With the Oscars slowly creeping closer I thought I’d write about what I believe was the best film of the past year. I watched nearly every film that’s nominated for best picture and none of them come to close to being anywhere near as good as Pan’s Labyrinth. While it is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film it is unfortunately not nominated for Best Picture. That’s a real shame. It would win without question.
I wish the academy would consider dumping the foreign film category and just allow great movies to be recognized as best picture regardless of what language is spoken. In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth the language is Spanish. Normally I have a hard time watching movies with subtitles. I find it to be a real chore to have to read all the lines as well as keep up with what’s going on visually in the film. That was never the case with Pan’s however. The movie is truly a masterpiece. I was fascinated from beginning to end.
Here’s a quick synopsis of the film from IMDB.com:
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is the story of a young girl who travels with her pregnant mother to live with her mother’s new husband in a rural area up North in Spain, 1944, after Franco’s victory. The girl lives in an imaginary world of her own creation and faces the real world with much chagrin. Fascist repression towards the end of World War II (1944) is at its height in rural Spain and the girl must come to terms with that through a fable of her own.”
My other favorite films from this past year include Children of Men, Little Miss Sunshine, and Blood Diamond.
I’m sitting here listening to the new album from the British Prog band Threshold and I’m loving it. I’ve always liked their stuff in the past but this new stuff is really exceptional. The band has reinvented itself somewhat. What used to be a gentler Prog Rock band has now become a darker, heavier and meaner sounding act teetering more on the side of metal than hard rock. While the band has always used clean vocals I was surprised to hear some backup death metal style vocals compliments of Dan Swano. Totally unexpected. They’re still by no means on the level of Dream Theater when it comes to Prog Metal but they’re not far behind either.
