MicShazam

There's no music in here, only distilled failure.
Making a journal about things that aren't music and then posting music on the very first page, immediately undermining the premise, would be silly.

But I don't wanna be famous!
However, I do want to hear by totally-not-music get thoroughly Bungled by the great Mondo.
I made a link for a Google Drive folder with WAV files of the 4 tracks above.
I'll be putting some more stuff in there next week and beyond. I plan to dig around my various folders now and then, uploading anything interesting I find.

MicShazam

Did I forget to post an actual link?
Anyway, here goes: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ef...r52Ndfe_UrAWvU

MicShazam

Pan's Labyrinth
2006/Guillermo Del Toro
2/5

Guillermo Del Toro has never struck me as anything but a childlike dreamer with a lack of anything interesting to say, save for a few interesting visions of the fantastical. He's a decent special effects guy attempting the big boy's game of directing movies.

Pan's Labyrinth once won an oscar for being the best foreign language film of the year it was published. This is downright silly and shows you exactly what to make of the Oscar's as a cultural institution.

His 2006 dark fantasy vision is a misguided and curiously empty attempt at mixing fairy tale themes with a tragic, downtrodden war time film. It's 1944, Spain is at the violent tail end of a civil war - rebels versus fascists, a young girl and her sickly, pregnant mother caught in the middle. Trouble is, every single scene in the entire movie that shows us the conflict and duress of the war are as stock as they come. You're not really watching a self sufficient story unfold as much as you're watching a bunch of bloodless references to clichés you already know by heart. The cartoonishly evil, stern faced fascists have a few encounters with the amicable and wide eyed rebels. Staff at the house of the fascist captain, who is also the new "father" of the young girl protagonist, clandestinely assist the rebels at their own peril. Things are slipped into pockets, knowing glances exchanged and night time excursions to the rebel camp undertaken. Later in the film, there's sabotage, rebel hostages taken, torture, and finally, of course, payback time for the fascist. Not one of these scenes have any interest to them - not a shred of character conflict, ethical or political exploration or even an eye for the symbolic. Amid all this, our girl heroine acts bravely as she seeks out, finds and eventually does the bidding of mysterious fairy creatures and a silly/sinister faun creature. Sadly, not much comes of this fantasy element, ostensibly the selling point of the movie.

Without engaging in spoilers, let's just say that it serves as a very obvious (explicitly stated, in fact) illustration of the opposite of the blind, unexamined obedience of the fascist lackeys (humanism good, fascism bad, Tarzan bored). Other than that, it serves to offer an escapist option for viewers who prefer to believe that children do not die when gunned down in war.

The film consistently mistakes a sombre mood and magical realist trappings for profundity. The soundtrack is exactly what you would expect it to be, given the murky, foggy, green-hued horror movie look of every scene (read = sombre and emotionally one-note). On a script level as well, there is not a single moment where a bit of dialogue carries interest. It is merely thematic and emotional obviousness, alternating with exposition. Worse, the girl herself is not much of a character. She's prone to flights of imagination and bravery, sure, but more than anything, she's dull and, in several scenes, thunderingly stupid. The scene with the now iconic "eyes in the hands" creature is nothing but a several minutes long demonstration of irritating action movie tropes, the thickness of our heroine and Del Toro's seeming lack of ability in ever actually making any of his grim visuals seem scary. Check out the lighting in that scene. A shadow or two, plus better editing would have done wonders, but then we're really asking for a better director.

So who is this movie for? It's chidishly simplistic. Any good movie that delves into such serious and grim subject matter as this will approach it with intelligence and emotional maturity. Wisdom is a necessary ingredient if you wish to show the viewer anything he or she does not already intuitively take for granted. Unexamined suffering as displayed in this movie is really nothing more than misery porn. The movie even takes itself a liberty or two with displaying some full on violence and gore, immediately excluding the idea that this could be aimed at children.

So it's a childishly unsophisticated pseudo-horror war movie with a bit of stillborn symbolism and nothing under it's thin, grimey surface. It's what you'd get when a grimness obsessed manchild get's a budget and an idea of this sort. He should stick to movies about monsters punching other monsters.

(spell checking: one pass)

Frownland

You have **** taste in film.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

MicShazam

Hi Frownie, nice of you to swing by

MicShazam

There's a bunch of DVD's on a shelf next to my computer, all waiting for me to take the time and watch them for the first time. I doubt that I'll write a review for each of them, but I'll try and write a fair amount of over time.

I never plan ahead as far as my next pick goes. I just watch whatever I feel like in the moment, but if there's a movie on the list anyone wants me to watch soon, then feel free to request it.

In no particular order:

The Descendants
Up In The Air
The Place Beyond The Pines
Irrational Man
The Sky Crawlers
Flanders
Sarajevo
Barfly
Women On The Verge Of Nervous Breakdown
Kika
Broken Embraces
Talk To Her
Rust And Bone
Cracks
Head-On
Three Colours: Blue (don't actually have this one, but I need to get it since it forms a trilogy with the two below)
Three Colours: Red
Three Colours: White
Malena
The Reader
Queen of the Desert
Tess
Night On Earth
Cairo Time
Actrises
Demolition
Golden Earrings
The Bonfire Of The Vanities
X-Men: Days Of Future Past
The Huntsman: Winter's War
A Single Man
The Royal Tenenbaums
Certain Women
Two Days, One Night
Underground
Lawrence of Arabia
Doctor Zjivago
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Arn II (Need to find the first)
25th Hour
Sherrybaby
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Match Point
Christiane F.
To Die For

Oriphiel

Watch Beautiful Dreamer already.

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MicShazam

****, I hoped you'd forgotten my hideous failure. I'll try and get around to it this time.

Frownland

Trash. Don't bother.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Oriphiel

Seriously though, The Sky Crawlers is easily Mamoru Oshii's worst movie. Quite possibly one of the worst animated movies I've ever seen. Beautiful Dreamer is ten jillion times better.

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