Christopher Robin Is Effectively Morose And Heartfelt

Between my life-long love for Winnie The Pooh, my adoration for Ewan McGregor as an actor and me constantly being drawn to melancholy pieces of art, on paper it appears Christopher Robin was made exactly for my sensibilities. There's a world of difference between what's on paper and how those concepts are handled in an actual film, Lord knows there's loads of pop culture that, conceptually, should have been right up my alley that ended up just falling flat due to lackluster execution. Thankfully, Christopher Robin, directed by Machine Gun Preacher helmer Marc Forster and based on a story by Alex Ross Perry, has been executed in a thoughtful manner with a deftly wistful touch that serves the story it wishes to tell quite well.

The Fountain Is Amazingly Grand In Both Its Visuals And Emotional Power

There exist a recurring subgenre of more substantive and ambitious high-concept fantasy/science-fiction movies dedicated to using the stylized tendencies ingrained into their specific genres to explore larger-scale ideas about mortality, our place in the world, death, etc. Some of the best films in this subgenre include A Monster Calls, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Cloud Atlas as well as the subject of this review, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, an absolutely beautiful motion picture that spans centuries and dances around the cosmos all in the name of an intimate tale depicting man's inability to cope with the looming prospect of death.

Coping With Grief At A Young Age Is The Crux Of The Phenomenal A Monster Calls

Contemplating on A Monster Calls after seeing it, I've come to the conclusion that the film is most reminiscent in tone of atmosphere of pop culture like Charles M. Schulz Peanuts comic strip or Spike Jonze's 2009 motion picture Where The Wild Things Are, slices of storytelling that dare to look at adolescence in an uncompromising fashion in a dramatically compelling way. After all, childhood isn't a portion of one's life that's just filled with ceaseless joy and wonderment, it's rife with its own set of unique challenges and struggles. To quote a blonde-haired self-proclaimed genius from the funny pages: "People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children." Much as we like to look back on childhood (like any part of our life that exists in the past) with rose-colored glasses, the reality of growing up as a youngster is much more emotionally complex and tumultuous.