Demob Happy

Scaling the dizzy heights ?
8/10
It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ - even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named Master Yehudi [...]

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More Icelandic fairytale prog from the band that specialises in Icelandic fairytale prog
6/10
Sigur Ros are fast becoming a Popular Experimental Band That I Don’t Like, a moniker I have only knowingly bestowed before on Spiritualised. On paper, Sigur Ros are a band that I should love, but it just doesn’t really engage me. For all [...]

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Newish spin on old horror standards
6/10
The Orphanage, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona in his debut feature, is a worthy genre movie that combines elements of numerous psychological horror films from The Others and The Sixth Sense to The Shining. Notably produced by Guillermo Del Toro, who is credited with invigorating Spanish horror with films such [...]

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The Chronicles of Oz in Wonderland
7/10
Guillermo Del Toro’s dark fairtytale was one of the most acclaimed films of 2006 - Alice In Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz brutally reimagined in Civil War Spain. 12-year-old Ofelia and her widowed mother, Carmen, have just moved into an abandoned mill with Ofelia’s cruel stepfather Vidal, an army [...]

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Fairytales and bad dreams
8/10
Innocence is a mysterious piece of of largely visual filmmaking with an impressive, mostly child cast. It is clearly intended as an allegory or parable about the end of childhood and the awakenings of adolescence, and is not meant to be treated too literally (clearly some people are puzzled by this, [...]

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