Rango and Suckerpunch
Mar. 27th, 2011 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinLong gone are the days of structured reviews that examine aspects of the films objectively; brace yourself for stream-of-consciousness rambling. There are no spoilers behind the cuts (the reviews would probably be better with them...) but I can't make any guarantees about the comments.
RANGO
I saw this opening weekend but put off making a post about it until I could find a way to sum it up ... Turns out I never did find a better way than what I did about half an hour after seeing it. And that is: It's as if the writers of Animaniacs got together with a group of animation students and made a film, with a big budget and no filters. Seriously, there were so many times, while watching this, that I could see the page of notes from the executive producers: 'You can't do that in a kids' movie!' 'No one will get that reference!' 'WTF?' 'You can't show that!' 'What is the point of [X]?' 'No, seriously, WTF??' And then I saw the director looking at the notes, and after a well-timed comedic pause, tossing them over his shoulder into the bin.
You know what? It's a fun movie anyway. It has enough restraint to keep it from going completely off the rails, but it was rarely predictable (except in a basic Western tropes kind of way), and kept throwing such weird curveballs that I never got bored enough to question the logic behind anything. That may sound bad, but ... it wasn't ... it was just so refreshing, at last, to see so much raw imagination make it all the way to the screen. There were things in it that, had it been made at Disney, I know wouldn't have even made it to a meeting, because the people who came up with them would assume they'd get shot down (even if they had the audacity to imagine them in the first place).
I've been harbouring a belief recently that the next big thing in animation – what will revitalise the medium – is for live-action directors to come in and bring their sensibilities to animated films. I was hoping Disney might take the lead on this, but it looks like ILM got there first. Oh well, I'm just glad someone's done it, and that it's been something of a success!
Hmm ... maybe another way of describing it is 'Sort of like Pirates, but a Western, with animals and a plot.' Both of those descriptions can live together in peace.
SUCKER PUNCH
I'm going to be frank here: Roughly 90% of why I went to see this movie is because of this image:*
OMG KICK-ASS GIRLS AND A GIANT ROBOT FIGHTING WWI SOLDIERS WITH AIRSHIPS AND TRIPLANES YES PUMP IT STRAIGHT INTO MY BRAIN NOW PLEASE
I only saw the trailer last week, long after I'd committed to see it; I looked the movie up on Rotten Tomatoes about half an hour before leaving for the theatre and saw it had a 20% Fresh rating – oh well, if it was a stinker, at least it would be a stinker with kick-ass girls, a giant robot, airships, and triplanes in WWI. It would at least be attractively bad!
I left the theatre convinced of my duty as a blogger to inform whoever will read: Rotten Tomatoes and the critical establishment be damned! I really liked this movie, and I don't care who knows it.
I have never seen a Zack Snyder film before. I don't know if this has any bearing on my opinion of this one, but that should probably be stated. I found his filmmaking to be very music-video, but the good kind of music video that gets a full narrative and atmosphere across in only a few minutes. Perhaps I was wooed by novelty – critics will have seen his other movies and so would not be impressed. I was! It's not often I see something new at the theatre, and I see a lot.
Novelty aside: something else I don't see much at the theatre are movies that have me constantly intellectually engaged. Inception did, as did Master and Commander, with their complex plots with multiple characters and all sorts of world-specific rules. This one was much the same but in a different way – I was kept constantly occupied either following the plot or going back over what I had seen and trying to figure out what was real, or what was really happening. It was engaging and kinetic enough that I couldn't stop and dwell on things that might have bugged me logic-wise, but wasn't so frenetic and disjointed that I stopped caring [coughPiratescough]. I can't remember any logic gaps (once 'suspension of disbelief' is factored in), and frankly, even if they were to be pointed out to me, I don't care. Sometimes I was confused, but I could tell that that was the director's intent, and I was confident that either I would figure it out or it would be revealed to me in due course. And so it came to pass. There were times I was worried they'd dropped the ball, but then they picked it back up again. It was a fun ride and, I felt, a worthy expenditure of both time and admission.
To be fair I should mention one part that did bother me: there is a critical turning point in the plot that rings false, the way it is played out. It's one of those moments that has to happen, for the story, but it's the only time the storyline feels like it's being driven by the writer rather than the characters. I don't want to spoil it here but it involves a dressing room, a celebration, and a remonstration – if anyone reading this has seen it, I'd like to know what you thought of that scene.
While watching the film I was trying to figure out why so many critics disliked it so much. There were moments of inaccessibility, but lots of high-brow concept movies have those and they don't seem to mind. It had all sorts of flashy filmmaking gimmicks, but that's nothing new, and those movies don't get panned. All I could figure was that critics must believe they are not allowed to like a movie in which a bunch of hot girls in skimpy outfits kick ass. I appreciate their feminist sentiments but it seems sort of a knee-jerk reaction in this case – while the premise of the movie makes for a certain amount of female objectification, that is always presented as a bad thing, and the girls kick ass in a way that, to me, feels a lot more true to most girls I've ever known than the sort of masculine ass-kicking you get from girls in action cartoons and the like. The same goes for the acting and characters. Many of the blurbs I read cited the flat characters and uninspired performances, but these reviewers must have rather hazy memories of high school. While the girls in this might be somewhat monotone and perhaps not as intellectually gifted as the modern movie heroine is expected to be, they felt a lot like the vast majority of young women I've ever known outside the animation biz. Not all women are, in real life, 'strong women,' but I think people forget this in their agenda to promote the idea through the media. Showing average insecure young women accomplish – or attempt to accomplish – something that takes uncharacteristic audacity and initiative is an important step on the road to creating strong women. If they'd only had some cute guy to gush over, perhaps the critics would have found them more believable, but all the men in this movie (bar one, who is definitely not a sex interest) are scum. As for the ass-kickery in skimpy outfits, again I understand the political motivations for disparaging it, but I have to say that even as a straight liberated female (albeit an unusual one) I find the image of a girly girl completely owning a much more powerful opponent to be viscerally appealing. I really hope the bad reviews don't sink this movie before it gets the chance to prove itself.
Upon deeper reflection today I wonder if my liking of the film is down to more-or-less unique personal circumstances. Thanks to watching The Wolves of Willoughby Chase at a formative age, for quite a while the only stories I wanted to write were about girls escaping some sort of horrible institution, which is exactly the premise here. It reminded me at times of the Snicket books, and at others of Monstrous Regiment – in fact, at some points, comparisons to the latter made me wonder if Mr Snyder had read it. And I am an artist, so easily swayed by visual spectacle, and the production design here was about as far up my alley as it is possible to go without being outright Edwardian. Perhaps my collected life experiences make me especially receptive to this movie ... but the other two people I saw it with liked it as well, so maybe not.
So, that image I mentioned at the beginning of this logorrhea? That part of the movie only lasts about ten minutes. But I think my brain virtually popped from the rapid escalation of sheer awesome – it went omg ... omg ... OMG ... OMG at each new thing that was introduced, until there was a shot of the airship coming into frame and with one final OMG!! I completely lost focus for about ten seconds, as if it crashed from awesome overload and had to reboot.
It feels so nice to be vindicated.
*Actually it's the one-sheet poster version of this image; despite it being all over LA I can't find it online.
RANGO
I saw this opening weekend but put off making a post about it until I could find a way to sum it up ... Turns out I never did find a better way than what I did about half an hour after seeing it. And that is: It's as if the writers of Animaniacs got together with a group of animation students and made a film, with a big budget and no filters. Seriously, there were so many times, while watching this, that I could see the page of notes from the executive producers: 'You can't do that in a kids' movie!' 'No one will get that reference!' 'WTF?' 'You can't show that!' 'What is the point of [X]?' 'No, seriously, WTF??' And then I saw the director looking at the notes, and after a well-timed comedic pause, tossing them over his shoulder into the bin.
You know what? It's a fun movie anyway. It has enough restraint to keep it from going completely off the rails, but it was rarely predictable (except in a basic Western tropes kind of way), and kept throwing such weird curveballs that I never got bored enough to question the logic behind anything. That may sound bad, but ... it wasn't ... it was just so refreshing, at last, to see so much raw imagination make it all the way to the screen. There were things in it that, had it been made at Disney, I know wouldn't have even made it to a meeting, because the people who came up with them would assume they'd get shot down (even if they had the audacity to imagine them in the first place).
I've been harbouring a belief recently that the next big thing in animation – what will revitalise the medium – is for live-action directors to come in and bring their sensibilities to animated films. I was hoping Disney might take the lead on this, but it looks like ILM got there first. Oh well, I'm just glad someone's done it, and that it's been something of a success!
Hmm ... maybe another way of describing it is 'Sort of like Pirates, but a Western, with animals and a plot.' Both of those descriptions can live together in peace.
SUCKER PUNCH
I'm going to be frank here: Roughly 90% of why I went to see this movie is because of this image:*
OMG KICK-ASS GIRLS AND A GIANT ROBOT FIGHTING WWI SOLDIERS WITH AIRSHIPS AND TRIPLANES YES PUMP IT STRAIGHT INTO MY BRAIN NOW PLEASE
I only saw the trailer last week, long after I'd committed to see it; I looked the movie up on Rotten Tomatoes about half an hour before leaving for the theatre and saw it had a 20% Fresh rating – oh well, if it was a stinker, at least it would be a stinker with kick-ass girls, a giant robot, airships, and triplanes in WWI. It would at least be attractively bad!
I left the theatre convinced of my duty as a blogger to inform whoever will read: Rotten Tomatoes and the critical establishment be damned! I really liked this movie, and I don't care who knows it.
I have never seen a Zack Snyder film before. I don't know if this has any bearing on my opinion of this one, but that should probably be stated. I found his filmmaking to be very music-video, but the good kind of music video that gets a full narrative and atmosphere across in only a few minutes. Perhaps I was wooed by novelty – critics will have seen his other movies and so would not be impressed. I was! It's not often I see something new at the theatre, and I see a lot.
Novelty aside: something else I don't see much at the theatre are movies that have me constantly intellectually engaged. Inception did, as did Master and Commander, with their complex plots with multiple characters and all sorts of world-specific rules. This one was much the same but in a different way – I was kept constantly occupied either following the plot or going back over what I had seen and trying to figure out what was real, or what was really happening. It was engaging and kinetic enough that I couldn't stop and dwell on things that might have bugged me logic-wise, but wasn't so frenetic and disjointed that I stopped caring [coughPiratescough]. I can't remember any logic gaps (once 'suspension of disbelief' is factored in), and frankly, even if they were to be pointed out to me, I don't care. Sometimes I was confused, but I could tell that that was the director's intent, and I was confident that either I would figure it out or it would be revealed to me in due course. And so it came to pass. There were times I was worried they'd dropped the ball, but then they picked it back up again. It was a fun ride and, I felt, a worthy expenditure of both time and admission.
To be fair I should mention one part that did bother me: there is a critical turning point in the plot that rings false, the way it is played out. It's one of those moments that has to happen, for the story, but it's the only time the storyline feels like it's being driven by the writer rather than the characters. I don't want to spoil it here but it involves a dressing room, a celebration, and a remonstration – if anyone reading this has seen it, I'd like to know what you thought of that scene.
While watching the film I was trying to figure out why so many critics disliked it so much. There were moments of inaccessibility, but lots of high-brow concept movies have those and they don't seem to mind. It had all sorts of flashy filmmaking gimmicks, but that's nothing new, and those movies don't get panned. All I could figure was that critics must believe they are not allowed to like a movie in which a bunch of hot girls in skimpy outfits kick ass. I appreciate their feminist sentiments but it seems sort of a knee-jerk reaction in this case – while the premise of the movie makes for a certain amount of female objectification, that is always presented as a bad thing, and the girls kick ass in a way that, to me, feels a lot more true to most girls I've ever known than the sort of masculine ass-kicking you get from girls in action cartoons and the like. The same goes for the acting and characters. Many of the blurbs I read cited the flat characters and uninspired performances, but these reviewers must have rather hazy memories of high school. While the girls in this might be somewhat monotone and perhaps not as intellectually gifted as the modern movie heroine is expected to be, they felt a lot like the vast majority of young women I've ever known outside the animation biz. Not all women are, in real life, 'strong women,' but I think people forget this in their agenda to promote the idea through the media. Showing average insecure young women accomplish – or attempt to accomplish – something that takes uncharacteristic audacity and initiative is an important step on the road to creating strong women. If they'd only had some cute guy to gush over, perhaps the critics would have found them more believable, but all the men in this movie (bar one, who is definitely not a sex interest) are scum. As for the ass-kickery in skimpy outfits, again I understand the political motivations for disparaging it, but I have to say that even as a straight liberated female (albeit an unusual one) I find the image of a girly girl completely owning a much more powerful opponent to be viscerally appealing. I really hope the bad reviews don't sink this movie before it gets the chance to prove itself.
Upon deeper reflection today I wonder if my liking of the film is down to more-or-less unique personal circumstances. Thanks to watching The Wolves of Willoughby Chase at a formative age, for quite a while the only stories I wanted to write were about girls escaping some sort of horrible institution, which is exactly the premise here. It reminded me at times of the Snicket books, and at others of Monstrous Regiment – in fact, at some points, comparisons to the latter made me wonder if Mr Snyder had read it. And I am an artist, so easily swayed by visual spectacle, and the production design here was about as far up my alley as it is possible to go without being outright Edwardian. Perhaps my collected life experiences make me especially receptive to this movie ... but the other two people I saw it with liked it as well, so maybe not.
So, that image I mentioned at the beginning of this logorrhea? That part of the movie only lasts about ten minutes. But I think my brain virtually popped from the rapid escalation of sheer awesome – it went omg ... omg ... OMG ... OMG at each new thing that was introduced, until there was a shot of the airship coming into frame and with one final OMG!! I completely lost focus for about ten seconds, as if it crashed from awesome overload and had to reboot.
It feels so nice to be vindicated.
*Actually it's the one-sheet poster version of this image; despite it being all over LA I can't find it online.
