Hacker Cinema
Sucker Punch
2011 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Zack Snyder
A young woman, institutionalized by her abusive stepfather, retreats into a vivid fantasy world where she envisions a plan to escape. Gathering a group of fellow inmates, she embarks on a quest to collect five mystical items, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
1 mixed7 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
> The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious – symbol and archetype.
The bookend narration of 2011 film Sucker Punch mentions such a thing.
> Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.
I appreciated music more after someone pointed out that music is the most evocative art form. Paintings can look realistic, movies can be based on real stories, video games can feel immersive, but music is almost never _like_ anything. I like that.
This sounds a bit like the plot to the hokey Zach Snyder egopiece Sucker Punch (2011), in which the main girl finds the resolve she needs to carry on in the real world, inside the fantasy world she inhabits where she and her friends are badasses in sexy clothing. I always got the feeling that movie was teasing something interesting to say, but fumbling the ball in the delivery of the message.
Like the movie Sucker Punch.
It's well known that movie rankings do. This was key to the resolution of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
The time series of reviews of movies like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Punch_(2011_film)
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_v_Superman:_Dawn_of_Justice
tend to have many early bad reviews by mainstream people who can't get past things that they find squicky and the lack of the usual "Hollywood Happy Ending" but that get better reviews from "true fans" later on who enjoy the fact that the directors tried to make something different even if it was flawed.
To elaborate, MI 1 and 2 can very much be seen as the glorified daydream of a child imagining himself to be a pirate. (There are certainly some books that play with this sort of thing, but I'm not remembering them at the moment. Pan's Labyrinth and Sucker Punch are movies in this vein.) Hence the zaniness of the world, and Guybrush having little personality of his own beyond a naive aspiration and a certain wit--he's a sort of surrogate for the player. The ending of MI2 suggests this is very much the case, but leaves it ambiguous. An MI3 by Gilbert would undoubtedly have continued along these lines.
CMI pretty much eschews the MI-as-daydream idea altogether in favor of MI as a sort of off-Disney world/production, meant to be taken at face value, with Guybrush becoming more of a character in his own right rather than a player surrogate.
So, off the top of my head I can think of these female lead roles who are 'strong' and a whole lot more, including sometimes vulnerable, weak, contradictory and even capricious:
Carrie from Homeland // Sookie from True Blood // Sonya from The Bridge // Sarah from The Killing // Jackie from Nurse Jackie // Tara from United States of Tara
All of those are TV shows, not movies. But I think that is just my own bias, I have a hard time remembering characters in movies because I only get ~90 minutes of exposure, compared to 450-1000 minutes a year with TV.
One point in support of the argument though -- Sucker Punch which was primarily a female cast, had to cut the most pivotal scene in the entire movie where the lead choses sex & death of her mental self rather than fighting because, despite not being explicit, it was the difference between a PG-13 and an R rating.
> Exactly the same thing is happening in the movie industry.
And I personally hate it. I remember a time when "blockbusters" included stuff like Total Recall, Die Hard, Terminator II or Aliens, I just want that again. There's still the casual Sucker Punch or Watchmen, but they're too few and far between.
Go to a cinema in China, where they seem to not have any noise control laws. It's shocking.
I saw Transformers II, and Sucker Punch. I couldn't understand the translation, but it's not like the plot really suffered.