When I decided to do a month of sci-fi movies I feel like I should have already seen, I didn’t realize that all of the greats were going to be from the 70s or that they’d be experimental and transgressive to the point that I’d start to feel like maybe I hate movies. I only knew that I had to include this movie that I was aware of from almost the time it was published and came very close to watching several times but always pulled back for some reason. Maybe because I was afraid it was going to be too disturbing, maybe because I had it a little mixed up with One Hour Photo, another Robin Williams drama from about the same time.
Robin Williams was the first actor I decided to search for and watch everything that came up, though I started to question that decision when I saw Jakob The Liar, and I ended up leaving a lot of what already existed at the time unseen. I’ve since closed that gap a little bit, but this one, which should be exactly in my wheelhouse even if it’s not a comedy, since it’s a sci-fi story speculating on the mind and perception, I stayed away from, because I was worried about what secret from his past the character was going to be unsettled by.
The one thing I know about this movie is I’m pretty sure it’s the standard-setter for modern “fast zombies”. I don’t consider myself a horror fan, so I wasn’t that interested at the time. Now I’m doing a zombies month and dip into horror a few times a year on this blog so I guess my tastes have expanded, but it’s still not one of my top genres.
Looks like a lot of wasteland-type zombies, maybe similar to I Am Legend, which was a zombie movie even if the look in that one was more like vampires.
A large part of why I’ve avoided this movie is because I have always confused it with Showgirls. I don’t know much about that movie either, but I realized I was confused whenI went looking for the movie poster for Dreamgirls and didn’t see the weird leg women, a design that told me enough to stay away.
What I do know is that Eddie Murphy is in it somehow. I always imagined him as the Emcee in front of a cabaret show, but that’s because of the confusion with the other movie.
After watching the movie:
In the early 60s, the Dreamettes, a trio of Black girls trying to get a singing act off the ground, enter an R&B talent contest at the Detroit Theater. While they don’t win, they do attract the attention of Curtis Taylor jr, a Cadillac salesman angling to enter the music business. Curtis offers to try to get them the gig as the backup singers behind Jimmy Thunder Early on his tour, acting as their manager and agent. Deena and Lorrell are eager to accept, but their lead Effie is hesitant to do backup, afraid that as backup singers they’ll have a hard time stepping out from behind the star, but ultimately accepts for the benefit of her friends and her brother C.C., their songwriter. Curtis soon worms his way in as Jimmy’s manager too, supplanting his longtime agent Marty, and they have modest local success with their first single until a white artist steals the song and makes a national hit. Curtis liquidates his dealership to fund a payola campaign to get their next song on the charts while pursuing a relationship with Effie and promising her own record soon. When Jimmy’s act fails to appeal to white crowds the way he hoped, Curtis separates him from the trio, now renamed the Dreams, and plans a national music domination campaign with them, but with Deena in front as a younger, lighter, more broadly appealing face and pop-friendly voice. Cheated of her stardom and feeling physically ill, Effie is disillusioned and increasingly belligerent with the group, until Curtis hires a replacement. Having just learned that she’s pregnant, Effie leaves Rainbow Records on her own, and Deena, Curtis’s new girlfriend, is on the way up.
Apparently the best way to go into a movie cold is to mistake it for a completely different one. I have to say I was rather relieved to realize that I was thinking of the wrong movie as I watched. An exploration of the Detroit sound music industry through the 60s and 70s is much more attractive to me than what turns out on looking it up to be an even more explicit portrayal of stripper life than I realized. I have no idea why Showgirls came into my awareness about the same time as Dreamgirls. I always thought that they came out at about the same time, but they’re almost exactly a decade apart.
I thought the setting was going to be a mainly aesthetic backdrop at first. It wasn’t until “Cadillac Car” got stolen by a white singer that I started to get the sense that this was going to be a history lesson about the business. I had to read after the fact that this is directly inspired by the story of Motown Records and the Supremes, but I probably could’ve gotten a clue from the obvious Jackson Five pastiche we see a few times as an example of a Rainbow Records act not directly involved in the plot.
I wasn’t sure how well Eddie Murphy was going to fit, especially with the setting, but he can take a turn for the dramatic so well it’s a surprise he doesn’t do it more often. He turns out to play a manchild in a serious world perfectly, and sings so well you wouldn’t know his earnest solo discography is often called forgettable at best (though he does do a lot of singing in comedy, come to think of it). I also don’t really think of Jennifer Hudson as a singer, and so I was surprised her credit here was “introducing”, but apparently she’s considered a singer before being an actor. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I was blindsided to realize that Deena was played by Beyonce. She disappeared completely into the role. However, even among all these luminaries, my eyes were always on Jamie Foxx when he was in the scene, quietly becoming the villain. I was also pleasantly surprised to see Jaleel White in what turned out to be a smaller role than I thought right at the beginning. I’m sure he’s been doing things since playing Urkel on Family Matters and Sonic on the 90s Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon (something I only learned a few years ago), but he hasn’t been nearly as visible, so it’s nice to see him getting to have something like a normal career after the national fame/infamy.
One thing that’s always interesting with musicals about show business is how they balance the songs that are happening because a character is actually singing and songs that are happening because it’s a musical and characters get to sing. The first song that isn’t initiated by someone being on a stage, behind a piano, or in front of a microphone happens about 30 minutes in, by the point I’d assumed there weren’t going to be any non-diegetic songs. Even so, almost every in-world number is thematic to the moment it takes place in, though they can get taken out of context and re-arranged for plot reasons too. C.C. is actually increasingly frustrated with Curtis ruining his songs by changing the soulful tune he had in mind into something poppier, but every one that Curtis changes is mostly just “yeah, that’s a different way to do that song and I can kind of tell it’s more dazzle and less heart”. The two changes that are calculated to hurt the most are “One Night Only”, which, while it’s an arrangement that takes it into a different mood, the real turn is how the meaning is turned on its head just by flipping a pronoun from “you’ve got one night only” to “I’ve got one night only”; and the theft of “Cadillac Car”, which manages to ruin the song entirely, as if drowned in mayonnaise.
I’m coming to notice how much I appreciate stories told across decades so we can see how people change in the long term. I’m not sure the characters change so much as the historical environment they’re in, but that’s also fascinating to watch unfold in over ten years. The songs and intrigue are a lot of fun, but it’s also just fascinating to see the world they live in evolving and how they adapt to fit in it. The songs, while really well done, are already kind of fading from my memory, but the trek through music history is what’s sticking with me from this movie.
I remember being unclear if this was ever on the stage when it came out or if it was original to the screen, just because I’d never heard of the musical before. Apparently it opened in the 70s, and what surprises me even more is that the musical was based on a play from 1926, so its origin wasn’t even a period piece.
There was a brief period in the 2000s when a lot of the great Broadway musicals of the last few decades were brought to movie theaters. Rent is one of the most modern musicals in that sweep, but what I know about it is basically “a bunch of young friends trying to keep going when their high rent is starving them” and “the AIDS musical”.
I pointedly stayed away from this movie. I didn’t want anything to do with the 2012 doomsaying because it was a load of bunk and hucksters were coming out of the walls to scare and fleece people, so I certainly didn’t want to touch the big blockbuster movie profiting off of that hype. Anything cosmological being cited was clearly nonsense or overblown, and the much-touted Mayan calendar was almost certainly a case of “plotting out thousands of years in the future is good enough for now”. But I think twelve years (15 years since release) is enough time to put some emotional distance in place.
I recall pretty well the appearance of this movie on the media landscape. I don’t think I saw any trailers, but Audrey Tautou’s face was suddenly in a lot of places. I never got any sense of why people loved this movie, but it looked like a painting and was probably a romance, so I never really took an interest in it. But it kept being out there, and when I decided to do a tour of foreign-language movies, this was an easy pick.
I have to wonder if I’d have been more enticed by a direct translation of the French title. “Amélie” tells me nothing except that it’s about a girl named Amélie. “The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain” at least conveys some kind of tone and direction.
I’m pretty sure I remember promotion for this movie, which is strange because foreign films hardly ever get significant US advertising campaigns. However, I have very clear memories of ads for the subsequent English-language remake with a slightly different title confusing me because wasn’t this the same story that came out a couple years ago?
I remember a lot of window knocking and vampires in the snow. I think it’s a coming of age movie, so it would center around children? The title sounds like there are good vampires and bad vampires and you have to know which one to invite inside (a vampire rule I think this movie introduced to me).
I never really had much interest in this movie when it came out. It looked like a horror movie thanks to the prominence of the Pale Man and I did not do horror movies even in 2006. This is the movie that made me aware of Guillermo del Toro as a filmmaker and probably most others, especially in this country. But mainly what I could say about it is that it appeared to be fantastical and dark story with a lot of fantasy production design and monsters.
I have a dim recollection of there being some buzz that this big budget tentpole movie is entirely in Spanish but I couldn’t have named it as a thing I knew about it until I was reminded very recently. In the past few weeks I’ve been watching a Latin American TV show and I’ve been impressed with how well I can follow it at this point in my learning of Spanish and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do a month of non-English language movies.
After watching the movie:
Once upon a time, it is said that Princess Moanna was so consumed with curiosity about the human world that she went to see it for herself, was struck blind and amnesiac by the sunlight, and died, but her father, the King of the Underworld, believing she would return, built labyrinthine portals around the world for her and swore to wait until the end of time if necessary. In 1944 Francoist Spain, Captain Vidal of the Francoist forces mopping up the last republican rebels, summons Ofelia and her pregnant mother to his post so that he can see his son as soon after birth as possible. Ofelia detests Vidal and refuses to call him her father, and tells the fairy tales she’s obsessed with to her unborn brother to calm him through the difficult pregnancy. Along the road, Ofelia sees a large stickbug and believes it to be a fairy, which is confirmed to her when it comes to her room that night and transforms into a humanoid leading her into the nearby labyrinth to meet a faun that tells her she is the reincarnation of Princess Moanna, and if she completes the three tasks a magic book will only reveal to her when she’s alone, she will regain her immortality and return to her throne. The rebels Captain Vidal viciously persecutes seem to have unusually good help in the region, and it transpires that the captain’s housekeeper Mercedes and the doctor Vidal brought to save his son and if possible also his wife are secretly supplying them with food, medicine, and information. Ofelia becomes aware of this but doesn’t report them, as she can see that Vidal is cruel and not on the side of right, but also she’s more focused on her escape from this life into the world of the fae.
The duality of this movie feels like more of a hindrance than a strength. On the one hand, there’s the fairy tale story that’s very expertly rendered on screen but which I didn’t find very compelling because it’s a (graphic and gory) fairy tale with pretty standard tropes, and on the other hand, there’s the story of the dictatorship’s rebel-hunting captain and his hypocrisy and hubris against the desperation and risk-taking of the rebels under his nose, which I was much more taken with because of the more grounded humanity vs. fascism plot. Captain Vidal is a despicable villain you really want to see get defeated (which I suppose is the modern fairy tale), but the fairy side of the story is a few episodes of monsters and tricks and I found the only real tension to be how the human world plot that’s too big for Ofelia to affect but only respond to and escape from would interfere with her fantastical hero’s journey.
Del Toro’s insistence on producing this movie in Spanish means its cast is full of actors that are completely unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences. I wish I knew more of López, Verdú, and Angulo’s work. However, I simply don’t have enough to be able to really speak to their performances, other than that I was always watching López and Angulo whenever they were on the screen and as I came to realize the importance of Mercedes I watched Verdú closely too. The actor I do know is Doug Jones. In a movie otherwise filled with Spanish actors, Del Toro selected one of the best big-creature workers in Hollywood. As a very tall and flexible performer, his career has been almost entirely buried under latex and it seems more often than not dubbed over by other actors with bigger names. An alum of my school, he came back to star in a student film as a regular guy and when I learned who he was, I was very happy for him to have the chance to play just a regular guy, even if outside of Muncie, IN it’s one of his least known films (he does appear to have had other work without prosthetics, but also lower profile than his creature work). He learned Spanish to play the Faun, but was dubbed here too, though his work made the dub work better than if he had learned the lines phonetically. I’m glad to see him getting the recognition now that he was only beginning to receive when I first learned his name.
The greatest strength of this movie is the lush visual design. The mid-2000s were a great time for sci-fi/fantasy movies because CGI was expensive enough that they only used it where they needed it, limited enough that they put in the work to play to its strengths, and new enough that they gave it enough time to get it absolutely right, while practical work was also at a high state of maturity that truly impossible things could be absolutely convincing. It was a time when they made movies perfectly suited for behind the scenes featurettes rather than filler for streaming services. I believe the Faun is almost entirely practical, but between the prosthetics, the performance, and the lighting/color grading, he is a completely believable creature you’ve never seen before. Everything in the fantastical episodes looks like a page from a lovingly illustrated storybook, and the civil war story is one of the best-looking war movies I’ve ever seen.
I wish I knew more about the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans and the Nationalists. In history as taught in this country, Spain falls out of the narrative after the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, and their contribution to 20th century history is mainly from being the only country that was documenting the 1918 pandemic. I wish I cared more about the fairy tale. There is no Pan’s Labyrinth without its fairy tale, and it’s certainly one of the most beautiful and terrible fairy tales I have ever seen, but I just never felt the tension in that side of the movie. As much as this is very likely Del Toro’s masterpiece, I think I’d rather see Hellboy or The Shape of Water again.
I think the main thing I know about this movie is the big secret that drives the plot. The core mystery is about finding out how a magic trick is done, so I suppose it’s about a younger or rival magician trying to learn the master’s secrets. I’m not sure how an entire movie can come out of that, so I don’t know what’s going on around it.
I believe I’ve heard there’s a lot of Christopher Nolan’s philosophy of moviemaking in how the character approaches being a magician. I recall some discussion of looking through this movie for clues of what Nolan was going to do with the Dark Knight trilogy, or that The Dark Knight Rises was going to be Nolan’s Prestige in the trick he was performing with Batman. I’m not sure that panned out, but speculation drives engagement.
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