Car Accidents, Drunken Tuesday, Sucker Punch.

It turns out that my car is cursed. Maybe not ‘Christine’ level cursed, but some level of cursage.
It is entirely possible that my car is made of hate, scorn and paprika.

I’m not even driving it, by the way. My sister and her partner have been driving it since October/November last year, but that’s a whole other story that will bore the pants off you and the idea of you (whoever you are) sitting around in your underpants and reading my blog is creepy.

That is unless you were about to sacrifice a small animal in the name of whichever deity it is you believe in. If so, who in their right mind would want blood spraying all over their pants? Not I, for one. I applaud you for reading this sans pants, pre-sacrificial rites.

Pants are circumstantial. Back to the car.

In January, the car was hit in the rear by a bus on Hoddle Street. Repairs, insurance, etc etc etc.
New bumper bar and a shiny paint job later, my car is happy.

Then last Sunday happened. While my car was parked, someone decided that driving into it was the best plan of action.
They moved the car back a whole metre and took off the front bumper bar in its entirety.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the rationale of a Victorian driver, “I hit the accelerator instead of the brake.”
Really? You don’t say! Fascinating insight there.

$3,000 of mechanical damage plus a brand-new front bumper is required to make my car happy again.

So it’s another set of repairs and another insurance claim even though the first time I wasn’t the driver and the second time the car wasn’t even moving.

Tuesday night I caught up with an ex-manager. We started drinking. We didn’t stop drinking until 3am or so. Biero, The Lounge and then Bar Open.

Common sense would suggest that you call it a night after the second place you visit on a Tuesday night closes. I slap thee, common sense.

I may have insulted some random because they used the word ‘like’ six times in one sentence. I then used the word ‘like’ twice in one sentence and copped a spray back. I submit that I was only 1/3 as annoying as said random.

Not even midweek and I’m soused like a sewer rat. Is this the student lifestyle I missed out on the first time around?

Wednesday. Hungover and filling out overdue worksheets in a lecture about motivation in the workplace.

Wednesday night I went to see Maria Bamford. Unbelievable range of vocal styles and pitches, full of quirky random moments and generally just a funny comedienne. I was seated right up the front, but to the extreme left so I was sitting in the dark and on an awkward angle. I felt like I was Gollum, hiding in the shadows and cackling like a loon.

After chilling out with some mates after the show, I caught up with another friend for a late-night hot chocolate until and got home at 2am. Remember what I said earlier about slapping common sense? I backhanded common sense so hard on Wednesday it exploded.

Real estate in Melbourne is an unbelievable joke. Want a one-bedroom apartment anywhere within a 15km radius of the CBD? You need god dollars. And then once you give up the god dollars, I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of clause involving 25% of your soul and giving up your firstborn after their 13th birthday, but only if it falls on a Wednesday.

After work on Saturday, I had some dinner with another newlywed couple in my social circle.

If you haven’t noticed already, I’m making an effort to leave out people’s names and places where appropriate. I guess I don’t want everyone that reads this knowing exactly where I was and who I was with at what times. I’m stalker-proofing my life. If you have a problem with that, it means you’re a potential stalker. Win/win for me. Anyhow, back to Saturday.

After dinner, we headed to IMAX to check out Sucker Punch. Now I am going to deliver a bunch of cheesy jokes regarding the film.

It really puts the suck in Sucker Punch.
After watching it, I felt like I had been sucker punched by a midget I couldn’t see for two hours.
And the film’s tagline…

YOU

WILL

BE

UNPREPARED

..for how much this film sucks.

No more jokes. Onto why I thought the film sucked. If you enjoyed this film, I applaud you. It means you were able to switch off every brain function for two hours and mutter unintelligible grunts of approval along the ride.

The film is not without its merits, though. Very stylistically shot with some very pretty effects. That’s about all it is, though.

We get it, Snyder, you love to engage in strategic allusion, marrying up aural and visual motifs to grab the viewer’s attention.
This technique was done with good measure in Dawn of the Dead and Watchmen. The opening credits of Watchmen, in fact, was faultless in terms of communicating exactly what you wanted to your audience.

The start of Sucker Punch, however, felt like it was a music video that was so overdone with style it choked me into submission.
It also lacked a certain subtlety tragic narratives should contain.
It basically said, “Fuck character development and motivation, let’s make everything look really cool” and ran with that for the entire duration of the film.

The protagonist, whom we only ever know as ‘Babydoll’, is mute for this entire sequence while we have an awful cover of ‘Sweet Dreams’ playing. Have I mentioned the unnecessary slow-mo yet?

Nnnnnooooowwwww ttthhhaaattt Iii hhhaaavvveee, it seems that we can only really understand what’s going on in this film if it’s slowed down to a point where you could walk away from the screen for five minutes, get a cup of tea, go to the loo (even number 2, if you were wondering) and still make it back to see the conclusion of the scene.

After being subjected to a terrible cover of ‘Sweet Dreams’, some other artist decided it was time to take aim at The Pixies ‘Where is my Mind?’ and royally screw that up too. 15 minutes in and this film has managed to ruin two songs I quite like.

When a cover is done right. Just sayin’.

Watching this film at IMAX meant I couldn’t escape from the barrage of suck that my eyeballs were subjected to, either.

You would think that for a film as visually striking as this, that it would actually enhance the viewing.
Well, there’s another big fat no, because it actually drew attention to the fact that everything else was so poorly crafted.

Once we escape the reality of the situation, this is where I thought things would pick up. Nope. After watching a shoddy music video, now I was watching a video game that I couldn’t actually interact with, complete with mission objectives being delivered to me by a man so old I’m going to call him ‘Cap’n Scrote’ because there were far too many folds in his skin.

There’s been a lot of tit-for-tat about whether or not this film exploits women or empowers them. I’m leaning toward the exploitation side of things because we don’t actually see how things played out in reality, except for the epilogue, and the remainder of the film plays out in a highly fantasized state. Yes, we get to see girls kicking a whole lot of butt, armed to the teeth with assault rifles, samurai swords and even a mecha at one point… But that brings me back to the point where all of that transpires in a fantasy world.

I can’t really say much more without spoiling much of the film, so I’ll wind it back to this very simple question…

The answer to this question regarding Sucker Punch is NO.
That is the greatest shame about Sucker Punch. All it had to be was entertaining and it somehow failed to do that.

Considering the types of films that are getting made today and buckets of money being thrown at nerdy-themed films, a chaotic visual mess like this comes along at puts the future of nerdy-themed films at risk all on its own.