Word: darker
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...Mexican filmmaker whose Pan's Labyrinth had its world premiere at last year's festival before becoming a surprise hit and an Oscar-winner in the States. The Orphanage has the same vital vibe: the sense that all crafts of filmmaking are bent to leading us into another, darker, magical world. The happy news is twofold: The Orphanage quite lives up to its billing; and it's been bought for U.S. release by Picturehouse, the company that distributed Pan's Labyrinth...
...satisfy. Familiarity breeds complicity. But there are some movies that, in the middle of the story or later, take turns, make strange twists, as if to say, like that new acquaintance, Don't presume you know me. I am not what you think I am. I am something darker, stronger, stranger...
...exhortation that “winning isn’t everything” without a shadow of irony, yet completely disingenuously. Put them at the helm of make-believe armies in a campus-wide game of Risk and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with their darker side; a ruthless ambition to win so intense that anyone who dares get in the way had better watch...
Sound like a formula to you? What these stories are reacting against is not so much fairy tales in general as the specific, saccharine Disney kind, which sanitized the far-darker originals. (As did Shrek, by the way. In the William Steig book, the ogre is way more brutal, scary and ... ogreish.) But the puncturing of the Disney style is in danger of becoming a clich itself. The pattern--set up, then puncture, set up, then puncture--is so relentless that it inoculates the audience against being spellbound, training them to wait for the other shoe to drop whenever they...
...Prussian junkers and Manchester’s dark satanic mills—is likewise gone. The real question is: Are the projected demographic changes bad? Here our prophets fall silent, largely assuming that any change is for the worse, or that the harms of a darker-skinned and more Islamic Europe are self-evident...