In mid 2005, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean put out a movie called Mirrormask. It won accolades, if not awards, in Toronto and at Sundance.
I saw it tonight.
It was unbelievably cool.
It deserves your attention.
(Also, I'm not dead; haven't been writing much lately because what I've wanted to say has been better covered elsewhere.)
1 comment:
So on your rec, I paid Mirrormask some attention.
First of all, yes, it was unbelievably cool. But I can't help but share some of my nitpicky complaints about it.
The story seemed very episodic in nature. I guess that comes with the territory when you're doing a "quest" type fantasy narrative, but it seemed to have a choppy execution. The main arc of the story got lost in the "oh we're here, no we're there, let's do this, let's do that" chain of episodes. This isn't a huge flaw, but it impeded my emotional involvement.
Also, the art direction was mind-blowingly awesome, yes, of course, Dave McKean is supercool. I have one quibble, though. Maybe it was my crappy LCD monitor, but the color palette of the movie didn't do the actual visuals justice. All those bronzes and dark browns and oranges set the mood alright, but it left the atmosphere unnecessarily dank. Perhaps on a different screen, most notably the big one, I would have had a different impression. As it was, the colors detracted from the amazing art direction, which would not have been a problem in any other movie; in this one, it felt like a waste because I couldn't see or fully appreciate the incredible detail.
And yet, the more I think about this movie, the more I love my memory of it. That is also unusual; my opinion of a movie almost always tends to decay with time. I came out of Mirrormask thinking "this would have been awesome if the colours were brighter... or it would have been so much better if they skipped this scene or added another one here to help it flow..." but as I write this, these criticisms are melting away leaving me with an overall positive impression. Weird!
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