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chocolatemilk0202
Reviews
Sucker Punch (2011)
Only worth its weight in references.
I would only recommend this movie to my friends that play Warhammer 40K because the only kick I got out of the movie was the references to units in the "dreams." I can sum up everything good about this movie in two points:
1. It had stunning visuals (though ill-used motifs). 2. It had the best original soundtrack of any movie I've seen (better than even Aronofsky's The Fountain).
The movie's opening was almost great being very reminiscent of the movie Up's opening that I could watch enough times to constitute the entire movie's screen time. However, the opening to Suckerpunch was squandered by a bad voice over and unnecessary dialogue that broke the mood very soon into the film. Throughout the rest of the movie, this becomes a recurring theme incarnate in useless screen time and an equally ruined ending to movie (a movie that should have ended two minutes and forty seconds earlier, but another bad voice over and pointless dialogue detracted from what would have been a lasting impression on the audience and me.
Now that we have cleared away the beginning and the end of the movie, we can look at all that's in between. The main character was very well written:
1. She was portrayed as a blank slate, but rather than having the other characters and her environment reflect onto her, she paints her own canvas as the movie goes on allowing the audience to grow with the character and share empathy. 2. She doesn't ruin the mood with poor dialogue too often.
On the other hand, she had many flaws that could have been left out to create a more enjoyable experience:
1. Her entire purpose in the movie seemed very much visual and much less mental in that much of her screen time was spent running and gunning against an endless stream of enemies. 2. Rather than contributing to the scenarios she is placed in, she goes with the flow and merges in with the other characters she is paired with giving her no room to stand out. 3. She is never alone enough for the audience to really grow into her without having to push another character out of the way.
Considering she's the protagonist, it's a bit unnerving to see her character have more flaws than strengths. I really did find myself rooting less for her, and more for the group she was in. The characters she attempts to escape with don't really become part of her, but rather conform to her contributing nothing, detracting from nothing, and being overall just filler.
The dreams in the movie themselves are poorly used and come across as merely an excuse to flash more military hardware in your face. This is where the movie becomes very much like the worst first person shooter released this year: Call of Duty: Black Ops. Much screen time is pointless firefights between Warhammer 40K factions and scantily clad teenagers wielding L/SMG's that does not advance the plot or develop the characters any, rather, all the people in this movie are two-dimensional without personality that drew no emotion from me with their deaths. Ask yourself, "Why do the characters in the movie cry when their friends die and I don't shed a tear?" The answer is clear: Those characters knew more about each other than we did, they were under greater stress than we were, they had greater ambitions than any of us in that theater, and they felt more emotions than we could looking at the screen in front of us. All of this is because the movie does not do a good job of replicating the character's emotions, we do not connect to the people in the film, and we know very little about almost all of them.
Plot and character wise, there is really nothing good about this movie at all. I suggest you watch a slideshow of some of the more stunning screenshots with the amazing soundtrack played over it, then you will get the optimum experience this movie has to offer, because that's all it is: a pretty picture and good music. My final statement: I watched it so you don't have to.
Season of the Witch (2011)
A Comedy Best Forgotten
I was almost kicked out of the theater for laughing so much at this movie; in all honesty, it is quite possibly the worst movie I've seen since "The Phantom Menace." One of the biggest jokes in this movie is the protagonist, or rather the lack thereof. After the movie, I asked my friend who he thought the protagonist was. That was a trick question! Everyone who may have been the protagonist dies having accomplished nothing! The only character who's even alive at the end of the movie is The Altar Boy, Kai, and let's face it: he wasn't even introduced until 30 or so minutes into the film, and he saves the day completely by chance; the only reason he does is because the priest dies in the middle of the fight (of course, who doesn't?).
From the beginning, this movie takes potentially great environments and ruins them. The series of battles that briefly flash across the screen are absolutely ridiculous and only come across as an attempt to shove as much CG as possible into each frame. This will come up time and time again: in the forest with the wolves and pretty much the entire time in the monastery. The entire time, you will find the environments to be over crowded, and though that can normally be used to the mood's advantage, here it's contradicting to the feeling's of the characters.
The dialog was really what made me laugh. Everything comes across as a failed attempt to sound serious, but as non-monotone as possible. After almost every scene's dialog ended, I would lean over to my friend and ask "So that was really the best take they got?" In the beginning of the movie, our two army deserters come across a farm house and find a dying couple in bed. Well, they're at least made to look dead: they have plague cysts all over their bodies and flies are buzzing around them, but then the woman briefly comes back to life...then dies. So they leave the house, burn it to the ground, and steal the horses. After words, they find all the monks in the monastery in a similar sick state, tied to their desks. Then the dumbest line in the whole movie is uttered by a man who has already seen one of these sick people come back to life "Why would they tie themselves to their desks?" It was either that or when they realize the witch wanted them to take her to the monastery and one character exclaims it was the witch that brought them there, as if the King's orders had nothing to do with it. At most points, the two knights will be speaking in a very old English dialect, and then ruin the effect by making some perverted joke about French women or say a modern word like "Don't."
After all the major characters have been introduced to us, I saw only one character who had a chance of development, and that was a swindler. He sounded like he was your common New Yorker and wasn't all that nice. So I found myself rooting for him so he could change a little, and I thought maybe he (a minor character) was supposed to be the protagonist: he was just a common guy, down on his luck, just trying to make loose ends meet. He was someone the audience could relate to and would have been a great character if it weren't for two things: 1. The audience never notices him because of how little he contributes to the plot, and 2. He gets killed off about halfway through the film, forty or so minutes before everyone else does.
Even the thing I look at the least caught my eye as terrible: the CG. I normally could care less how bad CG is done, these days it's been made so well, entire movies are CG. But even that was shockingly bad! The scene in which the witch (who has just been discovered to be a demon) melts her cage and escapes looked like something out of a Nintendo Gamecube title, the CG that is.
Maybe I blacked out at the end of the movie for a few minutes, but I never even saw a conclusion. The entire reason the knights go on this quest is to try and cure the Black Plague, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the movie ended with The Alter Boy and young girl riding away on a horse. It was the King that sent them on this quest, the least they could do is show us if he was okay in the end! I don't know, like I said, I may have blacked out when this happened, all the funny parts had already ended.
This movie was clearly trying to be formulaic, and with a concept such as the one at hand, I had no problem with that. But it screwed that up to! All the excitement seems to build and build, and then there is that horribly animated scene where they discover the witch is a demon and began to banish her or something (it never says) and all Heck breaks loose. This would have been a bad time to end the movie, but it would have been better than where it did in the real movie, at least here the excitement would have built up to something. After the demon escapes, I was miffed that this thing wouldn't end, so I'm assuming the entire audience was feeling like I did: "That was exciting! Oh...what? They're just walking around now..." And then without warning, gradual build up, or any smooth transition, the plot escalates into a battle with the demon and a hoard of demoniacally possessed monks. At the beginning of the move, I told my friend, "If that witch raises an army of the dead, I have all rights to call this movie predictable." So there you go.