If you recognize the named Random Rewatch in the context of my blog, well, you've been reading my blog for a long time.
In August of 2011 -- the same year the movie to the right hit theaters -- I introduced to you the idea of randomly rewatching movies using their current ranking on my Flickchart and running them through a random number generator.
It took me nearly four years, until March of 2015, to watch the first film drawn in that series, Full Metal Jacket.
I was much faster on the uptake with the next movie, even though it was considerably less interesting of a rewatch than the Kubrick film. The following June I watched Hollywoodland -- feeling, I suppose, I had regained some sort of momentum on this initiative.
Uh uh.
Two weeks shy of seven years later, I've finally watched Random Rewatch #3.
You might be able to understand why I wasn't super eager to take up Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, the 2011 film that did almost no box office and got almost universally poor critical notices. But on Saturday night, I was doing a CineNerdle puzzle (super fun if you've never done it) and Sucker Punch came up in a row of four Snyder movies. It's not the only time I've seen Sucker Punch appear on CineNerdle (it seems to be a go-to in the regular category of Zack Snyder movies), and on this particular occasion, I used it as inspiration to return to a promise I made so long ago, that if I'd shattered a mirror on the same night, my string of bad luck would already be over.
There's an argument to be made that Snyder movies are particularly worth revisiting, regardless of what you thought of them the first time, because they are undeniably visually interesting, if sometimes for the wrong reasons, and because they give you a bit more insight into mind of the director who has given us some of the most reviled movies in the DCEU.
Sucker Punch, it turns out, lives up -- or down -- to the reputation it had at the time: male gaze fetishism disguised as female empowerment.
Which is not to say I think it's worthless or that I didn't enjoy watching it on some level.
In revisiting a post I wrote in 2011 in which I focused on the scene of a baby dragon's throat being slit, I see I also compared it Inception. That's apt, since it does contain fantasies within fantasies, though that comparison didn't occur to me this time. I did briefly think about Pan's Labyrinth, which I also touched on 12 years ago, because there are multiple situations where a good character fails to take their opportunity to kill a bad character. (Real people murder being bad, fantasy dragon murder being okay.)
This time the similarities for me were more stylistic, which perhaps indicates the steady erosion of my ability to analyze themes in favor of making more obvious surface comparisons. The movies I was reminded of this time were movies that do similar things visually, particularly Robert Rodriguez' Sin City and Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. (I revisited the former last year, and may be due for a reappraisal of the latter, which I didn't like very much the first time.)
It occurs to me that there are a couple interesting links that encourage the Sin City comparison in particular. Both Snyder and Rodriguez directed an adaptation of a Frank Miller comic book, Sin City in Rodriguez' case and 300 in Snyder's. Carla Cugino is also a connection, appearing in both Sucker Punch and Sin City, and being a regular collaborator of Rodriguez'. (Miller also wrote some Batman comics, and of course we know Snyder has a relationship with that character as well.)
It was interesting to note Oscar Isaac in this film, playing the villain, because this was also just at the beginnings of my awareness of him. His role -- breakout role? -- in Drive was the same year, and since then he's become inescapable. (Good inescapable, of course.) I guess he had been in Agora, which I'd seen and loved two years before that, but most people wouldn't have that as a frame of reference.
But it all comes back to those women in those skimpy outfits.
I don't necessarily think you can accuse Snyder's camera of ogling its female characters the way Michael Bay's camera does, but there's no doubt that this film was made with titillation in mind, and that it probably could not be made today.
Even when the five female stars are kicking ass and taking names, they're doing it in a variety of bustiers and garters, or in the steampunk version thereof. They're the kind of costumes that female superhero stars like Scarlett Johansson and Elizabeth Olsen have made headlines for objecting to, and with good reason. Today I don't think you'd have the skimpy outfits nor the bordello setting.
I this a terrible film, though? No it is not.
For one I thought the green screens and fantasy settings all looked pretty good. I'm not saying 12 years ago is the dawn of time in terms of visual effects -- far from it. I mean Avatar was two years before that. But I did expect it to look a bit chintzy by today's standards, and it didn't. It's a pretty cool realization of a somewhat flawed, somewhat problematic concept. Even Zack Snyder's worst films are really interesting to look at, and he was just coming off his best one, Watchmen, so I should not be surprised this has visual intrigue to spare.
One big criticism about his style, though -- and which may be a factor more in this than in some of his other films -- is how much it looks like a music video. As music videos are not as central to the culture as they once were, this is not a complaint you hear as much anymore. But Snyder did get his start in videos, and you can really tell in the semi- slow-mo montages that accompany some songs used in this film that play out almost in their entirety. It's not that these sequences are any less interesting to look at, but they seem cheapened by the fact that the images in music videos tend to have a lower standard for thematic significance/obviousness. It's easy to level this same charge at the movie on the whole.
Okay, let's see what movie I'm going to watch the next time I do this, which will hopefully be before 2030.
There are currently 6273 movies in my Flickchart, which is about 150 fewer than my actual number seen. (After almost totally catching up, I've gotten behind in adding them again.)
If we go to random.org and plug in the range from 1 to 6273, the number it gives us is ...
28.
Which is ...
Time Bandits.
A pretty softball draw there, since anything in my top 500 is an easy rewatch, anything in my top 100 is a really easy rewatch and anything in my top 50 is a slam dunk. I did watch this as recently as 2020, but it's the kind of movie I would rewatch anytime.
Which unfortunately does not make it a great entry in this series, since the point is to dig up something truly random that I might not otherwise have considered. It might not make for a very interesting post either, since I've already tagged Time Bandits thrice on the blog and mentioned it a number of other times. (The exact quantity is unclear since the search returns some false positives.) I may have already written whatever I wanted to write about it.
But I do have to follow the rules of the series, and at least I can probably get in this particular rewatch sooner than seven years from now.
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