Review: Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty
Dir. Julia Leigh
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 105mins

There comes a moment about two thirds of the way through author-turned-director Julia Leigh’s debut Sleeping Beauty where a character breaks the fourth wall and recites a lengthy monologue directly to camera. It’s a particularly intriguing and brave moment, in a film that is filled with intriguing and brave moments, that solidifies Leigh’s intention to completely ignore the fundamentals of cinema. She all but states with this scene late in Beauty’s proceedings that there will be no neat and tidy bows tied to this story of high class high creep prostitution. She’s been confounding the audience up until this point and there’s no way she’s about to stop just so we mere mortal filmgoers can walk out the cinema feeling as if we know what we just witnessed.

Let’s go to the start though, shall we?

Read the rest at Onya Magazine

Review: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch
Dir. Zack Snyder
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 110mins

Original concept, female-led fantasy films don’t come along very often these days, what with Hollywood’s obsession with men, remakes, reboots and sequels, making Zack Snyder’s newest film, Sucker Punch, noteworthy. Moreso noteworthy is how truly awful it is. Snyder has succeeded in turning his female empowerment action extravaganza into a full-blown bore.

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine
Oy... what a train wreck. I'd also recommend you check out Clem Bastow's review at The Vine, which is a fantastic dissection of this colossal WTF-fest. In an early draft of my review - which, if you click over to Trespass, includes references to Sex and the City, Mortal Kombat, the "I Spit on Your Grave School of Feminism" and "Zach Snyder: Empowering women to wear matching hooker ensembles whilst seducing and murdering evil rapists since 2011!" and much more - I actually had many of the same observations, but had to cut them due to word limit. As Clem quipped on Facebook, "This movie is so dumb it's reduced all critics to sharing the same synapse." So true. D