Decco's Reviews of Print and Film

  Movie : Grave of the Fireflies Rating: ***** "September 21st, 1945. That was the night that I died."      The words spoken above are the words first heard through the narrative of the main character of the series in the first ten seconds of the movie, ten-year-old Seita, as he falls to the floor weakly in a wrecked train station, and with his last breath, muttering the name of his four-year-old sister, Setsuko. Seconds later, a train station employee digs through the boy's pockets and finds a rusted candy tin, and, after tossing it out in the war-stricken field outside, the lid pops out, and spills out a small amount of bone and ash into the night. Fireflies then start to rise slowly like a reverse rain as a small girl's spirit springs from the can, and, after realizing the girl is Setsuko, and seeing the two join hands, walking away together into the rising glowing insects, the viewer knows how the movie has ended, and yet, wonders how it could have ever gotten th...

  Film : Pan's Labyrinth  Rating:  ***** "To obey, just like that for the sake of obeying, without questioning, that's something only people like you can do, Captain."     Darkness. A few agonized breaths struggling to breathe come into the soundwaves. A female voice hums a sweet lullaby. A paragraph sets the stage of Spain, 1944, in the aftermath five years after the Spanish Civil War. Drops of blood start to drip upwards of the cliff wall. We see the dirty, bloody hand of a young girl, Ophelia, taking her last breaths. A long ribbon of blood is dripping backward into her nostrils, and her pupils dilate as the narrator starts the prologue as the camera zooms into her eye.     Guillermo Del Toro's 2006 Spanish film, Pan's Labyrinth , is my favorite film of all time. Not only for its amazing cinematography, its plot, soundtrack, and or symbolism, but also the large sense of meaning and wonder it leaves you feeling. A film for adults, it feels like somet...