f13.net

Apparently someone made a movie about EVERYTHING.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/suckerpunch/

I mean holy crap the only way these strippers can escape the mental hospital is by using their imagination to fight samurai and giant robots in WW2 with dragons and shit.  :ye_gods: OR SOMETHING.

Practically a year away, but damn if that trailer isn't the greatest thing ever.

Honestly, this movie will either cement the director as a god or it will begin his slide to M Night status.

Yeah, I think I'll have to schedule that day off work.  Looks awesome.  And even if it's nowhere as good as the trailer, there's still killer strippers, so it's a win either way, really.  :drill:

Or if it's only ok, maybe it will just cancel out the fact the he also directed "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole", which even for a kids movie looks underwhelming.

Snyder has been working on this movie for some time though, and unlike the other stuff he's directed (Dawn of the Dead remake, 300, and Watchmen) he's co-writing the screenplay and it isn't based off of a graphic novel or another movie.  Not sure if that's a good thing or not, but really the main thing that's had me skeptical about this movie was when they announced most of the cast around a year ago.   At the time, when all we had to go off of was a brief synopsis, I wasn't really sure that a large portion of the actresses they got would be able to pull it off.  The trailer looks much more action oriented than I was expecting though, so if they're only required to look good throughout most of the movie, it could end up working.

Looks too awesome for words.

Wow

kk. I'm in.  :drill:

Zack Snyder sure makes awesome movie trailers.  Not sure how you can go wrong with a giant samurai with a chain gun, however.

I saw this the other day and I thought it was badass.  Then a dragon came out of no where and I was like, "huh?".  Then I though this movie was BADASS. Woooooo.

Can I have some more, please?


(http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa68/random256/oliver-twist-gruel.jpg)

I like the part where that chick's fighter plane gets bit in half by a dragon and she's STILL SHOOTING AT IT AND LAUGHING. And yet I have the feeling what's really happening is more awesome than what it looks like.

Oh who am I kidding. I like the part where the whole trailer happens.

Why the fuck are people still using quicktime?

Because Apple pays them to.

Well it is the apple website

Goddamn quicktime means no full screen.  Screw you, Steve.

Is your menu bar or CTRL-F keys broken? :headscratch:

What menu bar, it's quicktime plug-in I was bitching about. No menu bar, no CTRL-F.  Does quicktime pro allow that on the "Click to View" of the website?

I'll confess I didn't realize there was a download option until I just went back to check if I'd simply missed a menu bar or CTRL-F in QT for the last 8 years. Since most trailers don't have that option I didn't realize it was there. I now have a nice, large 1080P version. Whee, Dragons.  Time to put this on a USB and watch it on the TV.

Just look at the non-quicktime video on imdb or youtube.

I dunno. When I heard someone describe Scott Pilgrim, I was not impressed. When I saw the trailer, I was floored.

My experience with Sucker Punch was entirely the opposite.

Sounded awesome on paper, and even as I got to the Quicktime site and saw the background image I was ready to be thrilled. Then the trailer left me cold. The action all seems heartless and arbitrary. There's no soul and story to ground the over-the-top ideas, and I couldn't bring myself to care what I was seeing. Hell, that might turn out to be an advantage. Maybe they're saving the spoilers for the film itself. Great. Right now it looked like one messy, chaotic live-action cartoon.

Meh.

Where did fun touch you?  If it's too hard to tell us, just point to the place on the doll.

If they start explaining why the cute girls in miniskirts are going kung-fu on the giant robots, I'm walking out of the damn theater.

Hey, all I need is the weak coating of varnish that The Fifth Element called a plot. Too much sound and fury signifying nothing and I start wondering why I'm watching. It has to be in the service of something, and the fact that the Movie Gods didn't see fit to put any of that in the trailer makes me suspicious that it's not in the service of anything worth watching.

Just do what everyone else does when they run into something quicktime:

find it on youtube

DO WANT.

The Rule of Cool cares not for your 'plot'.  :drill:

Ha!  Bonus points for using Lords of Acid in the trailer.

It's not mindless actions I'm worried about, it's having a shit movie wrapped around pretty effects. I mean I felt very similar with 300, I thought going in it would be non stop badassery but after leaving the movie it felt sort of flat.  I still can't quite put my finger on why I didn't like 300 but this movie could very well go down the same path.

300 is not rewatchable. I enjoyed it the first time, but can not stand watching it now. It's just too much of the slow motion crap and too wrapped up in it's own gimmick.

That's why I really worry about this. Snyder has the opportunity to be a new George Lucas. If he doesn't filter his "creativity", it gets too wrapped up in it's own kitsch. His best two films were from using someone else's subject matter.

New trailer out (http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/suckerpunch/).  More of the same kind of stuff shown in the first trailer.  Which is to say, awesome.

For those who prefer Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brBuIeH0vfg).

A series of unfortunate hotties.

All hovering around the age of 14.

I must trick the Mrs into watching this.  I had to watch sex and the city 2 the other night.

oh my.

x2 (Abbie Cornish is 28)

If you were forced to suffer through that drek, how is it you have to "trick" the wife?  We have a deal, if I have to watch a chick flick, she has to watch a movie of my choosing.  I haven't had to watch a chick flick since I traded Starship Troopers for Titanic.

Are you saying your female friend is logical?

While she may be 28, she's and the rest of them are dressed up like they're 14. I'm six months away from 40. Considering how much shit I got for dating a 21-year-old when I was 36, even watching this movie for the hotties in schoolgirl uniforms factor officially puts me in :pedobear: territory with lots of people that know me.

The schoolgirl thing puts me off this for similar :pedobear: reasons. I don't get the fascination with girls in school uniform - it always seems dubiously creepy to me.

As logical as any other female.  The trick is to think the way they do, and use their own rules against 'em.  :grin:

Well despite having all the dvd boxes and liking the first film, she hated Sex and the City 2, so under her rules, I'm fairly sure it was all somehow my fault.

I'll stick to trickery, I got her to see Kick-Ass which she enjoyed, so figure I'll come up with a way of comparing Sucker Punch to that or maybe tell her one of the girls in this is having an affair with Jamie Oliver.

It's a story about five women in a hospital who become friends, face trials together, and stick with each other no matter how much life tries to bring them down.

Perfect chick flick.

 :awesome_for_real:

Now all they need are a pair of pants between them  :why_so_serious:

Man, that's going to be Street-Fighter-Bad (TM) and not just because there's no girl under 30 that's a remotely decent actress.

I can't wait.

These kinds of discussions remind me of how lucky I am to have my wife. She loves sci-fi, fantasy and action movies. She loves video games. She has less tolerance for chick flicks than I do.

Saw the trailer for this one at the theater the other day.  Started off thinking "omg what is this boring girl-in-an-asylum crap".  Ended up thinking "omg I have to see this movie".

The wife was not impressed  :oh_i_see:  Though she liked Kick-Ass, so maybe there's a chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSIetIg7O3M

Apparently it has: 
1.  An insane asylum
2.  A hot chick as the lead role
3.  Samurai swords
4.  Robots
5.  Dragons
6.  A whacky "film noir" setting

Sounds like win to me.   :awesome_for_real:

It even has its own thread!  :awesome_for_real:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=19592.0

yeah, sorry.  I scanned the first page of Movies and assumed there wasn't a thread.  Should have done a search.  Feel free to trash this one :)

It also has more hot chicks in more lead roles, orcs, and zombie Nazis.

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20474245,00.html#20924749

Fuck.  Zombie Nazis are going to be awesome.  I may go see this at the theater. 

This movie is going to be awesome. ESPECIALLY the women in school girl uniforms!
(and all the other awesomeness like dragons, robots, zombie nazis, etc)

I'm with Schild, this looks like shit. It looks like a collection of cutscenes from a game I wouldn't play.

"BUT WUA HAHA IT HAS PIRATE NAZI NINJA ALIEN ROBOTS! ISN'T THAT AWESOME?!"

What are you, fucking six?

I figure it will provide a couple good avatars. Anything else is bonus.

I'm not...but I will watch this for the imagery: attractive younger females, bad ass weapons, bad ass bad guys... I am not looking for an Oscar winner, nor am I looking for much of a story, just straight visceral imagery. It's the only thing that I can think of which could have made Transformers movies that much money.

The trailer made it look more fun than 3/6 Star Wars films. You guess which ones!

Oh shit, he went there...

In all the time you've spent on these boards, did you somehow miss the two big forums devoted to MMO's and other video games?  The 70+ page T&A thread (the most posted in thread in Serious Business, not to mention the fact that the Britney Spears thread is still #3)?  The pre-release Avatar nerdfight you yourself were a part of?  The fact that the top movies we've discussed here in this forum are all Sci-Fi movies or comic book adaptations?

YES WE ARE ALL SIX FUCKING YEARS OLD!  Embrace it or gtfo.

Wow, the first few pages of that Avatar thread  :why_so_serious:, how did I miss that?

I like how the movie pretends to be based on something a hawt girl thought of, when in fact it's still base masculine desire driving the entire flick.
It's like if the Matrix was actually formed by Merv instead of the Architect.  You'd know the shit aint real, but you wouldnt care 'cause it'd still get you off.

This movie will do for feminism what 300 did for heterosexuality.

Careful, you're giving me "Scott Pilgrim/Kick Ass/Serenity/every picture The Internet has rooted for in the last five years, etc." flop vibes.

The trailer has "utterly awesome movie that will barely make its money back, if that" written all over it.

Still haven't seen any of those three, or even finished watching Firefly. Or Snakes on a Plane for that matter.
The trailer I watched looked like dumb fun with 300-esque Zack Snyder visuals and hot girls strippers with guns and dragons. I'm not expecting cinematic masterpiece that will provoke meaningful thought. I plan to wait 6 months, torrent it when it comes out on DVD/BR, watch it, and then if it's fun enough to warrant re-watching, I'll buy the BR. Of course this could be shit like Clash of the Titans or Inglourious Basterds, but it's not like I have anything invested in it.

What I said about the trailer compared to SW remains true, though. Still, even those 3 shitty SW films all had reasonably good trailers.

At the end of the day those movies were still good regardless of how much money they made.

This. Sucker Punch is geek wank fantasy, not mainstream action fare. That's why it's debuting in March and not June or July. No one expects it to be a blockbuster but morons.

Kick Ass didnt make money?
I thought it was a great fun cheesy movie and most non-nerd people I know liked it as well.

Scott Pilgrim was fucking stupidity on steroids.  (I mean there's nerds and then there's I'm a white boy with a Japanese/Anime fetish nerds. You dont make movies for the second group, at least not ones you hope to be commercially successful)

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up".

 :grin:

Somewhere, a bunny is missing his pancake.

The fact that this opens in two days and there isn't a single review on rottentomatoes does not bode well. They either aren't screening it or are embargoing the hell out of it.

Is the bunny named C S Lewis too?

Also, now that the Sunday box office preliminaries are out and look exactly like anyone with any sense expected, one might expect me to use them as trolling material. Not so. Mostly because I finally looked at this movie's reviews and frankly they're way more hilarious.


The ones that all scored 3 to 4 times as well critically as this commercially-failing shitpile that will be completely forgotten a few months from now? Next time someone here wants to use the "Well you liked the Star Wars prequels!" line on me, make sure it's in defense of something that at least manages to beat Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed on the RottenTomatoes scale, m'kay?

I'm not sure why it would be trolling material, people can say something looks interesting based on a trailer, it's only a trailer.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sucker-punch-2010/



Hmm, not sure that's a negative one.

I always enjoy watching the critics ratings vs the user ratings on movies.  This is running 20/63 and the new "Wimpy Kid" movie is running 40/78.   I'd go more with "the reviewers aren't the audience the movie was aiming for" than anything else.   Which would explain the 89/74 of Rango as well.

"Old" people shouldn't review teen movies.

The aforementioned Scooby-Doo sequel did 21/57. Alvin and the Chipmunks did 27/73. Two hours of scat porn would probably do 0/75 because you're only polling users who wanted to see scat porn in the first place. User ratings are a worthless metric for measuring anything at all.

Well see, there you're just plain wrong.  Scat purists don't give a flying fuck what you, me or Ebert think about their porn.  They only care what other scat purists who share the same taste think.  Ditto the audience for Sucker Punch, Scooby-Doo, Alvin, etc.  In that light user metrics are very useful to the users themselves.

Had you stuck to the, "just because geeks love it, doesn't mean it'll make it's bank," I'd agree with you.  It was going to do piss-poor at the box office. That anyone thought otherwise is the surprise here.

This movie is getting horrible reviews.  However everybody else I know, and I, still can't help but want to go see this this.  Its very odd, but we'll be doing so next weekend.  In 3D IMAX.  God help us all.   :awesome_for_real:

Saw it in IMAX.  It's... lol, not good, but actually not "bad", where "bad" = fails to deliver way-way-way-over-the-top action scenes.  It's ridiculous and takes itself very seriously.  Seeing it IMAX was a good choice, because if there is any chance at all to not be pissed off about seeing this movie, that would be it.

If you are going to be annoyed about spending $30 for spectacle, definitely don't see it.  If you want to see samurai robots (really, it's better to say 'golem' then robot, I think) with chainguns and are determined to not let some author's heavy-handed attempts to tell a story or moralize get in the way, you won't be very disappointed.

Was just about what I expected, I'm not pissed off that I saw it, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.

The plot was actively horrible.  The visuals were great, but didn't make up for the plot's badness, because the characters were so tedious that I really couldn't care even when they were fighting undead Germans.

They're worthless because all they tell you is that almost literally everything is at least kind of good... in the eyes of the sort of people who'll go see it and then come home and rate it on the internet. You really, really have to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel (Jack Black vehicles) to find anything that does below a 3/5 average user score.

Average user score, The Dark Knight: 4.5
Average user score, Ninja Turtles at the Earth's Core: 3.8
Average user score, Alvin and the Chipmunks: 3.6
Average user score, Sucker Punch: 3.4

What the fuck is the useful purpose of any rating system that can't even generate a full one-point break between Dark Knight and fucking Chipmunks? Editing to add some animated TMNT thing from 20 years ago for laughs. Oh man I bet it's good, the people who rated it thought it was. Maybe if I get pushed on this topic any further I'll do some sort of "Direct to video animated features versus Oscar nominees" user ratings extravaganza.

I once called this the "My Mother the Car" effect. There is literally no work of popular culture that does not have devotees who would rank it highly. Add to that a known aversion by some raters to use a full 5 or 10 point scale and a not-insignificant group of raters who use ratings primarily just to fuck with whatever ranking system is being maintained.

Yeah, hell there used to be a usenet group dedicated to the greatness of Joe Versus the Volcano. You literally can't make something bad enough that at least a few people won't think it's the greatest thing ever.

Well there's that, then there's The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard (http://liquidhotdog.com/shit/text/The%20Vagina%20Ass%20of%20Lucifer%20Niggerbastard%20-%20By%20Shawn%20Wunjo.pdf)

 :why_so_serious:

Battlefield Earth?

You have to have a braincloud if you don't think Joe Versus the Volcano is good fun....

Wait, did you just dis Joe Versus the Volcano?  You are officially never allowed to judge a movie ever again!  Ever!!!

One film that does is The Last Exorcism - it has a user rating of 2.6/5  Curiously, it has a reviewer rating of 6.2/10 and a 73/31 split.

But I'm gonna have to go ahead and side with WUA on this one. User metrics are fucking terrible, on the whole. X-Men: First Class already has user reviews rating it between 1 star and 5 stars  and the film isn't out for another 2 months. There's no pre-requisite criteria for knowing whether or not people have seen a film or not whereas if "professional" reviewers are doing their job then at least they're rating something they've seen.

Anyway, fuck reviews. All of them.

Is this movie good?

Ask Again Later.

Many things are much admired among those who like that sort of thing.

Not especially.  Visually, I think a lot of it is amazing and that's pretty much all I was there for (with my usually disclaimer that it didn't cost me anything).  The narration is pretty heavy-handed although only present in the beginning and at the end.  There are some confusing sequences, which I'm not sure if they are the result of bad writing or just bad editing.  In particular it's unclear how Baby Doll's sister dies at the beginning (I can only assume it's a ricocheted bullet, but scene where the shot is fired doesn't really show that well).  Also, there's no transition when Baby Doll goes from the Asylum to her being in a fantasy that this is all taking place inside a brothel (which is how she pictures things from then on up until near the end of the movie).  Again, I don't know if there's a scene they edited out there, but if you don't already have some idea about the premise of the story it probably comes across like they just decided to change the setting of the movie partway in and just hoped nobody noticed.

I do disagree somewhat with what people say about the fantasy sequences not mattering because they're all just fantasy.  I generally had the sense that if something were to go wrong in one of them, that it would correlate somehow with something going wrong in the real world.  I don't think they play with that enough, but it is eventually shown to be true.  I'm curious to see an eventual Director's cut of this, because I think it's just a few edits away from being a good movie at least, although it will probably never be a great one.

Reading this now. Its awesome!
I enjoy reading passages out loud to my wife and watching her cringe!  :why_so_serious:

That title sounds like something Haemish would choose.

Not so much. Too much fucking assfucking for my taste.

But the insides... my God, there are no words.  :ye_gods:

By my count there appear to be seven words (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words)

Looks like you missed the point entirely, which was that the trailer looked like more fun than those three SW films. Even TPM cut a good trailer, though.. And I was only talking about two of the prequels. But, shit, Star Wars branded films made more money than <insert movie title here>? Really? No Shit?

At the very least, he will need to get in a flexible frame before further reviews are permitted. 

So I saw Sucker Punch last night.  The visuals and music were great, but the plot made no sense.  I'm glad I saw it but do not feel compelled to see it again.

IMO Zack Snyder is a great director but he should stick to adapting other peoples' material.

Saw it on the weekend and... sort of enjoyed it. Loved the visuals and the soundtrack. Found parts of it rather disturbing - it was kind of weird in that I expected the movie to be sexy and titilating, but that was kind of ambushed by all the dark situations. The fight scenes were fun, but I think could have been edited down a bit.

That all being said, there are some story aspects that took me a while to form an oppinion on, and I'd like to know how my interpretation of things meshes with other peoples:

Saw it. Didn't like it right away, but slept on it and spun a large number of interesting thoughts out of it. I could go into another Tron-esque diatribe on the movie as I thought that looking at it in the traditional movie-watcher perspective would only lead to dissatisfaction, but it requires a massive amount of effort to put my thoughts on this to paper.

Bunk's theories are interesting though. It helps explains some loose ends in my head.

What matters is I enjoyed it.

Got some time at work:

upon further thought, I have even more theory:

Here's my take:

You know, for a movie that I figured would be 98% imagery, 2% story; there is a lot of theory crafting about the plot and ending. Not sure how I feel about that.

People try and find meaning in the most fuckstupid things. Its a natural progression of the "QWTF WAS THAT ABOUT?? I can't have just watched a 2 hour directors excuse for a wank movie!"

There are industry people that understand what the industry is about and the realities of it, but will still do their damndest to create meaningful works of art or do a good job within the constraints of that system. Not everyone tries because at a certain point they don't believe it's worth it to try. I think Zack tried; the alternative doesn't make sense. It's his baby, and something he invested an enormous amount of time and energy in to, likely at great risk to his career and his future prospects. Why the hell would he make a movie that would waste our time? If you were given the opportunity to make an original movie in an increasingly risk-adverse, jaded, sequel-heavy status quo, wouldn't you go all out to make something special? Especially if you thought you might not get this chance again?

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. When I dug around I was satisfied that there was something to think about here instead of "Oh look at those special effects." I know he's got a career built on more spectacle-driven films and adaptions, but I believe he impressed there and paid his dues so he could get his own project going, similar to Nolan with Inception. They have to first work within the system and succeed in order to be able to change the system.

I saw the same in Tron: Legacy's development. It was likely made for commercial exploitation of an older property Disney owned. But does that mean that passionate people on the project didn't fight like hell to get that movie made out of their love for the original movie? I don't think so.

Wait, I thought someone was going to explain how there was a usenet group to talk about how good Battlefield Earth was/is.  I hope there is one. :grin:

WUA is secretly the chairman of the Battlefield Earth Movie Appreciation Society of North America, true story!

Well I was, but right now I'm all about a little science fiction flick that seems to have slipped under everyone's radar. It's actually pretty old, but it has the same high average user rating as Serenity, and if user ratings mean anything then I figure it's probably pretty good. The Smurf They Call Astrosmurf (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-smurfs-the-smurf-they-call-astrosmurf/) has all the makings of a forgotten classic.

Then there's this super hero thing. Man when it comes to user ratings it scores 0.7 higher than the first Spider-Man, 0.3 higher than the first X-Men, and even 0.1 higher than Batman Begins! So you know it has to be fucking awesome. It's a VHS tape of two episodes of Captain Planet (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/captain_planet_and_the_planeteers_hero_for_earth/).

 :awesome_for_real:

 :uhrr:

*Ahem*

<----------------


That
Honestly, I was expecting a wank film when I went to see this. My oppinion after watching it, is that if you want to wank off to the posters, or just the battle sequences taken by themselves - go ahead, they were sexy as hell. If you actually watched this whole movie through and still wanted to wank off, I have to think there is something a little wrong with you. This movie alternates between uber hot sexy excitement, and scenes designed to remid you that the previous scene took place inside a young girl's head while she was being exploited and or abused.

As to finding meaning - it's something I like to do. I'm not looking for philisophical enlightment from this story, I just want to see if I can figure out what the writer was going for.

Speaking of wank films, I present the most user-adored thing (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/anal_sex_secrets/) I've found on Rotten Tomatoes. Okay I'm done with this tangent now.

:ye_gods:

 :drillf: :drill: :drillf: :drill: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :drill: :grin: :grin: :awesome_for_real: :facepalm: :woot:

(http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/aa306/charlielyne/2nd/fempow.gif)

Yeah I love how you can have raunchy whores in a movie (in general, haven't seen this one) and as long as they do karate it's all good and empowering and shit.

I just love how you can have raunchy whores in a movie.

I love raunchy whores.

Whores.

(http://taioo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/1990_julia_roberts_pretty_woman.jpg)

I kinda wanna see Sucker Punch in the theater now. It sounds at least mildly interesting, even if it is bad. I'll prolly wait till DVD though.

Isn't this why Joss Whedon is so popular?

Are you implying that Joss Whedon is a raunchy whore?

Just saw this in at IMAX.  Going to have to say fuck you to all the critics.  The film was actually pretty good.  Not perfect, and I agree with most in this thread that a better editing job could have made it a great film, but still a good film.  The music, visuals, and fight scenes were pretty top notch all the way though, and I dug the story.  There really is a lot of extra meaning behind what happened and its fun to try and interpret it.  The movie also had some strong emotional impact.  It was a good roller coaster style movie.

I can see how some people might be turned off by the film and not enjoy it, and thats fine.  But I seriously don't get the huge amount of criticism I've seen.

Critics know what you should like better than you do.  You're a bad person for thinking otherwise.

I'd empower the shit outta that.

I hardly ever let critics dictate whether or not I jump off the fence for a movie. They are not me and in fact, that a critic slams a movie makes me want to see it even more. Sadly, masses do follow critics and make movies into more than they actually are. Case in point, MSNBC (yeah, I know... :roll:) actually is picking Arthur as a best bet (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40200347/ns/today-entertainment/).

As coincidence would have it, the second Transformers and the second Chipmunks movie both scored the exact same 20% on Rotten Tomatoes that Sucker Punch did. Chipmunks did two hundred million bucks domestic, four hundred worldwide. Transformers doubled both of those figures. Critics mean jack shit in terms of what a movie does financially. The studios still neglect to screen a movie for critics when they know it's a real shitbag, but that's probably more out of reflex and wishful thinking than anything else at this point. Word of mouth circulates too quickly these days.


Fine, fine, critics don't mean shit. Box office doesn't mean shit. User ratings certainly don't mean shit. Everyone is a special snowflake and there are no meaningful criteria for slagging on anything. I don't really care. I haven't seen this movie, can't imagine that I ever will, and as much as I love vulturing over flops you'll never catch me trying to speak to the genuine merits of something I haven't actually seen.

I just LURRRRRVE it when one of these fanboy-driven pictures takes it in the ass. I love it in a ridiculous, petty way. I mean I enjoy watching the box office as a spectator sport anyway, and whenever the whole internet/fanboy culture gets kicked in the nuts and reminded that nobody cares what it thinks, that's just a sweet bonus. "Ninja pirates fighting robot dinosaurs, what else could a movie need?!" I dunno, maybe some fucking Gungans. Bahahahaha.

Considering the image that the marketing and discussion of this film has generated, I'm just stoked there was something there that didn't insult my intelligence. I should actually have guessed I might find something enjoyable from an original, one-shot, isolated I.P., non-exploitable story. However most films pander to stupid and the commercial, as WUA implied.

It's like how I always enjoy the one-shot comics from Marvel and DC (Old Man Logan, Elseworlds, etc.) with a definite beginning and end because the writers are able to actually write good non-franchise forwarding stories outside the main continuity. Familiar characters with an actual god damn character arc.

(One exception is Punisher: MAX, but that's because Frank Castle is just that damn interesting a character / story-telling device for an author to use when doing a story about mortality, law, justice, etc. without the rest of the Marvel U. It didn't hurt that Garth Ennis is damn good at what he does.)

Good times.  :drill:

I just came back from a screening of this movie. I now have the urge to shower for the next week and scrub myself with steel wool.

The whole film was like a long creepy leering look at underage flesh, just like the stepdad had for his two daughters. If somewhere in the movie you have to actually mention the age of your hero just to make sure that nobody get's the impression she might be a preteen that gets molested and abused on screen (and figuratively undressed by your peeping tom camera) then you have crossed several lines already and you know it.

Without the underage porn and 'creepy uncle that watches you undress' vibe this would just have been a bad movie. So it's just so much more. The vacant stare and utter robot-like 'acting' of half of the female cast didn't help. The actress playing baby doll had a stare as empty and devoid of any emotions as if she were a real victim of molestation and abuse.

The whole experience was seriously creepy and off-putting. I think I need a whole helping of cute kittens to get that out of my system.

:oh_i_see:

Yeah I know that I probably went off the rails a little there. The whole film felt really creepy to me though. And that look was NOT intentional.

Red Letter Media did a review of Sucker Punch (http://redlettermedia.com/half-in-the-bag-sucker-punch/). I agree with some of their criticisms. As much as I took out of the film (or at least tried to take out of it), I was pretty bored in certain parts and was waiting for the end of the film while watching it. I also saw how the action sequences did very, very little to advance the story.

So I kinda get the big picture but the execution is far from perfect.

I think that was easily the most times I have heard the word "fuckhole" in the span of a minute.

I wanted a Plinkett review, not two nerds sitting there talking.

I just saw it and thought it was amazing. I think as guys, it's impossible for us to imagine how it can be empowering, but every chick I've talked to about it says it was, so I just take their word for it.

And one more thing.

Heh.

Seriously though, I can understand why people wouldn't like it, because it was advertised as one thing but delivered something else. Tron Legacy had the same thing going for it. I liked that too. (And with that in mind, I think I get just as much schadenfreude from Tron-haters as I do Sucker-Punch-haters now.  :oh_i_see: )

I can see the issues here.

Your comment makes no sense.

I do believe he is insinuating that you don't actually have many women to talk to.  :awesome_for_real:

Or sad that he doesn't have any women to talk to.

It may have something to do with the term 'chick' when talking about female empowerment.

That's what I took away from it.

With every girl I talk to decisively calling this "a chick flick" I find it hard not to use the term myself.  :oh_i_see:

You didn't call the movie a chick flick, you called the women you know chicks. There's a difference. Although at least you didn't call them "girls!"

"Girls...???" I can only deduce the purpose of all y'alls responses is to confuse me now!  :ye_gods:

Is there really something wrong with "girls"? Especially if the age difference is appropriate. Most of the "girls" I work with are 15 years younger than me. Girls seems appropriate. If I say "ladies" its usually in one of those sterner, I am annoyed voices.

I try not to use it for adults, whatever the age difference. I'm sure I screw it up all the time, old habits die hard.

I usually say "girls," mainly because I can't bring myself to say "gals."  "Women" and "ladies" both sound way too formal; I almost never call guys "men" or "gentlemen" for the same reason.

"Girls" is incredibly patronizing if you're refering to grown women, yes. Do you call the men in your department "boys" if you're 15 years older than them? I bet you don't.

Yeah, it's annoying that women do not have a one-syllable term like "guys," but "girls" are children.

In before Politics. :why_so_serious:

Is this really a forum where we are expected to be sensitive to proper gender terms, to the extent that "chick" is to be avoided? Because there are posts earlier in this thread that are FAR FAR MORE MISOGYNISTIC than me saying I refer to my female friends as "chicks".

Also, if this is the case, I expect to be able to start posting in the Katy Perry Is Hot thread how much it offends me. (Because it does. No shit.)

Settle down girls.

For a moment I wondered if I was being too obtuse but at least Chimpy and Ingmar got exactly what I meant.

Sucker Punch is to female empowerment as Josef Fritzl is to wholesome family values.

'at a boy.

Seems like around here, "guys" is trending towards non-gender-exclusivity.  Since we're not in the land of y'all or youse.

Edit: to be clear, it would not seem strange to me at all to call or understand someone who is calling a group of all males, mixed sexes, or all females "guys".  As in "HEY GUYS, SHUT UP".

There are a lot of things you can women that aren't offensive. I would suggest skirts, broads or dames.

Women come in cans now?  :grin:

I'm unfamiliar with Josef Fritzl, and fear googling it in case it's NSFW.  :why_so_serious:

With that in mind, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it's "empowering to some". It's funny looking back on it, when I eluded to it earlier in this thread, being a sci-fi fantasy version of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Now, my (Insert Whatever Fucking Gender-based Term for Dual-X Chromosomal Homo Sapien You Deem Appropriate)-friends would nod and look at me seriously and say "It is." Sometimes with a look of incredulity that seemed to say "No duh."

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that those who felt empowered by Sucker Punch were the target audience.

Now that you mention it, I guess I've been trending that way without noticing it.  I also use the non-gender-indicative "dude" from time to time.

I"m feeling old and crotetey now. Sucker Punch wore it's heart on it's sleeve, and had the prota-gonist spell everything out, and people (critics, webreviewers, etc) still didn't seem to get it.
I'm starting to think that they should just show two hours of commercials in the movie theaters and no one will notice.

I always reckoned that the target audience was teenage boys. I know the 16 year old me would have loved this film.

I would genuinely love to know more about the women (or girls?) that you talk to who felt empowered by this film. Is it an age thing? Is it an American thing? What I do know is that, of the women I know who have seen this film (and most of the women I know who would go and watch this are into genre films - most of them are filmmakers, screenwriters and journalists) absolutely despise it. When I asked one friend who is a massive fantasy and horror film fan (although we only agree on the relative merits of about 50% of films) whether she had written anything about it, she said "I'm working on not giving money to bad films." And she's like me - she generally watches any old shit.

Maybe it's the difference between those who think stripping and prostitution is empowering for women and those who don't.

Oh - and a very SFW wiki article about Josef Fritzl  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case). It's the case that inspired the very strange, Bunuel-esque film "Dogtooth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1379182/)".

I'd think that teenage boys would be bothered by this movie, much like going to see Pretty Woman expecting sex scenes and finding out it's a Cinderella story.


Not necessarily, since the stripping and prostitution was depicted as horribly degrading in Sucker Punch.

As for the people I've discussed this with, they are young, American, sci-fi/fantasy geeks. (Also female, as I mentioned earlier.)

This is insensitive and exclusionary to the chromosomally-challenged and the gender-misassigned, you gigantic dick.


 :drillf: :why_so_serious:

Yeah, that seems to be happening and that's cool (I prefer 'dude' for some reason, but 'guy' is definitely also becoming inclusive 'round here). But there's always That One Guy who's all, "Listen up guys! ... And LADY." I can never decide if they want a cookie for noticing I have boobs or what.

WTF, your in California now!  Almost every damn woman/girl/dame I know even calls other women chicks!  That's the official word here!  Though for that matter, I generally refer to a guy as a dude.  Man and woman just sounds to damn formal...

And yeah, I realized I've been using "guys" as gender neutral for a long time now actually.  I'll ask a group of women if you guys saw such and such.  Guess its because saying gals sounds like your from the 1940's.

You know, I'm not even the one who initially fussed over the chick thing. But bitches, am i rite? So touchy!

No one's even said THE WORD CHICK IS FORBIDDEN. It's just pretty funny to talk about female empowerment while simultaneously using a word that is not exactly ... well, empowering.

But chicks are cute!

(http://www.moyerschicks.com/MC-Web/Portals/57ad7180-c5e7-49f5-b282-c6475cdb7ee7/baby_chicks.jpg)

Chick flick my ass, this movie trended 75% male or something like that.

Guy from The Escapist says stuff I pretty much agree with:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/2962-Sucker-Punch

So Scott Pilgrim was "game-changing cinematic artistry" and Watchmen was "a truly great movie" and this was really a chick flick guys even if no women wanted to see it. This dude is the poster boy for head-up-ass irrelevant nerds.

A faux "grrrl power" movie featuring a bunch of chicks dressed as strippers and directed by a guy who specializes in adolescent male fantasies is not a "chick flick."

Yeah, you dress the female characters as strippers and it's automatically labelled a guy's movie. The guys go see it and say how horrible it is, and how it failed at being a hot action movie. The girls don't watch it because it's clearly a guy's movie. So we end up with situations like Quagmire on Family Guy going to see the Vagina Monologues and bitching about how there weren't any vaginas at all.  :awesome_for_real:

I think the premise of the movie was flawed. The "sucker punch" is that it was a story about a couple of girls dealing with shit in a mental institution, dressed up as a crazy action movie to get guy nerds to go see it and *BAM* make them feel bad about wanting to look up a girl's skirt  while she's blasting steampunk zombies.

Which usually doesn't work because you can tune out the message and just look up the girl's skirt and not feel bad afterwards.

Question about the ending:

I think he leaves it open on purpose; either he couldn't decide what happened, or didn't want to decide, or maybe he just wanted to fuc with the audience some more. My first impression was that they were killed somehow, but that wouldn't make sense for the reasons you mentioned. They were probably fine (if they even existed, because they could very well have been constructs of Sweet Pea and/or Babydoll).

Gotta love lazy artists.

"What happened?"
"Whatever YOU think happened!"

Do you mean like how all the critics raved about the end of The Sopranos when it just

They were definitely real, they were all there when babydoll is first brought in before it switches to the fantasy world.

I'm still of the opinion that Sweet Pea and her sister were really just one person.

I think Sweetpea and Babydoll could indeed be the same person. As for the rest, they could be a case of Wizard of Oz-ness, where Sweetpea/Babydoll saw them in the commons area, then incorporated them into the fantasy. So the other three girls were there, but they could have had nothing to do with each other.

See, now you gotta bring up that ending... it was obvious that

Saw this last night on PPV. Other than cool music and CGI it sucked. Didnt allow enough time for character development and none of the characters really drew me in.
It was like a 1.5 hour music video or computer game trailer.

And no Sweet Pea and Baby Doll werent the same person. You are reading way to much into it and trying to find depth and hidden meaning where there was absolutely NONE.

You clearly were taking it far too literally and failed to read enough in to it!

Seriously though, yes it did fail somewhat at being a good movie. The fight scenes looked amazing, but dragged on for too long. I enjoyed it on a flash! Bang! Zoom! level, and I did enjoy trying to sort out all the hidden meaning and metaphor that the director *wanted* to put it in.

I think the fact that you felt there was no hidden meaning at all does show where the movie failed - but I still think it was intended to be there. Just the mere presense of the Bus Driver being in the fantasy sequences is enough to show that not everything was as it seemed.

Or it was merely a trumped up music video director saying to his creative team "Dude lets fuck with their heads by having the angel monk be the bus driver at the end. It will be fucking cool!"

The fight scenes in this movie were everything that's wrong in modern action flicks.  They were too clean, too sterile, with no sense of the heroes ever being in any danger.  It's sort of cool once in a while, if the setup and stunts are impressive enough, but it's just kind of boring after a few iterations.


Compare that to some of the '80s classics, like Die Hard or Predator.  In Die Hard, Bruce Willis gets the shit beaten out of him... and he has the visible damage of that.  In the climax of Predator, when Arnold finally goes toe to toe with the alien he gets creamed and is frantically crawling away.

Did they have any cuts that lasted longer than a half second? Because that fast cut shit is what's actually everything that's wrong in modern action movies.

Actually Sucker Punch was pretty much the opposite of this.

Just watched it. The guys in your link are dickheads, and their complains were mostly trite. Your description of it here is much better.

My verdict: Not the worst movie, but not a good movie either. Parts of it were artfully executed, or well done, but the film was too schizophrenic. It felt like it was almost cobbled together from several other films. If it'd stayed in one of it's styles it might have been a decent movie. Not something I'd need to watch again.

Wow, what a goddamn disappointment. The best thing about this movie was the art design on some of the dream/fight/dance sequences. Everything else? Boring. Very very boring. I cared about none of the characters, the "plot" was a pastiche of barely strung together situations that didn't relate to each other well at all. The whole "twist" ending was telegraphed about 10 seconds after Baby Doll got to the asylum and was trying way too hard to be way to clever and failing miserably. The most well-realized parts were the fight sequences, only they didn't have much relation to ANYTHING and so made the plot feel like a horrible excuse to have these big fights scenes all make sense within one movie. There were so many better ways to do that than the way they chose. I'm glad I didn't pay money to see this in the theater.

So I rented this BluRay from the library ($1 for a week and not out of my way). Figured I needed to see it just to understand a little of the back and forth I have seen about it.

I kept thinking it was like something that Baz Lurhmann would make if he played too many Korean MMOs.

Nice art direction, ok music, and just plain uninspiring in any other way.

Having recently watched Scott Pilgrim (The worst movie I've ever seen), I know how you feel and will avoid this one too.

Movies solely made for the fanbois are just a waste of time.

Scott Pilgrim was the worst movie you've ever seen?

Have you taken great pains to avoid bad movies? While it's not great it was at least fun and consistent, and I think I've seen 3 worse movies this year alone.

It was fucking atrocious and an enormous waste of both my time personally and the acting talent involved.  Not to mention the money they must have spent making that piece of shit.

I don't see many movies anymore and this one was one that certain people not a million miles away squealed about like schoolgirls.

And it was utter fucking shite with no merit whatsoever.

 :cry:

Sorry, it was.  It was just a step above Super Mario Brothers.

You've officially crossed over into old-man-hood.  Congrats.

Really.

Come on, you can't tell me that you didn't at least laugh at the vegan jokes.

Scott Pilgrim is easily the best video game movie of all time.

I realize that's not saying a whole lot.  I liked it anyway, though.   :drill:

I remember smiling at the Password segment and that was it.  Again, we can chalk this up to being NOT FOR YOU and I'll be cool with that.  I just wish I'd known beforehand so I could have avoided.

And that's the thing :  I really, really wanted to have a gander at Sucker Punch, if only for the, you know, older women pretending to be schoolgirls.  But I know if I do I'll probably end up hating it all because, frankly, all the reviews and word of mouth and friends who report back all have a big stamp that says 'NOT FOR YOU.'

Meh.

NOT FOR YOU usually means we like it but it probably does suck. Anyone who thinks Sucker Punch DOESN'T suck is really delusional.

However, Scott Pilgrim was awesome sauce on awesome toast, and I'm surprised you didn't find it funny. I can see how some people wouldn't get it at all, but I think it was brilliant and I would have thought you'd have gotten all the jokes.

Best way to give yourself an excuse to see Sucker Punch, would be to go in knowing that its basically just four extended music videos (full of hot bad-girls), with some "edgy" "I don't know what the hell is really going on here" interconnecting story bits.

I honestly thought it could have worked, but the director got so wrapped up in making the music video interludes awesome, that he forgot to make the rest of it make sense. On top of that, the interludes actually end up going on for too long, and you lose any sense of what connected them to the "story".

Is it great? No. I still thought the visuals made it worthwhile to watch though.

Would probably have been really interesting to see high, had that been something I was in to.

Don't do that.

I have studiously avoided the film for this reason. I watched enough of the trailers to see that I was just not going to find it that special, much the same way I didn't find Kick Ass any good, just exploiting a fleeting hipster zeitgeist.

Kick Ass was ok.  But just Ok.

And that was mostly because of Hit Girl and Big Daddy.  Though I kinda thought that was the point anyways.

Scott Pilgrim was unwatchable dreck.

Terrible overly cute and clever directing, another patented Michael Cera being Michael Cera and not actually acting at all acting performance, horrible obvious intelligence-insulting jokes. Yikes.

I get why some people like it but it is very much a bad bad movie meant to appeal to a very specific demographic rather than anything remotely good. Characterization, plot, emotional resonance - it has none of those things!

I give people a pass when they say they love the movie but in terms of quality it compares unfavorably to "Morlocks", last Saturday's SyFy movie of the week. It's just a 100% pure fan service movie.

Heh, Big Daddy, or more specifically Nicolas Cage nearly ruined Kick Ass for me because I thought he was so terrible in it.

Blargh. I don't know what Nick Cage was doing in that movie. Was he playing mild-mannered? Was he playing a superhero who was playing mild-mannered? Was he playing a character who played mild-mannered in his alter ego and played superhero in his hero form? Maybe Nick Cage didn't even know what Nick Cage was doing.

Nic Cage was doing his Adam West impersonation when he was in the Big Daddy suit. He was awesome.

The movie itself fucked up Big Daddy, it's not Nick's fault.  Had they stuck to the comic book's rendition of Big Daddy, the various fucked up things that he was doing would've fit much better, whereas it didn't really fit at all with the movie's claim that he was an actual vigilante cop instead of just batshit crazy.

You do know why they couldn't stick to the comic book's version of Big Daddy don't you?

I don't.  Was he fucking Hitgirl or something ?

That reason is much better than the real reason, so let's go with that!  :why_so_serious:

(Real reason: the screenplay and most of the comic were written in parallel. Mark Millar gave Jane Goldman pointers on how he planned to write the characters and what the story was going to be even though he hadn't written it. )

That's a shit reason.

 :why_so_serious:

IIRC, it's because


Just another case of Mark Millar throwing an "up yours" at his audience.

If you treat it like a music video, turn the volume off, put some music of your taste on in the background and do something else (use your laptop, read the paper, play a videogame) and then look up at it for a few minutes when the motion onscreen catches your eye then go back to your task, repeat, it might be quite decent.
 
 :oh_i_see:

Glowing praise.

That reads like some of the appraisals I used to write back when I had staff.

If, like me, you felt Emily Browning didn't show her boobs or vagina enough in this movie I recommend Sleeping Beauty (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588398/). The stoy of a college girl who takes a job in a brothel that specializes in drugging her into unconsciousness while the clients do stuff to her. It's got so much nudity in it makes me wonder why she wasn't begging to go nude in Sucker Punch.

I see that she's 23 but every pic of her I've seen makes me feel like  :pedobear: for thinking she's hot.

I got that way with Lily Cole.  :hello_thar:

I'm not into Lily Cole or Emily Browning. 

I feel the same about the chick from Juno.

I am. Two stunning women right there.

Sadly, I've thought she was rather stunning since Lemony.

Which puts me in a really tricky position.

I had to google image search to see what she looked like at the time of Lemony (also to see which of the two actresses mentioned above was in Lemony). Emily pretty much looks exactly the same now as she did then, according to my cursory googling. That's the thing though, I guess. 16 years olds don't look that much different to 17 or 18 or even 22 year-olds in many cases, especially when presented in a sexualised or semi-sexualised manner (ie in full makeup in Film or TV or Magazines). So if you find her hot now, and noone told you that a lemony picture was taken 5 years before a SP pic, you wouldn't likely know the diff, aside from hair colour.

Then again, bus drivers used to give me shit for not having a concession card when I was 15 (you needed one at 16 and up) and I could pass for 18+ at 16. So it happens.

The Escapist's film critic takes another look at this and what it tried to do, but failed at (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-big-picture/6266-You-Are-Wrong-About-Sucker-Punch-Part-Two). And pretty much comes up with what I thought at the time.

Jesus Fucking Christ. 2 things: 1) that's entirely too much fucking beret-wearing analysis of a movie that is just a failure from start to finish and 2) the Zero Punctuation staccato style of speaking isn't nearly as funny without an English accent or writing that is, you know, funny.

Poor Yahtzee.  I hope they pay him well to appear on the same website as cheap knockoffs of himself.

That analysis... gives Snyder far too much credit.

This movie's thread will not die. That is saying something... not sure what that something is though.

That it's a great bad-movie and in another decade or so will be on the air as much as Starship Troopers is now.

I think it is because you can see the pieces of a great movie that fail to come together on all levels.  Master's class in failure.

I think it's riotously unfair to compare this utter keech to Starship Troopers.

I wouldn't call this film keech because there are times when I feel totally satisfied after having a shit. I just felt abused after watching this.

Bob is alright. What kinda sucks is that he has a thick New Yawwk accent that he hides behind his fake midwestern non-accent because he was in broadcast/radio at some point and got trained to do so. It'd be a lot better if he just talked normally.

I think I like him because he hates the Transformers movies. Go check his "Escape to the Movies" reviews on The Escapist of the Transformers movies (also The Expendables). This Sucker Punch thing is an eye-roller though; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a bad movie is just a bad movie.