If you want to lose your last thread or grasp of hope that your faith as a child in magic meant anything real, believe wholeheartedly in this film.

Rating: 1/10 (25 January 2007)

Okay, I can grok a brilliant film; desperately intelligent, heartbreakingly reaching, meaningfully justified by its own (sudden, like a flash, i.e. brilliant) unique sense of self. I mean, I went back and saw 'being John Malcovich' 4 times in the theater before they stopped showing it! (the only other film I've ever become so immediately obsessed by was 'much ado about nothing'; is there a connection?) I just love any movie that obviously questions itself to the point of letting art happen. This can almost always make for a 'good' film. This film was good, but it was wrong, very wrong, and therefore, 'bad'. Okay, it was horrible. For real want of better means here I will attempt to explore, crippled by the in-articulate (my own) the why I am believing this.
Simply, the very heart or value of a fairy tale has always (secretly, or, 'that something which should not be mentioned but is universally known'...) been its dependence on the mystery of a moral reality.
By the word 'reality', it is presumed, without self conscious realization, to mean or be inexorably linked with the meaning behind the word 'morality'. That is, that that which happens in some circumstance, no matter how hopeless seeming, is somehow also revealing a deeper hope that would allow such a hopeless thing to seemingly be. This allowance is only for the sake of being ultimately, utterly beneficial for the developing identity of the observer or source perceiver. Or in other words, from the 'victims' point of view towards realising a self creating, divine 'forgiveness; or, from their eternal point of view, gratefulness realised. That is, this magic that makes morality the foundation of all and any true story also a fairy tale from the point of view of one who is lost amidst their own forever mysterious and developing story.
Fairy tales are built off of this world as a word, or an other-worldly unconditional point of view called love.
This film perverts this great tradition of human kind by attempting to presumptively build a fairy tale off of a fairy tale, rather than from (a faith in) reality first; and this to the ends of subverting the original magic of a true, faery story.
This is deeply shameful. I can't seem to grasp quite how bad this film really is, much less articulate it; but because I somehow just know how bad this film is I am inclined and motivated to try, and here it was.
I will this say to summarize. If you want to lose your last thread or grasp of hope that your faith as a child in magic meant anything real, believe wholeheartedly in this film.