The rest of the top five for this weekend is filled with holdovers from previous weeks like The Lincoln Lawyer and Limitless, which proves that the American taste for titles with L-sounds is great enough to sustain at least two separate L-filled movies at a time. (via Box Office Mojo)

I was connected to Snyder by phone in his home on Friday, opening day for Sucker Punch. He said he’d just gotten back from a Superman meeting and was flying out the next morning for international Sucker Punch press. He actually answered more questions about Superman than I expected him too.

Q: I’m sorry I have to ask this even after seeing the movie, but what exactly does “sucker punch” mean?

Zack Snyder: I think sucker punch sums it up for me. Look, literally it’s like a mechanism in the film that kind of brings us back into reality I think. But I think on the other hand, because the movie is a slight indictment – it talks about geek culture and pop culture, it talks about the why of the action cinema and stuff of that nature – it’s also a sucker punch because I kind of designed it that you go to this movie for entertainment and you get a little bit fucked up by it, hopefully.

Q: Is the plot supposed to be open to interpretation?

ZS: Oh, hugely. It’s all about that. She’s talking all about the movie when she says to Baby, “The dance” – meaning the action sequences – “should be more than just titillation,” which is in reference to other films I’ve made. When she says, “all that gyrating and moaning” which is basically all the slo-mo and all the action. It’s supposed to tell a story. Then she says, “My dance is personal. What is yours saying?” and “It says I’m going to be free” which is in reference to all the other, 300 or other action movies. The whole movie is like a show within a show and it’s all about the show within a show. Someone asked me, why are the girls dressed like that? I go, because if you’re indictment of male culture and on the other hand the idea that they’re in a brothel, so the people that are wanting the girls to dress like that are the men that go to brothel. When we see the action in the movie and the lights go down, the leering men sitting in a dark theater find girls that dress sexy and gyrate, and in my case that are gyrating with machine guns, that’s us! Anyway, and on and on.

Q: Do you expect some people will misread this and take it literally and actually accuse you of the things you’re commenting on?

ZS: Yeah, absolutely. They already have. So I don’t know what to do about that. I can only make the movie. I can only make the movie so that it’s multi-layered. I don’t want to make it boring and a lecture but I do want to slap your hand for liking it a little bit, if you do like it.

Q: Isn’t it also cool to just put crazy shit in a movie so that there’s crazy shit in the movie?

ZS: Absolutely, are you kidding me? Absolutely but I honestly think you can do both. I love crazy shit in a movie, don’t get me wrong. By the way, there is crazy shit in my movie. There is nutty, crazy shit in it but I’d like you to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I want you to be able to just go nuts and then also be able to sit with your friends afterwards and go, “No way, dude. You don’t get the socio-implications of this fuckin’ movie.” And the other guy going, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”

Q: What is your private fantasy life like?

ZS: I think you went to it. Did you see the movie? Strangely you get to know what mine is.

Q: It seems like we’re seeing several artists explore what fantasy means, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Black Swan. What do you think it is about this generation’s artists that they’re exploring that on film?

ZS: That’s an interesting question because I think it’s also interesting that fantasy for this generation is a not safe place. Maybe it’s because it has a little to do with the fact that the fantasies that we deal with are also product. You use part of yourself and that part of yourself is also something that you’re selling, so that is a scary and odd proposition that I think can cause anxiety and that anxiety can be manifested in cinematic landscapes that are threatening and/or dangerous.

Q: What moved you about the asylum story?

ZS: I like the threat of having your personality removed. Worse than death, the idea of your brain, the part of yourself that makes you private or unique is removed. Like in Planet of the Apes, Landon who gets his brain chopped out and then Chuck Heston is like, “What happened? They cut out your BRAIN!” I remember thinking that was really upsetting and freaky, and I kind of loved that. So I think that’s affected me at a young age. I thought that was fucked up. Then I remember I saw Frances and I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I really started to think the idea of having your personality removed would be a horrible, horrible thing. Maybe that’s another reflection on cinema and being a filmmaker and you use that part of yourself as your commerce, as the thing that supplies you and makes you able to make movies. Maybe that’s a paranoid delusion that I have that someone might chop out my brain.

Q: It seemed like you’d done your comic book movies with 300 and Watchmen, but was Superman just too good to pass up?

ZS: Yeah, and in a lot of ways it’s a different thing for me. It’s a chance to do it for real. I think 300 and Watchmen are both particular in their graphic novels. I almost don’t even see them as superhero movies. I see them as they’re both novels. It’s all about the story and the way the story exists as a work of literature. For me, Superman is a whole other thing. He’s a character that we get to explore. I can make a movie that’s not an indictment but really a celebration of the character.

Q: Are you working with DC or is it all you, Nolan and Goyer?

ZS: It’s all me, Nolan and Goyer. I mean, I meet with the DC guys but they don’t really [get involved.] It’s all us figuring it out.

Q: I know you’re starting over, but did you like the Bryan Singer Superman Returns and the Richard Donner movies?

ZS: Yeah, I love the movie, I love the Superman character and I like the movie. It’s just we felt like we had to shed all that in order to start again and find the why of the character over.

Q: Do you imagine doing slow motion flying and fighting?

ZS: I don’t know. I think the thing I’ve been thinking about with this movie is that it’s kind of its own thing in a lot of ways. I guess we’ll see how the action unfolds but the way I talk about Superman, the way I’ve been talking to everyone about shooting it is trying to get Superman to exist in the real world and be a character that lives in our world. So it’s a much more realistic, it’ll probably be the most realistic movie I’ve ever photographed.

Q: And there’s no Lois in this version. Is that the reason to do it, to strip away the things we know?

ZS: Oh, there’s no Lois Lane? I didn’t know that. I don’t know what that means.

Q: You’ve cast well known actors in the supporting cast, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. Is that a different way to approach the cast?

ZS: I just felt like Kevin and Diane are both amazing talents and they’re serious. I think it just sets the tone of what we’re trying to do.

Q: What is your schedule like the next few weeks, or year?

ZS: I go take the movie to Europe tomorrow. I fly out to Paris tomorrow. Then I go to London and Copenhagen. Then I come home and I just dig into Superman and we start shooting at the end of the summer.

Q: Do you do storyboards and drawings yourself?

ZS: Yeah, I’m drawing like crazy.

Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, which opens this weekend, revolves around a group of young women who are patients at the Lennox House for the Mentally Insane. And while the film clearly attempts to portray the asylum as a creepy location, it fails. Sure, it looks the part, but any building that is home to that much hot T&A can’t be all bad. I’ve personally been to strip clubs that, minus the girls, would give the Bates Mansion a run for its money. However, the following nine movie mental asylums don’t suffer from the same problem as the Lennox House.

The Asylum – The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

A lot of creepy stuff goes down at the asylum in this film…sort of. I don’t want to say too much, since it will spoil the twist ending. In fact, this film is often cited as the first example of a twist ending in cinema. So, at the end of the day, if you hate M. Night Shyamalan, you have no one but director Robert Wiene and the German Expressionists to blame.

Pescadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane – Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Compared to the other entries on this list, Pescadero State is pretty tame. The staff members are smug, but not exactly abusive. And there aren’t any ghosts or ghouls to speak of. In fact, it’s just your average mental hospital. But then the killer cyborgs from the future show up, and all hell breaks loose. Once you’ve seen a “cop” walk through a locked prison gate, the location’s creepiness factor shoots up at least ten fold.

State Prison for the Criminally Insane – Gothika

Imagine you’re a psych doctor who gets into an auto accident. When you wake up, you’ve been interned at your own mental hospital for supposedly murdering your husband. To make matters worse, you’re also being visited by a goddamn ghost. This movie might not have received the best reviews, but you’re lying if you say its asylum isn’t creepy.

Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane – Silence of the Lambs

The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is not a place you’d ever want to visit. There’s nothing supernatural going on here, but the residents within are enough to creep out even the most hardened moviegoers. Aside from its most famous resident, Hannibal Lecter, it’s home to a whole host of other murderers and perverts who are just waiting for the chance to throw semen on you.

Westin Hills – A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

Being locked in a mental asylum is creepy enough. Now imagine that a dead guy is trying to murder you via your dreams every time you fall asleep. Yeah, good luck trying to explain that to your “mental health professional,” ya nut bag.

Arkham Asylum – Batman Begins

Anytime Batman catches a sociopath like The Joker, they send him to Arkham Asylum. This turns out to be a really bad idea. Have you ever heard the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket?” Apparently, no one in Gotham City has. To make matters worse, the place is run by Dr. Jonathan Crane. Let’s just say that if an asylum is being run by a guy who secretly calls himself “The Scarecrow,” it’s going to get creepy.

Danvers State Hospital – Session 9

What’s creepier; a mental hospital filled with nut jobs, or an abandoned mental hospital filled with the ghosts of departed nut jobs? Session 9 makes a case for the latter with a tale of an asbestos removal crew working at the now defunct Danvers State Hospital. As you can imagine, it gets a little crazy.

Sorry.

Oregon State Hospital – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

There’s nothing criminal or supernatural going on at the Oregon State Hospital. What makes this place so creepy is the pure, run of the mill sadism and humiliation dished out by the staff. Nurse Ratched’s need to control the patients is all the more disturbing considering the main character, Murphy, might be an asshole, but he’s perfectly sane. Hell, I’d be in danger of a lobotomy there.

Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane – Shutter Island

Much like with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, I can’t go into details about this film for fear of spoiling it. That being said, take one look at the creepy old broad in the picture above, and tell me this is a place you’d like to stay overnight.

Sucker Punch is a crazy movie, but it’s my kind of crazy. I think Zack Snyder just thought of the craziest things he wanted to see in a movie, so he did it. That’s what artists should do. Now it turns out to be some metaphorical fantasy and that’s cool too. It makes the film beautiful in addition to being awesome.

Baby Doll (Emily Browning) faces an evil stepfather in a haunting slo-mo, dialogue free opening. He commits her to the Lennox House institution after she fights him and accidentally kills her own sister. He’s also paid the Lennox House orderly off to have Baby lobotomized so she can’t tell her side of the story.

In the asylum’s “theater,” Dr. Gorsky (Carla Gugino) tries to socialize the girls. At one point, the theater becomes a dance studio, so is that the fantasy or is that Baby Doll waking up from the fantasy? In the dance class phase, Baby Doll meets other inmates Sweat Pea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and Amber (Jamie Chung).

When it’s Baby Doll’s turn to dance, the blink of her eye takes us into another world. How many layers is Snyder building here? It turns out every time Baby Doll dances, we see the wild action fantasy. There’s a Shaolin temple battle agains armored warrior giants, World War II trenches with zeppelins blowing up, a monster castle and a train filled with robots.

Why would you not want to see these scenes on their own? In Sucker Punch, we get those awesome scenes and they’re also symbolic and open to interpretation. The action is 300-y with impossible teamwork and comic book logic. Baby Doll can hurl a tube mile up in the air and then catch it later. The temple battle looks a little like a video game boss in CGI but the moves and camerawork are still beautiful. The other battles don’t even have the CGI problem.

I don’t think you’re supposed to take any level of this literally. The asylum puts on a nightclub where the inmates dance for customers. That’s crazy! The women wear super thick makeup, not for beauty but to completely exaggerate their faces.

This is the kind of movie I want to interpret. It’s not asking us to make sense of some random minimalist montage. It’s putting on a multi-million dollar show with no restrictions.

Browning states that in the final cut, Snyder had to edit the scene down so that she appeared less “into it.” That’s upsetting. The last thing you would want to convey to a young audience is that sex with the likes of Jon Hamm is anything less than mind-blowing. Sooner or later, teenage girls will find out what sex with Jon Hamm is really like. You’re just delaying the inevitable, MPAA.

Of course, Snyder is left with little choice but to obey the board after Watchmen fell flat with an R rating. Given the clusterfuckiness (industry term) of Sucker Punch, Snyder and Co. will need all the help they can get from dumb little kids that don’t know any better than to see this movie. (Playlist)

The guy in the mask dies, and sexy girls walk toward the camera. If you claim to glean more than that from this clip, you’re a horrible liar, and you should be ashamed of yourself. (Coming Soon)

These preview snaps from Zack Snyder‘s Sucker Punch contain all the elements of a fanboy handjob, minus the inclusion of a recognizable superhero. You’ve got a lot of hot girls (Emily Browning, Jena Malone, Jamie Chung, Abbie Cornish and Vanessa Hudgens) in sexy outfits wielding weapons in fantasy locations, and Don Draper for all the girlfriends out there. That hits all the quadrants I can think of.

Warner Bros. just released a million stills from Sucker Punch for our ogling before the March 25th release date, and not to worry – I tossed out all the lame ones where it just looks like people are talking. Blab, blab, blab – more cleavage shaking due to holding a machine gun, please. (Cinema Blend)

A word from Abbie: “Wheneve I am acting, it’s everything, you know. If I’m researching a role, I’m completely consumed in that and, between action and cut, I live in this suspended time. It’s a really amazing experience and the only other thing I get it from is music.”

A word from Vanessa: “My passion is doing movies, and as long as I keep doing that, I’ll be happy. I want to do movies, fun roles and dramatic ones. I love all of it.”

Sucker Punch has stepped up its marketing game from posters to trailers in anticipation of its March 25th release date. And, as someone unfamiliar with the source material…I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. There appears to be a mental institution that transports hot jailbait to a medieval dragon world. Somehow, I think that’s all the plot one will need going into this film.

I’m sure if I was 13 year-old boy, this spot would give me a cinematic erection the likes of which the world has never seen. However, seeing as how this movie’s budget appears to be astronomical, I think the producers might want to consider marketing this movie to a broader audience who aren’t already sold on the feature. The cast is beyond solid with Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn and Oscar Isaac, but you would have no idea from watching the trailer. Fortunately, at a month or so out, the studio has some time to tweak their campaign, but not a lot.

I mean, they could just hold up a glossy photo of Jon Hamm with the words “Sucker” and “Punch” scrawled on it in crayon and probably tap 25% of the female 18-49 demographic. (Playlist)

Note: Collider has claimed that this trailer is interactive and “paint-able,” but if you can figure out how this trailer is different than any other trailer on the Internet, you’re smarter than me.

Sucker Punch still opens on March 25th, and as long as they keep rolling out these images, I’ll keep reminding you of that fact. (Cinema Blend)

This will be Zach Snyder‘s first movie based on an original script, not an adaptation. As you can see, the film’s got a bunch of sexy, scantily clad girls who also kick ass… and they say Hollywood is out of new ideas! *Rimshot* Though we’ve got to give props to any movie poster that features a fire-breathing dragon, a robot army, a B-52 bomber and some kind of ogre samurai. Between those elements and all the hot girls, it makes me wonder if Zack Snyder secretly optioned this recurring dream I had in middle school for source material. (Firstshowing.net)

Click twice for the bigger version!

Warner Bros. has unleashed the trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch. No matter what you’re fond of in life, it’s probably somewhere in this film. Hot girls, dragons, robots, robot samurai, zepplins, it’s all there. The film stars Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgins, Jon Hamm, Scott Glenn, and Carla Gugino. They all play humans, as far as I can tell, but I’m sure one of them could change into a robot samurai at any moment. I don’t even want to attempt putting this movie’s plot into words so here’s the official synopsis:

Sucker Punch is an epic action fantasy that takes us into the vivid imagination of a young girl whose dream world provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality.  Unrestrained by the boundaries of time and place, she is free to go where her mind takes her, but her incredible adventures blur the lines between what’s real and what is imaginary…with potentially tragic consequences.

Give your eyes an orgasm with the trailer below.

Sucker Punch — Trailer – Watch more Movie Trailers

(Apple)

The trailer for Director Zack Snyder’s new film, Sucker Punch, has hit the Internet, and boy does it look sexy…in a sort of retro, World War I, ancient Chinese warrior/1930′s gangster sort of way.

Other than the fact that the plot involves a girl in a mental institution, I really don’t know what the hell is going on here. Oh, sure, I read the Wikipedia page, but that didn’t help. What is clear is that the movie has hot girls, guns, and a dragon. If you really need to know more than that you’re probably not in the film’s target demographic, anyway.

Watch hot chicks fight WWI Germans, dragons, and ancient Chinese warriors after the jump…

Trailer for Zack Snyder’s ‘Sucker Punch’ – Watch more horror

More news ripped from the pages of this week’s Entertainment Weekly. Here’s a first look at the girls of Zack Snyder‘s Sucker Punch. I’ll be frank for a minute and you be Shirley — I was expecting a sexier crew of ass-kicking females. The group consists of Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Emily Browning, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung, all individually super hot actresses, yet when put together they look like they’re shuffling to a nearby cot for a nap. Scott Glenn even fits right in, which should never be the case.

Maybe it’s the grim landscape that’s bringing everyone down. I vote that the next batch of stills be set at the beach or a car wash. I realize that the movie takes place in a mental institution, but there’s gotta be a way to work a car wash in. Take a left past the schizo wing and tell the man at the desk what air freshener you’d like. (ComingSoon)