Films CXXXIII and CXXXIV

[drasecretcampus]

In retrospect, not a recommended double bill, although both good films in their own way.

I note in passing that I've met Mark Herman, and didn't hold Blame it on the Bell Boy against him - and he reminded me of Brian Stableford.

Comments

[sam_t]

I found Hellboy I strangely uninteresting - it seemed to have some good (if not necessarily intellectually challenging) ingredients, but they seemed to cancel each other out, somehow - so I didn't bother with II when it was in the cinema. Is it worth me borrowing the DVD?

[drasecretcampus]

It is very pretty and visually stimulating, but, yanno, who cares? I don't feel the need to see out Hellboy now.

[lamentables]

Striped PJs: disliked the book intensely. Probably need to reread to quantify why. Reviews of film suggest it's better than the book.

[drasecretcampus]

Haven't got or read; I've seen others with it and been intrigued.

It's such a different film from Brassed Off. No consolation.

[lamentables]

Responses (on child lit groups) to the book seem sharply divided.

[drasecretcampus]

I would imagine that anyone who didn't want children's literature to be like Robert Cormier's novels wouldn't like it. The horror in the film is that you (should) precisely know what's going on; that's a ghetto being cleared in the back of shot, that's a concentration camp, that's a gas chamber. I'm not sure what the right tone of a book for children doing that would be.

I do have an unease - which in part is about singling out one story from several million others, and so - but here I stray into spoiler territory. So I will hold off for now.

[anonymous]

[mini-spoilers ahead] Does 'Pan' endorse royalty? Only if you read the last scene as 'true', within the fantastic storyline, rather than 'true' in the other story. I thort it was a film about fantasy and escape/ism and so am minded to think that the final escape looks pretty grim... which makes it another 'I'm not the chosen one' story like Mieville's 'Un Lun Dun'? Dreams of noble birth and a royal past are therefore just another dead (sorry) end for Spain?

HB II looks great and possesses a good deal of charm; I always think of these films as superhero flicks and they're head and shoulders above everything else i've seen in ~that~ genre...

[drasecretcampus]

Maybe I was over concise in my telegraphese - I wrote in my comments: "The temptation is to read the tasks - which are straight out of Grimm and Perrault fairy-tales - as pathology, as an escape mechanism for a girl on the edge of puberty from a truly dreadful situation. The ending, which may be a dying fantasy, has the air of self-consolation - it is no more a real escape than say the ending of Brazil, and probably even less. But if we look for the marvellous rather than the uncanny explanation, I’m not convinced that things are much better. She escapes, thank you very much, I’m alright Jill. Whilst we are presented with a narrative which encourages us to side with the communists rather than the fascists, and we see the former get the upper hand, don’t forget that Franco won. He ruled Spain from 1939 through to 1975, with repressive force. It is perhaps little comfort that a filmmaker like Almodovar is like he is partly because so much could not be said or discussed or represented in Franco’s Spain, but in leaving us with triumphant