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Tuesday, July 27, 2010
So very torn about the trailer for "Sucker Punch"
That whole "directed by Zack Snyder" thing is so problematic. And then, already, this kind of stuff popped up.
But WWI and WWII aircraft battles, samurai, karate in trench warfare, Weimar-era burlesque, robots, dragons, shotguns, wire work sword fighting, an all-girl action crew, blowing up Nazis... It's like geek bingo.
This movie is going to be terrible, but I'll likely see it anyway.
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5 comments:
I don't think Zack Snyder is a "director" in the same stratosphere as Speilberg or Akira Kurosawa, but he still is an artist. And a pretty darn good director. He's a visualist in the same vein as Ridley Scott. I don't think Ridley Scott is up there with Kurosawa either.
How is Zach filtering pop culture in his directing any different from what Quentin Tarantino does? Tarantino borrows whole cloth from prior movies and other works. And he doesn't get nearly as slagged as Zach Snyder. You can do a frame by frame analysis of Kill Bill and I can source every one of those frames to a something else.
-NTT
I'm not going to defend Tarantino. I'll leave that to someone else who has actually seen "Kill Bill" and hasn't gotten a little irritated with his "homage". And I don't give him a pass with "oh, everyone steals from everyone else".
Look, everyone is an artist. That's not the question. The hack who churned out "Marmaduke" was, technically, making a film and therefore engaged in some sort of artistic endeavor, even if it was for cynical, commercial reasons.
He is sort of a visualist, but in the three Snyder films I've seen (the mediocre zombie movie, 300 and Watchmen), he was basically copying someone else's work, like your pal Tarantino. His contribution seemed to begin and end with variable frame rate during action sequences. If Tarantino has anything to lend credence to his rep over Snyder its that he at least seems to try to tell a story as if it were his own, not just repeat one he heard from someone else and copy what they did, except in film (just, you know, sucking it dry in the process).
Sucker Punch could be a lot of fun. To my knowledge, its his first non-adaptation. It has lots of neat looking stuff in it, but at the end of the day, Snyder proved with Watchmen that it doesn't even matter what story he's telling, he doesn't cast, direct actors particularly well or particularly understand character. But he can look at a picture and tell his designers to "copy that" like nobody else in the business. So, in many ways, if Sucker Punch is nothing but dumb action wrapped in cool sequences, that could easily be his sweet spot.
I certainly admit he is a clumsy director at times. Some of his scenes are cringe inducing. I guess it's not clear at what point his movies are the work of his gifted staff: visual art director, cinematographer and special effects director or him.
I do think that a deeper examination of what constitutes homage, inspiration or outfight plagiarism is warranted for discussion. Part of Snyder's issues is that his two biggest projects were adaptations of a visual medium. Should he have framed his scenes differently from the frames of the comics he adapted? I don't know. It would be difficult for anyone to not film Watchmen the way Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons laid out in the comic. Certainly I agree it wasn't the greatest adaptation of Watchmen, a little better than mediocre.
Sucker Punch though will be his first completely original production and I will be very curious to see what he can pull out. Will he be able to capture the right emotional arc in the "reality" scenes of mentally committed patients? It does look like a entertaining movie at the least. Of course, I'm the one guy who liked the mess that was Zardoz, The Cell and Brazil. So my tastes are skewed.
-NTT
Looks to me like strippers having sword battles against samurais and dragons. I truly cannot imagine a version of reality where I wouldn't end up seeing this movie. If some junior high kid had made this movie with his camcorder, I would still want to see it based upon what I'm gathering of the premise...
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