Reviews of Sucker Punch and Chalet Girl
Sucker Punch
I'm still trying to work out my thoughts about Sucker Punch. I found the movie fascinating but flawed and I came out of the cinema in tears because I found the ending incredibly bleak. But it was a very superficial emotional connection. I wouldn't really recommend it because the execution is flawed and it is horribly triggery for rape but I certainly don't think it completely sucks in the way that most of the reviews that I've seen do.
There is an awful lot to unravel and I like the fact that it was obviously (to me at least) an attempt to write a film about sexism in geek culture and trauma. Unfortunately it didn't work very well because the movie made no real sense and the Inception-like layers (of fantasy rather than dream) didn't follow organically from each other. The main problem for me was that I don't think that those characters would have those specific escapist fantasies.
I've been going back and forth on this a lot because the nineteen-sixties mental asylum is probably supposed to be another fantasy layer but I can't picture someone from that place and era being be familiar enough with the mechas and samurai warriors and the shiny robots to craft them into such an all encompassing fantasy. If the main protagonist had knowledge of present day geek culture it would sort of make sense but the device completely fails within the layers of the fantasy.
The action scenes looked amazing and were kickass but ultimately soulless and felt very jarring for the reasons described above.
I'm still not entirely sure whether I think Babydoll or Sweetpea was the main protagonist. Were Rocket and Sweetpea representatives of Babydoll and her sister? Or was Babydoll part of Sweetpea with more agency? I could go either way.
Were all the girls inside the brothel layer real? Their deaths weren't mentioned at the end by Dr Gorski and The Doctor (played by John Hamm) and early on Sweetpea says that last time someone tried to escape three girls died.
I'm not really sure what was going on with the ending. I originally took it as a straightforward act of self sacrifice from Babydoll to give . Now I've thought about it my interpretation of the ending was that Babydoll chose the lobotomy because she wanted to be free from the memory of all the trauma, particularly her role in her sister's death. Sweetpea's escape wasn't real and it represented Babydoll escaping into obliviousness. It was bleak and I didn't think that it was about as it appeared on the surface. I don't know.
I really want to see the DVD and the proposed director's cut especially if there is an in-depth commentary because I really want to know what the hell Zach Snyder was thinking when he made it.
Chalet Girl
I hadn't intended to see Chalet Girl because it looked terrible but it won a coin toss on Orange Wednesday after C and I discovered that the film we'd intended to watch (True Grit, I think) was on too early. All I knew was that it was about a Chalet Girl (obvs), there was snowboarding and it also starred Ed Westwick and was probably a romantic comedy. The actual film came as a very pleasant surprise. It is an entertaining British comedy with a cool female protagonist with a surprising amount of agency. Kim is a former championship-winning skateboarder (Felicity Jones) who has given up the sport after the death of her mother (her greatest supporter). She ends up working as a Chalet Girl for a rich banking family in the Alps because she needs the money.
It's pretty predictable but the cast is awesome with Bill Bailey (hee!) as her dad, Tamsin Egerton and Ed Westwick in pretty typical roles and Bill Nighy. I loved the fact that the love interest (the banker's son, of course) played a pretty incidental role in Kim's journey to learn to snowboard, overcome her fears and win the big competition. The characters all felt like people I've met and there was some awesome snowboarding, so it was an all round winner with me. (And made me curse the fact that I never got around to going boarding this winter. I fail at holidays.)
I'm still trying to work out my thoughts about Sucker Punch. I found the movie fascinating but flawed and I came out of the cinema in tears because I found the ending incredibly bleak. But it was a very superficial emotional connection. I wouldn't really recommend it because the execution is flawed and it is horribly triggery for rape but I certainly don't think it completely sucks in the way that most of the reviews that I've seen do.
There is an awful lot to unravel and I like the fact that it was obviously (to me at least) an attempt to write a film about sexism in geek culture and trauma. Unfortunately it didn't work very well because the movie made no real sense and the Inception-like layers (of fantasy rather than dream) didn't follow organically from each other. The main problem for me was that I don't think that those characters would have those specific escapist fantasies.
I've been going back and forth on this a lot because the nineteen-sixties mental asylum is probably supposed to be another fantasy layer but I can't picture someone from that place and era being be familiar enough with the mechas and samurai warriors and the shiny robots to craft them into such an all encompassing fantasy. If the main protagonist had knowledge of present day geek culture it would sort of make sense but the device completely fails within the layers of the fantasy.
The action scenes looked amazing and were kickass but ultimately soulless and felt very jarring for the reasons described above.
I'm still not entirely sure whether I think Babydoll or Sweetpea was the main protagonist. Were Rocket and Sweetpea representatives of Babydoll and her sister? Or was Babydoll part of Sweetpea with more agency? I could go either way.
Were all the girls inside the brothel layer real? Their deaths weren't mentioned at the end by Dr Gorski and The Doctor (played by John Hamm) and early on Sweetpea says that last time someone tried to escape three girls died.
I'm not really sure what was going on with the ending. I originally took it as a straightforward act of self sacrifice from Babydoll to give . Now I've thought about it my interpretation of the ending was that Babydoll chose the lobotomy because she wanted to be free from the memory of all the trauma, particularly her role in her sister's death. Sweetpea's escape wasn't real and it represented Babydoll escaping into obliviousness. It was bleak and I didn't think that it was about as it appeared on the surface. I don't know.
I really want to see the DVD and the proposed director's cut especially if there is an in-depth commentary because I really want to know what the hell Zach Snyder was thinking when he made it.
Chalet Girl
I hadn't intended to see Chalet Girl because it looked terrible but it won a coin toss on Orange Wednesday after C and I discovered that the film we'd intended to watch (True Grit, I think) was on too early. All I knew was that it was about a Chalet Girl (obvs), there was snowboarding and it also starred Ed Westwick and was probably a romantic comedy. The actual film came as a very pleasant surprise. It is an entertaining British comedy with a cool female protagonist with a surprising amount of agency. Kim is a former championship-winning skateboarder (Felicity Jones) who has given up the sport after the death of her mother (her greatest supporter). She ends up working as a Chalet Girl for a rich banking family in the Alps because she needs the money.
It's pretty predictable but the cast is awesome with Bill Bailey (hee!) as her dad, Tamsin Egerton and Ed Westwick in pretty typical roles and Bill Nighy. I loved the fact that the love interest (the banker's son, of course) played a pretty incidental role in Kim's journey to learn to snowboard, overcome her fears and win the big competition. The characters all felt like people I've met and there was some awesome snowboarding, so it was an all round winner with me. (And made me curse the fact that I never got around to going boarding this winter. I fail at holidays.)