The Stand
Moral: Never trust a man in a denim jacket.
Final Score: Phantom Menace
Conan: The Destroyer
Moral: They don’t make movies like they used to because they don’t make movies where camels get punched in the face anymore.
Final Score: Nicolas Cage
Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Moral: I bet if you mix mermaid tears with phoenix tears you can make one hell of a margarita.
Final Score: Iron Man
Conan: The Barbarian
Moral: All this time I was way off about what is best in life.
Final Score: Nicolas Cage
True Grit
Moral: If your aim is to kill someone, whisky makes a fine breakfast.
Final Score: Iron Man
2001: A Space Odyssey
Moral: The less entertaining and comprehensible the movie, the greater its critical reception.
Final Score: Troy
Male Depowerment
There’s quite the hubbub brewing over Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and it’s not concerning the shameful lack of explicit gore and nudity brought about by its tame PG-13 rating. Instead it seems that bras are being torched and flung through the air by many a high-minded, politically correct nerd due to the movie’s objectification of women.
But I haven’t heard one peep about how the movie portrays its men.
While the merits of Sucker Punch’s women empowerment is certainly debatable, even the most pessimistic view of its female leads wouldn’t come close to the bleak picture the movie paints of manhood.
(Men. In suits. And one has a mustache. You’re screwed.)
Every male character in Sucker Punch is a gross, power-hungry, lying, manipulative, immoral, sex-crazed, leering rapist. The step-father cares for nothing but money, assaults his step-daughters, throws one into a mental institution and pays off an orderly to have her lobotomized. The orderly is on the take, sexually assaults the girls, murders them and treats them as nothing more than cash registers. The cook is a giant slob who can’t even chew with his mouth closed and attempts to rape a girl in the kitchen. The one somewhat decent seeming man, played by Jon Hamm, is a professional lobostomist. Every male presented in Sucker Punch is a horrible human being. With much of their darkness stemming from their natural lust for power, money and women. A condition, apparently, stemming from their unfortunate case of having a penis.
The only representative of a moral male is the Wise Man in Babydoll’s action fantasies. And what should we infer from this except that this ideal of the “good man” is pure fantasy, for surely none are present in the real world of this movie.
(The wise, helpful, non-perv male. Only in your dreams.)
Yet despite this, no one seems concerned that males are going to have their self-esteems crushed by being portrayed in such a dark light. That they’re going to walk out of the theater and give up their quaint notions of rape and murder being, you know, bad. I doubt many men are going to see the male characters as people they can relate to or who somehow represent what their entire gender is all about. And nor should they.
So if the gals of Sucker Punch don’t live up to your ideals of the strong, independent, non-objectified heroine, don’t take it as some attack on the female gender. Just take it for what it is. Five flawed characters doing their best to make it through a shitty situation in a deeply flawed movie.
Spartacus: Blood And Sand Season 1
Moral: Boobies, blood, boobies, boobies, blood, boobies, blood, blood, boobies, boobies, blood, boobies, vajajay.
Final Score: The Dark Knight
