SUCKER PUNCH by jaiskizzy

gist: violet baudelaire is sent to a mental institution for poor marksmanship. there, she dreamweaves being in a brothel where clothes-deprived girls dance to survive. (why she chose that particular fantasy, i'll never know) in this imaginary realm, she concocts the idea to escape as per a wise man's instructions in another world she had imagined while dancing. inception much? with the help of four other girls, baby doll gyrates her virginal hips for attention in the first layer pseudoworld and goes kick-ass mode in the second layer pseudoworld to obtain the five items essential to their freedom.

reaction: first, a quickie on the sucker punch hate brigade. most of the criticism seems to stems from the fact that something else was expected from the film. some wanted packed action and were put off by the ponder-prompting metaplot. some demanded taut storytelling and were bitchslapped by all the armed fighting. why oh why do these people enter the movie theater to look at a painting? yes, you paid good money to be entertained but it doesn't mean you're just going to passively sit there and wait for whatever it is you want to see or hear and curse the movie to tartarus if you don't.

anyways, sucker punch is basically alice in wonderland gangbanged by 300. girls in an imagined setting doing unreal feats. but underneath all the fist and bullet trading is a story that, although simple enough to catch, requires a deeper train of thought for proper comprehension. but even then you'd still have doubts for certain aspects point elsewhere. that feeling where you need to debate what the movie's about or to recall details that one could have missed, let's call it the "afterview". and smart moviegoers who absorbed at least the bits and pieces of the film's true meaning will be engaged in further discussions due to a lingering afterview.

the pussy parade is led by emily browning. she's lookin all grown up here. i really didnt think she'd work, never having seen her in any role like this but she played the innocent girl with a badass slut inside real well. she also smoothly flew through the fight scenes. this is her show of course but it would have been greater if the same amount of screen time was relegated to her mysteriously enthralling dance routine, which was limited to the lame sway intro. as for the deuteragonist damsels, they did their parts okay but a teeny bit more characterization would have made the turncoating valid. plus in movies like this, you really don't for high-grade acting so vanessa hudgen's wallslide crying was weird.


there are a number of action set pieces that bend reality, all awesomely executed, but my favorite is the first one with the giant shoguns. it's a great way to immerse the audience to baby doll's dance-triggered world (where they all defy gravity but land the exact same way). there's a scene in the dressing room where the girls are talking and the camera makes an impossible one-take shot. this i think encapsulates how zack snyder uses the advancements in cgi to put a skew on traditional filmmaking. the action scenes, the color correction, the shots, nearly everything he has done here is abusing the technology. years ago, none of it could be done in the same magnitude. sure, with avatar and a gazillion cgi cartoons, the envelope has been pushed a lot but snyder has distinct style that reroutes where all those rendered pixels can go. and with sucker punch, the clunks of cgi physics (especially with real human character interaction), wirework and slow-mo/fast-mos are gone, leaving a nigh-perfect jaw-detaching eyecandy overdose.

i like how sucker punch is both a fanservice to guys and a girl power push for girls. i like how the main characters are girls in whorific costumes but sensually downplayed with no ass shots or in your face boobs, integral to most action flicks. it's not a great movie but it's really not as bad as some consider. i am definitely on board for the zack snyder superman.



good: action sequences, the visuals, the "afterview"
bad: little character development, studio cuts
ugly: vanessa hudgens
verdict: 8 lobotomy needles



sweet pee/baby dull.

shiny graves for frozen slaves

save your brain cells. title's nonsense generated online. so let's cut the crap, slice the shit, fillet the feces and dice the doodie and get the turdball rolling for my random stuff commentary enumerated in japanese.

ichi: watched sucker punch with my sweet pea babydoll yesterday (and in the process of piecemealing a review) and there was a bunch of bozos bitchslapped to stultiloquence by the real-to-imaginary world switch. i hate these kind of people. why do they question the movie the moment they see something they cant comprehend? cant they automatically conclude that it may possibly be explained in subsequent scenes or at the end? or even if it's never explained, cant these morons just shut the hell up and watch the damn movie? i mean, seriously, i hope there was a way to keep these idiots from getting inside the theater, or at least the ones im in. (they can do all the shit as much as they want in theaters showing pinoy flicks) i dont see movies theatricaly that much but almost every time i do, there'll be these imbeciles ruining the whole experience for me. i hate all of these people who want the entire movie plot spoonfed to them 100% clear, who watch but dont see and hear but don't listen, who want all movies tailor-made to their satisfaction. they're like wet ugly baby birds in a nest chirping with their beaks open and the mother bird has to chew and spit their worms for them. they shouldn't be sold tickets to films that are beyond their mental capacity and, accordingly, shouldn't be allowed to rant about it in their reviews. if you're one of them, fuck you.

ni: the director of sucker punch, zack snyder, will also direct the new superman reboot and nearly every week a new cast member is announced. joining henry cavill (supes/clarky), kevin costner (jonathan kent) and diane lane (martha kent) is amy adams as lois lane. i like the first three, but amy adams as lois lane just ruffle my feathers, if you catch my drift. sure it's a smart decision to cast an oscar nominated actress in a role integral to the story but i strongly believe miss adams aint right for the part. lois lane is supposed to be tough, a woman with an attitude. she's this daring reporter who's not afraid to stick her nose where she shouldn't, just to get the scoop. that's why she's always getting herself into situations where superman's presence is required. so it is only makes sense to get an actress who looks the part in one look. margot kidder did well in the old movies and that chick from smallville was just awesome. but amy adams doesn't look tough. even if she had fangs. this lois lane looks like she'll need superman's help because she's stupid and weak. i'll trust your decision, snyder-man, but i really think queen gorgo, carla gugino and olivia wilde are better choices. 

san: after over a year of invisibility, ping "i have no balls" lacson has resurfaced, answering questions from the media insisting he did no wrong. except that hiding from justice is wrong. when you're a former cop and now a senator whom people voted to uphold the law, being a fugitive when you're accused of murder is very, very wrong. the issue here isn't his guilt or innocence or whether the prosecutors are after him. the issue here is that ping lacson is a coward. he's telling every filpino out there, especially the criminals-to-be, that hiding from the law is okay. he said he hid because he's innocent. but that's his word. even if there is no evidence against you and they're just ganging up on you to get you behind bars, isn't facing your accusers the manly way of dealing with this problem? is hiding really the way to prove your innocence? bullshit. who the fuck elected for this guy? so the thing is if someone decides to kill another one, he could simply say he's innocent, go into hiding and wait it all out? what a way to show the country what a law-abiding citizen you are, lacson. and you even had the gall to compare yourself to a prisoner? prisoners dont get to eat what they want, they dont sleep on comfortable beds, they dont get to chat with their families or surf the internet to pass time, they don't get to travel from country to country, and you have the nerve to align yourself with them? you bastard. i think the only thing that you and the prisoners have in common is getting your ass pounded because that's probably the only thing that got you through this "ordeal" of yours. fuck you. (and to those journalists who interviewed him but did not have the guts to ask the right questions, fuck you too.)

SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR by jaiskizzy

gist: i am honestly lost for words. nothing can be said enough to summarize this movie, yet on the other hand, a one-sentence description of any scene may be too much. this is one of those films best viewed with virgin eyes.

reaction: holymotherfuckinshitballs. what did i just watch? roy andersson's sånger från andra våningen (or songs from the second floor, to the non-swedish readers) is definitely one of the weirdest films i have ever seen. and i love every odd frame of it. it starts with a guy talking to another guy who is inside a tanning bed and its just gets weirder and weirder from there. all scenes are shot static (except for one, if i remember correctly) framed in a way that the main focus is on the particular characters central to the sequence at hand but with room for extras and events in the background or on the sides to memontarily capture your attention. there is one where in there's a long road in the background and as the scene progresses, you realize that there are people who have been actually walking along that road beginning from horizon cut-off at the very start of the scene towards character situated at the sequence focal point. weird, eh? but something even weirder happens right after. yes, i am a junkie getting ultra high on weirness overdose.

funny is the other simple word i can associate with this complex peculiarity. everything is done seriously and nearly every scene is glum, but there'll be lines of dialogue, actions and little things that made me laugh, kind of like the way you laugh when you're outside and you see something bad happen to someone and you're not supposed to laugh but you cant help it (schadenfreude). it's exactly that. not corny or forced or inserted for a longer run time. this is a level of funny no pinoy slapstick comedy movie could ever attain. and beyond the absurdist comedy is the profound way the scenes meld together. there's a scene that didn't seem to make any sense and then later on, it a connecting scene reveals that the previous one was actually a rehearsal. mental drop kick!

this movie is proof that creativity has no bounds. you can always do something new and different. only people who arent born creative, who have no self-developed vision would say otherwise and insist imitation. i dont know who this roy andersson guy is but he just blipped in my directorial radar. he's on an entirely different plateau, a place i wanna stand on the precipice of and jump off one day.


good: the weirdness, the funniness, the progression of scenes
bad: lack of backstories
ugly: lasse's wife. half-naked. ugh.
verdict: 10 jesus-swinging-on-one-nail crucifixes


thongs from the second drawer.

hair spew: the mane issue

every weekend i'd be home with my smiling scion of sweetness and my sweet spouse of smiles and there'd always be a moment where the latter would take notice of my hair and ask me to have it cut. and every time that happens, i always tell her i'd do it only when everyone ceases forcing me to suffer another monumental trimming of my life. and every time i say that, she points out that i'm just saying that and that i have actually no plans of getting a haircut.

partially, she is correct but from my standpoint of view, that's something you do not plan. right now, yes, i do not want to lose my locks. but that fateful time will arrive (maybe tomorrow, i don't know) that i'll wake up and the first thing in my head as agreed upon by all of my mental entities will be to get a haircut. and then i'll probably google the hairstyle i'll want to have, which of course, ought to be something i've never had before.

but let's cue the flashback blur effect and siphon some background on the topic at hand. (this might be long so if you're busy, uninterested or on the verge of death and would rather read something more thought-provoking, you are permitted to leave as the two previous paragraphs seem enough to fulfill the primary objective of this post)

when i was a kid, i had moptop beatles hair, probably because my dad was a big fab four fan. when i started going to school, it was trimmed in such a way that it looked like a bowl was placed on top of my head and the barber made cuts straight along the rim. i rocked those rulered bangs for many years with occasional gel-enabled rizalian pompadour days. as puberty took over, i gradually lost my maternal dependence and began to loathe my hair. i developed a habit of jerking my head upwards to get strands off my face. i had to carry a comb around in my pocket but for some inexplicable reason, i kept losing that beige-colored toothed piece of plastic.

and then came high school, which meant four years of bad hair days. looking back, i still cannot comprehend why we had to have haircuts with such specific dimensions, three fingers from the ear and two from the eyebrow, if im correct. for all of my adult life i have never been in any job or situation where that haircut was required. anyways, a centimeter longer and an administrator would chop a chunk off forcing you to have an even stupider haircut than the infamous keempee look. skinheadedness was frowned upon back then and i never intended to go bald because i was so skinny then and wore glasses half of high school that i thought i'd look like gandhi. i also got tired of buying new combs so around third year, i decided i wasn't going to be a slave to grooming. i stopped combing my hair. of course, i'd use my hand to run through it when needed but i eschewed combs completely.

college onward, i took the haircut liberty to new verticals. i wore caps in class. i got spikes. undercut? sure. one day i'd be long-haired and then the next day, everything's suddnely mowed down to baldness (i got sick the first time). i even had my hair dyed red and got called rodman or moffat by strangers. i had it braided but never got the chance to get dreads. i did all of these things to my hair just because i wanted to. never due to fads.

but of all the hair metamorphoses i went through, i felt most comfortable wearing my hair long. not because i like rock music. (the top two questions i always get asked because of my hair: are you in a band? do you have a lighter?) i just like it this way. when i was younger and making comic strips on old notebooks instead of playing outside, i created my imaginary adult persona and he had ponytailed long-hair all the time so i guess having hair like this was one of my childhood dreams. (that guy was also very muscular and always had a lit cigarette on his lips -- staples of a boy's concept of coolness, i think -- but i never had either ever) ive stuck to using a specific brand of shampoo believing it helps in the faster growth of my already fast-growing hair. i'd avoid shaving facial hair for a couple of months and people would start calling me jesus.

so yeah, this is the definitive jai hairdo. how long it will get depends on the time i get the urge to see the mirror image of scissors murdering my scalp grass or if circumstances call for it (like when i got married), whichever comes first.

what it all comes down to is this: people think men look better with short hair not because it's the truth but because that's they been programmed to believe. so, as with most things, no one should force anything upon anybody just because it's dictated by the norm. hair length shouldn't be an issue. that's the long and the short of it.


p.s. i just got promoted recently, which means my hard work paid off, which mean my salary will increase (by how much, i dont know) which does not mean im coming to work with a new haircut. hah!
p.p.s. im halfway watching the kids are all right and already there've been two scenes involving gay porn. wtf. i dont know if i should go on, afraid there'll be more. i want to vomit. and watch five hours of real 100% straight made-for-real-men porn just to unsee that crap.