The Really Drawn-out Blog Cabins Decennial Spectacular: #8

Decennial, in case you're not hip to the term, means 1. relating to or lasting for ten years, or 2. occurring every ten years. It's really a word that we should hear more often. Anyway, this will be my series where I count down my favorites from the last decade, and since I don't plan on it taking 10 years to finish, we're going to go with the second definition.

Previous day's posts:
12/21: Intro/#10: Idiocracy
12/22: #9: Children of Men

Number 8 on the RD-oBCDS is...

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Alfonso Cuaron pops into the Top 10 of the 00s yet again. This time not as director, but as a producer of the Guillermo del Toro-helmed horror-fantasy period piece.

Pan showed us that the horrors of real life (war, specifically) will always be much darker than the monsters of our imaginations, while at the same time illustrating that the creativity locked inside our minds had the power to provide refuge from those all-too-real evils.

A powerful fairy tale, shot beautifully and enhanced tenfold by another imagination - del Toro's own, which filled the film with fairies, creatures and monsters unlike anything we'd ever seen before, giving us haunting images that serve as mental postcards of the film's evocative moods of danger, whimsy, and longing for a serene childhood that was not to be.