Ironik

I think you guys keep missing the fact that ZACK SNYDER said he based Sucker Punch on Brazil. The parallels are there because he put them there. He didn't base it on Volron, he based it on Brazil. And the giant samurai doesn't look like Voltron, it looks like the giant samurai in Brazil. Baby Doll doesn't go through the same character arc as Voltron, she goes through the same character arc as Sam Lowry.

I am always more than willing to discuss any film or book with someone who holds the opposite opinion. But you have to be able to explain to me logically why these obvious flaws exist in order for me to accept your point of view. There aren't many examples of me changing my mind on this forum, but those examples do exist.

In the case of District 9, though, you aren't going to achieve that feat, because it really is a stupendously stupid movie. This doesn't mean that you are a stupid person for liking it. That *might* be the case, but it's not an equation I make automatically, because you never know why someone likes something stupid. My mom liked watching Golden Girls when she came home from work, but she was an ER nurse who literally saved people's lives every single day. So she liked something that was neither emotionally nor intellectually taxing. If that's why you enjoy the stupidity of District 9, that's fine, but if you want to argue that it's a smart piece of cinema, I'm going to gut your argument like a fish and make you cry like a baby.

I'm a huge fan of you, too, MM but you got some 'splainin' to do...

Like, why does the film start off as a documentary, then the film crew stops filming... but it somehow KEEPS ON BEING a documentary? How is that possible, exactly?

And speaking of that, what's with the absolutely pointless interviews with the main guy's friends and family? He does something, we see it, we know why he did it, and then they have an interview with someone telling us why he did it. Is it because Blomkamp thinks we're idiots?

Sometimes the interviews are a lazy way to save money by having people tell us the things that happen.

And let's talk about the acting, such as it is. No wait, let's not. Too painful to watch and way too painful to reminisce about.

What's up with the McGuffin? A bunch of goo that takes 20 years to make that both powers interstellar starships and alters human DNA? WTF indeed.

There's nothing original about it, despite so many proclaiming that. It's like no one has ever seen a movie where the bad guys turn out to be the corporation and military, which is only, like, half the movies ever made. (Blomkamp knows this is so lame, in fact, that he named his evil company "Multi-National United." He must've spent zero time and brainpower coming up with that.)

I don't know why people keep equating this movie with Apartheid, because it's not about that at all. It's about illegal aliens. (Which is a little on the nose, isn't it?) Refugees. Apartheid was a racist system whereby the white minority subjugated and dehumanized the black majority. That's got nothing to do with refugees. So the Apartheid metaphor? Broken from the outset. That doesn't bother you? Because it bothers me. Don't advertise something you aren't.

The subtext of racism is still there, but not how reviewers want us to think it is. The depiction of the black thugs is simply cringe-worthy. They're superstitious and simple to the point of being racist cartoons. Witch doctor? Eat the protagonist's arm? Why not just say "Oogah-boogah" and be done with it.

There's a bunch of other stuff I disliked about it, too, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten it in favor of more important information. Like where I put my boots.

Apparently the guy who made the movie disagrees with you.

Totally agree with Dark One here. District 9 was terrible on almost every level. That thing was a mess.

Swiping the basic idea and some of the visual elements of another movie is a time-honored tradition. However, only the movies which actually take the source material in a new direction stand the test of time. Ripping off Brazil's look while missing its point just means Sucker Punch will be forgotten rather quickly.

The aggregate opinion of all of the reviews I've seen essentially boil down to calling Sucker Punch a "hot mess."

I've always maintained that Lucas lifted The Hidden Fortress' plot and characters and gave them the *look* of Flash Gordon with the *feel* of a pirate movie. That's a brilliant mash-up. It was the perfect antidote for the grim cinema of the 1970s -- all the films about darkness and despair, even the spectacle movies were downers of disaster flicks. Star Wars is simple and silly, but it's also very cool. Especially for boys.

Even in the earliest interviews, Lucas said that the target audience was 13-year-old boys. I was 12 when it came out, so the exact demographic he was going for. The reason the movie was such a huge hit was that fanboys went back time after time to see it. Since all of my friends had seen it multiple times (I was the slacker of the lot, having only seen it 3 times over the course of a year), I was surprised a few years later to discover almost no one at my high school had seen the original when Empire Strikes Back came out. None of the girls had seen it.

If you look at Star Wars from an adult perspective, especially one used to a diet of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, The French Connection, All The President's Men, Deliverance, Papillon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Marathon Man and so on, movies like Star Wars can seem like a silly little trifle. To reviewers of that time, Star Wars had more in common with Escape to Witch Mountain and Death Race 2000 than any of the weighty, serious films of the era.

You haven't seen any of the films she's been in? She can pretty much play any part -- bubbly ditz to intelligent minx.

The cast looks decent. Now if only we can get them to replace Snyder with someone like Pierre Morel. That guy can do action flicks.

Well, I was 6'2" and 165 pounds when I was 14. 32 years later I'm 5'11" and 204 pounds. Somehow I feel really old.

Can you act? I'm working on a project that needs people 5'5" and shorter and 6'5" and taller. Might be a few years before all the financing is in place, though.

The brain thing is biological, though. I think my grandparents and great-grandparents could party as well as any kid of today. They got into all the same trouble 20-somethings do today. I have photos of my great-aunts riding motorcycles circa 1905, big hats and skirts and all.

You will. It sneaks up on you. One day when you aren't paying attention, you're just an adult with adult concerns. When I was in my mid-30s I remember getting enthused about a vacuum cleaner that could go from wood floors to carpet just days after yelling at some neighborhood kids for leaving the gates to my yard open. I was like, "Holy crap, I'm a cranky old man. And I'm 35!" When I was 26 I looked at cars with an eye toward 0-60 times and cornering times. Now I'm trying to decide between heated seats with a massage feature or heated seats with a heated steering wheel. You know, something sensible and comfortable to pick up my fiber at grocery store.

Yeah, the coddling thing I don't get. Making something illegal simply entices its appeal. ESPECIALLY for people in their 20s whose brains haven't matured enough to be able to make sound judgements. The drinking age was 18 when I was in high school, but I got kicked out of grade school at 13 for drinking. It's not like making the law is keeping anyone from doing what they're going to do anyway.

That's interesting. I've not heard someone say that before, linking stature with age. Speaking as someone who looked younger than his chronological age for quite some time, you should enjoy that part of it as long as possible. We live in an ageist society and always have. (I mean, Oscar Wilde once said that the youth of America is our oldest tradition -- 129 years ago.)

We can't have them both out at the same time, but you certainly have both a katana and a pistol on the same character. However, I don't consider the weapons to be as much a part of the outfit as the rest of it. Of course it isn't going to be exact, but insisting on a one-for-one replication is silly.

Even when I was in high school and college, I rarely found women younger than about 25 attractive. Now I can barely find anything interesting about women under 30 or 35. Flawless skin isn't nearly as interesting as someone who has some stories to tell and a few miles on the odometer. When I found out that the brains of humans generally don't fully mature until we're in our early to mid-20s, it suddenly made sense: I'm not attracted to kids, and most people in their low to mid 20s still act like juveniles. So dressing and/or acting younger than that age just strikes me as retarded rather than anything remotely interesting.

However, I did notice that the outfit the main girl wears can be easily replicated with the CoH costume creator.

Which happened to me a decade ago.

::: weeps into his Geritol :::

So not. There is a Scale of Wrongness that measures how wrong people are, and I'm sorry to say you are so far off the scale you can't even see it from where you're sitting in your Big Chair of Wrong.

The comic book is a metacommentary on both the political climate of the day *and* on comic books. By turning it into a movie, they lost that entire layer of the story. And by losing that layer, they made it just another adventure movie, because they didn't substitute an equivalent commentary on cinematic or pop culture. Which would've been pointless even if they had, since there are numerous movies which have done that over the past 70 years.

Duplicating the drawings shot for shot doesn't make up for losing the entire point of the comic.

Skyway City has manhole covers on the roads... including the elevated highways that are 60 feet above the ground.

Pants for Christmas: Best. Present. Ever.

Also: they invented Sudoku. True story.