pnarco

I was very impressed by this adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Mist'. I have been a fan of the story since it came out and have played the text game and have heard the 3-D audio version of it. This is a masterful suspense/monster movie that puts an ensemble cast into the untenable situation of being in a deteriorating situation they cannot escape from. We watch as alliances are formed, religious paranoia takes hold and, nicely, the movie takes the time to establish characters whom we come to care for before the true action begins. I dock it a couple of points because some of the monsters seemed a little too cgi, and the middle lags a bit, but the much talked about ending is indeed awesome and I was most impressed by the director's decision to keep the music soundtrack down and even eliminate it completely during many of the action sequences. So many movies nowadays crank the music up to 11 to make up for the fact that their suspense scenes do not work. This movie does. I was breathlessly on the edge of my seat for most of it, even though I was already familiar with the story. Highly recommended.

This movie is pretty brilliant, I would say that it is a great movie, including a quite excellent performance by the male lead (villain) who the producers cautioned the director would not be able to deliver the role. Boy were they wrong. He deserves an award for his performance. Much of it was pretty brutal and rather hard to sit there and watch but I was very glad to have seen this. I was really glad that the filmmakers had the good taste to cut away at some points and didn't show on screen some things that happened in the story.

It concerns a gruesome battle going on between fascist forces in Spain and resistance forces circa 1940's I think, and in the midst of this is a little girl who gets involved in a rich fantasy world of magic and monsters. It is a rather intense, emotionally powerful, enchanting and violent movie. A dark fantasy.

Pan's Labyrinth is about many things and works on many different levels, but for me it seemed to be showing that in brutal, desperate times as in the story, some people will follow orders without question so that they can sort of save their own hides for a time, while others will do the compassionate, right things for others around them, even if it means giving up their own life and die with their moral boots on. And it suggest that maybe there is a higher system of things that is testing us to see what side of that line we will fall on and who we really are under such circumstances. A brilliant movie.

'Children of Men' can be described as a speculative fiction thriller set in the UK 20 years in the future.

I was really blown away by this movie. I wasn't quite expecting it and went into it knowing extremely little about it which is probably how it actually should be viewed. I picked up right away on the technical reasons for its specialness which I won't go into in order not to spoil anything about it. But I will say that it is perhaps the most uncompromising, haunting and compelling vision of the future I may have ever seen and that it is very rich with a lot of heavy details, many of which could have been the whole subject of a whole lesser movie in itself. I read the synopsis of the plot on Wikipedia to better understand it and I literally had to stop for a few minutes after reading each sentence and let what they were saying sink in, in light of what I had seen. It is quite often extremely intense almost to the point of making you want to look away from the screen, but they do not achieve this intensity really in any of the traditional Hollywood ways. I'd have to see it again, but I don't even think they used any music during those sequences. It has a very raw feel to it and yet is very sophisticated at the same time, but it is not totally relentless either. The makers of the movie were very clever in how they marketed it. It has been a very successful movie at least in the U.S. without really any commercial hype behind it, relying almost totally on word of mouth and it very much deserves that success. It makes V for Vendetta look like a Saturday morning cartoon. The violence in it is very very realistic and grim and disturbing, as in fact violence should be! It's not glorified or gratuitous in any way. This is not a movie to see if you don't like movies that give you a lot to think about. Quite frequently while watching it, I had to remind myself again and again that I was just watching a movie that somebody had produced. That says a lot to me because I tend to be pretty jaded and cynical when it comes to movies, I've seen so many of the moves they can make. But I got the impression that effect was a pretty typical reaction to it. No doubt one of the best movies, if not the best movie, to come out in 2006, it will give me a lot to remember and ponder about for a long time to come.