Sucker Punch *

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone

Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Oscar Isaac

Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn

You know how some people lament the state of the environment and then you see them throw their garbage on the sidewalk? Zack Snyder would be one of them.

His Sucker Punch is a pseudo-feminist allegory filtered by the mind and eyes of a horny geek who thinks that women's liberation fantasies are dressed, or rather undressed, in the same clothes that men demand they wear in society.

The film is filled with sleek setpieces, Amsterdam sex shop costumes and an esthetically interesting design which more than please its audience are meant to polish the director's own knob.

Sucker Punch is Snyder's first fully original screenplay and you can detect all his influences in the way he references Tarantino, anime, rock music, westerns and video games. The story follows Babydoll (Browning) a troubled teenager who's institutionalized by her evil stepfather after she accidentally kills her sister.

The film opens with an almost silent sequence in which Babydoll tries to save her sister, here Snyder proves he has a keen eye for creating suspense and scenes that recall comic books; but he still hasn't learned a single thing about subtleties and he scores this Dickensian opening with an emo cover of The Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).

At the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, Babydoll realizes her stepfather has paid an evil orderly (Isaac) to have her lobotomized within five days.

On the day of her lobotomy, seconds before the orbitoclast hits her body, Babydoll withdraws into a world of her own inside her mind. Here she's an orphan who has been taken to a burlesque/brothel where she is to be sold to a mysterious man called "the High Roller" within the next few days.

In the brothel Babydoll befriends fellow dancers Sweet Pea (Cornish), Rocket (Malone), Blondie (Hudgens) and Amber (Chung) and devises a plan for all of them to escape before the High Roller arrives. In order to escape they have to collect five items and each time they are about to do so, the film turns once again into subfilm in which the characters travel to different worlds.

When they need to collect a lighter, the fantasy turns into a proto-medieval adventure complete with Lord of the Rings' like orcs and vintage aeroplanes.

With all these layers of different universes within other universes, the film soon feels like Inception done for emo girls having their first acid trip. Curiously that might be precisely what Snyder wanted audiences to feel.

Throughout the film he seems to be completely unaware that what he delivers with utmost excitement as a version of "girl power" is nothing but false empathy from his side.
The worrisome thing about Sucker Punch is that Snyder at all times seems to be convinced that he is indeed telling a story about women becoming free. The fantasy sequences are filled with male villains as if to acknowledge the fact that all female troubles are caused by men. Yet this can be questioned because the villains in said sequences are usually deformed versions of men, whether they be zombie like creatures, robots or demonic samurai, none are really "human".

None of these sequences contains a female villain, except for one where a mother dragon attacks the girls only after they hurt her male offspring. Is Snyder saying that women only turn against other women when there's a male figure in the middle?

What the director fails to see at all times, is that his attempts at saving women from men are being done by himself: a man who obviously thinks of women like we expect heterosexual men to.

These heroines don't even have real names, who needs them when they have such badass nicknames huh? Yet the issue is that Snyder gives them innocent sounding aliases that barely cover the fact that Blondie could've easily been called Big Tits and Rocket, well, let's not even go there...

Every time the movie attempts to say something important about misogyny, it just manages to become even more abusive and offensive towards women. However it's not entirely easy to condemn the film because doing so would be to give in towards generalizations about the way we think women think.

It would be easy to say that no woman in her right mind would try to save herself from a rapist by wearing outfits used by Japanese prostitutes. But what if they do? At least one or two might feel identified with this strange fantasy, right?

Hopefully not but Snyder might get away easily using such hypotheses like that in order to point out that gender inequality is owed to both genders equally.

If women are objectified by men, should they attempt to repel this by creating new versions of femininity that don't click with the status quo? Or should they lure them with their own sexual fantasies and like the praying mantis just chop their heads off when they come to close?

All of the female characters in Sucker Punch are constantly being threatened by murderers or rapists who use their weapons and genitalia to subjugate them and keep them imprisoned for as long as they see fit.

More than this disturbing aura of threat, what comes obvious at some point is that the film is truly a door into the director's head and we see how his ideas come to light through the most seemingly inconspicuous moments. For example, we are informed by this movie that women who leave their families instantly become whores and they will only find salvation after atoning for their sins at strip clubs.

Funny to think that the figure Snyder chooses as their guardian angel is a multipurpose old guy played by Scott Glenn in full David Carradine from Kill Bill mode. What Snyder lacks, that Tarantino more than makes up for, is a completely surreal vision of femininity.

While Uma Thurman's "Bride" chopped bodies and severed heads to get her daughter back, she was never really objectified sexually, yet Browning's Babydoll plans every move in battle as if they were exclusively meant to highlight her breasts or vagina.

Sucker Punch feels like a school paper on feminism done by a stoned teenager who fell asleep playing Final Fantasy and wrote the first thing he came up with in the morning.

Even more interesting is to see Snyder's own takes on his perception of the modern female psyche, apparently he thinks that women's periods make them feel like they're in a Bjork video, that their professional fantasies are choreographed by Britney Spears and that their biggest dream is to get rid of urbanity and go back to the country.

Funniest thing in the whole movie? The lobotomist is played by matinee idol John Hamm, giving Snyder the last completely envious of the quarterback, pathetically dorky laugh.

The Messenger **

Director: Oren Moverman
Cast: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton
Jena Malone, Steve Buscemi, Eamonn Walker

Three months before he's done with service, Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Foster) suffers an eye injury that sends him back to the US. He's placed in a casualty notification team for the remainder of his time in the army with Captain Tony Stone (Harrelson) a harsh, detached man for whom delivering news of death is just another duty.
Will, with his baby face and sensitive grunts feels that Tony's inhuman delivery of news is a disservice to the family of people he knew in Iraq. Tony, who has never been in combat, despite having been in the army at least two decades longer than Will has the steely purpose of a robot and tells Will that rule number one in their job is to never make physical contact with the people they're talking to.
With little regard for subtle dilemma, the screenwriters (Moverman and Alessandro Camon) establish a ying-yang dynamic that in another genre would serve as comedic relief, but in an independent moody drama can only mean ominously forced empathy.
In that way we see as Will and Tony deliver news to all kinds of people, each vignette becoming a who's who of multiculturality and familiar background (to remind us of course that the army isn't just made up of people like the main characters).
Before long we also enter into their private lives and see Tony as a recovering alcoholic for whom sex with young women is both entertainment and a way to keep him grounded.
Will enters a troubling situation when he becomes interested in Olivia (an extraordinary Morton) a young widow he delivered the news for.
Before long the film shifts the importance from the families to the messengers by using unoriginal manipulation techniques.
In one scene Will does weights at the gym when his pager beeps him, he continues lifting with anger and sorrow. The exercise meant to represent the weight of the world on his poor Atlas' shoulders is merely a distraction from the fact that the people whose lives he will break into perhaps are the real ones who had no choice to make. Not to mention Will's eye condition which requires him to use eye drops that fall like tears down his cheeks when he's not supposed to cry or feel anything.
Entire families are destroyed by children who enroll and must go to wars they don't understand, but Moverman doesn't understand this.
His movie offers no possibilities for those for whom the very existence of the army and foreign invasions are a mystery.
Harrelson and Foster are quite good in their roles and bring their characters closer to the impartiality the director never bothers to.
Harrelson plays Tony like a time bomb even if the screenplay takes him to the oh so overused element of "he must have a big secret that wounded him and makes him act like this".
While Foster's troubles, we might believe, come from the fact that his ex girlfriend (Malone) is about to marry another guy.
The fascinating limbo that exists in the fact that soldiers can't return to their ordinary lives is lost in the film's big "the Army takes care of you like a family" discourse and what should've worked like an apolitical essay turns out only to be a buddy/road movie that has us waiting when Will and Tony will realize they're maybe alike, share a hug, a beer and move on to the next house.

The Ruins **1/2

Director: Carter Smith

Cast: Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, Laura Ramsey, Joe Anderson

"Four Americans on vacations don't just disappear" says Jeff (Tucker). He's talking to his girlfriend Amy (Malone) and his friends Eric (Ashmore) and Stacy (Ramsey) to try and make sense of what's happening to them.

While on vacation in Mexico, they meet Mathias (Anderson) a German tourist who invites them to a mysterious archaelogical site, off the maps, where his brother is working.

After convincing themselves that they should be doing more than downing cockatils at the pool, they all go. Once they arrive at the ruins they are surrounded by Mayan descendants with weapons that threaten to kill them if they leave the ruins.

After discarding the idea that these people are acting like crazy killers they realize that they're being kept there in order to contain something that lurks within the ruins.

Feature film debut by director Smith, this is the rare horror movie that is able to scare because of what's not being said or shown, as opposed to relying on gore, blood and extreme violence.

While other directors working in the genre feel like sadists who actually have fun making their characters go through hell, Smith knows that audiences have to empathize with the characters in order to feel for them.

And he tries his best to give them personalities, even though they always remain vapid. His direction is precise and never relies on cheap tricks to get your heart racing.

But the film is a collision of opposing forces, on one side we have the director who sometimes seems to care too much to show us what's going on and then there's the writer, Scott B. Smith who adapted from his own novel and sometimes feels as if he's saying these people deserve what's going on with them.

The screenplay is structured in such a way that at first we begin to think that it'll be yet another "pretty people in danger" story, but slowly as smith peels the layers, we end up with pure psychological terror rooted on misconceptions Americans have about the rest of the world.

With a dark sense of humor and some absolutely witty lines Smith exposes a dual mode of thought (subconscious mostly) which tells us that the characters probably needed this terrifying rush to justify their trip and get their money's worth.

But at the same time, when something bad happens, it proved to them that they were right all along and nothing good can come from an "uncivilized" country.

With an ambiguous mix of cheesy B movie-ness and exploration of complex themes, "The Ruins" may not be exactly the world's ninth wonder, but you're gonna want to excavate to find what it hides.