Now that George Clooney’s been involved in yet another high-profile, political box office disappointment, it’s predictably time for the Los Angeles — we read it so you don’t have to – Times to charge to the rescue with the absurd claim that the current 100% failure rate of left-wing films over the last few years has nothing to do with partisan politics. In fact, the L.A. Times practices the art of The Big Lie through the ridiculous claim that the lack of partisan politics might explain their failure.

Let’s start with this nonsense:

And yet [Clooney's] “Ides” seems bound for the same ephemeral status as so many other political allegories that have come and gone in recent years: “Man of the Year,” “Swing Vote,” “Bulworth,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Wag the Dog,” “Atlas Shrugged,” The Manchurian  Candidate.”  They’re movies that run the ideological gamut, yet most of them garnered middling reactions from both critics and the American public. And almost none of them have endured (with the possible, though only possible, exception of “Wag the Dog”).

There are plenty of challenges to dramatizing Washington these days. Among the much-digested issues: Real-life drama can seem so outlandish that no scripted entertainment can match it, while winds shift too quickly for comments on the process to be relevant by the time a film comes out. There may or may not have been something novel in “Ides’” message about the toll the system takes on idealism years ago, before Barack Obama’s presidency; there’s not much fresh nearly three years into his term.

So the theory here is that by the time these films come out, the subject matter they cover is no longer hot and therefore audiences have lost interest. How exactly does that theory apply to “The Manchurian Candidate” remake, “Bulworth,” and “Man of the Year?” Whatever your politics, those films aren’t ripped from the headlines or out to capture some political zeitgeist. There’s no stale date when it comes to “evil” weapons manufacturers, a politician who discovers the joy of telling (his version of) the truth, or the age-old tale of an everyman with a shot at the presidency. But the single most wrong-headed example here is “Lions for Lambs,” which actually was released in the heat of the political moment it wanted so desperately to capture: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, it starred three A-listers and still managed to flop.

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If Zack Snyder has shown us anything with his movies, it’s that the guy has an agenda when it comes to directing that is as follows:

1. Make everything look really cool
2. Other stuff

This is not an attack against Snyder, it’s simply the truth.  Sucker Punch is Snyder’s first movie that isn’t a remake or based on another property, so it seemed like this would be the time for him to really display what he’s all about as an artist.  What we got was a collection of nutty action scenes strung together with a dream-world framing device.  When I wrote about Heavy Metal in HomeVideodrome a couple of weeks ago, a Big Hollywood commenter likened it to Sucker Punch, which is an astute comparison.

Sucker Punch takes place in the sixties, and is about a young girl known as Babydoll (Emily Browning), who has been institutionalized by her evil stepfather after she accidentally kills her sister in an attempt on his life.  Once inside, she enters a fantasy world where the mental asylum becomes a brothel akin to Moulin Rouge, and the various inmates and staff at the hospital fill out the roles of the characters in her head.  Determined to escape, Babydoll does a seductive dance for the entertainment of their male clientele while her inmate pals steal what they need while everyone is distracted.  The audience is never privy to Babydoll’s legendary dance.  Instead we get another level of fantasy.  Each time she dances we are treated to a crazy fantasy action scene involving Babydoll and her fellow female inmates.  Scott Glenn makes an appearance in a role that would otherwise have been filled by the late David Carradine, playing Charlie to the girls’ Angels for each mission they go on.

This movie has been the subject to a great deal of criticism and controversy, specifically attacking the film’s supposed pretensions towards female empowerment as nothing more than juvenile male fantasy.  The problem with this criticism is that the movie seems to be more about the idea of female empowerment via fantasy sex and violence before grim reality rears its ugly head.  But critics reading are reading to deep into what Snyder is doing, as all of this is arbitrary.  The whole point of Sucker Punch is to have an excuse to show off action whackadoo action sequences that have no basis in reality.  Snyder has stated that this was his intent from the beginning, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. (more…)

As a lifelong movie buff working my dream job as a film critic, I’m generally pretty easy to please. I go into every movie wanting to be entertained and willing to give the filmmaker a shot – in fact, so much so that some people have wondered if there’s anything I don’t like.

Well, have I got an answer for them: the new movie “Sucker Punch” is the worst, most agonizing and incomprehensible movie I have ever seen. Dark, grim and utterly unpleasant, it comes from the mind of Zach Snyder, who has directed the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” as well as “300,” “Watchmen,” and that weird owl movie from last fall. Tragically, he’s been announced as the director of an upcoming “Superman” reboot, which leads me to think it’s not Kryptonite that will kill the Man of Steel, but rather Zach Snyder.

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“Sucker Punch” is dark, grim and utterly unpleasant from the get-go, as the opening scene shows a teenage girl learning her mother has died, as her stepfather sneers at the death and her sadness. He flips out when he finds that his wife’s will left her apparent fortune to her two daughters, and his abusiveness compels the young blonde pigtailed gal to whip out a gun and try to shoot him – only to miss and accidentally kill her sister instead.

As a result, she gets packed off to a mental institution that’s actually a weird sort of bordello in which teen girls are dumped off and trained to dress like tramps and dance whorishly for paying male customers who then apparently have their way with them. Our protagonist is renamed Baby Doll and is ordered by a ridiculous evil choreographer with an atrocious Eastern European accent (Carla Gugino in a rare misfired role) to start dancing or die.

But when the music – if you can call it that, as it’s an utterly obnoxious sonic atrocity that sounds like Trent Reznor attempted to write a burlesque score – starts, Baby Doll closes her eyes, starts to shimmy a little, and…

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Zack Snyder has made a name for himself through visually stunning films, strong characters and larger than life stories. The beyond-epic “300,” beautiful “Watchmen,” soaring “Legend of the Guardians.” His latest, “Sucker Punch,” strives for an unknown in sensory overload, in some ways combining elements of all three into one explosive vision. 

“Sucker Punch” stars Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a blonde beauty thrown into a mental institution by her stepfather, who sees a path to her mother’s fortune through her demise. Baby Doll is scheduled for a lobotomy within a week of arriving at the institution, sealing her stepfather’s grip on the fortune. To save herself, she must escape. To do so, she enlists the help of fellow asylum inmates (a who’s who of rising young actresses) and a vivid imagination. Between the two, reality and fantasy blur, as Snyder’s rock-and-roll ride inhabits worlds beyond the constructs of “Inception” and “Alice in Wonderland.” As her psychologist (Carla Gugino) in the asylum assures her, she has all the weapons she needs inside of herself. All she must do is fight. 

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And she does, in some of the most original battle sequences I’ve ever seen. Spike’s Deadliest Warrior can’t compare to the battle combinations of Zack Snyder. Our heroines are the stuff of fanboy dreams, their schoolgirl outfits accessorized with bits of armor and an arsenal of weapons including but not limited to samurai swords, machine guns, a Native American tomahawk and Revolutionary War pistols – with a giant robot, what looks like a WW II bomber and a futuristic helicopter for air support – battle goblins, knights, a dragon, oriental light-filled samurai giants, robots and World War I steam-powered zombie Germans – yes, you read that correctly – in landscapes that range from a medieval castle to another planet in some technologically-advanced future. Their dilapidated insane asylum looks pretty normal by comparison. 

Snyder’s signature style of mixing slow-motion and ultra-fast-paced action is back with a vengeance. One battle in particular, when the girls fight robots on a bullet train, is shot in fluid motion, without cuts that I can remember – just a rhythmic speed-up and slow-down. It’s an incredible scene. In addition, battle sounds are gratingly amplified, bringing the fight that much closer. 

For a film so visually stunning and intense, there’s a surprising lack of color, as Snyder again paints from a palette of gray and black hues. 

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Glee is the worst show on television, and its creator Ryan Murphy is the most unabashed bigot in television.  We saw Kathy Griffin portray an egregious Tea Party stereotype last week (and, remember– this character was supposed to highlight Murphy’s “inclusiveness” toward conservatives), and Murphy has continued this winning trend by making friends and influencing people mouthing off about artists who have actually created the popular music he parasitically exploits.  I’m sensing a pattern here; anyone who dares to challenge Murphy gets publicly insulted, even with hateful portrayals on his show (including shockingly racist ones– but more on that later).

I will admit, when it was first announced, I looked forward to the show, because it was promoted as an offbeat comedy featuring Jane Lynch, who’s normally hilarious, but it’s nothing of the sort.  This is a soap opera of the worst kind– it’s the ultimate wet dream for the kind of people who actually believe that gays should be more outraged at high school bullies than Shariah-ordered executions.  It’s nothing but blatant wish fulfillment for TV executives who are at the top of the world but can’t get over some hangup from high school. Your glee club wasn’t that great and didn’t get any funding in school?  Aww, poor baby, let’s make a show where everyone in the glee club would be a final contestant on American Idol! You got picked on in high school?  That’s okay, you can write a show where the homophobic bully is secretly gay!  Don’t like Christians opposing gay marriage? No worries; we’ll just create a stupid, belligerent, superstitious, overweight, violent black character to mock them:

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And, even worse, it’s a musical.  Not a musical in the sense that characters express themselves through songs– it’s a musical where the characters extraneously break into glammed-up, severely auto-tuned covers of hit pop songs.  It’s all about leeching off the success of those who create in the music world…

… and some in that world have begun to publicly denounce it.

When the band Kings of Leon quietly rejected a request to license their music to the show, Murphy shot back by telling the band “F— you,” calling them “self-centered a–holes,” then accusing them of the unforgivable sin of neglecting him “arts education.”  Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses rightly dissed the show as an insult to musicals, and Murphy tactfully declared, “people who make those comments, their careers are over; they’re uneducated and quite stupid.”  That’s odd, because the rather popular and prolific Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz didn’t have nice things to say about Glee, either.  Nor does Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters:  ”f— that guy for thinking anybody and everybody should want to do Glee.”

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[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

They say exposing Hollywood’s liberal sucker punches is like a drug, and Big Hollywood’s secret script source had just handed one over that was practically ticking:  The Adjustment Bureau, coming out in March.  John Nolte ran down the situation for me:  Zinn-loving Hollywood half-wit Matt Damon is the star.  He plays a liberal politician.  And since it’s a fantasy, the liberal politician is the hero.

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This could have been the H-Bomb of sucker punch movies.  I knew that if I didn’t handle it just right it could detonate and splatter me with razor sharp shards of progressive clichés and jagged fragments of left-wing memes.  “Suit me up,” I said, “I’m going in.”

Sweat collected on my furrowed brow.  I cut the red wire.  Nothing.  I cut the blue wire.  Nothing.   I had defused a sucker punch dud.   

I was actually let down.  Where was the thrill?  I felt like trotting over to Safeway and acting bewildered by all the choices in the cereal aisle.

Sure, I’m disappointed – you don’t need me if a movie doesn’t treat half its audience like borderline morons.  But The Adjustment Bureau still has some important lessons – like how to be a liberal, make movies according to your vision, and still not gratuitously alienate potential moviegoers.

First, a quick look at the plot.  We’re not here to blow the lid off of the script’s surprises, so if you want more detail it’s probably lurking out there on the web.  In short, the story involves the aforementioned Matt Damon as a liberal congressman with a fateful destiny that an unexpected infatuation threatens to derail.  The infatuee is a quirky ballet dancer – she’s wacky in a kind of “Look at me! I’m wearing Doc Martens with this vintage prom dress!” kind of way that is only slightly less tiresome on-screen than it is in real life.  (more…)

It’s pretty clear from the loud and explodey and awesome trailer of the upcoming A-Team remake that the script version the Sucker Punch Squad’s source obtained was a draft or two back from the final shooting script.  That’s a good thing, because the old script was a little slower, left out some treasured icons (Where’s the van!) and its B.A. Baracus had nowhere near the original show’s essential Mr. T-errificness.

So, all hail the new A-Team.  I just hope they’ve fixed the one hackey sucker punch aspect – the lame use of U.S. contractors as, once again, the villain du jour.

Now, anyone who at any point in the 1980s was unable to legally drive knows The A-Team and its mythology.  Basically, a bunch of Vietnam War commandos are falsely accused of a crime, escape from a stockade and dodge the military police while acting as soldiers of fortune.  George Peppard was their leader Hannibal Smith, Dirk Benedict was Face, the good-looking con man, Dwight Schultz was “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock, the resident wacko, and Mr. T portrayed, well, pretty much himself.

Every week they crashed a lot of cars, shot millions of bullets without ever hitting anything, made smartass remarks and issued memorable catchphrases.  This was all highly entertaining – particularly if you were a college student like me who enjoyed accepting creative drinking game challenges.  Here’s a hint – designate not just a driver but a stretcher-bearer if you dare join in a round of “Let’s Watch The A-Team and Down a Brew Whenever Something Explodes.”  (more…)

Like many Americans, I tuned into “Glee” this Monday to give the show a second go. In the spirit of objectivity, I must admit that the cast is talented, the characters well-developed, and there’s some strong writing to tie it all together. I felt that it deserved another shot. Only eight minutes into the episode however, much like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie decoder pen, I’d been skunked again. Is anybody else turning the dial off of “Glee” for good?

If you frequent the BigHollywood often, you’ve no doubt read about Glee’s recent jabs aimed toward Conservatives (more specifically, last week with Sarah Palin). Despite Sarah Palin having a legion of supporters (many of whom watch “Glee”), the people at Fox thought that it was a safe bet. After all, none of their Hollywood buddies would criticize them for it. That would require, shall we say… testicles? No, when it comes to speaking up against the popular opinion among their elitist peers, Tinseltown decided to lie themselves on the neutering bench a long time ago. It’s because of this that they travel in packs, making drive-bys and are more akin to acting like Cobra-Kais’ cronies than fighting the establishment a la Daniel Larusso. When “Glee” took a swipe at Ann Coulter this week, one could faintly hear the cries of their Hollywood lackeys screeching “Get’him a bodybag!” in the studio back lots and writers’ boardrooms. (more…)

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Christian Toto:

“The new drama “The Blind Side” tells the story of a homeless black teen who is taken in by a Christian family led by Sandra Bullock.

“It’s a heartwarming story based on the life of NFL lineman Michael Oher.

“So why does the film feel the need to awkwardly squeeze in a slam at former president George W. Bush?” (more…)