Elsewhere, 12/31

Most of this GreenCine interview with Guillermo Del Toro naturally focuses on Pan’s Labyrinth, but I found this quote to be the most interesting bit:

We live in times that have huge disdain for anything even remotely enlightening or uplifting… I believe that irony has usurped the place of intelligence. The easiest position to have intellectually is to have disdain for something. It’s so easy to disqualify, because the standards are completely gone. In a very iconoclastic way, we took them down one by one. The easiest way to pretend to have intelligence is to be ironic and dismissive. We live in a time where you have to be much braver to be romantic and involved in what you do than to be even ironic.

Jeffrey Overstreet reviews Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the year’s most acclaimed films:

This film would probably have delighted Tolkien and Lewis, who believed that fairy tales — even dark and troubling myths like this one — serve to help us explore spiritual mysteries and apprehend the reality of grace as it glimmers through a glass, or in this case a screen, darkly. Pan’s Labyrinth is a parable so profound it’s like the gospel masquerading in a mysterious disguise.

Please, please, please let this come to Lincoln soon.

Ever wonder what it would be like if all of the James Bonds sat down and played cards together? Via

‘Tis the end of the year, which means countless folks firing up their list-making machines and elaborating on what knocked them for a loop during the last 12 months. Most lists are fairly predictable — my own included — but there are a few that rise above the rabble and are truly worth reading. The AV Club’s “Least Essential Albums” list, with categories such as “Least Essential Album By An Actor Pretending To Be A Shit-Kicking Country Boy” and “Least Essential Rachael Ray Branding Venture (Music Division)”, is one of those.