IT’S WINDY IN CHICAGO

Look, children, it’s an Interwub meme.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Just to liven things up and make people smile, post your favorite cheesy pop song from any era, and then ask your LJ friends to do the same.

I wouldn’t say this is my favorite, but I’ve always had a soft spot for The Association, the band so clean-cut they made the Beach Boys look like dope-smoking thugs.

Point of interest for those of you tuning in from Chicago: you may recognize the urban backgrounds during the “Windy” bits.

Lighter than air,

This is dF

THE GREATEST SAMURAI SCHOOLGIRL STEAMPUNK FILM EVER MADE

Yes, I do still go to the movies sometimes.

Sucker Punch

I confess, the trailer for Sucker Punch was a sucker punch in itself for me. I like Zack Snyder as a director, but the idea of samurai chicks in schoolgirl uniforms on a quest for five objects set amidst WW1-steampunk battle scenes – well, I could see plenty going wrong with a premise like that. And indeed, the reviews haven’t been kind.

So naturally it’s one of the better films I’ve seen this year.

The use of two fantasy layers – a dance club/brothel, and a samurai steampunk war zone – to tell the story of a girl unjustly committed to a mental hospital by a greedy uncle isn’t as clever as it sounds on paper, if only because Snyder never explains why or how it all works. On the other hand, the result is a jarring juxtaposition between different realities and genres – it’s almost like switching channels between different movies to find they’re all telling the same story. So explaining the hows and whys would probably diminish the effect.

And while some have said they’d rather that Snyder had stuck to the samurai steampunk stuff, I don’t think it would have worked nearly as well as a standalone story. Those sequences are for the most part incredibly well done (by CGI-fest standards) and a fun mishmash of pop culture artifacts (say what you will about Snyder's originality, but when he steals, he steals smartly), but they're probably better in small doses.

It’s not perfect, and I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone – and clearly just putting Emily Browning in a schoolgirl uniform was enough to put off a lot of reviewers who thought it was sexist (most of them guys, interestingly enough). But I loved it for its sheer chutzpah alone. I wish more filmmakers were willing to take these kinds of chances.

When you least expect it,

This is dF