Watched Pan's Labyrinth. Thought it was fantastic: the performances, story, the photography (beautiful yet utterly bleak). I liked the overlap between the harsh realities of the outpost and the fights with the Resistance, and the macabre fanatasy world of the labyrinth - the two worlds borders are blurred and look very similar, which furthers the idea that the fantasy world is the creation of Ofelia. It is horrific and violent in short bursts, often executed in such a way that seems both visually shocking yet massively real, like the bullet through the Captain's cheek, and the bloody in the eye above it, or the way the Captain crushes the poacher's son's face with a bottle in distinct phases. There's lots of pleasing little details which recur throughout, which start small yet grown in significance. The broken watch, for example, begins as a bit of backstory, but ends up telling us about how the Captain mistakenly sees himself relative to his more noble and heroic father. I'm sure there's a bunch of clever stuff about Fascism and the parallels with the orders of the faun, but I haven't thought it all out yet.

Movie films watched in 2010: 1