Films CXXXIII and CXXXIV

[faustus]

In retrospect, not a recommended double bill, although both good films in their own way.

I note in passing that I've met Mark Herman, and didn't hold Blame it on the Bell Boy against him - and he reminded me of Brian Stableford.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008)
There's a point toward the end of this film were you guess where it's headed; for ten minutes you hope and know it won't go there. Then it does, and rips your heart out - actually leaving more problems than it solves. Six million Jews ought to be enough - but one death stands in for all the others. there a problem there, just as Life is Beautiful was a problem for its comedy and Schindler's List was a problem for focusing on the exceptions. Edit: This film is based on the book by John Boyne - a cross-over title with adult and YA editions I gather, which I have not read. End of edit

But that is to get ahead of ourselves - which is the case in any film we're the audience know more about what's going on than all but a handful on the characters.

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is happy, even in war time Berlin, but less happy to move with his family to the country: his sister is growing up, they are to have a tutor, and he's not allowed to visit the farm next door. Interdictions are made to be broken, and so it is he makes his way through a back gate, through window and across a magical land to an electrified fence to where a boy Schmuel (Jack Scanlon) is waiting in his pyjamas.

We know, of course; we know what the farmers are doing, and we can guess at their fate - and that Bruno's father (David Thewlis) is now is charge of all this. We know how disagreement is viewed as disloyalty, and how even patrents need to be informed upon. We know how this will play out. If I invoke The Night of the Hunter it is perhaps too far; rarely is childhood innocence and real evil so closely depicted. Empire of the Sun is another ancestor, but there we are hardly made to feel Jim is in damger.

Bruno betrays his friend - not three times, but once, and make atonement - and more profoundly than the film of the same name. But it is Schmuel we should care for, and the six million others, not just Bruno.


Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo Del Toro, 2008)

Here we don't need to worry as much about the politics as a pro-republican pseudo-historical drama which ended up endorsing royalty (Pan's Labyrinth). We get fed a back story of the manufactured army, possibly lifted direct from John Hurt's performance in The Storyteller (so where's the muppet dog?). Forty years later Elric Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) comes to retrieve part of the crown that will help him raise an army of golden warriors, unless his power is challenged by, oh don't know, maybe Hellboy (Ron Perlman).

Much as you'd expect with the law of diminishing returns - bigger assed villain faces meaner tougher hero. There's niceness around the edges - demons in the background, a troll afraid of a canary, a cahracter who is ectoplasm, and digital blends to with puppetry all but seemlessly. And it's ironic enough that you never really have to care.

Totals: 134 (Cinema: 61; DVD: 68; TV: 5

Comments

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I found Hellboy I strangely uninteresting - it seemed to have some good (if not necessarily intellectually challenging) ingredients, but they seemed to cancel each other out, somehow - so I didn't bother with II when it was in the cinema. Is it worth me borrowing the DVD?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

It is very pretty and visually stimulating, but, yanno, who cares? I don't feel the need to see out Hellboy now.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Striped PJs: disliked the book intensely. Probably need to reread to quantify why. Reviews of film suggest it's better than the book.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Haven't got or read; I've seen others with it and been intrigued.

It's such a different film from Brassed Off. No consolation.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Responses (on child lit groups) to the book seem sharply divided.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that anyone who didn't want children's literature to be like Robert Cormier's novels wouldn't like it. The horror in the film is that you (should) precisely know what's going on; that's a ghetto being cleared in the back of shot, that's a concentration camp, that's a gas chamber. I'm not sure what the right tone of a book for children doing that would be.

I do have an unease - which in part is about singling out one story from several million others, and so - but here I stray into spoiler territory. So I will hold off for now.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

No, it's not about shying away from horror nor about protecting children from it. It's more about pulling punches and lack of horror, I think.

And dammit, I'm going to have to read a book I hated just to find out precisely why I hated it. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

[(Anonymous)]

[mini-spoilers ahead] Does 'Pan' endorse royalty? Only if you read the last scene as 'true', within the fantastic storyline, rather than 'true' in the other story. I thort it was a film about fantasy and escape/ism and so am minded to think that the final escape looks pretty grim... which makes it another 'I'm not the chosen one' story like Mieville's 'Un Lun Dun'? Dreams of noble birth and a royal past are therefore just another dead (sorry) end for Spain?

HB II looks great and possesses a good deal of charm; I always think of these films as superhero flicks and they're head and shoulders above everything else i've seen in ~that~ genre...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Maybe I was over concise in my telegraphese - I wrote in my comments (http://drasecretcampus.livejournal.com/25747.html#cutid7): "The temptation is to read the tasks – which are straight out of Grimm and Perrault fairy-tales – as pathology, as an escape mechanism for a girl on the edge of puberty from a truly dreadful situation. The ending, which may be a dying fantasy, has the air of self-consolation – it is no more a real escape than say the ending of Brazil, and probably even less. But if we look for the marvellous rather than the uncanny explanation, I’m not convinced that things are much better. She escapes, thank you very much, I’m alright Jill. Whilst we are presented with a narrative which encourages us to side with the communists rather than the fascists, and we see the former get the upper hand, don’t forget that Franco won. He ruled Spain from 1939 through to 1975, with repressive force. It is perhaps little comfort that a filmmaker like Almodovar is like he is partly because so much could not be said or discussed or represented in Franco’s Spain, but in leaving us with triumphant rebels we see a triumphal exceptionalism worthy of Spielberg."

I wasn't happy with it as consoling dream of the dying, nor the escapist hope of the transcending. And it lost the framework of who wins the Spanish Civil War.

~That~ genre feels like praising with faint damns.