TAPETRVE wrote:There are hell a lot of people who didn't like the film. I find it way overrated, too, but that's because it severely fails as the Kunstmärchen it claims to be. It's shallow and ridden with empty and incoherent metaphors that have absolutely no connection to the meta level. That's what you call "pretentious". It falls in exactly the same category as The Fountain, which beyond its heartfelt plot is also pretty much a truckload of utter amateur-spiritualist bullshit. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful film to look at and as a mere feast for eyes and ears and soggy hearts, it serves well. But then, so do a lot of movies nowadays.
It's a Buddhist parable. It's not pretentious. I think it's a beautiful movie.
Also...
TAPETRVE wrote:Alfredson's film has no pseudo-mythological metaphors. It doesn't dwell on elaborate clicheés of dreamy kids and disillusioned grownups - they (kids and adults, wishes and reality)) are just there with no further wannabe-symbolic undercurrent. And most of all, it doesn't try to be a fairy tale and fail so hard at its task. The one big failure of El Labirinto del Fauno is that it basically reenacts The little Match Girl but goes way aboard with involving further elements that don't have any point at all. As a fairy tale, it doesn't work.
It's about a little girl escaping into her fantasy world away from the horrible reality she lives in. That's it. It's a bit like Gilliam's
Brazil in that respect. The "moral" of the tale is that the only way out of this awful life you happen to find yourself in is madness/fantasy escape. I think that's a far more useful comment than any straight fairy tale would be. I don't think its purpose was ever to BE a fairy tale.
The film's structure (a loosely connected fairy tale framework) informs us how Ophelia thinks about her world. She read, but did not fully comprehend in any kind of an adult way, her fantastical books. It doesn't exist on any kind of "meta" level because she never thought of them like that -- she picked and chose which parts she liked and she imagined herself in them (she was a princess, she escaped the Pale Man, she retrieved the key from the frog, she was the ultimate hero in her story). Didn't you do that when you were little? I know I did. When she dies, we get to see her "Heaven", or what she imagines in her dying moments. ("Oh, I really *am* a princess, and they let me in after all! I did a good deed!")
It was pretty well established that she escaped into her books quite often. I don't think it was intended to teach any lessons apart from the resiliency of and the respite imagination can bring, especially when we need it most.
At the end of the movie Brazil, we find Sam Lowry humming the song "Brazil" in a state of madness and we find out he's been imagining Harry Tuttle and his band of militant Air Conditioning Repairmen saving him. He runs off with his (now miraculously alive) love Jill to a little home in the country to live happily ever after -- except not really. He's been tortured and probably lobotomized. The moral of the story? The only escape is through madness.
: Just found one of the animation clips about LdRKI (the book) shown in Norwegian television.
and yeah it is funny, especially fat Oskar hehe 
Although I think Oskar came out better than Eli did. She looked like she just stuck a finger in a light socket. 
