I don’t know that pretty young women in panties kicking robots in the face so as to escape a life of sexual violence in a dream is enough to sustain my interest so as to create a successful narrative.Yeah it doesn't sound very compelling.
The reviewer seems to have misunderstood the basic premise, such as it is.Well, what is the premise then?
If when asked, “Tell me about your character,” all that can be said is, “She is abused,” you have not told me anything about who she is.That line said a lot about the problem with female characters in hollywood action movies to me.
Watchmen may have been "shot for shot" accurate, but is it really an accurate representation if it gets tone wrong?The problem with saying that he got the tone 'wrong' is that you're adding your own interpretation of what the tone of the comic was. Maybe it was a little different for me because I read the comic just a few months before I saw the movie, and it was still fresh in my head. I just enjoyed it as a visual interpretation of the comic. It was fun to watch. I agree that it wasn't as apocalyptic as the comic, though.
Meredith, our lead, is a somewhat rebellious Long Island goth-girl who one night towards the end of the school year is brought out clubbing in the city with her college-aged brother and his friends. While at the club, she ends up in a K-hole and the brother's friends gang-rape her while she is immobile. Abandoned there, she finds her way back to LI and finds herself in a screaming match with her mother before Meredith snaps, barges into her mothers room, takes her valium and money, and heads back into the city, impulsively intent on drinking and dosing herself to death.It's not a fantastic story, I'll be the first to admit. But it came from a lot of things I knew well. In college, I'd had a friend who was sexually assaulted while on ketamine, a friend-of-a-friend (and story-collaborator) who was the primary hostage in a stand-off in an east-village bar, and a friend who impetually pulled the most half-assed suicide-by-pills attempt imaginable, but whom I spent the night with at the hospital talking her through it all. In high school I had a friend who survived being shot by gang members, and another who- along with her younger siblings -was kidnapped by her criminal birth-father and taken back to Germany, where she escaped, found her way the the U.S. Embassy and got them all returned.
As she collapses in the ladies' room, a man named Charlie (who I really should have thought of a better name for) accidentally barges in, thinking it's the mens' room, and helps her up, before Charlie murders up the bar, and takes Meredith with him to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. While there, Charlie the serial killer asks her about why she tried to kill herself, and why, if she were taking that action, she wouldn't rather just act as if she had nothing to lose.
So Meredith assumes the identity of Ashley, a popular girl she hated at her high school, and along with Charlie goes out to target her brother and his friends, one by one, in a series of grisly murders. After the final one, Charlie and Meredith hole up in a library, where she finally lets herself sleep with him, after which he turns on her and she fights him off, just as the cops are surrounding the building. She walks out onto the front steps as the dawn is breaking, refusing to put her hands up and forcing the cops into shooting her down-
-at which point we return to the floor of the ladies' room, and no rescue is coming. Meredith is just dying on the floor, imagining what she wished she had done.
Some guy says: "I think the criticisms you have of the movie are completely petty and unfair. If you walk into the movie expecting a fun action film with characters and plots that pass for decent, then yeah, you're going to be dissapointed."But on the other hand, whores with swords!
[Y]ou did something called AARGH, Artists Against -posted by Grangousier at 3:04 AM on March 29, 2011 [2 favorites]
- Rampant Government Homophobia. Yeah this was - what year was this? About '88? The Clause 28.
Oh, I remember that.
Well, you would remember it then, I don't think they have got rid of it still, have they? I mean, they're still having these fucking huge debates. I thought it had just dropped out of existence completely but then I see that they're having these huge debates up in Scotland because everyone's upset because the government want to get rid of Clause 28 and they see Clause 28 as being the only fragile bulwark between their precious children and this army of homosexuals who out to corrupt them, you know? Yeah but when Thatcher brought that in, in '88, at the time I was part of - there was kind of - there was me, there was my wife and there was our girlfriend and we were all kind of living together quite openly as a different sort of relationship. It lasted for two or three years. At that time obviously we were a lot closer to the lesbian and gay scene and when we saw this legislation coming down we thought it was pretty alarming because there actually hadn't been any legislation that had specifically legislated against one particular sub-group before.
This was Nazi legislation, especially when you'd got enthusiastic Conservative councillors talking about "gassing the queers" being the only ultimate solution to the problem, then it was a bit nerve-wracking. So what we decided to do was mobilize as many famous friends as I could dig up and put out a benefit book with all the money going to the organization for lesbian and gay action.
So it wasn't an organization in itself?
It wasn't an organization in itself, no, it was just a magazine. The response was great. We had Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, Dave Gibbons, Art Spiegelman, Howard Cruse, Brian Bolland, Hunt Emerson, just everybody, Neil Gaiman, everybody chipped in and I think we made somewhere like pushing twenty grand for the organization of lesbian and gay action, who actually, we didn't even like that much, because they were sort of -
Were they militant themselves?
Ah, they were militant, bigoted, half-arsed. When we actually met them they didn't even like the fact that - I mean it was Phyllis and Debbie who went to deal with them - the fact that Phyllis and Debbie said that they were bisexual. This, you know, "Huh! Accepting money from bisexuals!" I think one of them said "We'll be allowing men in next!" However, once we raised the seventeen, twenty thousand, whatever it was, they were very different.
They loved you then?
Oh, they loved us then. But we kept up a kind of frosty contempt. We said "Here's your seventeen thousand but please understand that the way that you've treated us throughout all this says an awful lot about problems that you ought to look at within your own structure." [Laughs] Yeah. You know. It was a worthwhile thing. I've still got some copies of AARGH floating around upstairs somewhere. It was a nice Dave McKean cover.
Oh, cool.
It was a cool little magazine.
Delmoi, that movie is pretty much an epic exercise in point-missing. It's okay to miss the point if your point is better -- I'm talking like Starship Troopers, The Shining -- but Snyder's point was like, duuuuuuuuuuuude they just sawed off his arms braaaaahhhhhhh sweeeeeetMaybe its about the attachment to the story. I mean, The live-action U.S. version of Akira they're making sounds like a Crime Against Humanity to me, but that's because I saw the Anime when I was a kid and loved it. When I read The Watchmen it was in the context of knowing a movie was already being made.
Sucker Punch Review: A Spectacular Display Of Breathtaking Incompetencefrom Pajiba. The reviewer did not like the movie.
It’s as if Snyder spent a weekend dropping acid and playing every video game he could find, and developed a series of hallucination-based short films. Then, he came up with a sordid, melodramatic-as-fuck story about young girls trapped in a brothel/insane asylum/burlesque club/Dickensian shithole. Then, he decided he was gonna get all girl-powered and developed his own brand of lingerie-inspired pedophelia-themed feminism. Then he took all of those things, stuffed them into a bag three sizes to small, and then beat the fucking bag with hammers until he shit himself.posted by ob1quixote at 6:12 PM on March 30, 2011 [1 favorite]
He then topped off the bag with feces, and hit me in the face with it. In short, Zack Snyder is an asshole.
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posted by ged at 2:57 PM on March 28, 2011 [2 favorites]