SUCKER PUNCH Capsules: ULTRAVIOLET, ELEKTRA, BLOODRAYNE, BITCH-SLAP, CIRCLE OF IRON, SO CLOSE, and AZUMI
Film is our ultimate escape, so when filmmakers decide they need to metatextualize all that by having characters dreaming alternate realities in their films, it's like a double negative - leaving you stuck at the airport when you were hoping to travel to newdestinations. Zak Snyder is to blame. Dude, film already is an alternate reality, don't you trust yourself? Are you anxious to cover up plot holes and suffering from the compulsive need to cram as much GGI into every frame as you can?
In the early days of horror there were producers, particularly at MGM, who felt the public wouldn't 'get' a horror film if you didn't bring it back down to logic at the end - the 'it was all a dream' or 'the vampire was a detective in disguise to catch a killer' or the monster is just a crook in an ape costume trying to frighten the next heir to the family fortune. Gradually they realized no one goes to the movies--or books for that matter--wanting to be anchored to the real, then again we also want our story to make logical sense within the context of itself, and to not 'show the monster in the first half-hour" otherwise we just won't care. If you want to have a giant samurai robot attack an orphanage, go ahead, we don't need it situated in a fantasy within a fantasy. Stuff like VAN HELSING and CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK prefer to assume you don't need characterization or story to go with your nonstop CGI stuntwork.
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) knew how to do it right, leaving the interconnection between Oz and Kansas and Dorothy's unconscious completely untouched. Oz is real in the film because Dorothy sees it as real. Once you cross the line into 'the power of imagination,' you hit that vein of who gives a shit that clearly made Nick Shager so disillusioned, in his review from Slant below:
Sucker Punch follows Baby Doll as she's committed to a grimy mental institution by her stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). The old man has locked her away because she tried to prevent him from raping her younger sister (hey, he was mad about getting cut out of his dead wife's will!), and accidentally killed the young girl instead. Once inside the facility, skeezy supervisor Blue (Oscar Isaac) shows her a common area with a stage known as the Theater, which—when coupled with the intro sight of a curtain being pulled back to reveal the action proper—is Snyder's clumsy way of conveying how the locale of Baby Doll's adventure is really the theater of the mind. And as every other character seems to blurt out in one form or another, the mind affords people thepower to shape their own destiny, and the world. It's a notion that also applies to a director and his films, though Snyder's self-reflexive instincts are blunt and lifeless, and his subsequent trip down the fantasies-within-fantasies rabbit hole, replete with a fem-rock cover of "White Rabbit" to boot, primarily speaks to his confusion over notions of actualization and empowerment. (cont.)
I was really hoping SUCKER would be awesome, but after I saw the extended previewduring last night's Archer, I knew it was going to go the route of so much video game-based dreck that's come before--TOMB RAIDER, RESIDENT EVIL, BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SERVER, MAX PAYNE--that came before: "To fulfill your destiny you must seek five items..." Why not get it over with and just show a bunch of girls playing Doom IV in their underwear? At least then maybe we can get Bazin on it, and not have to stare at the screen all the time.
The castrative/revengeful counter-misogynist avenger girl is one that's always been popular amongst sensitive comic book readers like me, who first found the gold vein of it in the early 1980s when Frank Miller rose to fame writing and penciling Daredevil. From this wellsprung has come much joy and imitation joy. Miller's character of Elektra captivated all our teenage virgin hearts. The way she wore her scarf, the way she kicked Bullseye in the face, and slashed scores of ninja with her sai, and died... tragically... it was manna to our sexually frustrated teenage hearts. Flash forward and lazy screenwriters are opening every single film with an elaborate break-in to a compound heavily guarded and usually presided over by a bald guy in an expensive suit and sunglasses. He gets killed! It all like Frank Miller in his Daredevil- Elektra period after it's been cut five ways to Sunday with cut-rate B12, and sold direct to cable. Let's meet some of SUCKER's relatives, and a mangy bunch they are to be certain:
2006 - *
Milla Jovovich as a vampire hottie out to protect a kid everyone wants to-- yawn--kill. Worse than watching your mom try to learn to play Duke Nukem on her Dell PC.
"It is worse than Plan 9 from outerspace. For the love of ALL that is holy, do NOT see it." - Batese -- Imdb:
2005 - ***
I actually paid full price for the director's cut on DVD and I'm glad I did. This picture grows on me, namely due to Garner's doe-eyed hotness. Terence Stamp is 'Stick' - the stoic blind poolhall Zen master who trained Daredevil. Elektra's douchebag assassination 'agent' (he call's her 'El' or 'tra' or 'Lek' and keeps his cell phone and smarm ever at the ready) and a cliche'd 'likeable single dad next door' don't detract from the moody beauty of the Pacific Northwest imagery and excellent use of deep blacks! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll believe tattoos of animals can slither to life off a superhero assassin badass guy.
"This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or Kill Bill-style wisecracks. Some of the effects recall vintage Ray Harryhausen, the villains all perish in puffs of green smoke, and Garner's sincere glumness suggests Buster Crabbe inFlash Gordon." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum
2005 - *1/8
Uwe Boll's SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER, it benefits from Michelle Rodriguez and Michael Madsen, both apparently hungover and in need of a script. Gandhi plays the head vampire, badly. It's stolen by Billy Zane as a rival head vampire. Look at poor Kristina Lokken (above), basically wearing Elektra's hand-me-downs and dulled sai.
"The plot of "BloodRayne" is basically "Blade" with a white chick -- set just after the invention of gunpowder but long before the invention of humor. Kristanna Loken, who played the female cyborg in the last "Terminator" film, stars as a half-human, half-vampire who must avenge the death of her mother while stopping the evil vampire Lord Kagen (Ben Kingsley, slumming like few Oscar winners before him) from ruling the Earth." -- Peter Hartlaub - SF Gate
2009 - **
"Those expecting a seamy, Vaseline-uncorked ride through exploitation cinema heaven with “Bitch Slap” might be well advised to skip this picture entirely. More of an “Austin Powers” carnival of camp with YouTube production polish, “Bitch Slap” opens with a Joseph Conrad quote and ends in a hail of bullets, leaving the midsection fairly anticlimactic and insistently silly. It’s criminal to dismiss something so utterly consumed with ample feminine assets and cross-eyed ultraviolence, but the goofball pitch of this fluff grows tiresome early in the first round, rendering the picture a splendid 10-minute short film idea stretched intolerably to 100 minutes." -- Brian OrndorffI only got ten minutes into BITCH-SLAP before I had a wopper headache and animosity towards every character, so I agree. Word to the wise: never show clips from better films in the opening credits. And I can only shudder at how bad SUCKER-PUNCH must be if Horror.com's Staci Layne sez: Let me put it this way: having seen Sucker Punch once, I'd rather watch Bitch Slap 10 times in a row.
1978 - **1/2
Basically a Zen video game "Nothing is real - and nothing to get hung over" movie before Zen video games and hang-ups were invented. A wanderer on a mystic quest learns that's 'all in his mind' with the help of David Carradine in multiple roles. Based on a Bruce Lee storyline, it's got some really bad Kung Fu, Christopher Lee as the guardian of the sacred book, and Eli Wallach in a cauldron. And lots of horses and beaches and flutes.
The finished film sits about half way between the meaningful, but still sappy brand of 'Zen Buddhism' that Lee taught in life, and the daft, everything and the kitchen sink brand of martial arts films the United States put out after the master’s death. Like Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, Circle of Iron (aka The Silent Flute) anticipates fighting style video games, but also features the afterglow of the insistently pointed philosophical films of the late 1960s. On top of its ridiculous imagery, and shaky plotting, the film acts as an unintentional (or perhaps intentional?) parody of Confucianism and Taoism. It's even sub-Yoda at some points, but it's continuously charming and even intentionally funny on several occasions. - Gabriel Powers - DVD Active
2002 - ***1/2
Surely Qi Shu is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and good with a gun. She must avenge her sister's death! Karen Mok (GOD OF COOKERY) is the cop rival with whom Qi forms a semi-lesbian grrl-power connection, all while they kick each other all over expensive corporate buildings. Hizillarious, though the ending is weak... like all men!
2003 - ***
She takes on so many guys in a big climactic swordfight it's insane--and she's cute as a lil button! It's set in the days of the Shoguns, though, so beware bulky sashed robes, funny hats, and scrolls. Strangely, it all works and leaves one whirling and out of breath, though all the side plotting might confuse the very buzzed.
There you go... if, like me, you were pumped for SUCKER PUNCH and then felt like you'd actually been sucker punched when you saw the 'it's all in your mind' previews and negative reviews, then stay home and watch SO CLOSE, or DEATH-PROOF, or SIN CITY, or NAKED KILLER, or ELEKTRA and keep your expectations low to the ground. I mean low!! LOWER!
Pre-Code Capsules 2: CITY STREETS, BOMBSHELL, THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH, THEY CALL IT SIN, SAFE IN HELL, HOLD YOUR MAN
1931 - ****
The banal title kept me away from this all these years, and it seems silly that some alcohol kingpin would endanger his whole operation trying to muscle in on Gary Cooper's girl --how could anyone be so dumb? But it's all sleazy and unrepentant and stylized - murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very sleazy fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibee (as you've never seen him before!). Shades of SCARFACE with a Dashiell Hammett storyline keeping everything edgy and free of any remote chance of gangster cliche - it's like a molten crucible of gangsterism, with everything post-code being molds of moulds. Artsy, ingeniously written, but Sylvia Sidney's pleas drag on and on: "Kid, don't go! Oh no Kid! No, Kid, please don't go if you love me, if you love me kid please don't go." Sylvia you were ten times cooler when you're all tough in prison; now you've gone soft, and the rackets got no place for soft. Pick a side. Pick a gun, lay your money down otherwise go to bed.... and lock your door! Still, there's a super sexy scene of passion with a wire screen between, in the ladies' prison room, and the best bedroom mirror ever (she has a giant vulture/eagle over it, with wings outspread). Visceral photography (TCM restored with a loving hand), great dialogue (including hilariously curt and Hammett-esque dialogue between thug Kibee and daughter Sydney) with Cooper at his most ravishing.
(1933) - ****
A loose conglomerate of Clara Bow, Thelma Todd, herself, Jean Harlow is awesome in this early meta comedy. Harlow comes through in spades, earning her place at the top of the spitfire heap, with whipcrack slang-filled dialogue pouring in satin torrents from her tongue as she goes zipping, 8 1/2-style, through a carnival of blustery studio heads, make-up artists, insurance fraud grifters, drunken embezzler money managing fathers (Frank Morgan, hilarious as a drunken loafer partying like it's 1899!), an accented gigolo lover, an infatuated dirctor (Pat O'Brien), and Lee Tracy's unscrupulous publicity agent.
There's something inherently unlikable (to me) about Tracy, but he sure can talk fast and believably think on his feet. But even when he all apologetically comes to tell her he's been fired, you don't notice his emotions, you just stare at the ferocious meta-amphetamine insect anger in his sharply slicked-back hair. It forms--in the excellent TCM transfer--a weird bi-level tripple side wave-part. Too much information! In order to appease Harlow and get his job back, Tracy agrees to stop sleazing her up in the tabloids and to put her onto the 'home and garden' page, dressing her up in frilly aprons, with forks and potatoes in her hand; petting her dogs in the garden, and talking gently about the patter of little feet. In a hilarious interview with a moral lady journalist, Harlow holds her hands clasped together and gazes into the heavens, imagining the baby and then sets off to adopt one, ala Angelina Jolie, picking them out by the bushel like puppies. Mythical Monkey writes:
"The movie skewers every Hollywood type—the hangers-on, the rapacious press, the stalkers, the slicky boys, the fraudsters, the petty tyrants—and does so with a manic quality that would characterize the screwball comedies allegedly invented by Howard Hawks and Frank Capra in 1934, but which, as I mentioned in my review of Design For Living, seems to have developed full-blown sometime earlier. Fleming spared no one, including himself—he's caricatured as director Jim Brogan (Pat O'Brien), alternately described in the movie as a "piano mover" and "a smooth-tongued bluebeard." (here)
Irregardless of any future screwballing, the damage has been done and the post-1934 serious code enforcement look for women has been dreamt up, right here, in an act of parody. As Harlow assumes this pose of born again maternal sanctity, we briefly--or did I hallucinate--see her smile to herself--a subliminal wink to the audience--as she gets all pious and starry-eyed at the thought of a woman's 'ultimate duty to the continuance of the species.' Phony or not, she never lets up in it - she either figures out the ultimate way to beat the system at its own game of hypocritical posturing or she genuinely believes that dull code of ethics barefoot/pregnant line - the fact we'll never know if she was just bullshitting is what the code is all about. For every 'you know I'm just kidding' there shalt be an accompanying kick, sayeth the enforcer of the code and cinema's own Hitler equivalent, Joseph Breen.
(1932) - **
Secretary: "Imagine anyone daring to question your veracity."
Tracy: "Such language!"
More Lee Tracy doing what he does best, being an unscrupulous press agent: first, as a carny barker, hawking Lupe Velez as an uninhibited fan dancer from the tropics; second, as a city slicker, hawking a blonde hotel maid and partner-in-crime Eugene Palette as wild, untamed nudists. Frank Morgan is in the Edward Everett Horton Broadway impressario role who eventually winds up with Velez, who by then is in diva-harridan mode. Tracy's got the rapid fire patter, but he lacks Jimmy Cagney's agility, and humility -- a scene where he bombards Morgan with blackmail photos is just irritating. Some rare moments of real connection exist, like at the end, between Eugene Pallette and Tracy and a handful of sawdust, which Tracy pours through his fingers asking 'can you imagine this stuff running though your veins?" We can't, and suddenly we realize Tracy's painful awareness of the cliches by which he's bound; all is forgiven
1932 - **1/2
Loretta Young's pre-code persona is that of the woman who looks around at the newfangled crazes like divorce, premarital sex, drugs and prohibition liquor, and quickly calls her matron at the convent for emotional support. The devoutly Catholic Young uses her hotness like an Olympic torch for the post-code draconian era. Always first in line to confess to a crime or sacrifice her happiness to save someone else, anyone else, she's a martyr like only a pious hottie can be. Here her sleazy ex-boss is accidentally killed and she races like a Chariots of Fire sprinter to be the first person to confess and save her true love--zzzz. Before that she's dicked around by David Manners, rescued by George Brent, and ripped-off by Louis Calhern (the guy who would go on to hire Chicolini and Harpo as spies against Freedonia in DUCK SOUP the following year).
1931 - ***
Ah, one of the most lurid masterworks from the pre-code era: Gilda (Dorothy Mackaill) is a dissolute party girl who winds up accidentally burning down a building with a drunk john in it. Her innocent sailor fella (Donald Cook, unbearable) returns home and-- hey! He's earned a first mate stripe so now they can finally get married. He gives her a ship in a bottle and a fan from Japan as presents from abroad - but she lets him know the score and before you can say "Jake" he's smuggling her off to a remote island with no extradition laws and plenty of low life debauched expats all eyeing her like the big brass ring.
Clarence Muse (THE INVISIBLE GHOST) is on hand, once again bringing as much dignity as ten ordinary men into the bellhop role; at the front desk and tending bar is Nina Mae McKinny (THE GREEN PASTURES) who sings "When It's Sleepy time Down South" right in time for Gilda to drop the airs and come down and make nice with the seven dwarfy sleazes. William Wellman as usual packs the film with earthy detail and weird characterizations: Charles B. Middleton, Gustav Von Seffeyrtitz, and--as the sleaziest hangman of all, Morgan Wallace, are some of the sleazes. Noble Johnson (the zombie in GHOST BREAKERS) is a guard.With her terrible profile and posture, McKail is not your ordinary heroine (she makes Rose Hobart look like Loretta Yong), but she's perfect as a depression-era fallen woman who's genuinely no good; a cranky snob for whom the woman's picture conceit of romantic self-sacrifice is a kind of Antigone-like fuck you to the world of sin (unlike so many heroines who fall just to rise, she's fallen, and rises erratically). When she finally gives up her sainthood and starts drinking with the riff raff, you get a real sense that she's smoked and drank before, and often. You don't ever get that with Loretta Yong. SAFE IN HELL is one of many pre-code films made about women of ill repute lamming out to the tropics or the Orient after skipping bail or being wanted for murder: Joan Crawford in RAIN (1932); Kay Francis in MANDELAY (1934); Marlene Dietrich in SHANGHAI EXPRESS, to name a few. All of them, for some reason, are amazing. Must be something in the water.
1933 - ***1/2
Jean Harlow gets pregnant via hood Clark Gable, but she's in jail and a martyr, so doesn't tell him. Stu Erwin tries to take care of her up in some bo-hunk town when she gets out but no way, see, there's only one guy for her - and he can't visit her as he's wanted. George Reed (THE GREEN PASTURES), is the black preacher father of fellow inmate Theresa Harris (Alma in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) who sings "Saint Louis Blues". This is one of those movies that gets me deep in the gut because everyone is redeemed--even the romantic rivals and prison warden--and not in a martyr-happy Loretta Young kind of way, but in a genuine caring, cliche-defying way. When Gable cries to Clarence Muse in the chapel, I feel redeemed, too, every time - and mister, I'm a hell of a sinner.
HOLD YOUR MAN was written by a woman (Anita Loos, who also wrote: GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, and THE WOMEN) but that still doesn't fully explain the incredible compassion this film offers. How often do you come away from a tough pre-code crime picture feeling optimistic about humanity? Just this once.
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