[Rictor]

I just saw it at the Toronto Internationall Film Festival. Freaking awesome. It's not just plain awesome, it's jawesome!

I'de say it easily deserved a 9/10.

So a little run-down. Directed by Guillmero del Toro, who did The Devil's Backbone (never saw it, have no idea what it's about.) It's basically a fairy tale set on the backdrop of real-world events. Specifically, a little girl (the protagonist) and her pregnant mother are shipped off to stay with a captain (as in military) and his battalion in the remote woods of Franco's Spain circa 1944.

Parralel to that, the girl gets wrapped up in all sorts of super-natural shenanigans. The style, especially for the magical cretures and environments, has a definite Tim Burton quality to it, by which I mean equal amounts of wonderful and dark. The mood and structure of the movie are quite similar to Mirrormask (if anyone except me saw it), though more subdued than Mirrormask's all-out visual craziness.

Definitely worth seeing when it comes out in theatres or on video, or if, like me, you're lucky enough to catch it at a film festival. I'll post my review of The Fountain (Darren Aaronofsky who did Requiem for a Dream) when I see it in a few days.

So, has anyone seen any other non-maintstream films lately, or am I the only one with some culture up in this joint. Speak up, ya philistines!

[Ransom]

God damn it, I won't have a chance to see The Fountain for months. You're a bastard.

That aside, Pan's Labyrinth just got into my 'Films to see' list. Mirrormask was brilliant. On the subject of non-mainstream films, I did see Brick a few weeks ago -- I'm a sucker for neo-noir.

As I recall, The Devil's Backbone is a ghost story of some sort. I actually hired it when it first arrived on DVD a few years back, but the disc was NTSC so I wasn't able to watch it.