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October 3, 2005
Polite conversation means death!
Yesterday was apparently Father/Daughter Tripout Movie Day, as evidenced by both Karl and I each coincidentally taking our oldest to see Mirrormask, the new Gaiman/McKean/Henson movie. (Minor spoilers ahead, if you can call them that.)
It is a stunningly beautiful film. The whole time Cassidy was talking to herself, alternating between "this is so weird" and "this is so cool". Thematically very similar to Labyrinth...teenage girl has growing-up conflicts with her parents, ends up in a dreamlike fantasy world that looks a lot like her real-world passions, meets a quirky but helpful character who becomes her guide and friend, goes on a long quest meeting many strange and wondrous creatures, battles an evil monarch, and eventually comes back to the real world with her family issues resolved.
Mirrormask is much more adult in appearance than Labyrinth, however. I've been out of the comics thing for a long time, but the style looked very familiar to me, so a little googling jogged my memory. Neil Gaiman and David McKean created Black Orchid, which I read a little of many years ago, and McKean's been compared to Bill Sienkiewicz, the author of Stray Toasters, which I absolutely loved.
Cass was also hip enough to notice that it looked a lot like Coraline...figures my daughter actually started reading Gaiman before I did.
And much as I would like to say this is a wondrous, stupendous cinematic event...it's actually kind of boring in spots. It's so beautiful to look at that it's almost self-conciously beautiful, like a gorgeous woman who thinks that all she has to do is sit there and look pretty to keep my attention. There's a lot of "look what we can do" footage...seemingly included just "because we can" rather than because it advanced the plot or filled out the characters.
Stilll, you definitely need to see it. I predict it will drop pretty quickly from sight...it's only playing in one theatre in Austin, the Dobie, and that was only one-third full at the showing last night, so I doubt more than a few hundred people have seen it locally. But I predict cult-film status for it in the coming years.
And as for the National Goth Month predictions...maybe the gothlings don't come on Sunday nights, because the predominant stereotype at the Dobie last night was Unix hippy.
Posted by ray at October 3, 2005 1:36 PM | Permalink
Categories: [movies ]
Comments
I agree that parts of MirrorMask were slow, but I would descibe it as dreamy; the nature of the thing was that it was about the art as much as the story, so rushing it would have seemed criminal. I wasn't the least bit bored, and I have the attention span of a woodpecker.
YMMV.
In Palo Alto, CA, it was about an equal mix, unix hippies and goth kids; I predict the goth kids will catch up and we'll see a sort of dragoncon audience for shows within a few days. But you're right, it's going to vanish into cult-land quickly, it's way too damned weird for mass audiences.
Posted by: Karl Elvis at October 3, 2005 5:46 PM
Yeah, I agree it should not have been rushed. I think in the middle, before the nature of the conflict was apparent, I was starting to wonder if it was going to get to some kind of point or if it was going to just wander around looking pretty for another hour.
I think seeing it a second time it might move quicker because you know where it's going to end up.
We also had the misfortune of seeing it at an arthouse theatre with tiny screens. I'd love to see this on a large screen somewhere.
Oh, and we saw previews for "Three...Extremes", which looks like the most glorious fucked-up erotic horror movie ever. Comes out this Halloween.
Posted by: Ray at October 3, 2005 5:51 PM
Yeah the screen we saw it on was pretty dinky also - art houses, y'know? Olivia had never been in a theater like that, she thought it was quite a lark, sitting in a theater where the screen is higher than the seats, the arms don't go up, the seats don't rock.
The thing with the pacing, to me, was that it didn't matter where it'd end up. It was getting there that mattered. Plot was almost irrelevant. Art for art's sake, baby! B^)
Posted by: Karl Elvis at October 3, 2005 6:33 PM
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