guillermo del toro | the m0vie blog

260. El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (#146)

Posted on November 13, 2021 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, with special guest Jack Packard, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, Guillermo Del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno.

In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl named Ofelia moves to her new stepfather’s house. As Captain Vidal ruthlessly hunts down the remaining rebels, Ofelia discovers that there is something enchanted lurking in the nearby woods. A mysterious faun promises to secret Ofelia away to a magical realm, if she can complete three tasks. As Ofelia finds herself caught between fantasy and reality, she discovers the sometimes the worst monsters are the human kind.

At time of recording, it was ranked 146th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: childhood, coming of age, Fairy tale, fantasy, feminism, guillermo del toro, horror, jack packard, metaphors, monsters, pans labyrinth, podcast, Spanish Civil War, The 250, the shape of water, violence | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Witches (2020)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Darren

The Witches offers a clumsy American update of the classic Roald Dahl novel.

To be fair, there is something potentially interesting in attempting to update The Witches, both for modern audiences and for American viewers. It’s to the credit of director Robert Zemeckis and co-writers Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro that they at least understand this. The Witches makes a number of alterations to its source material, and at least some of those reflect a genuine and compelling attempt to update the story to fit in a modern and American context.

Any witch way but loose…

At the same time, The Witches is a mess. Part of this is down to the way in which a lot of the appeal of Dahl’s story is lost in translation, as a wry and arch British story gets filtered through the hypersaturated Americana of one of the defining American directors, an even more exaggerated effect of what happened with Steven Spielberg’s work on The B.F.G. However, some of this is more fundamental, as Zemeckis struggles to balance tone and mood across the film, and finds his attentions drawn more to what his interests desire than what the plot demands.

The Witches is a misfire, but an intriguing one. There are hints of a much more compelling movie to found, sifting between its more misjudged moments.

Putting a (ro)dent in his reputation…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: anne hathaway, Chris Rock, film, guillermo del toro, horror, mice, Movie, non-review review, Octavia Spencer, racism, rates, review, roald dahl, robert zemeckis, the witches | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Shape of Water

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Darren

The Shape of Water is a beautiful emerald fairy tale, told from the fringes.

Set in the early sixties, against the backdrop of “the last days of a fair prince’s reign”, The Shape of Water promises to regale audience members with the story of “the princess without a voice” and “the monster who tried to end it all.” However the most striking aspect of The Shape of Water is in how it chooses to focus its magical story. The Shape of Water is a story largely about those who are silenced on the margins, right down to its decision to cast Sally Hawkins as protagonist Elisa Esposito, a mute cleaner working in a secret government lab.

He’s in a glass case of emotion.

The Shape of Water is very much an exploration of the concept of “the other”, of the lives of those who exist outside the confines of “normal” society. The film’s central antagonist is a happily married white American man, who finds himself set against a collection of misfits and outcasts; a mute orphan, a black cleaning lady, a gay designer, an immigrant scientist, and a monstrosity pulled from the depths of the Amazon river. Coasting from the conservative fifties, Colonel Richard Strickland faces the threat that everything he accepts as granted might be washed away.

The Shape of Water suffers from some minor pacing problems in its romantic adventure, but these are minor issues in a haunting and enchanting piece of work.

The Creature from the Black Ops Department.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Cold War, film, guillermo del toro, monster, Movie, non-review review, other, review, the other, the shape of water | 7 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Pacific Rim

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Darren

The generic way of describing Pacific Rim seems to be “Transformers vs. Godzilla“, which really says more about how hard it is to sell an original blockbuster these days than it does about the quality of the film itself. There are obvious and superficial similarities between Pacific Rim and the two film series cited – giant robots and monsters from the ocean – but that cynical synopsis doesn’t do justice to director Guillermo Del Toro’s bold vision.

Pacific Rim is a punchy old-school summer blockbuster, one which remembers that characters are the foundation of drama, and which imbues its flesh-and-blood cast with as much personality as the flesh-and-blood spectacle unfolding overhead.

Here there be monsters…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: arts, Charlie Day, del toro, film, guillermo del toro, Hong Kong, Idris Elba, Kanye West, michael bay, Movie, non-review review, Pacific Rim, r eview, ron perlman, transformers, Warner Bros | 2 Comments »

Watch! Mama Trailer…

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Darren

Universal just set over the new trailer for Mama, the new supernatural thriller produced by Guillermo del Toro. Del Toror is producing, and writer-director Andres Muschietti is making his theatrical début, having worked on a number of short films before this (including one called Mamá). It stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Jessica Chastain and follows the mysterious recovery of two missing girls years after their initial disappearance. It looks nice and atmospheric, and del Toro’s name is enough to make the film worth a look to me.

Give the trailer a watch and let me know what you think.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Andres Muschietti, Guillermo, guillermo del toro, Jessica Chastain, Movie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Short film, thriller | 4 Comments »

John Carter is Marred: Thoughts on Big-Budget Schadenfreude & Film Media Hypocrisy…

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Darren

Everybody is talking about Disney’s John Carter. And not in a good way. It seems that everybody is talking about the project’s huge budget and poor marketing, with many news outlets taking an obscene amount of pleasure in declaring Andrew Stanton’s live action project dead on arrival. Some have even started making comparisons to Waterworld, another science-fiction epic with a huge budget that failed to find an audience. In the interest of honesty, I haven’t seen the film yet; I am cautiously optimistic, but I can’t help but worry about the film. Still, I can’t help but feel like this is an example of an hypocritical “damned if do, damned if you don’t” logic from film writers and journalists all over the web, who seem to be salivating at the prospect of a huge studio being humbled by a blockbuster that might mess up the landing. The irony being that these are probably the same people who frequently deride the “safe” and “obvious” choices for blockbuster films, bemoaning the fact that directors like Guillermo Del Toro aren’t given the budget to make the films they want to make.

Does anybody "get" Carter?

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Andrew Stanton, disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs, guillermo del toro, hollywood, John Carter, oscar, Princess of Mars, Tars Tarkas, Taylor Kitsch, The Walt Disney Company, willem dafoe | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Warrior’s Way

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Darren

I don’t think that pulpy nostalgia lends itself particularly well to cinematic reimagining. We’ve seen a variety of high-concept mish-mashes on the big screen in the past decade or so. There was a time when Freddie vs. Jason was confined to the bargain basement of your local DVD store, but we’ve seen major theatrical releases like Cowboys & Aliens or Aliens vs. Predators in the past number of years – all based around the idea that you can pit a cool concept against another cool concept and the resulting movie will be “super-cool.” Essentially an opportunity to answer the age-old question of “who would win in a fight between cowboys and ninjas”, The Warrior’s Way has a few really enjoyable and gleefully silly moments, but they tend to get lost in the midst of an overly-stylised and too-heavily-green-screen-ed moments, with a skilled cast unable to inject life into a range of characters who are struggling to reach the second dimension.

Give it a stab?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Computer-generated imagery, Danny Huston, Dong-gun Jang, Ennio Morricone, film, Geoffrey Rush, guillermo del toro, kate bosworth, non-review review, review, Spaghetti Western, the warriors way, Warrior's Ways | Leave a comment »

Only Ourselves to Blame: The Sad Truth about the Mountains of Madness…

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Darren

The internet seems to be in mourning. There’s none of the angry fist-waving fury that we saw over the announcement of the planned sequels and prequels to Blade Runner, just a solemn sense of reflection. After it seemed that good news was on the way, word came down the wire that Guillermo Del Toro’s planned adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness would not be happening. Apparently Universal Studios have decided that instead of spending $150m on a genuinely respected classic horror story, they’d rather blow $175m on another shot at Doom. The two decisions probably aren’t directly related (in that I doubt it was an “either or” situation), but it’s fairly damning. However, I honestly don’t think we should blame the studio for any of this. And, that, my friends, is the sad madness-inspiring truth of it all: we have only ourselves to blame.

Del Toro's dream project met an icy reception...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: At the Mountains of Madness, blade runner, danny mcbride, edgar wright, films, forgetting sarah marshall, guillermo del toro, H. P. Lovecraft, Mountain of Madness, Movies, United States, universal studios | 8 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Agnosia

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

There were a lot of reasons to get excited about Agnosia, one of the anticipated highlights of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. The movie was written by Antonis Trashorras, the writer of The Devil’s Backbone, perhaps the film that put director Guillermo del Toro on the map. In fact, this film comes with an endorsement from del Toro himself, which has quite a large amount of weight among the film community. However, Agnosia lacks the magic or elegance of del Toro’s work, with director Eugenio Mira (whose last work was in 2004) able to craft a stylish visual design for the film – but never quite able to create a sense of magic or engagement.

99 Schwarz ballons...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: agnosia, agnosia (film), Antonis Trashorras, Devil's Backbone, Eugenio Mira, film, guillermo del toro, jameson dublin international film festival, MacGuffin, Movies, non-review review, pans labyrinth, review, Salvation Army, spain, spanish cinema | 2 Comments »

Why Del Toro Departing The Hobbit is a Good Thing…

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Darren

The Hobbit is dead. Long live The Hobbit. Look, we all know it’s going to happen. Like the next James Bond film, the economics of the situation dictate that it must happen – a spin-off from The Lord of the Rings is too lucrative an opportunity to pass up, it’s an excuse to print money. Think of all the simple/theatrical/standard/deluxe/super/extended versions of the films have been released on video/DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray. Now double that. So now you know why The Hobbit is going to happen, eventually. Unfortunately, I think we all know it’s not going to happen soon. And I’m here to tell you why Del Toro departing the film is actually a good thing.

Down the hobbit hole...

Note: This is part of a two-part article. Andrew over at the always wonderful Andrew at the Cinema is offering this article a jolly good rebuttal. Pop over and give it a read. Just make sure to spend a few minutes appreciating my flim-flam arguments before he pretty much destroys them with his advanced reasoning.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: andrew at the cinema, del toro, district 9, films, guillermo del toro, lord of the rings, mgm, Movies, neill blomkamp, prequels, the hobbit, the lord of the rings, trilogies | 6 Comments »