Well, the book (based on the play, which is backwards to what you'd expect, but that's how it went) is likewise vague because it's Heroic Fantasyland — it's like mythology, or Marvel/DC universes before they started worrying about how to make them line up with realworld chronology, your villains and protagonists are…

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised! — nothing can, after the Smells Like Teen Spirit thing — but there's a replication of the follow-the-bomb shot that's gotten a few reviewers' attention for being so glaringly obviously copied from Bay.

Also watch "Cronos" which is the most lyrically Bradbury-like film I've ever seen, more like a Bradbury short story than any adaptation of Bradbury's writing to date.

Gossamer is, literally, spiderweb. (Which is amusing to me, because most people don't find spiderwebs romantic or poetic at all. Only us bug-loving weirdos…)

I wonder if any of the people who were so shocked at the violence in Laberinto, even blinked at the parallel violence in V for Vendetta? Because a little girl whose character journey is built up throughout the movie as paralleling Evey's, is shot down like a dog in the street in that fil, to serve as the catalyst for…

It's part of the Lang corpus, which is the mainstream channel for world fairy tales since before Tolkien. I agree that the argument that the poison — because that is what it was, poison wielded by an apprentice healer in an act of defence — blinded Vidal doesn't hold up, but it doesn't hold up in accordance with the…

Except that General Franco is still dead. Their victory, in this case, was not dying in a 'glorious' but pointless skirmish, instead emigrating (many did go to Mexico, where del Toro heard their stories of the war as a child) and choosing to make a difference by the way they lived their lives and to influence the…

Just curious, do you have the same problem watching the gleeful bloody violence in the Indiana Jones movies? Because I find that equally disturbing and more so because we're supposed to find it funny or at least be happy it isn't happening to Our Hero…

Oh, and I forgot — the Pale Man is framed onscreen in a way that very explicitly invokes Goya's famous painting of Saturn — aka Kronos, father of the Olympian gods, aka Time — Devouring His Son, painting in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars' particularly brutal Iberian Campaign.

And yet, it's not half so brutal as the played-for-joke scene of a man getting chopped up by a propeller in that jolly family film, Raiders of the Lost Ark…let alone the melting eyeballs and exploding heads of the climax, nor the hearts-ripped-out of its subsequent prequel!

There are multiple meanings in that image — first, it's an allusion to who Ofelia is, in the story archetype (hint: eyes on a plate are a very specific bit of iconagraphy!) but it's also, simultaneously, a reference to Devil's Backbone AND to Hellboy, because there is a Baroque poet who was known in her lifetime as…

The old classics have that too — there's a whole subgenre of fairy tales about "The Elves' Nursemaid" in which a magic ointment is needed to behold the Land Under The Hills, and if only one eye is annointed, then you must close the other eye to see the fay as they really are…

Of course, Classical comedy also involved exaggerated masks and actors playing satyrs (and giant fake cocks as part of the costumes!) and sometimes also slaves outwitting their masters and old men trying to recapture their lost youths BUT not at the same time as wars, Oracles, princesses, sirens, or prophecies of…

I want to sing that refrain to the tune of "Kokomo"!

Sorry, that's a theatre nerd reference — "tragedy" originally means "goat-song" because they were plays that the Athenians put on to honour Dionysus, god of wine, whose legendary followers were the fauns & satyrs. Classical actors wore heavily-stylized masks, similar to kabuki makeup, and tall platform boots called…

I'm afraid the nearest they come to honouring your patron deity is to caper around a sad story (albeit mockingly and without cothurns or proper masks) relying on modern Worldbeat and Oxfam-shop generations' only familiarity with the panpipes as popularized by Peruvian music…

It's even more nuts than any of us can imagine! Every detail that comes out paradoxically makes me want to go see it to goggle at the train wreck, while not wanting to give Warners any of my money to even risk rewarding it a tiny bit.

Apparently there's an overt homage to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor…

Hopefully no one actually "broke a leg" in this production!

One review of Fuchs' previous movie (Ice Age 4!) said it sure felt like there was no script at all, just a bunch of "ideas" roughly scribbled down in draft form…so, an improvement?