The Cinematic Black Hole: Mirrormask
Friday, April 11, 2008
Dave McKean. His asthetic leans toward creepy, shadow-box inspired collages, which isn't my particular cup of tea. But lots of people like it. He's made a name for himself as an illustrator and artist, and he's written a bit, too. He got his start collaborating with Neil Gaiman; their collaboration made them both (relatively) famous. It was probably inevitable that they would wind up making a movie together.
Alas, that movie was Mirrormask.
Gaiman scripted this mess, and McKean "designed and directed" it. I do not deny that either man is gifted, arguably exceptionally. Sandman is great, at times extraordinary. I've already confessed that McKean's art isn't to my taste, but I recognize it as compelling nonetheless. Yet, somehow, the cinematic pairing of these two resulted in a terrible movie.
It was so bad we didn't finish it; Jared may have been willing to push through to the end, but after an exhausting 15 minute prologue made excruciating by flashing lights and pounding music and super-fast cuts and vertiginous angles, followed by scene after painfully long scene of static shots and heavy-handed exposition, followed in turn by an agressively fantastic alterna-world, I'd had enough.
Nope. Didn't even finish it.
I feel like I'm betraying my geekdom by consigning Mirrormask to the CBH - I mean, c'mon! Neil Gaiman! - but damn, this movie sucked. At least, the first however-much-I-watched of it did. So, rather than assign it some number of negative stars, I'm going to label it a movie that deserves to be forgotten, a failure rather than a soul-sucking fiasco, a move on with my life.