Another movie everybody has seen but me. Even though it was directed by Jim Henson, I was surprised by the number of puppets involved. I was overwhelmed by them: I think even more than in the all-puppets-all-the-time The Dark Crystal, but I haven’t seen that since it was in the theaters and I was 11, so my puppet tolerance may well have decreased in the intervening years.
Jennifer Connolly is very young here, and her accent is strangely British, which I suppose has to do with the movie being shot in the UK when she was at a linguistically impressionable age.
Labyrinth was mostly written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and in retrospect you can see his handiwork. Certainly the interest in quests and fairies and dwarves, et al. The film has its absurdist and amusing bits, but it’s not really Python-quality in most places. At the same time, I think I understand the nostalgia that a lot of people have for this film, down to the not-half-bad musical extravaganzas such as “Dance Magic Dance,” although I will complain about the difficulty inherent in parsing the song’s title. Is he commanding the magic to dance? Is he suggesting that the dance magic should dance? Maybe the dance should do the magic dance? Very hard to tell.
I was impressed with a lot of the pre-CGI tech of the film, especially after watching the making-of featurette on the DVD. The Goblin King’s bubble-juggling, the various larger-than-life puppets, and the Escher-iffic set piece at the end are all worthy of accolades.
Somewhat disturbing is David Bowie’s Goblin King package, which is a little too leotardinously exhibited for an ostensible kids’ movie. Also, his hair is Joe Dirt mulletistically bad. If you find my coinage of “leotardinously” and “mulletistically” gratuitous, be grateful that I refrained from coining “spandexticular.”
Interesting item: The eagle-eyed Jessica noticed from the making-of that the choreographer of the ball scene, Cheryl McFadden, was the exact same person who later called herself Gates McFadden and played Beverly Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Do I need any other reason to marry her (i.e., Jessica, not Cheryl/Gates)?
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