Re: Sucker Punch (2011)
Yeah, Snyder is very talented behind the camera and knows how to make a movie pretty exciting visually - but he's a lot of flash and not very much substance. Even with strong material backing him up; like 300 and Watchmen - two really good graphic novels that he managed to make look absolutely spectacular onscreen, but he couldn't capture the writing magic that made the comics so special. And while his remake of Dawn of the Dead was a kick ass action film and featured an unbelievably well done first 15 minutes, it pales in the substance department when it comes to the political/social satire element of the original. I'm looking forward to seeing what he'll turn out with Superman, having Christopher Nolan "supervising" him - I'm hoping that there will be something other than the eye popping visuals that he excels at so well.
The more I think about this, the more it has in common with the Heavy Metal movie from 1981 - it's practically a live action version of everything Heavy Metal was about, but with the raunch and nudity toned down and the fantasy/sci fi elements cranked up. It's a fucking amazing movie to look at, but some of the elements you mentioned - a bit of a misogynistic tone to the film with the girls constantly being hyper-sexualized and looking so young. It's a good thing that he had the story mention at the beginning of the film that Baby Doll was 20 years old, or some parental groups would be up in arms - but then again, Tarantino got away with some of the most brutal elements in Kill Bill Vol 1 by going the route of presenting it in an anime format and nobody bitched. But, on the other had, Kill Bill was unapologeticly a hard R and this is PG 13 - you're going for different audiences with each rating.