Last night I saw a movie for the first time in ages and ages (okay, a month). I thought I'd long since missed my chance to see Mirrormask, but I caught it on what I think was really its last night in town.
I'm generally interested in anything Mr. Gaiman (the screenwriter) is involved in, partly because he's done some remarkable things, and partly because he's just such a nice guy. Considering the mixed reviews it got, though, I wasn't expecting to be impressed by this one. Oh, but I was.
Sure, it was uneven, parts were boring and/or confusing, and it could have been cut a lot shorter without losing much. But it also offered a fascinating metaphorical examination of what it's like to be a girl at the edge of adolescence.
Helena, the pre-adolescent heroine, gets lost in a dream-city that seems to have been inspired by her own drawings. The windows of the buildings in this city look into her own bedroom, from the walls where her drawings hang. Peering through these windows, Helena sees a dark doppelganger of herself taking over her world: wearing punk clothes and heavy makeup, acting hateful toward her father, kissing a boy (gross!), and gleefully destroying things that are precious to Helena. When the child-Helena shouted in vain from a drawing, "Dad, don't listen to her! That's not me!" I got that weird déjà vu feeling.
When we left the theater, we discovered a huge old mobile stairway-thing right in the middle of the walkway. It was unmanned; apparently whoever was changing the marquee had decided it was time for a break. So, of course, I climbed it. The marquee letters were brittle and hard to move, so I didn't actually get to help out with the sign-changing. But the view sure was nice from up there.
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