two movies

Sucker Punch (Japanese title: Angel Wars)

What an entirely pointless movie this is. It's a lush love letter to glorified decay, but Zack Snyder is better off pursuing adapting the work of better authors. He understands translating sequential art to movies, and his final visions are gorgeous.

But as a writer, he doesn't seem to understand how to resolve his arcs, and clearly thought he was being clever by twisting the end around to revise whose story it ends up being.

I wonder if people on his set were blowing smoke up his butt that it was all genius, or if it was more like Star Trek V, where Shatner was being warned that no-one makes movies this way, and Shatner insisted that he knew better than not only everyone on the set, but all directors and writers who had come before him.

It starts in an unrealistic world, some fairy tale version of the '40s or '50s, then goes to other places in the character's mind. The initial scenes may be fantasy, or it may not be; it's so heavily stylized, it's difficult to tell apart from the other clearly fantasy worlds the story subsequently takes us. A mundane presentation of the initial scenes would have served to clarify the other levels of fantasy in which the story takes place.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Not nearly as bad as I'd expected. Actually, as a filthy liberal, I enjoyed the subplot of an established global power invading a non-threatening minor nation based on fabricated evidence, with the real goal being to attain ready access to a huge underground vein of unsurpassed power.

My only disappointment with the political subtext was that the desert libertarian tribe didn't manage to have a catastrophe in which their no-tax society utter collapsed or was otherwise subjugated. I guess I'm just happy to have an action movie with a clear liberal agenda.

I watched it in Japanese for the most part, so my kids could enjoy it. We got through about half the movie when I noticed the kids weren't watching, so I flipped it to English. I am not sure what I was expecting, but I was stunned to hear everyone in this ancient, Persian empire speaking with a British accent. Including Glylenhaal, who is American. I dunno, it's a Disney movie. I don't expect everyone to be speaking ancient Persian, but I don't know why the don't just let everyone go with their natural spoken accent, or standard American newscaster accent? I guess they wanted to unify on one accent, and someone on the set realized "old" and "empire," the first thing anyone thinks of is "United Kingdom." Or maybe "China," but that would have been too much of a challenge for most actors. So they went with a British accent.

Some of the composited action shots, particularly the early ones with the kid, look quite bad. The CG knife sequences, where the human is rendered in CG, almost a rotoscoped technique, looked poor. Some uncanny valley problem, likely.

For once, I actually liked the ending of the movie more than bulk of the movie itself. I should have seen it coming, and I more or less knew where it was going, but it was well-executed.