Recaps & Reviews

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Movie Review: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch

Starring: Emily Browning, Abbey Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino & Oscar Isaac
Directed by: Zach Snyder
Written by: Zach Snyder & Steve Shibuya based on a story by Zach Snyder

Zach Snyder is a director that is probably best known for his visual flair. His groundbreaking work in 300, his beautifully realized (whether you liked the actual film or not) version of Watchmen, these are what people have come to expect from Snyder. Even his earliest feature, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead showed that he was a director with a vision.

However his greatest strength is also his biggest weakness. Snyder is so focused on the visual spectacle that the story gets muddled and lost on the way to its ultimate realization. In the past when he was doing a remake or working with someone else’s material this wasn’t as noticeable.  And ultimately he still pulled it off. However Sucker Punch is an entirely original film written by Snyder. And in this case that lack of focus or attention to story, plot & characterization is glaring.

It’s really no mystery at this point what Sucker Punch is about. The studio promoted the hell out of this thing. With a price tag of around $82 million not including marketing costs they had to. So I don’t think I give anything away here by recapping briefly (though there may be some mild spoilers, you are forewarned). “Baby Doll”(Browning) is sent to a mental institution. In there she meets fellow in mates “Sweat Pea”(Cornish), “Rocket”(Malone), “Blondie”(Hudgens) & “Amber”(Chung). The hospital is run through a combination of Dr. Vera Gorski(Gugina) and head lackey/orderly Blue Jones(Isaac).

Baby Doll, who’s got a limited amount of time sort of conjures up in her mind a dreamworld where she gets a quest to free herself from the asylum. Like in the trailer we’re told she needs a map, fire, a knife, a key and some other mystery object.

The majority of the rest of the film as shown in the previews is about Baby Doll and gang trying to procure those items through her warped vision of reality. What’s actually going on back in the asylum is anyone’s guess because we don’t even see it again till the film is almost over. This is part of the problem.

I understand that films want to have “layers” of dreams or subconscious. I mean hell it worked for Inception(at least I thought it did) so why not here. We spend much more time in that “second layer” the first layer being reality. In the second layer none of them are in an insane asylum, but rather in some strange burlesque/prostitution club. It’s through this layer that we  get to the third layer which in this case is all the stuff you saw in the preview with dragons and weird steampunk zombie Nazis(which is kind of funny only because I had watched Dead Snow the night before for the first time) etc.

It all looks quite frankly for the most part pretty awesome. The action sequences are fast paced adrenaline pumping scenes. You see some really cool stuff that is very visually impressive. And you only stop and scratch your head a little bit wondering why exactly these 5 women are fighting all these things scantily clad in school girl outfits and other garb better suited for a fetish video than the alleged ass kicking they are handing out.

And then it really hits you. Because while you’re distracted by all the visual fireworks you’re not really thinking. Then wham you get sucker punched. The movie doesn’t really make any fucking sense whatsoever.

I’m sure Snyder had the best of intentions going into this. He just didn’t think things through. The idea is that Baby Doll is supposed to be getting “empowered” when she sets herself free in her mind and through that she can somehow free herself from the physical prison she’s in. What? How the hell is hallucinating your way through a smorgasbord of fanboy wet dreams equal freeing yourself? Are we to believe that Baby Doll is empowering and freeing herself by imagining herself slicing things with a katana in a school girl outfit? The very idea of it is preposterous. .

Like all good morality tales(and this kind sorta tries to be one) there is a lesson to be learned here. That lesson is apparently that Zach Snyder needs to stick to directing other people’s material. Because when it’s his own material we get flat emotionless acting, horrible dialogue and of course to hammer the same nail again an essentially incomprehensible plot. Of course wrapped up really really nice. Oh and sorry folks Jon Hamm is in the film all of five minutes; if you were going to see him, don’t.

Sucker Punch is a beautiful mess. I can’t say I’m anything less than impressed with the visuals, they are stunning and if that’s enough for you than go see it. If you’re looking for anything more save your money and see something else. I give it two beers.

Product Review: Ooma Telo

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is how you make phone calls through your internet connection and is a common way of ditching traditional land line service.  If you’re in the market for a VOIP solution or want to look at alternatives to your existing VOIP provider then this may be one option.

When I was looking for a VOIP solution I considered Ooma, Vonage, MagicJack and Comcast Voice.  I wanted a low cost, high quality, reliable connection and did not have any need for international calling.   I quickly ruled out MagicJack because it requires a computer be on at all times and that’s not very friendly to my power bill or the environment.

Vonage and Comcast offer a similar service for comparable prices.  Comcast offers their Triple Play service which combines cable television, internet and phone service in one package, but for me the package includes a slower internet speed than I have with them now and I the package deal is only really attractive for the first year.  Vonage seemed reasonable, but the monthly cost wasn’t better than Comcast.

The Ooma Telo on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs.  The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive.  It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection.  I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it.  Ooma offers a handset but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead.  I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening.  Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.

The voice quality sounds like a traditional land line and I only rarely hear digital artifacts on the line.

The other features that Ooma offers are all accessed through their web based portal.  The portal gives access to listen to voicemail, see call logs and change settings.  I subscribed to a community black list of known telemarketers and have entered a few numbers into a personal blacklist of my own.  You have the choice of sending blacklisted numbers to voicemail or just having them go into the void.

In case my network goes down (we are talking about Comcast here) I enabled is call forwarding on outage.  When there are network problems and the Ooma device is unable to get online then all calls are forwarded to the number of your choice.  In my case I send them to my cell phone.

For voicemails I have them sent to my email as a mp3 attachment and can listen to them on my computer, cell phone, on the portal or directly on the Telo device.

Overall it’s been great and has saved me a lot of money.

Lost Wax: So Red The Rose (1985)

After skewering a sacred cow with my first ever salvo for Crasstalk, I thought I’d change tack and praise Caesar instead of bury him. Music makes me happy, and I’d love to share what I consider lost, under-appreciated or misunderstood works from great bands. Hopefully, if y’all like it, I could make this a semi-regular thing. With that in mind, the goal of Lost Wax will be to introduce or re-introduce you to songs and albums that time has forgotten. So here are the prerequisites:

It has to be:

  1. a song or an album
  2. panned at the time of its release or critically ignored
  3. due a modern reevaluation

Enjoy!

 

Lost Wax: So Red The Rose (1985)

Cocaine is a terrible drug for musicians. It is possible to work through a healthy heroin addiction and still make an album like, say, Transformer. LSD can lead to some beautiful experimentation, and some truly awful, terrible album covers (Tarkus, Emerson, Lake & Palmer), but cocaine just turns people into assholes and songs into overproduced covers of Bang a Gong.

Tarkus! Ahhh!!! What the fuck is that thing?!?!

When two of the three Taylors in Duran Duran (Andy and John) left to join Robert Palmer, Tony Thompson and a mountain of coke and hookers (not really) to form Power Station in 1985, this left remaining members Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes with a critical shortage of Taylors. But instead of panicking, grabbing Chuck and Meshach Taylor and soldiering on as Duran Duran 2.0, messrs. Rhodes, Le Bon and Roger Taylor felt free to indulge in whatever atmospheric flight of fancy their frosted little hearts desired. That flight of fancy turned out to be a band called Arcadia, whose sole output was 1985’s beautiful, strange So Red The Rose.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s a bit of a cheat to choose this album for Lost Wax. It wasn’t a bomb (it went platinum), it wasn’t panned, it put 2 songs in the US top 40 and it contained 3/5th of what was arguably one of the biggest acts in the world at that time. And yet, the album has been largely cast off as just another indulgence from members of a band that had already peaked and was still years away from reinventing itself as the ‘Come Undone’ Duran of the 90’s.

On the face of it, ‘overindulgent’ would seem to fit. The album is as heavily overproduced as Duran Duran’s previous album, Seven And The Ragged Tiger (both were produced by Alex Sadkin), complete with the requisite electric drum kits, keyboards and Cor Anglais one would expect of the mid-80s, and there are more guest appearances on this album than a disaster telethon. Sting, Grace Jones, Herbie Hancock, Carlos Alomar, Andy Mackay and David Gilmour all have a hand in this work. The album art is a lurid mix of Anime, Flamenco and S&M. The songs have titles like ‘El Diablo’, ‘Goodbye Is Forever’ and ‘Lady Ice’. Yes, all the pieces are there for this album to be a train wreck and the apex of mid-80s pretentious excess.

What we get instead is a twisted, dark, mysterious fairy tale, more a musical than album. Listened front to back, a story emerges, something akin to a farm boy coming to the big sinful, corrupt city only to become involved with good women, bad women and the Devil. It’s pretty clear someone wants to screw him, kill him, steal his soul or do all three.

So Red The Rose opens with perhaps the album’s most famous song (and also its only bona fide hit, reaching #6 in the US singles chart), Election Day. With its driving mechanical beat and moody lyrics about ‘shadows and subways’ and entire cities being slaves to a mistress (not to mention Grace Jones sounding like she is ready to raise welts), it delivers an opening number that Sweeney Todd would be proud of.

Listen:  Arcadia – Election Day

The next few tracks modulate between the sweet, bouncy, and upbeat sound of Keep Me In The Dark and the bombastic, black humor of The Flame. The real winner of the album, though, is Missing, the ‘A’ side closer (remember when Albums had such a thing?) which is full of a melancholy and grief that boy bands aren’t supposed to possess.

The B side opens with The Promise, probably the only real clunker on the album, what with its over the top lyrics like ‘The hungry make their stand when they’ll stand for no more’ and Sting’s breathy backup singing, but then everything returns to form with El Diablo, which has far better lyrics (‘only the brightest shine, but not forever’). It’s a fun take on your typical Faustian deal with the Devil, and it ends with the protagonist ruing his fate while Nick Rhodes’ keyboards make a sound similar to a fun house ride spinning out of control.

No Faustian bargain here: Time makes Shatners of us all, Mr. LeBon

The album ends with Lady Ice, not the best track on the album, but a song that is courteous enough to leave the ending to the story ambiguous.

So there you have it. So Red The Rose owes more to the Duran Duran of The Chauffeur than of The Reflex, but this is a good thing. Darker, meaner and more melancholy than anything else Duran Duran (under any name) ever did, this album could really be considered their Blood And Chocolate, if that conceit weren’t the most pretentious fucking thing ever.

And now, here’s a bonus for you all for getting to the bottom: The Russell Mulcahy directed video for The Flame.

Arcadia – The Flame – YouTube

-Baconcat

International Security and Local Law Enforcement

Occasionally, I’d like to touch on something a little more serious. Countless critics provide quality artistic and socio-political analysis of today’s high quality dramas: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Top Chef. But I’m afraid that this particular focus has led us to ignore the important lessons we can learn from America’s Top New Drama:  Hawaii Five-O.  Here are some important lessons from this week’s episode. Continue reading