Drive ****

You'll have to go to PopMatters and read my review though.

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.

Agora **

Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast: Rachel Weisz
Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Sami Samir, Rupert Evans
Michael Lonsdale, Ashraf Barhom

Agora is a highly ambitious, if not entirely effective, parable that uses the life of Hypatia of Alexandria to deliver its views on modern times.
The famous philosopher is played by Rachel Weisz who with her timeless, ethereal beauty does justice to the crush the director has on the character.
His Hypatia is a strong willed woman who becomes the center of men's lives and ignites passion, fear and admiration within them.
One of them is her slave Davus (Minghella) who secretly becomes a Christian to see if this god will grant his wish of making Hypatia fall for him. Another is her pupil Orestes (Isaac) who declares his love for her in song form.
But she remains indifferent to their feelings and dedicates her time to the study of the universe, particularly what is its center and how gravity, stars, circles, orbs and planets all interfere with one another.
Because we know that most of the topics she's obsessed with, became concepts until centuries later (and the film never really makes her discoveries exciting enough), Amenábar has an easy way to get rid of her emotional depth and turn her into a selfish character whose obsession with knowledge isn't as prominent as her detachment from humanity.
When in the film's centerpiece (a remarkable scene that teases us of the epic possibilities the film loses), the Christians destroy the Library of Alexandria, Hypatia sobs at the loss of books and not at the destruction of life around her.
Her dedication to the written word and science at least distract her from the conflicts between Christians, Pagans and Jews.
Christians being the new religion and all try to impose their views on everyone and seek to exterminate those who disagree. We all know how this went but instead of rubbing in our faces how misled our conception of religion has been, the film really turns the Christians into outlandish movie villains.
Fully dressed in black they wreak havoc across Alexandria, screaming "hallelujah" and looking like Satan's minions.
While it's true that Christianism (especially Roman Catholicism) has proven in the last decades to be plagued with immorality and corruption, what does the film achieve by reinforcing viciousness?
What can we make of the film's discourse when it only explores motives on the surface? The director seemingly wants to say something about the way intolerance has shaped history but mostly ends up revealing his own shortsightedness.
It's quite clear that he's on the side of "reason", seeing how he tries to glorify Hypatia in every scene and Weisz does a convincing job playing someone who's both muse and heroine.
"I feel that what you say can be refuted but now I don't know how" she says at one point and Weisz provides her for a second with a warmth that reassures us that she will find how before she's skinned alive by Christians in the end.
Agora's biggest setback is its inability to see its limitations. When it becomes clear that the screenplay (written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil) doesn't know how to create characters, the director should've worked with their flaws instead of perpetuating them.
Seeing how Davus, Orestes and Hypatia all have secret, perhaps unjustified, motivations, why not use them as metaphors of selfcenteredness and its relation to eternal intolerance?
It's clear to the audience at least that because all the characters are living exclusively for themselves they're unable to perceive the world around them.
In the same way the movie, in its effort to rediscover the center of the universe, ended up losing its own.

Crush of the Week.

Robin Hood *1/2

Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett
Mark Strong, William Hurt, Matthew Macfadyen, Oscar Isaac
Danny Huston, Mark Addy, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes
Eileen Atkins, Max von Sydow

What do you get when you combine Batman Begins, Gladiator and Lord of the Rings but take away anything that was good about them? The answer is Robin Hood.
Ridley Scott's retelling of the English folk tale is a conflicted attempt at updating the basic story for modern audiences and keeping faithful to its roots.
It's the 12th century and rebellious soldier Robin Longstride (Crowe) decides he's had enough of the Crusades. He's been fighting along Richard the Lionheart (Huston) for a decade and his patience just runs out one day.
After learning the king has died (which he obviously hasn't as anyone with the slightest inkling of world history would know) Robin and his, not so, Merry Men (Addy, Grimes and Durand) run into an ambush planned by the wicked sir Godfrey (Strong).
Godfrey plans to steal the crown, create civil war in England and help the French invade the country but Robin botches his plan and inadvertently ends setting the way for a farce which has him travel to England and pretend to be the deceased sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) who before dying made him promise he'd deliver his sword to his estranged father sir Walter (von Sydow).
Before Robin even leaves France we have ourselves the possibility to make at least four different movies but Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland seem to think that more is more and keep on stuffing the plot.
Back in British territory, the spoiled Prince John (Isaac) is wreaking havoc, bedding French women and making his mom (Atkins) quite pissed. Like a villain out of Shrek the young man simply succumbs to his whims and jeopardizes his kingdom and the movie's attempt at being coherent.
He's convinced by Godfrey to tax the hell out of his people, while he's secretly plotting to create a distraction for the French to take over the country, and paves the way for Robin to earn his hood.
Robin meanwhile is on his way to Nottingham where the evil Sheriff (MacFadyen) is executing the crown's orders with mean delight. There he meets sir Walter and Marion Loxley (Blanchett), no longer a maiden but a widow. Walter immediately takes a liking to Robin and requests that he pretend to be his son officially and stay living with them.
He obliges and soon is robbing grain from the Church, traveling at the speed of light to be in war councils, plowing the fields, saving England from the French invasion, creating the Magna Carta, solving daddy issues and courting the reluctant Marion.
There is so much going on in Robin Hood that it makes total sense how it's only when the film ends that we learn that "so the legend begins". Precisely, how would this man have time to become the Robin we know about, when Scott forces him to be so many things?
The hero's lack of identity determines the disunity that characterizes the entire film which amounts to little more than a wasted opportunity.
With that cast, which is rather impressive, one would at least expect the movie to deliver moments that evoked The Lion in Winter, instead the performances range from the hammy (Strong) to the confusing (Hurt).
Crowe, varies his accent from scene to scene and really shows no commitment to the role he's playing. This is obviously not his fault, entirely, given how the screenplay shows no regard whatsoever for any dramatic background.
In a way it's strange that Robin Hood in a way repeats the Gladiator formula yet fails so miserably.
As in the previous film, Crowe plays a troubles soldier adopted by a great actor, who changes the course of history. But while Gladiator had an almost Shakesparean aspect to it, Robin Hood is more unintentional Monty Python.
The film's major issue is probably the lack of clarity about what it wants to be exactly. Scott is known for his gritty realism and wondrously crafted action sequences but he also can do stupendous fantasy.
Here though he tries to do both at the same time without any cohesion, therefore we have Robin being all "Robin" and seducing the tough Marion (who honestly never seems to be into him) and a few minutes later he's behaving like an actual historical figure delivering grandiose speeches.
The story sometimes moves by inertia (it's never explained why the Merry Men actually follow Robin and the sudden "I love you" he says to Marion is ludicrous), then stalls, then throws in a random action sequence.
We never know for sure if we're meant to take anything about the movie seriously, is it trying to demythify the character? Is it trying to mythify history? What about the political undertones? Is it actually saying something about socialism and human rights?
It's ironic to say so but this is one Robin with no aim.