Fancy Film Friday #2: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch, 2011 (USA)
A young girl is institutionalized by her abusive stepfather. Retreating to an alternative reality as a coping strategy, she envisions a plan which will help her escape.

When I first watched this movie, I was in a nearly-empty movie theatre. The opening sequence chilled me to the bone, and the very end had me struggling for a tissue. My first words after the movie were... wanna go again?

It blew me away. It's an uncomfortable movie, yes. It's uncomfortable, and thought-provoking. It's a movie about rape, about coping, about sexuality, about freedom, about oppression, and you're being manipulated through most of it. The dragons, the corsets, the brothel, the katana and the helicopter and the zeppelin... none of that is real. We see our main character's fantasies, her projections, her pantomimes played by a persona who shares little more than her looks and her desire to escape - not even her name. She's so detached from herself, so curled up in her own inner world, that she doesn't let us see what's actually happening to her, behind that flimsy curtain of deception that we're not allowed to pull open until her quest is finished. Is it sucessful? That depends. From my perspective, yes, it is. Not fully, but enough. You can't always win everything, or save everyone. And to me, it's more than enough that she fought back until she couldn't anymore.

xx

Cortejo

So. I graduate in a few months, did you know that? Now you do.

For the past four years, I've been studying Criminology, and for the past seven days, I've been figuring out the best way to edit these photos. The event depicted is... well, it's our yearly student parade. It's probably a bit hard to explain to the unitiated in Portuguese academic traditions, but let's put it simply. The university is composed of different faculties. Each faculty has its own color (or combination of colors). And so each year, for one day in May, the students march around the city (most of them in their uniforms), in one big colorful academic pride parade. The near-graduates get to wear top hats, there are songs and games, and generally it takes everyone around six hours to walk a distance that would usually take ten minutes. Too much noise and too many people, but I can proudly say I lasted a whole three hours before calling it quits. Slow walking, man. Most certainly not my thing.

I don't know what was happening here, but I swear we didn't look that gloomy the whole time.

In which I hold my DSLR like a point-and-shoot and lose around 100% of my style cred.

"It doesn't have to be easy, it has to be worth it."

And on that bombshell... *spins chair* ...back to work.
xx

Fancy Film Friday #1: Melancholia

Melancholia, 2011 (Denmark)
Two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with the Earth.

I haven't been watching a lot of movies (maybe to make up for last year's never ending list?), but I thought this one was really good. Not only because Charlotte Gainsbourg looks amazing in her flimsy silk shirts - that's no surprise -, but mostly because it's just... it's the prettiest, softest, most relaxed doomsday movie I've ever seen. And it speaks to my inner dreamer who wants to live in some place where the grass is always green, the skies are always grey, and the sun is always cold.

Oh, and it made me cry.
xx

PS - How do you like my title? FFF. Yeah.