So, look, I'm not going to budge from my position that nostalgia is the prion disease of culture. So many controversies over revived, rebooted or recast franchises have made the subtext text. You don't have to stretch to see a link between nerd culture fetishising its childhood as a lost arcadia and reactionary politics any more, you can just find a Facebook page for the latest franchise whose latest incarnation has dared to cast a woman or a POC or - horrors - a WOC and read the comments. When people are complaining that the casting in a new series of Star Trek - Star fucking Trek! - is too diverse, you know you're dealing with a mentality that has…

  The City of Lost Children is a wonderfully dark fairy-tale, spiced up by the visual flair of Jeunet and Caro.

There is something inescapably alluring about a dark tale that is about children but perhaps isn’t suitable for them. Stories like this often reside in between dark fantasy and light-hearted morality tale and this one is no exception. The conceit is rather classic, evil man tries to steal dreams from children. It is therefore not so much the content of the film that makes it so enjoyable, but most definitely the approach the pair of directors take to present it. It is visually as rich as it is grim.

Like their previous collaboration Delicatessen this film has a lovely…

When you're born in the gutter you end up in the port.
-Miette

A long time ago, in a movie theater far far away, the only film I had seen from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet was <a href="http://letterboxd.com/mr_dulac/film/alien-resurrection/reviews/"Alien: Resurrection. It didn't exactly ignite a desire in me to pursue anything in his filmography. Although my opinion on the director was dramatically changed after seeing Amélie for obvious reasons, it took over 15 years for me to finally see what I believe is the film that got Jeunet the Alien sequel... for all the wrong reasons.

The City of Lost Children is a dark and disturbing fairytale. I could easily see why a Hollywood studio would drool over the thought of getting…

I'm in awe of the crazy production design of The City of Lost Children. It is an original slice of surreal cinema that oozes creativity in every scene. The beautifully stylised fantasy world is the effort of unique filmmaking that embraces all kind of weird. The grungey look and odd shots (including loads of angled close-ups) contributes to a kind of adult fairytale. Which is strange as the humour is rather childish and part of the film seems to be that we are all children on some level. I think that's a weakness really, because The City of Lost Children has such a special style with horror inflections but the story is trope-heavy and feels mismatched for the dark, adult…

The pinnacle of gothic grotesquery, this takes everything that is wonderful about French film (the romance, the humour, the lack of a need for straightforward explanation, the pure joie de vivre) and wraps it into a fantastical fairy tale for both adults and children.

The production design is utterly stunning - every location feels tangible and lived in, anything that can take a rivet has a rivet in it, rendering the whole environment hugely tactile and real; which when added to the overall design (the kind of steampunk gothic whimsy that Tim Burton never got anywhere near even in his finest work) gives the entire film a dreamy/nightmare feel that actually could have come from your own imagination.

All of…

Close Encounters of the Feb Kind

World Tour 2020

Sadly, The City of Lost Children didn't *quite* land as well with me as it did when I first watched it, which was admittedly a very long time ago.

The story's just a bit too elusive at times and it really doesn't need to be. The complexity of so many characters and subplots is a distraction rather than an embellishment, even more so because the central story is an extremely strong one that is replete with possibilities all by itself.

But you know what you're going to get from Jeunet et Caro. Their visuals and their pile-on of eccentric characters are part and parcel of their films, and it's difficult to…

If Tim Burton had a nightmare after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would probably have turned out something like The City of Lost Children. Set in a twisted, cyberpunk, surrealist alternate post-apocalyptic reality, The City of Lost Children features more imagination per square inch then the average year's worth of films combined. The story follows One, a circus strongman who goes on a quest to save his little brother from the clutches of a mad scientist trying to steal the dreams of children. Along the way he joins forces with a tough young orphan named Miette, and meets a host of odd and colorful characters.

I could fill up a small novel just listing off some of the strange…

This is a difficult film to rate.
Here's the thing: Visually, the film is absolutely amazing. Marc Caro's art direction with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's inventive visual language is just perfection. Loved it, loved it, loved it. However, I was pretty lost on the story for the most part. My mind started to wander on its own and I had to rewind the film multiple times because I found myself not being really engaged with it. Just when I thought that all was lost, an amazing cinematic moment that Jeunet would obviously later expand on in Amelie happened around the one hour mark, and it all kinda came together after that. And then it ended. And the more I thought about it,…