The Bank Job (Donaldson 2008)

In order to take posession of some incriminating pictures of a royal family member, an institution that has probably a fancy acronym, but that I call "Royal Family Reputation Maintenance Task Force" initiates a bank robbery through which those pictures can be withdrawn from the control of a politically inconvenient character. While being used for higher purposes, the group of bank robbers does the best it can to mess it up, but succeed in several ways that is most annoying to the well-dressed Royal entourage.
When checking where the hell I have heard the name of the director Roger Donaldson before, I realised that I watched a lot of his films (Dante's Nonsense Peak, Naked Species, Cadillac Man is getting on my nerves… and I do not even mention Cocktail, even though I do...), but half-liked only one: Thirteen Days. All these films looks so much different from the Bank Job. Those slick Hollywood productions with their machine-generated production design and their arbitraily exchangeable character actors (Brosnan, Cruise, Costner, pfff). But here? Brilliant cast almost throughout, with particular honours to the smart, handsome and immediately approachable Jonathan Statham and Richard Lintern (as Tim), who dresses, looks and orders drinks as if the James Bond role was up for grabs again. How you can play such a slimy tuxedo-Tim and still be sympathetic is beyond me, but I liked him and did not blame him for getting the hot chick Martine occasionally (played by Saffron Burrows, who looks much better in film than on IMDB).
A sympathetic English 1970s film-alike, with cute characters, not enough tension to keep you awake at night, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Mang Jing - Blind Shaft (Li Yang 2001)

Two coal miners float from one occupation to the next, trying to find a victim who pretends to be a relative in order also to get a job. The they kill him in an "accident" and cash in the compensation from the mine. The scheme works fine for them until they meet a young boy who they start liking just a bit too much.
While the film has the neorealistic touch to it that is typical of 6th generation, critical social filmmaking in China, I found it stunningly well composed and directed. It does not show the technical flaws of, say, the early Jia Zhang-Ke pictures, but a very mature approach to introducing the characters, revealing their dimensions slowly and controlledly, and of rolling out the drama and building suspense, mixed with comic relief. You could actually say this is played by the book of narrative, but is feels very natural and relaxed. Great actors an all accounts, brilliant settings that show the desolate reality of large parts of rural China, and the equally desolate lifes a large workforce has to lead. Very good film!
A stunning number of external reviews at IMDB worth checking out.

Nim's Island (Mark and Levin 2008)

A young girl and her father live on a beautiful island, him studying nature, her hanging out with cute animals and reading adventure books. When the father goes missing with his boat after a storm, Nim - the girl - calls for help from the hero of her favourite books. Turns out this Alex hero is only a whimpish Jodie Foster author in real life, almost too scare to leave her Manhattan apartment. But she does, and they find each other, and all is well.
Spectacularly harmless, the joining of Jodie Foster and 300-star Gerard Butler (who is actually quite enjoyable here as Foster's alter ego) is aimed at somebody considerably younger than me. For those, there may be joy in flying chamaeleons and fat English tourists with sunburns, but then again, even the most little ones may realise that the script is a bit all over the place, with the whole drama suddenly evaporating when the father just returns without much ado.

10.000 B.C. (Emmerich 2008)

The plot is … er … some stone age or something people hunt mammoths, and then … er … some of them get kidnapped and one of them follows them and then there or Kenian warriors and more mammoths, only now they are working on an Egyptianal pyramid. In the end, they kill the Egyptian Prime Minister with a white spear.
The most horrible dialogues, and a narration that sheds light in the fact that at some point in your carreer, you start doing just about anything for money, because at Omar Sharif's age, there is nothing to lose. The most un-thrilling action sequences involving mammoths and dinosaurs (??? WTF???) and whatever.
When I heard of the film for the forst time a couple of years back, I was wondering why the hell anybody would want to make such a film, and how they would manage to create a decent story in such a setting. Well, yeah…

The Flock (Andrew Lau 2007)

Andrew Lau is representative of the very strange breed of Hongkong filmmakers who got a certain fame for being rather ruthlessly stylish and brutal in their films, and by influencing European and American directors with their overtly visual style. To me, these guys are notorious for hiding their lack of stringent story-telling behind recurring episodes with leg-cringing brutality, and usually produce rather forgettable merchanidse, not attributable to a specific director, but rather to the genre of "modern HongKong style".
And "The Flock"? Has an impressive set of well-known actors that you are kind of surprised to see here - but clearly being the result of this HongKong reputation leading to some producers and agents expecting another John Woo phenomenon to be around the corner (the John Woo of Face Off fame, that is, not of the other nonsense he has done in the US). That's a good bonus to get started, working with an eerily slim and exhausted Richard Gere and a very fragile and slightly dispaced-looking Clare Danes. When you get down to the story, it is confusingly thin, so that you keep wondering what twist is around the corner to make it worth all the fuzz. Nothing, however, is around the corner, apart from more and more "quotes" from high-concept genre films: Seven, Silence of the Lambs in particular, but also - as some IMDB reviewers have pointed out - a general X-Files setting about all of it. The final is really embarassing in it even trying to replicate Brad Pitt's every movement from the final scene in Seven, but without the high-tension builidup to the scene it just falls flat on the face.
The most interesting question is whether Andrew Lau will get another chance after this first US effort that did, I understand, not just go out without a bang at the box office, but that even very few reviewers cared to pay attention at.

TV shows and other reflections

I have hardly ever been expecting a tv show as eagerly as I was expecting the 4th Season of Battlestar Galactica over the last nine or so months (now how is that about being auspicious?). In the last two years, I have been catching up with quite a bit of tv show material that I could never be bothered to watch before, or where the sheer format - the weekly installments putting their cruel dictate upon me - were just not my kind of ball game. Some considerations on this self-surprising development:

I suppose most of my change of attitude is due to the age of DVD boxes and online download platforms. It started, I remember, when I VHS-taped the first season of "24" a couple of years ago (and even before that, I was the occassional "X Files" and of course "Twin Peaks" audience member), but only took really off with the boxed sets of the first season(s) of "Lost", "Heroes", and "Battlestar Galactica". I admit that those four shows have turned me around - I was absolutely amazed at the high quality of tv that is being written and produced on any given day in the wide world of US tv (only very recently did I realise that for some strange reason, all the best US tv premiers on Thursdays and Fridays - and I cannot for the life of me imagine why a broadcaster wants to offer his crown jewels on a Friday night, honestly!).

Outside those BIG FOUR, there is plenty of material with which I could brighten my day any time: the perennial "C.S.I.", the hard-hitting "Dexter", very clever "Californication", eerie "Life" (will you be back, Damon? Pleeease!), terminated "Jericho", sexy "Entourage", even the recently re-discovered "South Park" (all episodes online, takes only about a month to watch 12 of them. Seasons, I mean). There will be the day when I will get the complete "Sopranoes" box set, no doubt. And "The Wire" lurking behind the corner, waiting to be discovered.

Through the writers' strike, it became clearer to me how difficult it must be to sustain a coherent story line, credible characters and just the right pacing for each of these dramas to work out. The strike messed it all up royally, and nowhere was it as visible as in the case of "Heroes", where the transition from excellent character drama to completely disoriented and pointless superheroes patchwork took exactly one day - last episode season 1 to first episode season 2. Arbitrarily introduced new characters did not work, storylines got lost, nobody really saw what the actual drama, the McGuffin driving the story, was. You cannot pack a show designed for 23 episodes in just 11 or so. It got random, and while there is the hope that the long hiatus gives the writers and producers the unprecedented chance to write the best and most intelligent and most dramatic season in tv show history, chances are rather that the show will glide into oblivion, having missed the chance to keep up the high quality, and not getting another one. "Lost" had a similar problem, actually, also introduced a new set of characters for the new season, but managed slightly better to keep their profile low, indicating that somebody out there knows what to do with them - only next year instead of this.

Even the shows that are running on very high steam and with constant quality for years - BSG and Lost, maybe - are extremely fragile in that respect. The audience's urge to come back every week - to watch it or to start the download or to get home and watch the TiVo recording - can evaporate just like that if you push the wrong button once too often. "Lost" almost achieved that when they lost track of their mythology by introducing new characters and killing them off right away within one episode: the two guys who got buried alive in season 3 were not just irrelevant to the show, they were an intruder from the hostile planet of "continuous tv programming", where a tv show's story having a beginning, a mid-section and an end is considered blasphemy against the God of profitability. One-off stories allow a show to go on forever - and going on forever is exactly what all those shows I like cannot do without destroying themselves (with maybe the only exception and guilty pleasure of CSI, assuming that Grissom is immortal, and why should he not be?):

"Lost" needs to find a way to either get the people off the island for good - or to keep them there for good. "Heroes" and "24" are odd brothers in that they must find a new apocalyptic threat per season (one that did not really exist in Season 2 of "Heroes", and a couple too many in the last "24" season), and Battlestar Galactica must lead the colonial fleet to Earth - or get smashed by the Cylon armies to smithereens - which is what I still kind of hope for: a truly heroic ending for that beaten-up garabage truck and its brave crew.

Before BSG had decided to fulfil its mission after season 4 (and praise the Lords of Kobol for this wise decision!), isolated episodes were seeping in by the minute: about Sagritarian sects, rogue doctors, admirals' wedding anniversaries, trade union nonsense and so forth. I believe the high concentration of these episodes in the second third of season 3 made the decision to terminate the show after one more season unavoidable, unless you can live with the fact of turning a high-quality drama in a rubbish soap opera (as the X-files creators did, of course - learn from history, shape the future…). "Lost" is a bit more hesitant, but 100 episodes will be enough for them, two more seasons to go. The "24" format has reached a point where you cannot just repeat the same pattern, because only so many presidents can get assassinated per tv show. Unless they re-invent themselves after the long long long break, they should consider also going out with a bang (make Jack president, and have him shot when swearing the oath - and then his annoying daughter takes over his job, longing for revenge, and we will never have to watch again. Or we have to watch the loop re-runs of episodes 1 - 7).

As all the shows have been taking breath recently, and only the Battlestar has been revving her engines again, with plenty of waiting time ahead for all the others, I was wondering: what's coming next? Where is the next "Lost", the other BSG-like re-invention of Science Fiction drama, where is the proof that there can be decent tv outside those shows? I am a bit concerned, to be honest, that the time of big-scale drama may already be at an end, that shows that are running over a couple of seasons, but hardly ever lose their aim, their target out of their eyes, may be outdated? Or too expensive? Please no… I just got used to them.

South Park - Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker 1999)

After the kids of South Park get exposed to the barbaric humour of the latest Terence & Phillip movie, all hell breaks loose in South Park and they sing some brilliant songs. Kyle's mother (the "Big old bitch" of the song of the same name, probably the best musical song in 60 years - in good company with 14 others in the film, including the ear worm "what would Brian Boytano do?") seeks to ban all TP products and perferably Canada, while Saddam Hussein gets involved in an amour fou with Satan. The kids form and sing a Resistance movement and free Terence & Philip before their execution. In vain, however, because their blood is still spilled and Satan may rule the Earth, if Saddam lets him, but Eric shoots some light flashes at Saddam and the White side (or rather: Satan's red butt) wins.
Some of the most hilarious musical songs, a record in profanity, dead Kelly, gay Satan - this film is indeed the centre of everything the South Park universe stands for. I don't particularly care for the Satan character or his annoying boyfriend (or for T&P, for that matter), but in the words of immortal Eric Cartman: "Aaawesome!"
Review by an admirer at NYT
Roger Ebert quote of the week: "I laughed. I did not always feel proud of myself while I was laughing, however." Exactly!
And if you want to know what I have been doing for the last two months: go see all (!) SP episodes online at http://www.southparkstudios.com/

Se, Jie / Lust, Caution (Ang Lee 2007)

The life of Wang Chia Chi, who shifts her life in Shanghai from being an normal student to cecoming an assassinating actress, trying to help the resistance movement to eliminate the collaborator Yee.
Ang Lee films are always a bit strange for me: the little Americal bourgeois drama of Ice Storm qualities, the melancholy of Brokeback Mountain, the standard Hollywood ware of the Hulk … there are not too many drawers into which he could fit, maybe the only drawer is the one where "sadness" is written on. I always find his films to be filled with sad nostalgia, memories of a better world or life. And of the difficult decisions that had to be made, the characters reflecting on the what if's of their decisions. In this case by both the assassin and the emperor, so to say. The seduction game leads to the possibility to kill, but for both sides, and maybe the way to this point where every decision is possible has somehow reversed the ability of the persons to act: she cannot kill him anymore, but now he can. Maybe they now are better suited to face their lives, because pretending to be a killer (she) or pretending not to be one (he) was too strenuous? In the words of the ever-brilliant Roger Ebert: "There is not a frame of the film that is not beautiful, but there may be too many frames."
Salon.com Review, Variety Review

Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001)

Donnie Darko learns in a dream or vision that the world will end in 28 days, unless he and the giant rabbit who told him … emmm … do something I do not remember.
There's the president of the Colonies as his mother and the gay cowboy from Brokeback Mountain as Donnie, and the chubby girl from Charly's Angels, and the ...
There is a book on time travel written by an old woman with white hair and an innovative school teacher who gets sacked, and ...
And there is a kiddie lover who gets exposed when Donnie burns down his house, and there is a lot of sewage water in the school headmaster's office and ...
The nice girl gets killed and Donnie takes revenge by shhoting someone in the eye and travels back in time and ...

It is really worth to look at the full synopsis again IMDB offers, I could really honestly not figure out anymore what had happened. Now my poor memory is partly responsible, but I also think that the film's problem may be a script problem: too much stuff happening at the same time, and often just stuff, not too coherent, too many exotic developments creating an early expectation of the unavoidable ending - or at least a possibility of how that ending was created with the help of time travel?
I feel slightly confused, but I believe that the film with its cute starring actor and the nice level of absurdity about it will remain with us for a while, as it seem to touch a nerve of confused teenagers who adhore it as a cult film.

Jumper (Liman 2008)

The story of a young boy who discovers his ability to leap though space at will, allowing him a life in style by withdrawing cash directly from the bank vaults (of which he makes generous use) and allowing him to safe people trapped in floods and take them out safely (of which he abstains).
Trouble hits his calm life between breakfast on top of the Gize pyramids and taking a ride on a London double decker, when Samuel L. Jackson sniffs his trace and decides to hunt him down. "Jumpers are the worst." he sighs, but we never learn the worst among which specific sub-group of society and why anyway. Whichever it is, his intention is to kill them all with a big knife, which is why the Jumper boy is in trouble. And his girlfriend, and his Jumper buddy from Scotland. In the end, it is about jumping away a house, which has never been managed before, so … you guess.
There is a new rule in movies. After we have safely established the "Whenever Ben Kingsley plays the head of a secret organisations: beware!" rule, now here comes the "Whenever Samuel L. Jackson plays in a movie having a supporting role and his hair dyed white, beware!" rule. Or maybe "Any films with Samuel Jackson and Hayden Christiansen and a metal tube electronic gadget: beware!" Some bits of the special effects are quite pleasant to watch, with the possibilities involved in this particular ability rather well developed and not too many holes in the setup of this idea. What exactly the problem is between the Jumpers and the other guys (what are they called again? Centurions??) we do not learn, but it is a very old battle they are fighting, just like those vampires and Blade, you know? The whole drama, however, does not have a point and nothing happens that would be above mediorce in terms of directions, design, editing, camera, or acting. Script is actually way down the bottomless pit of terribleness: "We have his girlfirend, now he must come to us." Arg! The director did do O.C., this terrible tv show before, so I hope for him that he is on a long-term contract with the networks - this movie I would not include in my job application package!

Iron Man (Favreau 2008)

Weapons producer Tony Stark gets hijacked in Afghanistan, and develops scuples about his trade as well as an armed and armoured suit while in captivity. This does is not taken up friendly by hus business companion, who also wants a flying suit (and not such a "conservative one") and Stark out of the way. Stark discovers he wants to be a hero, and now he can.
As predicted, the girls are in love with Robert Downey Jr., and who wouldn't? It is exactly the cool badass bastard that gets all the upscale journalist chicks with Brown degrees and who cannot be mean enough to them and still makes them addicted. Perfect choice for a superhero who is not super, but just very smart, tech-savy and in command of next to unlimited riches. In the company of The Dude and the girl from Shakespeare in Love and Hook, this superhero film fortunately has very little superhero about it and does not need it really. The characters are strong, the locations awesome, the suit very kinetically real-feeling and the damage done during the fights loud and painful to man and material. And Downey does not even mumble as much as usual. Well done!

National Treasure Double Feature (2004, 2008)

Part 1: National Treasure
Ben Gates is Nichoals Cages is the son of John Voight, and like a scaled-down version of Doctor Indy he is being chased around the world by the quest after a giant treasure, hidden by Freemasions and Templers and all the usual suspects of hiding things and conspiring about it. Digging up a ship in the Arctic ice, stealing the American decleration of indepedence, wearing coloured glasses and other stuff that I don't remember 24 hours after I watched it happen.

With the producers in the background, an admirable cast and plenty of money to spend on location shooting, there is a film that shouts "rollercoaster", and that's what it tries to do. A bit of physical action, a bit of heist, a bit of high tech mission impossible, a bit of this stuff and of that, and admittedly this potpurri stays entertaining and most of the time well-paced throughout two hours of running around. It is very hard to remember what exactly they did, but the feeling of a well-choreographed Indy-rip-off and the realisation that well, maybe sometime it needs to be admitted that this is what Nicholas Cage is bet at. The German model playing his girl is actually not bad, too, and comes across quite refreshing - surely she will attract hordes of new students to study the ancient arts of whatever she was a scientist in.

Part 2: National Treasure, Book of Secrets
Ben Gates has to wash clear the name of his ancestor, who was supposed to be a war hero, but now comes under suspicion of having been a part in Abraham Lincoln's assassination. This leads him to a new trasure hunt, this time it is some Maya city of Gold he needs to find, and the quest takes him through the Queen's and the US president's desks, the latter desk's owner's kidnapping as well as to a book with all the secrets you ever wanted to know about. Area 51, anyone?

The cast is quite likeable, actually. Same as first time, plus Ed Harris and the Queen and the nice woman with the cute nose from Jericho. They are doing the expected things, but why is it that whenever directors like to Wow their audiences, they have to include car chase scenes in their movies. Adventure films do not need car chases, they need pygmae canibals and poisoned darts stuck into the heroes' hearts. Anyway: the tourism boards of London, Washington and wherever Mount Rushmore is have kindly contributed to this breath- and slightly brainless hunt. Unfortunately the script is predictable on a painful level (yes, the water dams will break, yes, the Ferrari will be crashed etc. etc.), and there is basically no humour.

The summary from the double feature: the films (both directed by John Turtletaub) are expensive follow-ups to Romancing the Stone, not in the same league of the original, lacking the charme and humour of Indiana Jones' Goofy Adventures. Entertaining, of course, but only a serious alternative when it's raining outside and the there is no new "Lost" or "Battlestar Galactica" episode around.

Diary of the Dead (George Romero 2007)

During the shooting of a mummy horror C movie, a crew of film students is being confronted with the world falling apart around them: dead bodies stand up again, the world turns into a zombie madhouse, and they have to find some refuge with their trailer. They do, at last, take cover in one of the crew members' huge mansion, where they take their last stand.

George Romero is some kind of routine zombie provider, and you have to gove him that the quality of this provision never drops below a certain standard. As zombies in a zombie movie are not the key point anymore, he takes the chance of showing how societies evolve when being struck by apocaplypse's horsemen. How military abuses the vulnerability of the non-armed, how the previously underpriviledged use the ruthlessness they were forced to develop in order to get in charge of supplies and hence civilisation. How people deal with the fact that their beloved ones are "slow mutants" - eager to eat flesh.

None of this is new, but . . . no "but", unfortunately, this time it is actually a problem that pre-existing patterns are being recycled without really adding anything substantial. The shaky camera, or the obsession of the guy who holds the camera to the last moment, is very much last year, and what does it add, anyway? Media criticism? Voyeur-Bashing? More authenticity? The threats or benefits of ubiquitous computing? No, not anymore, if ever. There is one funny aspect, at least, which is that the Mummy turns into a Zombie, kind of mind-boggling, when you are geekish enough to analyse the implications while being sufficiently drunk.
Diary of the Dead is the Diary of a film-maker who cannot escape his clichee at the moment, but who will need to re-invent himself in order to remain interesting for audiences.

Nice opportunity to come back to an old favourite - when did you last visit the Fangoria website to read a review? Do now!
Salon.com Review
Jim Emerson's review

Horton Hears a Who (2008)

An elephant stumbles across a speck of dust in which apparently a whole world is hidden. He goes at great lengths in order to protect the speck and the world from being boiled by a nasty kangaroo sceptic.

I think it is difficult to assess what this film means to an American audience who grew up with Dr Seuss books and knows the story with nostalgic intensity. If you see it without that history, the story appears to be incredibly thin, the characters all pretty non-edgy and the - in terms of the way it has been produced for the screen - the animation very very not interesting, none of the characters particularly original, cute, nasty or any adjective. I hope this works for the little ones. For the slightly elderly there is a short sequence reminiscent of Japanese manga comic books and films (without context, though), and a short reference to Apocaplypse Now, and that's about it. Uninspired and way too family friendly in the word's worst connotation.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451079/
Salon.com review: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/03/14/horton/index.html?CP=IMD

Roger Ebert Weblog

This is too good to be true. I am a late Ebert-explorer, having grown up in parts of the world where he was not known as writer or tv host. So after a couple of months of diving through the regular archives (pleasant enough), but being annoyed at the lack of subscribing in one way or the other to the website, now here comes the Ebert-Blog, opening with the most appropriate things you can expect, a humorous obituary on Arthur C. Clarke, who "died convinced Bill Gates had made a big mistake in not keeping the Cinemania CD-Rom in print."
This is something to look forward to!

Interview Jia ZhangKe

Still maybe my favourite contemporary Chinese filmmaker (auteur? If you please!), Jia ZhangKe's films are, in his own words, but also quite visibly, about ordinary people in typical Chinese settings. This means the people are usually neither rich nor do they live in the prosperous Eastern cities. If they do (as in Shi Jie - The World), then they are caught in a desolate wasteland from where they can only observe the new wealth puring into the country.
Some interesting bits about this interview with Good magazine: I never knew what it means to be "banned from making film" on a practical level, but Jia mentions it, telling about his experience after being subjected to such a ban in 1999:
"So, when I made Pickpocket, I gave no thought to the censors. We just wanted to make the film the way we wanted. In 1998 it showed at the Berlin film festival, and then in 1999 I was banned from making films. This ban had no expiration date, and it meant that I was on a blacklist at all the postproduction companies in Beijing and Shanghai, saying that I couldn’t borrow equipment or develop film."

And on the notion of piracy:
"In the context of China, I also think DVD piracy is useful. I went through a long period during which my knowledge of film came from reading scripts, or listening to other people’s descriptions. I knew about Godard, Truffaut, and films like Kramer vs. Kramer and On Golden Pond, but I hadn’t seen any of them. China had these films, but they were locked away in an archive, to be seen by film insiders and people with special privileges."
The end of the article has a list of his films, useful as a checklist, because I just realise I still have not yet seen "Dong" and "Useless", his latest documentaries. There is also another list of recommended non-Jia movies, most of which are pretty decent.

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves 2008)

These days, it is relatively easy to hype a film to the Internet geeks, make it the talk of the days on the Blogs. Snakes on a Plane, Hulk, Cloverfield - all Internet phenomena that will usually not reflect the internet hype in a real life setting. Cloverfield is, actually, a nice little crappy B movie, with uninspired actors, a lot of helicopters, even more military personnel to shoot the crap out of Godzilla (or not: not the crap out of, and not Godzilla, but some wormy thing), and a monster of appropriate size and desctructive quality with little critters falling off it so it can also reach out to those heroes hidden away within skyscrapers or subway tunnels (always weak points of Godzilla films - even though Roland Emmerich cheated his way into the subway tunnels by alternating monster sizes at his will and really pissing me off with that nonsense).
It is not a real film, of course, no input for the brain, and would be much better had they not chosen the PG strategy - the film could do with some ripped-off heads, chests and clothes. Still entertaining, though, and pleasantly short. But the South Park Episode with Barbara Streisand as Godzilla where she gets thrown into Outer Space by the singer of The Cure is much better, of course.

Wong Kar-wai in Slate Magazine

Even though the guys at "Slate" have a more sober attitude towards Wong's latest films in particular than I have (Mood for Love, 2046 being repetitive efforts - yes, we knew that, but that was somehow the point, was it not?), they still have the fair point that currently it looks as if this without doubt visionary and visually inspiring director is somehow stalled. Even though I have not seen it yet, My Blueberry Nights does not appear to be the re-invention of Sturm und Drang narration and cinematography, either. However, following his contemplating characters dream around for a while is still among the better movie experiences in any case. Just imagine to would have to spend the same time sitting through a Cheng KaiGe epic…

Das Papst-Attentat (somebody 2008)

4:52 min into the film, the scriptwriters had the nerve to actually write the infamous German line "das wird ein Nachspiel haben" (this will not be the end of it!" or something tacky like that). At this moment, I lost all hope that a film with one of the most virile German actors Heiner Lauterbach may be interesting despite the fact that it was produced as a tv movie for RTL. German private tv drama, it needs to be said, is of the poorest quality, and that is particlularly sad because the money is there, the training is there, but acting and storytelling is missing completely! Oh so completely. A train crash of a tv movie.

El Espinazo del diablo - Devil's Backbone (del Toro 2001)

So the earlier film by Guillermo del Toro I see after I watched Laberinto del Fauno for the second time, which may be important to mention, because had I seen Devil's Backbone first, I am pretty sure my assessment might have been considerably different. Devil's Backbone (of 2001) also takes war into the lives of children, this time the children in some kind of orphanage. The mansion they inhabit houses not just the typical social relationships a newcomer initially has to endure when joining such a group, but also a proper ghost, the ghost of Santi, a previous inhabitant of the orphanage who is believed to be missing since a couple of years. The new kid (Carlos) decides that interest is better than fear and seeks to investigate the mystery around the ghost. He succeeds, and this leads him and his buddies into darker territory, where it's not the ghosts they need to fear, but those who created them.
The film is a "ghost story" in a very traditional sense, in one line with the recent "Orphanage" (for which del Toro serves as producer, I believe), "Los Otros" or the whole tradition of gothic Haunted Hill House-style literature. This appears to be one of the darker traditions of the Spanish people in Europe and America (just read Marquez and Allende and Llosa…), and it is very nice to see it in such a pure fashion, not spoiled by the (perceived) need to add gore and gruel to the ghost because the narration is insufficient. Here it is done very well, and - just as in Laberinto del Fauno later - real world and fantasy world continue to convergence, and find each other in the end.

Roger Ebert Review
And plenty of praise from Guardian / Observer
And Scott Weinberg actually wording "masterful"