movie, all dead eyes and aggressive infantalization. She might not be the actual protagonist of the movie but she's the marquee character. and the one one we're supposed to believe we care for.
"Oh my god she's so sexy and good at using her body sensually" - Nobody
So when she jank dances, time slows down and we engage in the bits that made up everything you've seen about the movie. Taken on their own, they work well despite the awful dialogue because they play to Snyder's core competencies. A dragon fighting a B-25 is cool, a Titan fighting WW1 zombies is cool and we see that Sweat Pea could have carried the movie in a satisfying matter instead of the direction they went with Baby Doll. They work and that's all I can say about them because they ultimately don't matter to the ultimate plot. The plot goes "We need x", baby doll dances, and someone just grabs the thing they need. While they briefly teleport to fantastical worlds to engage in over the top action, their actual place in the plot could be replaced with "Look over here, look at me!" and "Look its Bart, and he's doing stuff." Scott Glen shows up to engage in a very early audition for his role as Stick in Daredevil and collect a check in each section.
So things go wrong in one of these "missions" (they really just fuck up in the dream within the real world) and Sweet Pea's sister gets killed. Sweat Pea caring for her sister was the single piece of characterization she got and that was just so I could feel something when she dies within the fantasy. Not the real world of course, there are no stakes, there can never be stakes. Blue shows up before Baby Doll can dance again, and starts executing supporting characters while all the women in the room passively let him before he is later stabbed by Sweat Pea with a plot hole. With him stabbed, she drags off Sweat Pea and sacrifices herself lamely before it snaps back to Baby Doll being lobotomized. Sorry if you thought that was going somewhere else, but nope, she's lobotomized. Don't worry though, the look she gave him before he did it disturbs him enough for him to actually check with Gorsky and the 7 seconds of effort put forth causes Blue to be arrested.
Yes, she would have been fine if she had said or done literally anything. This is a deception so flimsy that simple conversation could bring an end to it.
"Hey so this is the woman you wanted lobotomized?"
"I don't want her lobotomized..."
"Oh, well these forms say you ordered it."
"I must investigate this immediately."
Baby Doll looked at him "like she wanted it" and that was enough to bring this entire enterprise crashing down. Imagine if she had say, yelled that Blue was taking money for this, written a note of some kind or just flailed wildly like Kermit the Frog in the general direction of help. But that doesn't matter, we find out that she really did help Sweat Pea escape and stabbed Blue. Before he's arrested, we learn he doesn't find her fuckable post-lobotomization and he has a break down, while we ask "Why is this even a thing Zach Snyder?" Is Frank Miller literally haunting you like Scorpio from Farscape, did he get put there when you were making 300? Baby Doll is just an enabler for the real protagonist, Sweat Pea. Sweat Pea gets on a bus with the help of Scott Glenn showing up one last time as a wise old bus driver who helps her escape and we close the movie with a narration challenging us, the audience and blaming us for the preceding events. We apparently didn't fight hard enough for Baby Doll and placed her in her predicament before challenging us to "Fight" the ending.
I see you're trying to engage in a metaplot movie, and the words of a wise figure come to mind: Why don't you take a step back and literally fuck your own face. This is like shitting in my milkshake and going "Well you wanted a milkshake." This would be pretentious if it wasn't so dumb, the literary equivalent of a dude trying to do a sick wheelie past you and getting his underwear caught in the wheels. I like good Metaplots. Metaplots are fantastic when done properly and the work has to be properly structured in order for this to work. The movie Resolution has a similar message but it actually actively works at it and is a critique of the found footage genre and the question of why they exist in universe. When you get it, that movie becomes brilliant. You can't just shove one in awkwardly like you were writing the movie and suddenly had the realization that it was tripe and instead of doing the honorable thing (throwing the script into a dumpster fire), you went "I CHALLENGE YOU AUDIENCE, DON'T ACCEPT MY ENDING".
Resolution let's you figure out its shit like a grown ass person and never insults your intelligence. It gives you all you need to figure it out, the rest is up to you.
Well, Challenge Accepted: You set out to create "Alice in Wonderland" but made an anthology movie with the shittiest and longest framing device possible. You couldn't actually connect these ideas together in any meaningful way, so you jammed them haphazardly together. Heavy Metal is one of my favorite movies of all time and if not for a printer malfunction more than a decade ago, I would have a tattoo of Taarna right now. Anthology movies can work and if you wanted these 4 submovies, you should have fleshed them out and pared down the framing device. They don't actually work as "Alice in Wonderland" because there is an internal logic to illogical things, and there is more going on in that book than "Weird things happen". Dreams have logic. It might not make sense in the waking world but things make sense to you in the dream. You'll wake up and be telling your girlfriend about how you were invited to a Cheers character reunion because you were the secret character that tied it together but Cliff Clavin shows up and he's converted to Radical Islam and doesn't want to drink anymore, he just wants Diane to wear a Burkha. That was an actual dream I had years ago when I was extremely conservative and it made perfect sense while I was asleep and for about ten minutes after I woke up. Dreams are not just "Fuck it, whatever random shit I want happens".
That's why when people tell you about dreams, they talk about the insane underlying logic that's happening like "I accidentally entered a writing contest for 10 year olds and got a chance to meet Hillary Clinton but she challenged us to a scavenger hunt and I was the only one old enough to buy alcohol. So like, these girls needed hard alcohol to complete the scavenger hunt and I had to buy it all but I spent so much time buying alcohol for 5th graders that I was running late and I was running to the train with a paper bag filled with fifths of booze when I stopped and hurled up The Stuff from the movie The Stuff only it was like, poop" and that is in fact an actual dream I had last month and it made sense while I was asleep, stop looking at me like that.
The entire ending of the movie is trite and insulting, and the plot twist means there are two underestablished leads in the movie. Sweat Pea gets effectively no development in the dream world and even less in the real one. Who is she? Why is she there? Why should I actually care she escapes. For all I know she was in there for stacking a family of immigrants like cord wood and saying that her lord Satan commanded to do it. You spent the time establishing Baby Doll and did an actually fucking good job with it but then discarded her and wrote a lame coda about it blaming me. I mean, you literally gave her a lobotomy and had the impact be "Obviously evil guy gets arrested after he cries because he doesn't want to fuck her anymore." Was that a concern I had? That the dead eyed 20 year old in a 9 year old girls clothes was still fuckable? Was there supposed to be dramatic irony there?
When I actually think about it, maybe Zach Snyder is the one who should go Little Mermaid: He's obviously brighter when he isn't trying to say anything and his work often falls apart when people open their mouths and start talking because MARTHA IS ALSO MY MOMS NAME.
Now to start off, this is the theatrical version we're reviewing here, not the "extended edition". There are two reasons behind this: The Extended Edition is not labeled as a Directors Cut and this isn't Blade Runner. Your movie wasn't butchered by other people, you cut up your own movie to avoid an R rating and so I have no obligation to see anything but what you put forth in the theater. Your movie wasn't called "Sucker Punch: Trust me its going to be better on Blu-Ray", and this is a trend that I really fucking hate as someone who prefers to see movies in a theater, even if I can't currently do that financially. So, we're going to review the one you put forth as your best effort.
Sucker Punch begins well enough, with a wordless sequence that will be better than anything in the rest of the movie. In it we are introduced to Baby Doll: Her mother dies leaving her and her sister in the care of her abusive step-father. She attempts to intervene to protect her sister from his predation, but in the struggle she accidentally kills her and is committed to an asylum. This part of the movie works because its completely dialogue free and Baby Doll hasn't been ruined by the narrative yet. When forced to rely on his visual chops, Snyder succeeds. However after this point, Baby Doll in the "real" world goes full "Little Mermaid" as Garfunkle and Oates call it, which is the single biggest plot hole in this mess.
See, at the asylum, her step-father bribes an orderly to forge a signature in order to have her lobotomized by Don Draper so that he won't have to answer any tough questions vis a vis that whole attempted rape and physical abuse brouhaha. They discuss this right behind Baby Doll and she hears them. She's not restrained from talking in any way, we see her talking, we see her talking to the psychiatrist whose signature will be forged, she could literally prevent the entire movie right here. It goes all the way up to the point of Lobotomization, with her having the absolute power to stop any and all of this. She could tell Dr Gorsky, she can yell to the Specialist that its been fixed. They're going to come back to this scene later and the movie going to shoot itself in the dick with this entire plot point.
Artists Representation
So at the point of Lobotomization, it snaps back to a fantasy world at the time of her arrival. In this framing device they're all whores, because apparently Frank Miller is contagious. Dr Gorsky is now a Madam and the Orderly is now Blue, the owner of the club because woah there, we almost had a woman in charge. Zach Snyder has claimed this movie is feminist BTW, so have that rattling around as I describe things. In this version of events, the High Roller is going to come to town and take her away, and she tries to get the other girls to join her in an escape.
This is where we meet the actual main character and protagonist Sweet Pea. Oh we're not going to find out that fact until the last five minutes and as a result we're going to learn nothing about her as we go along. It's actually her story but she doesn't have any effect on the narrative in an effort to conceal this fact. This is the twist of the movie, and I think M Night Shyamalan had he been involved would have quietly taken Snyder aside and asked if this movie really needed a twist. "I think it might be a bit much" he'd say, pushing Zach Snyder's hand away from the script. "This isn't going to satisfy anyone."
Baby Doll's plan is the framing device for the four unconnected vignettes that make up the core of the movies efforts. What happens to cause these is, whenever she dances, she dances so well that everyone is transfixed and time literally slows down, and she creates these whole other worlds with her dancing. What little glances we see of the dancing or at least leading up to the dance, show it as a Janky mess. It's like a bad American Idol contestant suffering a stroke while trying to do an impression of a dashboard hula dancer. It's like someone rocked the footage of the awkward dancing of Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies to remove the bits where she's sexy. Baby Doll is in fact dangerously unsexy. She owns thirty five acres of land inside the uncanny valley the whole movie, all dead eyes and aggressive infantalization. She might not be the actual protagonist of the movie but she's the marquee character. and the one one we're supposed to believe we care for.
"Oh my god she's so sexy and good at using her body sensually" - Nobody
So when she jank dances, time slows down and we engage in the bits that made up everything you've seen about the movie. Taken on their own, they work well despite the awful dialogue because they play to Snyder's core competencies. A dragon fighting a B-25 is cool, a Titan fighting WW1 zombies is cool and we see that Sweat Pea could have carried the movie in a satisfying matter instead of the direction they went with Baby Doll. They work and that's all I can say about them because they ultimately don't matter to the ultimate plot. The plot goes "We need x", baby doll dances, and someone just grabs the thing they need. While they briefly teleport to fantastical worlds to engage in over the top action, their actual place in the plot could be replaced with "Look over here, look at me!" and "Look its Bart, and he's doing stuff." Scott Glen shows up to engage in a very early audition for his role as Stick in Daredevil and collect a check in each section.
So things go wrong in one of these "missions" (they really just fuck up in the dream within the real world) and Sweet Pea's sister gets killed. Sweat Pea caring for her sister was the single piece of characterization she got and that was just so I could feel something when she dies within the fantasy. Not the real world of course, there are no stakes, there can never be stakes. Blue shows up before Baby Doll can dance again, and starts executing supporting characters while all the women in the room passively let him before he is later stabbed by Sweat Pea with a plot hole. With him stabbed, she drags off Sweat Pea and sacrifices herself lamely before it snaps back to Baby Doll being lobotomized. Sorry if you thought that was going somewhere else, but nope, she's lobotomized. Don't worry though, the look she gave him before he did it disturbs him enough for him to actually check with Gorsky and the 7 seconds of effort put forth causes Blue to be arrested.
Yes, she would have been fine if she had said or done literally anything. This is a deception so flimsy that simple conversation could bring an end to it.
"Hey so this is the woman you wanted lobotomized?"
"I don't want her lobotomized..."
"Oh, well these forms say you ordered it."
"I must investigate this immediately."
Baby Doll looked at him "like she wanted it" and that was enough to bring this entire enterprise crashing down. Imagine if she had say, yelled that Blue was taking money for this, written a note of some kind or just flailed wildly like Kermit the Frog in the general direction of help. But that doesn't matter, we find out that she really did help Sweat Pea escape and stabbed Blue. Before he's arrested, we learn he doesn't find her fuckable post-lobotomization and he has a break down, while we ask "Why is this even a thing Zach Snyder?" Is Frank Miller literally haunting you like Scorpio from Farscape, did he get put there when you were making 300? Baby Doll is just an enabler for the real protagonist, Sweat Pea. Sweat Pea gets on a bus with the help of Scott Glenn showing up one last time as a wise old bus driver who helps her escape and we close the movie with a narration challenging us, the audience and blaming us for the preceding events. We apparently didn't fight hard enough for Baby Doll and placed her in her predicament before challenging us to "Fight" the ending.
I see you're trying to engage in a metaplot movie, and the words of a wise figure come to mind: Why don't you take a step back and literally fuck your own face. This is like shitting in my milkshake and going "Well you wanted a milkshake." This would be pretentious if it wasn't so dumb, the literary equivalent of a dude trying to do a sick wheelie past you and getting his underwear caught in the wheels. I like good Metaplots. Metaplots are fantastic when done properly and the work has to be properly structured in order for this to work. The movie Resolution has a similar message but it actually actively works at it and is a critique of the found footage genre and the question of why they exist in universe. When you get it, that movie becomes brilliant. You can't just shove one in awkwardly like you were writing the movie and suddenly had the realization that it was tripe and instead of doing the honorable thing (throwing the script into a dumpster fire), you went "I CHALLENGE YOU AUDIENCE, DON'T ACCEPT MY ENDING".
Resolution let's you figure out its shit like a grown ass person and never insults your intelligence. It gives you all you need to figure it out, the rest is up to you.
Well, Challenge Accepted: You set out to create "Alice in Wonderland" but made an anthology movie with the shittiest and longest framing device possible. You couldn't actually connect these ideas together in any meaningful way, so you jammed them haphazardly together. Heavy Metal is one of my favorite movies of all time and if not for a printer malfunction more than a decade ago, I would have a tattoo of Taarna right now. Anthology movies can work and if you wanted these 4 submovies, you should have fleshed them out and pared down the framing device. They don't actually work as "Alice in Wonderland" because there is an internal logic to illogical things, and there is more going on in that book than "Weird things happen". Dreams have logic. It might not make sense in the waking world but things make sense to you in the dream. You'll wake up and be telling your girlfriend about how you were invited to a Cheers character reunion because you were the secret character that tied it together but Cliff Clavin shows up and he's converted to Radical Islam and doesn't want to drink anymore, he just wants Diane to wear a Burkha. That was an actual dream I had years ago when I was extremely conservative and it made perfect sense while I was asleep and for about ten minutes after I woke up. Dreams are not just "Fuck it, whatever random shit I want happens".
That's why when people tell you about dreams, they talk about the insane underlying logic that's happening like "I accidentally entered a writing contest for 10 year olds and got a chance to meet Hillary Clinton but she challenged us to a scavenger hunt and I was the only one old enough to buy alcohol. So like, these girls needed hard alcohol to complete the scavenger hunt and I had to buy it all but I spent so much time buying alcohol for 5th graders that I was running late and I was running to the train with a paper bag filled with fifths of booze when I stopped and hurled up The Stuff from the movie The Stuff only it was like, poop" and that is in fact an actual dream I had last month and it made sense while I was asleep, stop looking at me like that.
The entire ending of the movie is trite and insulting, and the plot twist means there are two underestablished leads in the movie. Sweat Pea gets effectively no development in the dream world and even less in the real one. Who is she? Why is she there? Why should I actually care she escapes. For all I know she was in there for stacking a family of immigrants like cord wood and saying that her lord Satan commanded to do it. You spent the time establishing Baby Doll and did an actually fucking good job with it but then discarded her and wrote a lame coda about it blaming me. I mean, you literally gave her a lobotomy and had the impact be "Obviously evil guy gets arrested after he cries because he doesn't want to fuck her anymore." Was that a concern I had? That the dead eyed 20 year old in a 9 year old girls clothes was still fuckable? Was there supposed to be dramatic irony there?
When I actually think about it, maybe Zach Snyder is the one who should go Little Mermaid: He's obviously brighter when he isn't trying to say anything and his work often falls apart when people open their mouths and start talking because MARTHA IS ALSO MY MOMS NAME.
Last edited:
RoboRenee
Trans of gender
- Location
- FFXIV, probably
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've actually got a bit of a soft spot for this one. It's such a mess of nonsense sequences that I was completely lost by like 8 minutes in but it managed to be so visually what-the-hell that all I could do was laugh at like all of it, straight through. I mean, it's a fucked up stupid mess but so is my sense of humor so watching this bizarrely earnest trainwreck legitimately made me laugh more than like any actual comedy I saw that year.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
This review pretty well sums up the movie:
Sucker Punch lures you in, drugs your drink, and dumps you outside the theater with a confused headache after it takes $12.50 out of your wallet.
Sucker Punch lures you in, drugs your drink, and dumps you outside the theater with a confused headache after it takes $12.50 out of your wallet.
Sufficient Juice
A steady supply of vitamins
- Location
- The carbohydrates
The ending of Sucker Punch apparently:
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You ladies see Reign of Fire by chance? Might be worth watching.
teslashark
One of the brother site’s janitors
- Location
- Somewhere
A ton of good CGI and prop gun rental money wasted I know. As said in the prophecy though, people still call Sucker Punch deep as if it's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or The White Hotel!
Sufficient Juice
A steady supply of vitamins
- Location
- The carbohydrates
Quoting my own self like a proper douchebag:The ending of Sucker Punch apparently:
You should totally do a Neveldine/Taylor movie. Gamer, Crank 1&2, Ghost Rider 2, all of those are garbage of the best kind.
(I mean you could do a proper movie like Darkman, but apparently this isn't where The Project is heading.
)
Number6
Unrepentant Like Addict
- Location
- The Village, Scotland
Quoting my own self like a proper douchebag:
You should totally do a Neveldine/Taylor movie. Gamer, Crank 1&2, Ghost Rider 2, all of those are garbage of the best kind.
(I mean you could do a proper movie like Darkman, but apparently this isn't where The Project is heading.
We've already done delightfully demented Darkman.
Sufficient Juice
A steady supply of vitamins
- Location
- The carbohydrates
Yeah, I meant to say another movie like Darkman.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
How about the sequel?
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's amazing but it's a thinker. I figured it out several days later and it was both genius and unsettling.