London Calling
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Pan's Labyrinth.
Compelling, intricate story, well two contrasting stories intermixed into one, a mythical fantasy of the underworld with an armed rebellion agaiongst Franco.
And its works. If you have sensitivities to the Spanish Civil War you must go and watch the Fascists get a hiding.
Great background music, great acting, brutal scenes and human characters more frightening than anything out of the underworld.
Its not full of action, its not gormless and it has subtitles. But if you love something different its got a 10/10 from me. The C4 summary is below.
LC
The In Guillermo Del Toro's Falangist fairytale for adults, fascism struggles to trample an innocent's imagination
In the imagination of filmmakers, there is something about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath that lends itself to the innocent, often fanciful perspective of a child. So Victor Erice's The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973) presented an idyllic Spanish postwar countryside through the eyes of a girl obsessed with James Whale's Frankenstein, and Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001) seamlessly merged the inexorable advance of fascism with a ghost story unfolding in a rural school for boys.
Pan's Labyrinth is a sister film to The Devil's Backbone, and similarly blends historical realism with more genre-bound fantasy elements to create an expansive, visionary and moving examination of Spain's darkest chapter of the last century.
It is 1944, at the end of the Civil War, a time when idealism and innocence are taking their final, doomed stand. With her father dead, bookish young Ofélia (Baquero) is brought to the country outpost of her pregnant mother's new man, the fascist Captain Vidal (López), who is ruthlessly engaged in rooting out the last remnants of a ragtag guerrilla group hidden in the neighbouring woods.
Verdict
In Pan's Labyrinth, fairytale fantasy and fascist reality vie for the soul of a girl and a nation, in an unmissable celebration of cinema's capacity to enthrall.
Compelling, intricate story, well two contrasting stories intermixed into one, a mythical fantasy of the underworld with an armed rebellion agaiongst Franco.
And its works. If you have sensitivities to the Spanish Civil War you must go and watch the Fascists get a hiding.
Great background music, great acting, brutal scenes and human characters more frightening than anything out of the underworld.
Its not full of action, its not gormless and it has subtitles. But if you love something different its got a 10/10 from me. The C4 summary is below.
LC
The In Guillermo Del Toro's Falangist fairytale for adults, fascism struggles to trample an innocent's imagination
In the imagination of filmmakers, there is something about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath that lends itself to the innocent, often fanciful perspective of a child. So Victor Erice's The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973) presented an idyllic Spanish postwar countryside through the eyes of a girl obsessed with James Whale's Frankenstein, and Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone (2001) seamlessly merged the inexorable advance of fascism with a ghost story unfolding in a rural school for boys.
Pan's Labyrinth is a sister film to The Devil's Backbone, and similarly blends historical realism with more genre-bound fantasy elements to create an expansive, visionary and moving examination of Spain's darkest chapter of the last century.
It is 1944, at the end of the Civil War, a time when idealism and innocence are taking their final, doomed stand. With her father dead, bookish young Ofélia (Baquero) is brought to the country outpost of her pregnant mother's new man, the fascist Captain Vidal (López), who is ruthlessly engaged in rooting out the last remnants of a ragtag guerrilla group hidden in the neighbouring woods.
Verdict
In Pan's Labyrinth, fairytale fantasy and fascist reality vie for the soul of a girl and a nation, in an unmissable celebration of cinema's capacity to enthrall.
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