Sucker Punch Post-Release Discussion - Page 2

I guess I liked it? Objectively I knew that the acting was horrible and story barely there. But it was fun damn it! The brothel and asylum scenes weren't that great but each fantasy world was pretty well done for the most part. This might have worked better without a connecting story bridging each world. The space train heist was the most entertaining. We should have seen at least some dancing and maybe had some exposition on how the dreams are connected to reality. It felt sort of like a movie with trailers for other movies or video game cutscenes inside of it.

 

But the movie wasn't completely stupid. The female empowerment angle was their even if it can't decide if we should be ogling the girls or feeling sorry for them. It also becomes sort of meta near the end with the girl telling the audience that she needed us. So maybe Baby Doll did escape through our memories of the movie? Was the bus station another dream world? What exactly is Scott Glenn? That should have been touched on sooner. Either way I'm still thinking about Suckerpunch when it feels completely empty on the surface level.

 

If Snyder can bring even half of the insanity of this movie to Superman we'll have something great.

I dunno- I thought the delineation of the levels was pretty straightforward.

 

The brothel is where the main character becomes Baby Doll.  It is a stand in for the hopeless situation of the asylum.  This is important because it's no picnic either, but she imagines a place where her sexuality (represented primarily by "the dance") can offer her escape.

 

The fighting level is a direct representation of the dance.   It's intended to show that, to Baby Doll, the dances are not sexual- they're a battle to get ahead.  This level is also aimed at the audience, implicating us in our enjoyment of movies/shows/animes like Sucker Punch, which mock the idea of true female empowerment by turning it into a fetish.

This'll be ripe for reappraisal in a few years. The workaday critics didn't quite know what to do with it, and it was easier to give Snyder the spanking he was assumed to deserve than to engage what the film is doing or trying to do. It'll get its cult audience on Blu-ray.

 

On the plus side, any Sucker Punch merchandise will now be a whole lot cheaper. That Art of Sucker Punch book needs to come down forty, fifty bucks before I'll bite.

If you read between the lines, EVERYONE, more or less, realizes that the movie is objectively awful (or "interesting failure" if you want to be nice about it, and I still think that's an accurate way to categorize it, btw).

 

From there it's just how many excuses do you feel like making for it? Every single "positive" review for the film is basically an exercise in making excuses for it and for Snyder. "Okay, yeah... _____ is really mishandled and bad. But if you just bend your perspective this way a bit..."

 

And it all stems from Snyder a) being such a genuine and seemingly nice guy who actually cares about the genre he works in and the crowd he caters to, b) his unmistakable visual prowess, and c) personal investment and expectations that this thing was going to be, well, "awesome."

 

And c) is where it gets kind of irritating to watch. Not naming names, but it's interesting to watch certain reviewers contort themselves into insanely tough yoga positions in order to stake their flag in the "unique" territory of defending this thing as something that actually contains "deep" or interesting takes on feminism, the male gaze, etc. etc. And on top of that, lashing out at the majority of people that, rather than do heavy lifting for the filmmaker and make excuses, label it the piece of shit that it is and move on.

 

There ARE differing levels of "piece of shit," and this is quite obviously on the "better" level as opposed to flat out grotesque things like "Big Momma's House" or a fucking Tyler Perry film or Twilight. But it's still an awful film any way you slice it, and I don't see how you can "hate" on anyone who addresses it as such.

 

 

ETA: Having said that, if you DO enjoy it, good on you. I can't disparage anyone for enjoying this in whatever way they want. Hell, I really enjoyed my viewing, just not in the way others did. Just don't try to make it into something it's not, which is a "misunderstood" film.

 

This is where the debate on Snyder's movies always gets muddled.  Arguing if they're there and arguing if they're deep are two completely different things.  They may not be deep, but they are there.

 

Oh, there's no doubt that they're there and that he deliberately tried to tackle those issues. But Snyder tries to tackle stuff like this time and time again, and always fails on one level or another. This time it was just an epic flame-out as opposed to the very creaky but still sort of standing buildings of 300 and Watchmen. But Snyder gets a pat on the head where if, oh, some other director had done it they'd be getting ripped to shreds by the same critics that are trying to salvage this one in some way.

 

And I realize that part of that just comes with the territory. Snyder has earned a lot of goodwill in the geek crowd, and fairly so through his visual command of the medium. Even Sucker Punch has fleeting glimpses of some flat out amazing action choreography and photography.

 

ETA: And it's FINE as a reviewer to want to dig and find a new take on something like Sucker Punch. But don't call everyone else "dumb" and act like an asshole because they call it like it is.

"Everyone" isn't a word that should be used re: people's subjective experience of art. Neither is "objectively awful," which is like saying "It's a fact that this is awful," and facts don't enter into opinion of art, however much people might like them to.

 

I genuinely loved the film (and I'm not "in the tank" for Snyder — the only flick of his I liked before this was Watchmen), but I'm not calling anyone "dumb" for not liking it. People can like it or not like it. I don't need to be agreed with. Doesn't affect my enjoyment of it. And my enjoyment of it shouldn't affect other people's disdain towards it. Life's too short. Enjoy what you enjoy, don't enjoy what you don't enjoy. Either way you're not dumb.

I just meant that I haven't read or heard from anyone who liked it that doesn't come from a place of "I liked it despite _____" and so forth. We all recognize, I think, what's bad about it and what its shortcomings are. Some people just assign different weight to those aspects, I guess.

 

And yes, enjoy what you enjoy. I can't hate on anyone's enjoyment.

 

I just notice, and I'm talking about a lot of the reviewing community here not board posters or anything, an interesting level of "I really wanted to love this thing and am rooting for Snyder, and so I'm not going to call this thing a turd because I'm not ready to."

 

But again, I get it. Reviewers and their work is subjective and it's fair to have your filmmakers that you let slide on things you would eviscerate others for. And it's fair because someone like Snyder, as a filmmaker, shows promise in ways that Catherine Hardwicke (arbitrary name out of the shitty-director hat) does not.

 

But I just don't see any arguing objectively that this film, on its own divorced from who made it, is an absolute mess at the best of times.

 

In the spirit of not shitting on this thing anymore though, what (if any) did you all think were highlights? (Of the non-ironic variety of course. I could rattle off 94% of the film as something I loved in a so bad it's good way).

 

I thought the "key-hole zoom in" in the opening was neat. I also thought that the train sequence was visually amazing at times. Just enough movement to keep it lively and interesting bordering on dizzy, but never incoherent and felt like an appropriately "bad ass" live-action approximation of anime. That moment when the camera whips around to reveal Baby Doll's reflection in that Robut's face was particularly nice, I thought.

Actually, I'd say Hardwicke is a better director than Snyder. Snyder couldn't have made Thirteen, which I think is a fine film. Hardwicke, who started as a really good production designer, has lately been going where the money is, which is unfortunate but a sad reality for most filmmakers.

 

Purely subjectively, I have to say I was on the fence about Sucker Punch until the first fantasy sequence kicked in with "Army of Me" (a song that I love and that reminds me of another grrl-power flick I love that everyone else hates, Tank Girl). After that the flick was on wheels for me. It got my adrenaline buzzing, which doesn't happen a lot to me at movies any more. The music, the editing and composition, it was all there for me and I just responded to it as pure cinema. Certain angles, certain shots cutting to other shots, just do something to me that's beyond logic.

 

I also have to wonder, if this didn't come from Zack Snyder, who was due for a whipping in both the geek press and workaday press, and it came from, say, Japan or India, would people respond to it the way it's probably intended to be taken. I mean, people genuflect to Miike (who's great, don't get me wrong) but have such a hard time with this? And god help Brazil (which is great, don't get me wrong) if it came out new today. "It makes no sense! It rips off 1984!" and who knows what else.

Gilliam and Miike know how to get honest-to-God good performances from actors, though.

 

 

 

How on earth did Jamie Chung get that part?  Snyder couldn't find anyone better than a roommate on an MTV reality show?

 

She was so horrifically bad that it was a distraction whenever she had to say a line.

 

And after the last line of the film was spoken, most of the audience burst out laughing.  I didn't share the hate for the film (only for Chung), but this really looks to be tanking, being beaten out by the Wimpy Kid sequel and not even managing 20 mil for the weekend.

 

 

See, I feel like if it wasn't Snyder it'd be getting an even worse and more universal lashing. (Although we're getting way into hypothetical territory here)
 

 

It was a noble failure. But could've used some dancing footage cross-cut with the action fantasies. At least so as to bring some sort of character-driven psychological reality to them. That wouldn't have fixed this film's myriad of problems but it would have at least drawn the relationship between the male audience inside and outside of the film into sharper relief. Nevermind all the other valid criticisms about the content of the fantasies, the lack of characters, the spotty acting, etc....

 

Yeah, I guess it's hypothetical. Still, it reminded me of when I saw Gummo and thought to myself, "If this had subtitles and came from Mexico or something, people would be lionizing it as a surreal classic. Because it's Harmony Korine and it's set in America, apparently it's crap."

 

Like I've said elsewhere, though, as I get older I have less respect for the merely competent and more respect for the bold and weird. And whatever else can be said about it, Sucker Punch is the boldest, weirdest thing to open on 3,000 screens across America in quite some time. I realize and accept that my view on it is really, really minority, but I also say that it'll find a wider audience on Blu-ray, where people who were scared off by the reviews from paying full price in a theater might discover it and appreciate it.
 

 

 

 

How much more universal can it really get, without become parody? It's being called the death of filmmaking on legitimate sites, has +78% of critics giving it a negative rating... I can't think of another film that's had as energetic of a negative reaction in some time. Sure, a Tyler Perry film or something gets more hate maybe, but only amidst an overwhelming cloud of apathy.

 

Snyder's name has in no way, shape, or form had any significant dampening effect on the negative reaction, and I would be willing to stake my grapes that it's actually done more to compound it.

 

You're probably right. I guess I meant more among a certain pod of online critics.

 

As bad as I think the film is, I'll concede that a great deal of the negative reaction goes way into hyperbolic and stupid territory. Namely this "death of filmmaking" talk. Even IF the thing raked in a billion dollars this weekend, I'd still say that's irresponsible hyperbole.

 

I think also that opening in the patented "Zack Snyder window" really hurt this one because there's nothing else going on. If this opened mid-summer it'd get buried pretty quick. But as is, there's nothing else to look at (more or less) so it's really standing out there begging to be gawked at in a way.
 

 

We obviously weren't prepared.

 

Have you still not seen it, Nick? I'm curious to hear your reaction.

 

 

Also, I thought it was interesting that for all the complaining I've done regarding the over-use of speed-ramping, I found the fantasy that seemed to be nearly totally devoid of it (the WWI Zombie trench mess) was far and away the dullest and most boring of all the action bits.

I thought this might be interesting to put here, so here is Snyder being asked about the original ending by the Filmschoolrejects.com crew.

Obviously, spoilers bellow.

 

I’m curious, if you don’t mind talking about it, what was the originally shot and intended ending?

The very first ending I wrote the order was: Babydoll was being lobotomized, she got chained in the basement, Sweet Pea escapes – well, let me back up. There’s a scene you’ll see on the Director’s Cut with Jon Hamm. When Jon Hamm arrives as the High Roller – and we took this scene out because of the MPAA – when that guy punches Babydoll in the face, she wakes up in the High Roller’s suite. He basically makes a deal with her that if she gives herself to him, and willingly and not against her will, then he’ll give her freedom and get [her] out of that place. He’ll make it so that Blue will never touch her and she’ll be free. She’s seduced by that concept, and right when they go to kiss each other, that’s her being lobotomized. When they kiss, it’s her being lobotomized.

The very end of the movie was: you see Sweet Pea steal a dress from a clothesline, then after she’s lobotomized and Blue says, “Do you remember me? Take her downstairs,” and then you see Sweet Pea getting on the bus, then after her getting on the bus, it cuts back to Babydoll in the basement and that whole scene happens of the cops taking him away. When he shines the flashlight on her, she gets up, and the camera dollies in on her and then goes around her head – and you see that she’s on a stage in the theater and she signs “O-o-h Child” at the very end. After that, all the dead girls come out and they sing together, then the curtain closes. That’s the end.

Why was that cut?

We tested it, and people just did not know how to… I don’t know. I thought it was awesome, personally. Maybe there’s a cult version of it that’ll exist that I can put together sometime [Laughs], but for a mass audience, it just played as this super culty, bizarro ending. I love it, personally. I could tell that people just didn’t know how to take it, though.

He is delusional.

I saw it and hated it, but it a totally different way that I thought I might.

 

I see. Then I await the inevitable write up?

 

Funny that Snyder originally had the High Roller and Baby Doll's sexual encounter leading into the lobotomy moment. At least the theatrical cut equates sex and violence with a little more subtlety. In fact it's funny how Sucker Punch attempts to cover similar ground as Black Swan (and Inception, and Shutter Island...), dealing with a stunted woman, seemingly stuck in adolescence, learning to become a woman by using sexuality as a weapon.

 

Or to put it another way, all she needed was to be penetrated in order to be happy.

 

Does it matter that we're given little explanation for why Baby Doll would have these fantasies? We learn little about Dorothy before she (seemingly) conjures up Oz from her imagination. I think a few quick shots of Weird Tales comic books in her room would have been nice at the beginning, but whatever...

It's a pity, though, that "When the Levee Breaks" isn't in the film as it is in the trailer. If that had kicked in when, say, the fuckin' dragon was chasing the fighter plane, I would've been all "CITIZEN KANE, I'M HAPPY FOR YOU AND I'MMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT SUCKER PUNCH IS THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME. OF ALL TIME."

 

...Well, maybe not that bad. Still, at that moment, maybe.

 

Oh dude, wait: if he'd put "The Immigrant Song" over the fuckin' dragon chasing the fighter plane? "THIS MOVIE IS THE ESSENCE AND THE ULTIMATE OF EVERYTHING. IT IS NOW MY RELIGION AND MY WAY OF LIFE."

 

I'm just saying. Flick cried out for some Zep. I realize they charge a fuckload. But hell, Warner was already spending $82 mil. What's another $81 mil for Zep music clearance?

Ah fuck, here it is: I can't believe I didn't think of this before:

 

Sucker Punch is the Princess Kate of movies.

 

Adjust your perception of it accordingly. Some hated her posts, some of us dug the sheer loopiness.

 

There you go. You're welcome. Sucker Punch is Princess Kate in IMAX. Complete with epic digressions and derailing.

The film's just flawed on many levels. There was no need for the brothel -- everything that happened in the brothel essentially happened in the asylum. It was just an excuse to keep the girls in fetish clothing for the entire running time.

 

Switching, the second before Babydoll is lobotomized, into the brothel world ruins any kind of tension or drama in the story. We already know it's coming -- the main character that we're supposed to be pulling for and hoping for her success is already gone. It made the entire story hollow from the get-go. I think a far more compelling way of telling the story would have been Babydoll and the other girls being in the asylum the entire time, trying to escape, with Babydoll switching off into her battle fantasies whenever things get difficult. But no, we had to have chicks in chaps and fishnet stockings instead.

 

And the battle scenes themselves (which are the entire draw of the film), make no sense either. If Babydoll is just the distraction while all the other girls do the hard work, then why is Babydoll the hero in the fantasies? Sweetpea risked herself to get the map of the brothel/asylum, but Babydoll is the hero in the Steampunk war setting? Amber has to schmooze the mayor to get the lighter right from his jacket pocket, but Babydoll is the one who kills both dragons? The fight scenes are completely disjointed from the rest of the film -- they don't even follow the parameters set up by the brothel scenes leading up to them. And it makes the stupid fucking "This isn't my story... it's yours!" line all the more terrible and illogical.

 

It's just bad storytelling. Storytelling which does nothing but give Snyder an excuse to have hot girls dressed in fetish clothing fight Nazi zombies, dragons and robots. The rest of the story is set up as padding around those three action sequences, and the film is broken from the get-go because of it. Honestly, I think the best and most honest director's cut we could get would be just those three sequences, with everything else cut out.

 

But god DAMN does Emily Browning look good as a platinum blonde.

Wow.  I agree with your overall assessment of the film, and yet I think I disagree with pretty much everything you say.

 

ETA- I would go into more detail, but much of it would just be repeating what I said in previous posts in a different way.

Face facts, this piece of stinking shit is nothing more then a bunch of 90 pound girls playing dress up and make-believe while pretending to be badasses. There is no weight to the subject matter and the entire movie is a mish mash of Anime, Manga, Riot-girl and Heavy Metal magazine influenced wank.

If this had been loaded with graphic sex and nudity, I might have given it a pass. But there is none! If there was some nice juicy gore then I could enjoy it on a visceral level. But this is PG-13 so I'm shit out of luck. So why the Hell would you willingly pay to see this when you also know that Zack "Rockstar" Snyder is a fucking jerkoff and most likely a closet homo.

I mean, In Dawn of the Dead there’s the middle aged guy who watches the redneck mall cops strip down, while they’re behind bars, as he confesses his love for man flesh and then later cuts the hottest women in the movie, in half, with a chainsaw!

 

300 had men ripped and oiled like they were starring in a fucking gay porno. Snyder also just HAD to give Dr. Manhattan a big swinging cock in Watchmen. "Oh but you see Manhattan's dick in the Watchmen comic, so he was just being faithful!". BULLFUCKINGSHIT!!! The movie is soo faithful but Zack needed to remove the giant squid? That's because it resembled a massive vagina and homo's fear the poon!!!

And now we have his magnum opus, from his own "imagination", about a bunch of teenage girls dressing like burlesque dancers, fighting fantasy badguys in their imagination all the while looking fabulous. I suspect that all of the hardcore violence, nudity and macho posturing in his earlier films was really a cover for Snyder's latent homosexuality. The man even Directed a movie about OWLS and everyone know that Owls are inherently gay.

Their inclusion in the Harry Potter universe led me to suspect that the entire HP universe was teeming with homosexual subtext. That Harry and Ron wanted to stick their wands up each others asses while Hermione was their fag hag. We all know Dumbledore was gay, as Rowling admitted, so I have to wonder if Voldemort was really evil or was he just a closet case self loather who resisted Big D's efforts to get him to live out loud? Did V-man's thirst for cock drive him to madness and murder?

Anywho, with the failure of Sucker Punch and the Gay Owl movie, I'm sure Warner Brothers will be telling him to get the fuck away from Superman before he gays it up even more then Bryan Singer did. In which case I suspect we'll soon see Zack doing an adaptation of the 1980's cartoon JEM......now that would be truly outrageous!!!   

 

cool story bro

Snyder talks Sucker Punch and more on Attack of the Show:

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/52052/sucker-punchs-zack-snyder-on-superman-the-300-sequel/

  I just saw Sucker Punch and I enjoyed it. It is style of substance, but it is some really wild style. The best parts of the movie are the four fantasy sequences. I thought all  were brilliant! I think that is why the movie is worth watching once. I don't need to own it on DVD.

 

  When it come to female empowerment, Sucker Punch has nothing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course I'm talking about the show. I do realize its silly for a guy to talk about what is an isn't good female empowerment.

 

  Lastly Blue is a weak villain. Whenever he had a mustache, I thought he looked like an evil Freddie Mercury

Kinda felt compelled to join in on the discussion here.

 

After two viewings, I kinda think this is Snyder's best work yet, flawed as it is, and I'm not really ashamed to admit it.

 

The best way way for me to explain that opinion is that I think for the first time Snyder has made a film with a beating heart. Its absolutely bursting at the seams with energy, emotion and ideas, and in a way its flaws magnify it's pulse even more. Even the action shines here in a way it never has in a Snyder film I think. As much as I think the action would have been helped with an R rating, I still feel that what is here is magnitudes better than his previous movies. The cinematography, choreography and music all help these action scenes feel like the most ambitious, fully realised, and energetic of all of Snyder's work, with the final setpiece of the film, the train, being a culmination of all that he has shown in his toolbox so far and finally putting all of it to incredible use.

 

Same goes for the characters, as much as they would benefit from a fuller script, for the first time I felt the humanity in the characters of a Snyder film. Nothing in any of Snyder's previous films has felt as authentic as Sweet Pea's reaction to her sister's death or Baby Doll breaking down during the night as Rocket gets out of bed to comfort her.

 

Concept/theme wise, I think something that clears the movie up a lot is that the films action fantasy sequences are not part of the films narrative. The film is strictly a 1 level fantasy. The brothel. The action scenes are to the audience what Baby's dances are to the men in the brothel. The power that her dance holds over those men, is the same as the power of women dressed in fetishistic outfits in outlandish fantasy scenarios are to the people who compromise most of Snyder's fanbase. Its in a way a kind of 4th wall breaking, that is never outright stated nor acknowledged. While I think theres a case to be made about the movie partly being about the objectification and all around awkwardness towards women in geek/nerd subculture, overall I found the movie to be moreso about true empowerment of oneself, the "perfect victory" over those that oppress you. Its a film about the oppressed rebelling against the power that seeks to control by subverting ones strength and humanity against itself. This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but I feel there's a lot more the meat of the film than a lot are willing to admit/look into.

 

While the screenplay's flaws do affect the film,(whether structurally or in the dialogue) after two viewings I found myself too engaged with the final product to react to the film in anything but a positive manner. Like I said above also, the flaws magnify the films pulse in a way. It all feels so much less calculated than Watchmen and 300, this thing is a living and breathing beast.

 

I only wish the film had kept its originally intended musical focus, with all of the individual dances, and the films original ending. I do think they would have added one hell of a unique framing to the film.

Wow, this guy IS delusional. He doesn't understand what makes True Grit work versus his own adaptation of Watchmen. I don't think he is capable. Let's just pat this idiot savant's head and say "Good job. Good for you!" from now on.

 

Thanks for the link.

Never has a film worked so hard to empower woman and faltered so badly. So what? The only place women have power is in the reality past the whore house and even then it's not real power because it's not the real world. Oh and in the end we STILL need a man to save us because we're too weak and ineffectual to survive the real world on our own.

Not to mention the costumes and make up. Emily Browning looked plastic. The CGi technique that made all the women super smooth? Gross.

Such a big flipping failure of a movie.

The film says much of popular female empowerment, especially the iconography, really just reinforces traditional male power structures.  A true path to freedom is never introduced.  It's not about grrrl power.

I must be missing something because I missed all that.

You know what we don't need as a culture? Another film where woman are oppressed but it's okay because the filmmaker acknowledges that it totally sucks. That's like the hipsters who make racists jokes but say it's okay because it's ironic or they have black/asian/hispanic friends.

I went into this film REALLY wanting to like it. And I came out offended, which is a feat because I'm not (usually) offended easily. I have no problems beating up hookers in video games.

Jesus, Snyder doesn't understand that there is no such thing as "faithfully" adapting a work of literature from novel to book because the very nature of adapting a work focuses it through a different creative lens.  That he compares Watchmen to Coen Brothers movies is ridiculous.  Both the Coen version and the John Wayne version of TRUE GRIT are faithful to the novel, but they're very different films because they have different creative forces at the hell.  He's bragging that WATCHMEN is true to the source now and complaining that people wanted him to "reinvent" it?  Nobody wanted him to reinvent it, they just wanted him to think about the material and properly adapt it.  That he doesn't understand that leads me to believe that he doesn't know what his own spin would even be, because it's not about the material but about how "cool" everything looks/is.  He's a visual stylist and everything I've heard about SUCKER PUNCH backs that up further.  The fact that people are bending over backwards to defend this guy is more then a little baffling. 
 

Here's something everyone seems to be missing. The script is co-credited to Steve Shibuya. People love to say that Snyder is too much of a surface-obsessed retard to have put any depth or feminist subtext into the film. But then you have Shibuya, whose parents were sent to an internment camp in WWII, and who is self-described as a "househusband."

 

Just saying. There's a whole other person who worked on the script. And maybe, just maybe, the stuff some of us (like Depton) are reading and responding to in the film was put there by a guy who took care of his daughter at home for years while his wife worked. Here's a profile of Shibuya.

 

Oh, and JacknifeJohnny, I'll give Richard Kelly all the leeway in the world; he's 3 for 3 so far, as far as I'm concerned. I loved Southland Tales and I loved Sucker Punch.

You know, for me personally, I am just reacting to the movie I saw.  I've never even read an interview with Snyder.  The type of movies he makes aren't going to lend themselves to deep examinations of anything, but they do have subtext.  I watch Michael Bay movies too.  He's got a good eye too.  He's hated by geeks too.  But I don't see that his movies are about anything interesting.

This hasn't been released down here yet but I gotta say, the more I read from you guys about it, the more it sounds like it'd be pretty great to go see at Imax on some good mushrooms or half a tab of acid. It's been a very long time since I've even considered doing that, but this magnificent sounding operatic mess certainly seems like it may qualify.

I'm kind of in the middle with this sentiment.  Snyder has an edge on Bay in terms of context because he attaches himself to interesting source material (it's not hard to chose Watchmen or Dawn of the Dead over Transformer toys).  At the same time, I actually think Bay is a better technical film maker who's capable of real beauty when he doesn't let his indulgences get in the way (which isn't too often).  With Snyder, his visual flourishes feel like nothing but indulgences.  His most restrained film is the Dawn of the Dead remake and he seems to have been getting more and more up his own ass ever since. 

I haven't seen Sucker Punch yet (plan to this Friday) but I'm kind of dreading it.  I don't want to hate it, but I expect to. 

Snyder is the author of this film.  Snyder is the author of all of his films.  Even though they're mostly all adaptations, they are his films, and don't belong to anyone else.  George Romero authored his version of Dawn of the Dead and there's a reason why Snyder's version is uniquely his own, even if they follow (roughly) the same story.  The film version of Watchmen is Snyder's version.  If anyone else to direct it, they would be the author.  We can make excuses about how uninvolved he was with his own film until we're blue in the face, but the bottom line is he is ultimately responsible. 

 

Richard Kelly is 3 for 3?  I haven't seen Southland Tales yet, but tou liked THE BOX???

 

Well, that's the auteur theory, which I think is bullshit, but whatever.

 

The reason that the Dawn of the Dead remake is different from the Romero version is that James Gunn wrote it that way (with uncredited assist from Scott Frank and Michael Tolkin). David Hayter took the squid out of Watchmen, not Snyder. And so on.

 

And yes, I liked The Box.

 

Edited by Martin Blank - 3/29/11 at 7:43pm

 

For what its worth, I was much more mixed on my first viewing, and I found the movie to hold up much better on a 2nd one.
 

 

Lemme guess: you're an aspiring screenwriter aintcha.

Ahahahahahaahhaah. Oh please do. Only I'd recommend a very light dose of whatever simply because the profound thud of much of the dialog might sail right past your head if you were too out of it. 

 

But yeah, if you're going to see it, might as well go whole-hog and see it on IMAX. 

 

So the only reason the two Dawn's are different is because different people wrote the scripts?  Really?  You're telling me if Snyder shot the same script as Romero, they'd be nearly identical?

 

Mind if I ask what you saw in The Box?