We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 185

not-quite micro-review


SUCKER PUNCH (aka RAPE IS IMMINENT: THE MOVIE) - 5/10

i'm split on it... i thought much of the fantasy / geek elements were well rendered and exhilarating, the girls were all sicknice (when did Donnie Darko's girlfriend become a hardbody? holyfhghghghgfffffffffffffffff)... that aspect of the film was where it shined. but it succumbs to to the same problems many fantastical/surreal movies fall into when they try to sell themselves to the general public; they attempt to apply a narrative that explains the images rather than letting the viewer just take them in, and the explanations more often then not either fall into on-the-nose symbolism or power-draining nonsense.

while the attempt at being something more is commendable, Sucker Punch is not intelligent enough to support such stabs at psychological allegory. the movie is at its strongest when its being a naively misogynistic mix-tape of various geek cultures, and it should've forgone the "go to your happy place" dream within a dream wrap-around device and just created a genre mash-up imagination land filled with wild characters, over-the-top set pieces, and no explanation.

It's the same way i felt about the Cell and the Fall. It's a total cop-out to just say "well durdeedur it's all in her head". right, cause a hot 19 year old mega-blond is going to imagine mowing down Zombified Steampunk SS Troopers while her luscious Asian BFF is clad in a slutted up military uniform and flies around in an ED-209 with anime rabbits painted on it? i mean, i don't wanna be presumptuous here, i know girls are into this stuff too, but i just don't believe that this particular character has the imaginative capacity to conjure up Samurai Golems with Gatling Guns from her sub-subconscious to run from the sexy dance routine she's being forced to do IN HER BRAIN'S HAPPY PLACE? and the aforementioned happy place is a White Slavery Bordello run by Madame PolishHottie and Bromez Addams?

i guess it could be saying that there really is no where to run, and turning too much into yourself cuts you off, rendering you useless to those around you.... but in a film whose main selling point was gorgeous girls in fetish gear having machine-gun fights with Glow-in-the-Dark Androids and pissed off Mother Dragons... i'm not looking for something deeper. i mean, it's nice that you want to have a brain in your head, but you gotta learn to crawl before you learn to clumsily crash into a pile of psychology text books.

it's like going to the Bunny Ranch to "party" with Mika Tan and Isabella Soprano, and all they wanna do is talk to you about classic literature and music history; yeah, that's great and all... but i'm here to get this erection nursed, not learn something new about myself and the world around me. if i'm here i already know the truth... that i'm a slovenly pervert with the blooming libido of a 12 year old comic geek whose been granted unsupervised internet access for the first time. and you're hot and you're battling magic robots while "Army of Me" blares on the stereo. that'll do, movie.

so all in all... it's not an unlikeable movie. it's worth a viewing for the fantasy sequences and the stellar production design. it just would've been better if it didn't try to make sense of it self. also the pg-13 rating really held it back in terms of the potential sexiness, but whatever. gotta catch pedophiles somehow. anyways... whenever it tried to get "clever", all it did was become more stupid and aggravating. i didn't think it was a completely unlikeable movie, it just would've been a lot better if it didn't try to explain itself and stayed an over-the-top dumb action fantasy with cute girls fighting random amalgams of geek shit. kind of like how cool The Cell would've been, just replace geek shit with morose high art shit.

i dunno... Netflix it i guess.

ps:



holy fucking WANT.

NERRRRRRRRRD! vol. 31

Aronofsky Drops Out Of WOLVERINE

whelp... there goes any hope of this project not freebasing rectal grindings.

"didn't wanna leave the country". i call bullshit on that one... given Fox's track record with this franchise, maybe Arronofsky felt it best not to stain his surgical implements with this particular back alley abortion.

grumble.

Fuck YOUR Life vol. 15

... no, this isn't some CollegeHumor.com send up. this is for real. meet Rebecca Black

even Pedobear would say no.

makes Ke$sha sound like Maria Callas, don't it (or at least a little less like Crispin Glover doing a Robitussin Colonic Karaoke rendition of a Willa Ford song while dressed like the lost Olsen triplet left to die in the dumpster behind a Persian Bath House)?

to call this "insipid" would be a detriment to the word. the death rattle of anecephalic harlequin babies trapped in a burning nursery filled with kerosene blankies still would not illicit the pained expression cutting canyon-deep lines into my skull as i see/listen to this razor-wire dial tone.
























aaaand here's the ironic screammetalcore cover;




EDIT: Speaking of Meh$Ha;



....yeah....








....Not Quite....

NERRRRRRRRRD! vol. 30

David Slade to Reboot Daredevil

though he's (regrettably) best known for one of those shitass Twilight movies, David Slade also directed Hard Candy, the Ms. 45 of the Myspace Generation (and Ellen Page's breakout role), so this new is so far so good. Script and cast are next.

Daredevil deserves a good movie. hopefully this will be it. and what the hell, here's some lame ass fantasy casting;






Michael C. Hall as Matt Murdock / Daredevil

i can't think of a better catholic vigilante than the star of Dexter. just the right balance of unflappable idealism and brooding vengeance.





Olga Kurylenko as Elektra

the hottest Bond Girl since... probably ever. the hottest anything since anything ever. exotic and alluring, she would further reveal Jennifer Garner to be the Dudechinned Dudeface that she's always been.






Dean Winters as Bullseye

he played crafty Irish thug Ryan O-Riley for the entire run of HBO's OZ, and as Daredevil's charmingly violent arch-villain, Winters could fully go into his morbidly amusing side without all the baggage and family drama.





Stephen Graham as the Kingpin

I know he's a bit svelt to play Wilson Fisk, but watch him in the brilliant This is England or as Al Capone on HBO's fantastic Boardwalk Empire, and you'll see that all it would take is some clever camera tricks and body padding to turn him into one of the most imposing and deadly comic book villains of all time.

We are the Sprocket Holes vol. 184

BEAST’S FLASHBACK: Re-visiting the Un-visited, ANGST (aka FEAR or SCHITZOPHRENIA) (1983)

another write-up on shit you don't care about.

Ми смо задњих ланчаника рупе Волуме Оне осамдесет три

The Sitges Festival And Director Angel Sala Charged With Exhibition Of Child Pornography For Screening A SERBIAN FILM

by Todd Brown, March 5, 2011 10:18 PM

Some disturbing news out of Barcelona today with word that the Sitges Film Festival - one of the oldest, largest and most respected genre film events in the world - and its director, Angel Sala, have been charged with the exhibition of child pornography in connection with a screening of A Serbian Film at the 2010 edition of the festival.

Now, don't get me wrong, A Serbian Film is shocking and extreme cinema and designed to be so. But child porn? That is absolutely ridiculous - the scene that tends to get people worked up occurring entirely offscreen with the violence implied and not actually depicted - and I can only hope that the courts recognize it as such and throw the case out.

There have been rumblings that something was coming down the line after subsequent screenings of the film were banned in Spain but this is excessive in the extreme. Sala and the festival could be facing jail time and / or a fine if convicted.

----------------------------

of course you know already how completely fucking ridiculous this whole thing is, but whatever. Regardless of how you feel about this film (and i know most of you despise it with near-violent virulence, in some cases without having seen the fucking thing, but i digress), this is just a complete insult to all involved.

Spoiler; NO CHILDREN OR INFANTS WERE RAPED DURING THE MAKING OF THIS FILM. IT'S A MOVIE, ASSHOLES.

i know every child, real or theoretical, is a puppy-kissed angel cloud of unbridled dreaming innocence who should never under any circumstances be faced with any sort of truth about life and death, but this is not a movie for children, nor is it aimed at children, nor are children the center of its thesis. this isn't about wall-to-wall kid-fucking. the children are more-or-less a metaphor for the destruction of purity... all the bodies in this film represent that. it's similar to Passolini's Salo or Cannibal Holocaust in that regard. it's not about entertainment. you're not meant to be aroused or excited by what's happening in front of you. It's not a celebration of violence but an indictment of humanity.

i know whenever an artform actually attempts to comment on something, it's written off by the blank-voiced void-junkies as being "pretentious" or "in love with itself", but that's more a problem with today's film viewer than with films themselves. we're so accustomed to everything being entertainment for entertainment's sake that whenever something comes out that stirs up some sort of actual reaction in us, we're shocked to see that we haven't completely anesthetized ourselves to the point of full body nerve damage, and we don't like it, so we lash out at these things for daring to be effective rather than conceding to be thoughtless.

I'm not suggesting that A Serbian Film is anything more than a really strong horror film... it's those who hate it that think it's something it isn't.

but most of you are genuinely excited for Scream 4 or Scre4m or whatever bullshit Craven is limping to the barn with, so what's the use of all this passion when you've already made up your simple minds?

grow the fuck up.

Fuck YOUR Life vol. 14

BILL MAHER: Charlie Sheen Is Sarah Palin On Cocaine


"I don't care. I mean, you know me, I've been a social libertarian. I don't care if you do drugs, I don't care if you have goddesses... skanks. But all this talk from Charlie about how he's tired of pretending he's not a rock star from Mars. Dude, you're on Two And A Half Men. You're on, like, the lamest sitcom ever. This is what no one is talking about. How can you be this cool if the central thing you do is not that cool? 'I have tiger's blood and Adonis DNA and normal brains can't process me.' You play Uncle Sleazy on "Bringing Up Chunky". That's what you do for a living. 'I'm an F-18 that will melt your face off.' No, you're on CBS. The old person's network. So, you know, can we stop all the talk about 'magic in my fingertips'? You know, magic is Shakespeare and Leaves of Grass and Stanley Kubrick. Who gives a fuck what happens to Two and a Half Men? This movement. Oh yes, write your network executives and your Congressman cause if we don't have a ninth season of Two and a Half Men, art will die.

And America said forget Wisconsin, forget the Middle East. Charlie Sheen is coming off a coke high, it is funny. It is funny that he keeps waving a paper saying he passed a drug test. How is that good for his image? It just mean he's like that sober? He said, one interviewer said, "Are you bi-polar?" He said, “I'm bi-winning. I win here and I win there.” So yes, it's childish, it’s needlessly defensive, it makes no sense. So if you ever wondered what it would be like if Sarah Palin was on coke...."

The Last fucking word on the more-over-prescribed-than-Ritalin "meltdown" of theoretical bad-ass / avarice conduit / syndicated suck job Charlie Sheen.

Shut up, Mom! vol. 1

Why The King’s Speech Proves The Oscars Are Irrelevant

"oh but THE KING'S SPEECH was sooooo good! it's so nice to see a movie that doesn't rely on sex or violence or adventure or excitement or any of that nonsense that gets in the way of my Disney-owned sensitivities."





"Shut Up, Mom!"

STREBERRRRR! Volumen 29

Red Schädel

FxMxLx vol. 26

i knew there was a reason for me wishing i looked like Paul Rudd.

Double You, Tea F. vol. 113 (now featuring HFS!)

UMMM....

.... HFS!