Sucker Punch: Zach Snyder (with Hot Tub Time Machine and Your Highness)

I had intended to review only the first two films titled but, having seen the third before writing this, have decided to do a single review of all three. 'Sucker Punch' is a fantasy which is either the imaginings of Abbie Cornish which the closing scene suggests or a retreat from reality into a comic-book world involving Emily Browning who has the main part. Five girls are imprisoned in a mental institute for young ladies which the chief warder operates as a brothel with the house shrink, played by Carla Gugino using a weird accent, as the madam. Part of their duties is to dance for the selected customers and it is when made to do this that Emily Browning escapes into a different fantasy world each time. All wear costumes meant to arouse - schoolgirl with very short skirt, tight leather and so on - and each fantasy includes Scott Glenn as some form of father figure/guide. At least one reviewer has desribed this as soft porn for the teenage male which it might have been fifty or so years ago but hardly now. Taken at face level, it is a series of well-imagined and executed implausible adventures in which, eventually, three of the girls die as they do in the intervening reality. This leaves ... now broked in spirit and trapped but her efforts have helped Abbie Cornish, the only one old enough to be thought of as a woman, to escape to a nearby bus station where she is saved from police interrogation and recapture by the bus driver - Scott Glenn. Fast-paced enjoyable hokum.
'Hot Tub Time Machine' is much nearer to porn though not so described. Four male friends return to a ski lodge to relive their past with the weekend starting badly until they short-circuit the hot tub accidentally and are taken back to their earlier
visit where they try to repeat what happened in order to return to the present. A series of misadventures, mainly sexual, do
eventually get three of the four back, the fourth choosing not to return: this alters what the present has become but for the
better for all. A few amusing moments in a rather gross film in which John Cusack is wasted.
However, this is easily surpassed in grossness by 'Your Highness' which is almost a Carry On film with explicitness rather than
the innuendo the English series had to use. James Franco, who should know better, is the heroic older son of Charles Dance,
who seems nowadays to collect pay cheques, whose bride-to-be, Zooey Deschanel, is seized by the inevitable evil wizard just
as the wedding ceremony is all but done. He sets off to rescue her with his younger brother, Danny McBride, who has been a
foul-mouthes wastrel in his brother's shadow. The gallant knights with Franco turn out to be in the pay of the wizard which complicates matters as well as adding more vulgarity. Along the way they meet Natalie Portman whose near-nude swim in long shot is almost the film's highlight though she does have a good line in cgi assisted fighting. They do, at last, save the bride and kill the wizard returning hom in triumph. For no good reason, Portman seems to have a thing for Mc Bride but has
another quest to follow - however, she turns up at the end so all live happily. Utter rubbish but midly enjoyable.

Campbell, Ramsey: Scared Stiff

A series of short stories about sex and death by one of the leading writers of horror fiction which are explicit rather than implicit about sexual matters though rather tame. Although by a single author, the tales vary in effectiveness quite a lot with the best reasonably good and the worst rather trite. Not a great encouragement to read his longer works.

Evans, Gareth and Robson, Di (Eds): Towards Re-Enchantment

The full title continues 'Place and Its Meanings' which describes this collection of essays and poems about different parts of
the United Kingdom by various authors. Some are much better than others at evoking a sense of the place they are describing with the essays by Richard Mabey on Norfolk, Iain Sinclair on Springgield Park, Jay Griffiths on Ystrad Fflur being
especially good. Others which impressed were Ken Worpole on Essex and Kathleen Jamie on Rona while Robert Macfarlane on the Isle of Lewis rather extended the local to the more general. However, I found this final essay in the book to be one of the more memorable. A few were spoilt for me by the political undertones with which I did not agree and I wonder if this was the appropriate place to express them - the editors presumably thought it was. The editors run a production agency which provides a platform for artists to explore the nature and values of contemporary society etc. which does incline one to the feeling that radical/socialist thought is more likely to find favour than expressions of a more right-wing frame of mind. There is, of course, every reason to encourage this approach even though it is not one which I find quite to my liking.
Overall, I am pleased to have read the collection though I did sort of skip the poetry.