Here we are, under the bright lights. Now I'm me. And you're you. And here we both are out in the open. So who loves who?
Here She is, the unbridled, the unhinged, the undomesticated, the heathen, the Whore, The Feminine in its rawest expression: monstrous, abject, divine. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, who transgress the boundaries of Her domain, hidden away by the wall that terminates the influence of Western, Christian, masculine rationality, devoid of most signifiers…
Your mileage on this film will vary depending on exactly one variable: how much are you willing to buy into Sucker Punch? If you don’t think Zack Snyder is capable of making a feminist film, of subverting the male gaze through nuanced application thereof, or of commenting on nerd misogyny and the toxic masculinist core of geek culture, then I’m not going to change your mind; the man made 300 after all. But I don’t know anything about Zack Snyder,…
disaffected youth, ennui and poverty, the limitations of male bonds struggling for connection in a decaying cityscape where there's nothing for a delinquent to do but try to live fast enough to leave alienation in the rearview. not my thing, not aligned with my thematic fixations, not deep enough into the characters for me, and all too masculine, but i'm willing to reappraise when i have more to compare it to than the best wong kar-wai and hou hsiao-hsien films
So this is obviously blatant copaganda. It wants you to sympathize with Amerikan pigs as they brutalize people of colour and generally impart fascism in a poor community, going as far as zooming in on a suspect getting the George Floyd kneel from Jake Gyllenhaal. The hyperbolic construction of policing in this film is in such poor taste that I was constantly expecting a tonal shift that revealed the film to be critiquing it; unfortunately, there was no such relief…
I was excited for this as a safe, checkpoint kind of watch in my Markathon and, in spite of my usual reservations with watching big C Canon films like this, I wasn't disappointed! Where a less talented director may have turned this into an offensive sexploitation piece, PTA approaches the material from his characteristically unique, sympathetic perspective and creates a genuinely empathetic piece that paints a complex picture of a complex subject. Frequently films that deal with sex…
