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RE: Suckerpunch, an interesting case!   The Movie Bob piece was a good watch, but IMHO Movie Bob is doing exactly what the neckbeard audience always does: read too much into their movies, books and games in an attempt to make them cleverer than they are. He may be attempting to stop people ascribing negative "testosterone fueled" intentions to the picture by revealing a plot underneath, but in truth the complexity or otherwise of any plot underneath doesn't matter if the film fails to rise above that which it attempts to parody or subvert.   If you followed the theory he's using here, every single dumb over-the-shoulder shooting game actually deserves our respect for its incredibly deep plot, just because it attempts to in some way humanise its characters, and throw in twists to seem smart. *slow clap*. This theory would make Dragonball Z genius, because it's both over complicated and  really violent.   In gears of war they chat for a minute or so between huge battles, and use ham-fisted ways to get us to connect witht he "characters": a dead wife, some other family nonsense, but it's still hackneyed tripe. Basically, Bob's line runs that because they gave it some kind of attempt at plot, because they bolted a puzzle-piece story around the action scenes they wanted to show, we are wrong to say it's a wankfest. I say it plays to precisely the same audience, and lacks subversion.   The theory seems to be that if you throw a load of clunky, disconnected and overt-thought complex metaphors into a graphics piece it's somehow clever. But it's not, it's still reams and reams of extended, explosive battleporn interspersed with minimal dialogue and a paper-thin storyline, which itself is cobbled together from the least emotive, most aesthetically pleasing parts of of other stories. The purpose of the so called story is to excuse the following action.   Setting something in multiple reality layers does not automatically render it clever or successful (see: Inception), it can give a superficial appearance of out-of-the-box writing, especially in a genre of movie where risk aversion is a way of life, but this swiftly becomes unraveled without the character empathy necessary to allow the audience to truly connect.   There's no real development of character in Suckerpunch, every single player in it is one-dimensional designed to drive the flaccid story in one direction or another in order to line up the next round of basement-bro bad-guy thwacking.   We have zero empathy with the characters, which means it doesn't matter how many levels of reality are there or how much we're 'being laughed at', we don't care. It's not good enough to go "Aaaaaaah, but you didn't get it, it's actually really complex...", so are all stories, especially if you start to project you own beliefs onto them vie in-depth after-viewing analysis.   The important thing is that it does not function as a anything more than a beautiful graphics showreel, because the graphics are beautiful, overwhelming and make you go "wow" while the plotline, characters, scripting, pacing, acting and attempts to make a point that may or may not be intentional, are all lacklustre.   Finally, the layer of "it's laughing at the audience" plays perfectly to the target audience, who always want to feel cleverer than the rest, like they get something no-one else does. In order to truly subvert you have to rise above. In order to be a Trojan horse it's not enough just to get in the gates, you need to bust out at night and take over! Suckerpunch just ended up in the stables with rest of em...

Suckerpunch was Snyder's Inception, it failed on an emotional level, it failed even on VFX level ( looked like a video game, just like Man of Steel ) but it did manage to mislead 99% of audiences in critics into an incorrect interpretion of the story. And this is where it is a 100% success in terms of what it was trying to do, that is sucker punch everyone.   Almost everyone interprets the film as a story of a girl who is in a madhouse who escapes into a fantasy whorehouse reality, then escapes into a video game reality. That is incorrect. The correct interpretation is that this film is about a girl in a whorehouse who escapes into a madhouse fantasy, then escapes into a video game fantasy.   There was never an evil uncle or a dead sister, there was never a lobotomy...the "sister" is the girl who sacrifices herself to let her escape, the evil uncle is the pimp, the "lobotomy" is her losing her virginity to John Ham, who she visualizes as the Doctor who "penetrates" her body. Lobotomy = Loss of virginity, innocence, childhood.   The movie basically reveals the artifice of the lobotomy in one key scene when she first arrives at the Whorehouse, you see the other girl performing a theatre play portraying a character GETTING A LOBOTOMY, that's where she got the idea for her Madhouse fantasy. Even more, the opening narration SPELLS IT OUT for you, when it talks about "angels, demons, and an old man who comes to save us when we least expect it"...the old man on the bus who saves her from the cops is REAL and everything else is imagined, she is imagining everything on the bus, having escaped the whorehouse.   Is noone paying attention anymore? That was probably Snyder's point. 

I normally don't get upset over these kinds of things but the lack of 24p in my RX100 really peeves me. I feel like it should easily be offered as a free firmware update. Certainly shouldn't have to pay $100 difference for it.    I feel better now having complained to you all :) 

...boring...and pretentious