Currently trying to decide what to stream tonight. 🤔 🤔 🤔
@Apocryphiliac HAH! One of those films is NOT like the others. 😂 Have fun, whichever you choose!
@MLClark oh btw, TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID about destroyed me. 😆 Seriously amazing film.
@Apocryphiliac Right?! There's something rare and precious about taking the fantastical as seriously as a child would -- meaning, with every bit as much peril as everything else in their too-often fragile and violence-haunted worlds. Glad you "enjoyed" it -- for very particular uses of the word "enjoyed"! 😬
@MLClark I did enjoy it, a lot. I already posted about this, but I was so impressed and surprised by how they approached the idea of supernatural elements.... I am totally unaware of any discourse surrounding the film (I purposely avoid any press or foreknowledge of movies if possible) but I'm guessing many remarked on the Del Toro influences... Which I'm sure is valid, but this film has a much more interesting way of blurring the boundaries of real/unreal... Really amazed by it.
@Apocryphiliac We have such an impoverished vocabulary for these things, don't we? So we usually just slap the most familiar Western creator onto promos and call it a day. But I've watched my fair share of Spanish, South-, Southeast-, and East Asian films with spiritual elements, so that slipstream realism was super familiar. Hopefully we'll get better at talking about the range of "realisms" in our world soon! 🤞
@MLClark Oh for sure. Interested then, in your opinion on this point: did you take it as that the "blurred line" was important to distinguish, in metaphysical terms.. I don't want to reduce the beauty of the way they played it in that way... I think all elements, "natural" and "other" are supposed to co-exist here, without a need for judgement. People will get caught up in a debate much of the time on "what happened" but I feel like that is a very counterproductive approach here. 🤔 🤷♂️
@Apocryphiliac Oddly enough, it reminded me of Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a Thai-Buddhist meditation on a dying man whose journey into his past lives and estranged elements of this life all help to ready him for the next. In both films, for me, what's tangibly verifiable matters far less than the momentum either created or hindered by how we perceive ourselves and the world. The realness of events lies in how they move us: no more or less. 🙃
@MLClark and to your point, Yessss. Totally dead on.
The other thing that really moved me was how clearly the horrors of the "real" were portrayed so much more starkly than the "unreal" while never stepping out of the film's "world"--the established style... It was so pointed, so fluid and sure in the portrayal... The actors brought a ton of that into it... (the child cast was incredible!) and the direction ofc... Lopez is amazing. I'm really blown away by it.