Adepeate Toto: last late review for a while
Since there's no moment of doubt about which One to Let In, I'm going to just trust teh Wikipedia that it's a reference to a Morrissey song. Curious.
Also curious: the not-present day, not-period setting; the references to Brezhnev as a Swedish official; the elisions in the movie from the book plot (which render almost all the relationships in the version I saw utterly mysterious); all the action that takes place offscreen, of which there appears to be a lot, but about which we remain almost completely ignorant.
For instance: what happens in between the next door's bathroom scene and the mother's hysterical sobbing? How does Eli track Oskar, and why does she keep leaving him leaving notes without going? What's the gym teacher's back story? Most of all, why is everyone in the film so very cadaverous? Oskar does a creditable impersonation of Bran in The Grey King, but he's by no means the only starey, hollow-eyed kid on the block. The drinking club down at the Rising Sun looks like a gang of off-duty salt miners, and everyone, young and old alike, clearly gave up on love years ago. It's the sort of film that makes me want to hold my kids close and find out what they're doing at the playground in the afternoon.
Which makes me wonder how/why it has such universal appeal: 97% is the second highest rating I've ever seen at Rotten Tomatoes, topped only by the Wallace and Gromit film A Close Shave. Nobody seems to have a bad word to say about it. Which tells me that socialist housing, restrained soundtrack and middle-distance mutilation must be more popular than I ever suspected. And makes me wonder if Nick Park should direct the English language version...
Princeofcairo says that it's the best version of the Renfield story in any medium, and I'm inclined to agree: it strikes me that that is the heart of the film, which turns it into a very strange meditation on love, co-dependency and manipulation indeed.
For all that it's a very affecting movie: a pre-teen gender-bending vampire (pre-, maybe)love story. And the final 2 scenes are extraordinary, like nothing I've ever seen. Darkly humourous in exactly the wrong places. Recommended any time you feel like a bleakly peculiar evening.
Also curious: the not-present day, not-period setting; the references to Brezhnev as a Swedish official; the elisions in the movie from the book plot (which render almost all the relationships in the version I saw utterly mysterious); all the action that takes place offscreen, of which there appears to be a lot, but about which we remain almost completely ignorant.
For instance: what happens in between the next door's bathroom scene and the mother's hysterical sobbing? How does Eli track Oskar, and why does she keep leaving him leaving notes without going? What's the gym teacher's back story? Most of all, why is everyone in the film so very cadaverous? Oskar does a creditable impersonation of Bran in The Grey King, but he's by no means the only starey, hollow-eyed kid on the block. The drinking club down at the Rising Sun looks like a gang of off-duty salt miners, and everyone, young and old alike, clearly gave up on love years ago. It's the sort of film that makes me want to hold my kids close and find out what they're doing at the playground in the afternoon.
Which makes me wonder how/why it has such universal appeal: 97% is the second highest rating I've ever seen at Rotten Tomatoes, topped only by the Wallace and Gromit film A Close Shave. Nobody seems to have a bad word to say about it. Which tells me that socialist housing, restrained soundtrack and middle-distance mutilation must be more popular than I ever suspected. And makes me wonder if Nick Park should direct the English language version...
Princeofcairo says that it's the best version of the Renfield story in any medium, and I'm inclined to agree: it strikes me that that is the heart of the film, which turns it into a very strange meditation on love, co-dependency and manipulation indeed.
For all that it's a very affecting movie: a pre-teen gender-bending vampire (pre-, maybe)love story. And the final 2 scenes are extraordinary, like nothing I've ever seen. Darkly humourous in exactly the wrong places. Recommended any time you feel like a bleakly peculiar evening.