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Showing posts from January, 2007

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

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It's that time of year when each new movie that opened late last year are heralded with many accolades as this years Academy Award nominations take shape. I had been tracking this movie for some time and immediately made plans to redeem my "Customer Loyalty" voucher. The film takes place in Spain, 1944. Ophelia, the heroine of the story, travels with her pregnant mother to live with her new stepfather. The stepfather is a decidedly cruel Captain in charge of Franco's forces to root out Communist resistance that still prevails in the mountainside. The stepfather could care less about Ophelia, and has more concern for his yet unborn son being carried by her mother. Ophelia is a dreamer, using fairy tales to escape the death of her real father, the sudden move to the country side, her stepfather and life. She comes face to face with a Faun who reveals to her that, in actuality, Ophelia is the daughter of a great king. Upon proving that she is not mortal, she may pass thr

James Reviews Pan's Labyrinth

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It’s a very rare thing for me to go to a movie I know nothing about, but that’s what I did last Saturday night based simply on the title and the lobby poster. Pan’s Labyrinth turned out to be one of those rare impulses that paid off. I really liked Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro’s 2001 Spanish-language film The Devil’s Backbone , and his latest subtitled effort is just as enthralling as Backbone , but far darker and more imaginative. Set in the 1940’s around the time of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl is removed with her expectant mother to her cruel stepfather’s military outpost where her life descends into a maelstrom of intrigue, despair and tragedy, both within the context of her new life with the embattled Captain and into her (imagined?) decent through a labyrinth and into an underworld waiting for the return of its lost princess. There Ophelia encounters the faun Pan, who tells her that she is the long-awaited princess. Pan gives her a book of blank pages into which w

Rocky Returns

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I have to admit that I was not too enthusiastic about another Rocky picture. The joke has been that Stallone does not know when to stop. ( Rambo III , anyone?) It’s been quite some time since the last really good Rocky film (that would be the third, released in 1982, which I saw in the theater twice). And following a mediocre fourth outing (Rocky versus the Russian) and an utterly forgettable Rocky V , Rocky VI just did not hold much appeal for me. But I have to say that it was good to reconnect with Rocky Balboa after all of these years. Balboa, now in his fifties, has lost his wife to cancer and spends his time telling boxing stories to patrons in his small Italian restaurant. It seems to be a sad existence compared with Rocky’s past glories, but he is content with what his life has become. That is, until he is coerced into going back into the ring just one more time. But this movie is not about the fight, not about who wins. It’s about a man dealing with grief and desiring to conne