Category Archives: All the Spoilers
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Sucker Punch”
Dear Frank,
About two months ago, it got programmed into my brain that I wanted to see Sucker Punch, Zach Snyder’s “first original film” — in part because I’m a sucker for anything that might promise to be a girl power epic, and in part because I have a strange residual fondness for 300. (Not entirely because of this, but, yeah.) Combine that residual goodwill with the fact that American film is currently experiencing a drought of original premises and I like to support the ones that do make it into theaters, and you end up with me giving Zack Snyder my money on Sunday night.
Let’s end the mystery right here, Frank — if the movie had been great, I wouldn’t be writing this, and this installment wouldn’t be filled with SPOILERS. Read with caution.
Sucker Punch starts off by introducing a young girl only known as Baby Doll, who gets sent to a mental asylum by her evil stepfather after the death of her mother. (This movie does not deal in subtleties.) In the mental institution, she meets a pack of girls with whom she teams up for an escape attempt — because in five days, thanks to her stepfather bribing an orderly, she’s getting lobotomized.
What then happens? Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Conan the Barbarian”
Dear Frank,
Thank you so much for telling me about My Neighbor Totoro last week! Miyazaki has always been a director I’ve struggled to appreciate, but there is the slightest chance that I now get what the big deal is.
I can only hope I bring that same level of joy to today’s retelling of the 1982 classic Conan the Barbarian. Because let me be clear here, Frank — this movie is a delight. It’s a weird, slowly-paced flavor of delight, but its blunt, hypermasculine telling of a legend I have done absolutely no research into prior to writing this is downright arresting.
Lest you had doubts about this movie’s politics or message, Conan opens with a quote from Nietzsche about his beloved Ubermensch philosophy. When we meet the titular Ubermensch, though, he is but a little boy being raised by his father to believe in the god Krum, who lives in the ground and is responsible for all good things.
Life seems good for Li’l Conan, but then (because these are barbarian times) his home village is raided by an outside gang of troops, and they kill his parents and enlist him into slavery. Eh oh. Read the rest of this entry
Frank Tells Liz What Happened In “My Neighbor Totoro”
Dear Liz,
First of all, thanks so much for asking me to tell you about something this week. This blog has filled my life with so much warmth and information, and your efforts to shine an edifying light on the underdeveloped corners of my pop culture soul continue to make me a better human being. I know you’re having a busy week, so the least I can do is pick up the baton for once and tell you about a Miyazaki movie.
Liz, like many of us who spent our childhoods in the 1980s, I experienced a deep, early love of cartoons. It started with the animated shorts on Sesame Street and reached its zenith with the arrival of The Muppet Babies, whose imaginative flights of fancy and media mash-ups were the highlight of my Saturday mornings. But like many of us, I gradually realized that most of the other cartoons I was devouring were totally terrible: derivative, violent toy commercials of the crudest hand-drawn sort. (For me, the breaking point was probably the day I recognized the imperialist undertones of The InHumanoids.) In many ways, the 1980s were the nadir of American animation.
Meanwhile in Japan, the 1980s were an animation renaissance, spearheaded by the formation of Studio Ghibli, the company formed by animator-auteurs Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. I’ve seen a number of Miyazaki movies, but I’ve actually never seen My Neighbor Totoro, so I’m very pleased that we’re sharing it for the first time together. Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In the “Sliders” Pilot
Dear Frank,
Of all the terrible things about being a teenager, here is one that’s only really terrible in retrospect: There will be books and movies and TV shows you consume in your adolescence that, upon future reflection, might prove to be embarrassing, especially when you realize just how much they reveal about you. There’s an inevitability to this — the most you can hope for is that the media with that kind of power over your psyche won’t include a Vancouver-produced micro-budgeted Fox show about people who hop between alternate universes with the help of an oversized cell phone.
I am, alas, not so lucky.
The pilot episode of Sliders opens with Jerry O’Connell videotaping his experiments with wormhole technology in the basement of his mother’s house; blah blah blah science science science Jerry’s a genius, having successfully opened up a portal of some sort to a… I dunno. It’s a mystery! (The answer is parallel universes.) Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Predator”
Dear Frank,
So, okay, you say that you’ve watched Predator, but I’m here to question whether you’ve truly seen it. For one thing, you never talk about it, and having just seen it for the first time a few days ago, I can tell you that I CAN’t stop talking about it. Maybe it’s been a while for you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten how incredible this movie is.
Also, I just checked with your girlfriend and she says you don’t have two penises. Given that this movie’s hypermasculinity caused me to GROW a penis while watching it (it is kind of weird having a penis, for the record!), and it seems unlikely that you were born without one, I can only assume that you have not truly let Predator into your heart.
So lemme tell you what happens in Predator so you truly understand. Some bad-ass Alan Silvestri music takes us into the jungles of… I dunno. Probably South America somewhere. It was the 80s, after all. And you know it’s the 80s, because here’s Ahnuld, ripped and youthful, accompanying his team of commandos off a helicopter and into a base.
Here, he meets Carl Weathers! And let me just get this out of my system now: Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In “Batman and Robin”
Dear Frank,
So as you know, I’m a very big fan of performance artist Lady Gaga, primarily because in the world of pop music, she’s the rare person unafraid to truly experiment. Like, I know there are plenty of people giving her shit over coming to the Grammys last night ensconced inside a translucent egg, but frankly I kinda loved it. Especially because she also came on stage inside said egg, basically making the red carpet a dramatic lead-up to her onstage performance, which is such a bold and interesting way of approaching the conceit of an awards show! Lady Gaga is so great.
Why am I talking about Lady Gaga, Frank, when (as the subject of this post clearly states) I am here to tell you what happens in the 1997 film Batman and Robin? Here’s the deal. We all know this is a terrible movie (Akiva Goldsman, even Fringe being awesome doesn’t mean I forgive you). But while other cinematic disasters I’ve told you about were failures because of a lack of talent or inspiration, that’s not where Batman and Robin falls apart. Batman and Robin is fucking terrible, but it’s fucking terrible because it was a bold attempt at capturing a certain spirit in film format — specifically, being a live-action comic book.
The primary problem, of course, is that the people involved have this completely childish idea of what comic books are — probably because the last time they read a piece of sequential art, they were actually children — and the entire movie is a fucking mess. But there is a part of me that admires the amount of risk taken here, the flat-out balls of trying something new with what was previously such a profitable franchise. The visual extravagance of this film alone could inspire an entire concert’s worth of Lady Gaga ensembles. In short: This is probably why I am not in charge of a major motion picture studio, but there is a part of me that would rather Hollywood make five flat-out insane Batman and Robins than one generic and blah Transformers.
Thus ends my defense of Batman and Robin. Let’s begin making fun of it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry
Liz Tells Frank What Happened In... 