"Sucker Punch," a movie aimed at young men whose fascination with sexy child-girls kicking bad guys in the faces with high-heeled shoes has absolutely no relation to their inability to connect with actual females in real life, did not do well over the weekend. The director is certainly talented - "300," that CGI owl movie - but this incoherent thing about women in an insane asylum who turn into strippers and then have fantasy battles with dragons and steampunky Prussian soldiers may not have broad appeal. So to speak. Lisa Schwartzbaum of EW explains:
Well, "scared" might not be the right word; "annoyed" comes to mind, because the "fanboys" are the ones who supposedly have the power to lift up a movie - they create "buzz" on the "internet" and make clips go "viral" and other things that matter if you're hanging around the aint-it-cool-news boards all the livelong day. But if there were sufficient quantity of fanboys to make these movies a safe bet, "Snakes on a Plane" would still be in the theaters.
Do the execs not understand the footage, as she says? We're not talking some strange David Lynch movie here, but a movie with women in short skirts with guns, a fairly straight-forward proposition - but the movie execs may not understand the culture from which it comes, the nerdygeek comic-book roots, the samurai posturing, the winks and nods to a hundred different subcultures. It's like making movies for people on another planet who will just steal it anyway as soon as someone puts up a pre-release version on the web. What's the point?
She also wonders why, in these movies, the women have to be sexually degraded before they "fight back" and become "empowered." Because that's the plot of every one of the splatter-revenge films the geeks admire, and because critics have been falling over janey's-got-a-gun stories since "I Spit On Your Grave." Because movies now are about other movies.
The problem may have the marketing campaign, which made the mistake of summing up the movie quite accurately. If it had been just one of these movies, well, maybe, but all of them plus The Very Bad Insane Asylum + bad acting + Scott Glenn as David Carradine, well, maybe not.
