Sucker Punch (4/5 Stars)

Zach Snyder, director of “300” and “Watchmen,” tries out his writing chops for the first time with “Sucker Punch,” a story about a wrongly committed girl who attempts an insane asylum escape. Well actually there is five of them and they’re prostitutes in a bordello and um…The whole escape thing involves fighting World War I, giant mechanical samurais, a dragon…and it all takes place at or in uh…imagination land…you know what? I’ll get back to that. “Sucker Punch” lives up to its title. It is a totally unpredictable unapologetic excess of heightened emotion, ultra violence, and stylistic overindulgence. You can arguably say that “Sucker Punch” is a bad movie but that's sort of like remarking that Opera isn’t realistic enough. I will say this though about Snyder. I’ve always had the feeling while watching his movies that I was witnessing something unmistakably new. If “Sucker Punch” is folly, it is at least my favorite kind. An ambitious one.

The movie starts with your average worst-case scenario. A woman dies. She leaves her entire estate to her two daughters. The evil stepfather gets enraged and with largely incestuous overtones attacks his kids. The older daughter, a girl named Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning, runs to get a gun but returns to late. Her sister has been murdered. The evil stepfather frames Baby Doll and gets her committed to an insane asylum. He then bribes the sadistic operator, played by Oscar Isaac, to have Baby Doll lobotomized within the week.

At this point, the movie becomes a completely different parallel movie, whereupon it seems that Baby Doll imagines herself to be a prostitute in a bordello, who is to be sold to a character called the High Roller within the week. She enlists the help of four other fellow prostitutes, Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung), and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) to plan an escape. They will need a map, a cigarette lighter, a knife, and a key. The plan is for Baby Doll to put on a highly entertaining burlesque act that will distract all the men in order for the others to steal the items.

I left something out. In the asylum story, there is a psychiatrist (Carla Gugino) who has the inmates perform their sad stories on a theater stage as a sort of therapy. In the bordello, she is a madame who runs the burlesque show. When Baby Doll starts dancing (or supposedly acting out therapy in the first storyline) the movie switches over into battle scenes, which include the five girls donning salacious battle-rattle and fighting various armies for the items. They have to kill Zombie Germans stationed in World War I trenches for the map, a fire-breathing dragon for the fire, and so on. Throughout most of this you can sort of tell what is actually happening in the other story-lines although you may have some very good questions. Like for instance, why is this woman imagining herself in a so very male fantasy world. Or who is the Scott Glenn character, a wise entity that shows up only in the battle fantasies to intone enjoyably ridiculous advice, supposed to be in reality, whatever that is.

The best answer I think is that the several story-worlds have less to do with plot or logic and much more to do with giving Snyder an excuse to zealously indulge into what could perhaps be called an “artistic vision.” I’m guessing he worked backward with a thought process like this: How can I get a team of scantily clad women to battle World War I zombies, medieval dragons, and science fiction robots, all in the same movie? Well, it can totally be in the imagination of a stripper on a mission. That would provide the excuse for putting them in full makeup and revealing outfits the entire time. But wait, what type of stripper would be crazy enough to imagine all that? Well, perhaps if the stripper was but the schizophrenic alter ego of a truly insane woman. But wait, what would make someone be that bat shit crazy? Aha! I’ll have her father kill her sister and frame her for it! Break out the champagne! I’m going to start up the drawings for the gigantic samurai robots!

Really, your enjoyment of this movie is not going to come from the plot or character development. It will come from your willingness to enjoy stand-alone set pieces of ridiculously outfitted women battling equally ridiculous things. In that aspect, the movie truly delivers. The action scenes are outrageous and innovative. Helpfully, Snyder also has the habit of using slow motion. This allows the viewer to admire the artistic still frame, which in turn stops the action from becoming a Bayesian mish mash of mindless confusion. Outside the battle scenes, there is also plenty to admire in style if not in substance. I especially like the camera angles and the exaggerated details in objects and characters. (The Mayor and Cook were my favorite grotesquely comical caricatures). Plenty of attention is placed on composition, color palette, and atmosphere. Snyder’s use of green screen in every shot allows him the requisite control to stylize every single shot. The voiceovers and serious talk could have been more poetic and Snyder's choice of music isn't very good, but still there is a truly great movie waiting somewhere in Snyder’s style. I hope to someday see it. 

The character development in this movie leaves something to be desired. I don’t think it was a very good idea to name the characters Sweet Pea, Amber, or Baby Doll. Blondie is okay I guess. But really, given what the women are made to do, the only name that makes any sense is Rocket. She’s played by Jena Malone and is appropriately the only actor here that gives off any lasting impression. (Emily Browning on the other hand seems to have been cast solely on her ability to look sad). Jena you may remember from “Donnie Darko” and “Into the Wild” and probably don’t remember from one of my favorite hidden movies, “Cheaters.” She deserves to be on the short list of underrated and perpetually underused actresses. Her presence here lends the team its admittedly limited amount of credibility. 

Two more things. The makers will have you believe that this contains themes of female empowerment. Plenty of critics, including two I highly respect A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, say it is decisively misogynistic. I disagree with both. It’s neither. It’s a comic book movie and as such it contains a certain style that equally applies to both men and women. The good guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal beauty and the bad guys are exaggerated into the maker’s idea of ideal ugliness. I don’t recall anybody saying that the one-dimensional Spartans in “300” with their ridiculously perfect perpetually uncovered abdominals were somehow demeaning to men. They simply commented on how nice the abs looked. That attitude should be applied to the heroines of this movie. It's true, Snyder deals in the objectification of people. But then again so do all comic books, and for that matter anything dealing with fashion, or why not the entire branch of art called Humanism going all the way back to when Michelangelo added all those muscles in the Sistine Chapel for no other reason than he thought the human body was an admirable thing and that there was no harm in making it look its best. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and people may logically be turned off by the presentation of these women (or like me have a preference for one amongst the others), but I don’t think anyone can argue that Snyder, or for that matter his wife/executive producer Deborah Snyder, wasn’t trying to make the team look as gorgeous as he thought possible. There's nothing wrong with that. 

As far as the plenty of "women in danger" material in this movie, I can’t see how you can have an action movie without it. If there isn’t any danger, there isn’t any conflict. The movie might as well have taken place at a shooting range with the bad guys being cardboard cutouts. The test I would think is whether the makers intend the audience to empathize primarily with the women: Do they mean for us to feel scared when they are in danger and to be relieved when they are triumphant? I think the answer to that is obvious in this movie. If the test worked any other way than every movie with a female action star would be automatically exploitative. That would include Ripley, Clarice Starling, and Lisbeth Salandar. Truly we would be missing out by keeping all those fictional women in the movie universe up on their pedestals totally safe all the time.

Having said that, the PG-13 rating is completely absurd, a perfect example of how hypocritical the MPAA can be. Future moviemakers take note. You can kill all you want just as long as there isn’t any blood. You can present sexual violence just as long as there isn’t any nudity. And you can have characters yell "motherfucker" just as long as you cut out the audio for the second half of the word. Of course, the most ridiculous thing is what the MPAA apparently thought was too objectionable to keep in. The credits and trailer show what sort of look to be like the actual burlesque shows that we never get to see in the movie. So apparently murder and near-rape is fine, but a song and dance number that the women seem to be actually enjoying isn’t. Hmm…now is that misogynistic? 

W. 10/19/08

"Who is in charge here?" yells Dubya to his senior staff. Months have passed in the Iraq war and no weapons of mass destruction have been found. "What I want to know is who here is in charge of finding those damn weapons?" pleads Dubya. Everyone looks around and starts blaming everyone else. That's when it struck me. What an ironic question for the leader of the free world to posit? The answer of course should be Dubya, but he isn't (even though he keeps on emphatically stating he is) and as this movie points out is that Dubya never was. He is a hollow man, headpiece filled with straw. Sort of like a post turtle. What's a post turtle? Well a post turtle is a turtle sitting on a post. You know it didn't get up there on it's own. It has no reason for being there. It doesn't know what to do while it's up there. And you just wonder what kind of idiot put it up there to begin with. 
Oliver takes us through the story of Bush before he became President of the United States. You probably didn't know much of this. He was an alcoholic struggling under the shadow of his father. He got legacied into Yale and Harvard business school. He went through several jobs, doing poorly in all of them. He knocked up a girl and was once sent to prison. His early story basically consists of his father getting him out of mess after mess. Never does Dubya appear grateful for his many second chances. He is a spoiled rich kid with an air of arrogance and extreme resentment toward others for his own limitations. 
But because of his lineage he is swept up by the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who see an opportunity to exchange their ideology for the face time and charisma of a Bush. The exchanges in this movie probe to the real depths of why Bush does what he does. He gets lectured, informed, and at times even told what to say and how to act by Rove and Cheney. He may do exactly as they ask, but he still takes credit for all the decisions he makes to do exactly what they say. What an incredible delusion. 
There is an especially telling scene at a press conference (This actually happened apparently) where Bush is asked what mistakes he's made and what he has learned from them. He's completely speechless and he should be. How can you learn from mistakes when your Daddy has been solving them for you all your life? How can you take responsibility when nothing you have done was your idea in the first place? If God called you to be president, how could you possibly do a bad job? 
Oliver Stone's portrayal of Bush is truly a sympathetic one. He brings us through the story with sincerity and respect toward the subject matter. (If the story of Bush is a bit of a tragedy and the man comes off as not too great that's because he wasn't. The last eight years can attest to that.) Unfortunately this story may be a little too sympathetic, at least for an Oliver Stone film. As a tremendous Oliver Stone fan I expect a little something more from his movies. I expect him to blow the top off his films, to see something truly passionate and stimulating in a degree completely lacking in lesser films. I'd hate to be one of those critics to demand that a director make films like he made them twenty years ago, but that is what I come to expect from him. Oliver Stone has changed. One noticeable area is the energy level of this film. This is most apparent in the soundtrack. When a director decides to play a dainty version of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" as the backdrop to thee 'Shock and Awe' bombing of Baghdad you know he's lost his hardcore edge. When he transitions his scenes with a slow fade to black and a slow fade to a different scene he has deliberately slowed the movie down. When Oliver Stone made earlier biopics he entered scenes into those movies that didn't take place in real life but helped the viewer understand the emotions behind the story. (A great example is the wheelchair fight in 'Born on the 4th of July.' I know that didn't happen, but it is the best part of the movie.) Here he seems to have bowed down to the fact that he was making a very controversial film. I was taken aback by the risks he didn't take than by the ones he did. I have never seen an Oliver Stone film till now that felt like the director got cold feet. He refrains from any direct political stance, any hard line point, or any pointed judgment. The tone was muted. It was a bit disappointing. I truly believe that George W. Bush deserved a movie by Oliver Stone. Now I would say he deserves a movie by Oliver Stone twenty years ago. 
The acting is superb although the script refrains from giving anyone a truly stand out performance. James Cromwell is great as the elder Bush. Toby Jones is a very good Karl Rove. Richard Dreyfuss plays a fine Dick Cheney. Josh Brolin does a very good job as President Bush. I liked him more as Bush than I liked Will Ferrel, Frank Caliendo, or Bush as Bush. The one weird performance was Thandie Newton playing Condoleeza Rice. Now I've never really heard her speak, but Thandie, in this movie, portrays her as a yes-man brown nose stuck with down syndrome. It's particularly weird. This movie, I'd say, is harder on Rice than anybody else. Colin Powell comes off looking like a genius by the way. He was the only person in the room who knew what he was talking about when it came to Iraq. Odd it is that he would be the first one fired.

The Bourne Ultimatum 09/15/07

Pam Landy (Joan Allen) enters a hi-tech room in the CIA headquarters. She's greeted by David Straitharn who proceeds to introduce the rest of his staff, an entire room of techies stationed at a big desk with lots of computer screens. "Let's get to names later, What's the situation?" She asks. She is told and you know what, we never do find out who those people in the room are. They never are introduced. They certainly are yelled at alot by Straitharn, and they seem competent for his directives are always carried out, but they aren’t really characters in the movie. They are a modern movie cliché: A bunch of people in a control room who are shouted at and magically provide answers by typing rapidly on a keyboard. 
This is the third Bourne movie. The first two villains were Brian Cox and Cris Cooper respectively. We've got two more this time in David Straitharn and Albert Finney. If they make another one, I bet the bad guy will be Jon Voight. After that, who knows, I think they would have killed off every second tier dramatic elderly actor in the business. (Ian McKellan and Ben Kingsley maybe but I wouldn't call them second tier)
Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass reunite to give us not so much a movie as a really good television episode. By that I mean it didn't have any real gravity to it, no more extensive character development than an episode of the Sopranos. People do come to realizations, but you kind of get the sense that nothing substantial has changed. I don't think it would lose any intensity if they ran commercials through it every twenty minutes, maybe before and after every chase sequence, which is literally every twenty minutes. But I'm not just degrading the movie; I'm also complimenting it. An enormous amount has been done with very little and if it weren't in the sure hands of Damon and Greengrass this movie would not be worth seeing at all. 
This movie shouldn't be seen so much as it should be studied. It's the sort of movie that one would show in a film school. "Listen kids, this is how you film a car chase. This is how you stage a fight. This is how you shoot a roof chase in Morocco. Now all you have to do is add motivation." The techniques used here are ingenious and exciting in every way, and yes, if Greengrass directs it, I probably will see the next Bourne movie. It's a safe bet that I will get my heart pounding action and great dramatic acting. What isn't sure is that they'll offer closure of any sort. Like a television show it's afraid of any real change or character arc. They are deliberately inching their way to that point where the series 'jumps the shark' and they finally have to end the show.