Everyone who's deeply interested in folklore, as I dare to say I am, knows the story of the Fairies of Cottingley, it's one nearly-epic story of the two girls who inadvertently made a half of the world actually believe in magical creatures (I don't count children, for they did, they do and they will believe, and that's wondrous), and the best part of the epic is that they had never straightforwardly confessed that they've forged it just not to ruin people's glimpse of faith in magical.
If that's what this movie should have been telling about then it certainly does not the job. Despite the wonderful and believable acting of Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl, the incoherent screenplay and direction ruin everything and only a shadow of the childhood magic remains in the dark corner pushed away by the social-drama clichés (they even managed to insert there a villain and the goddammit comic relief!). And the top-notch CGI doesn't help out. There's more magic even in ghost-story movies, such as 'Lady in White' or 'The Changeling'. Worth watching, but only once. I deeply hope that some day someone will make a movie worthy of this story's spiritual background, so you'd understand why some perfectly sane people believe in fairies, even without the photographs.
One of my favorite books is the collection of narrative tales, recorded in the middle of the 20th century among the Siberian villagers, mostly in the Chita region, by V.P. Zinovyev, and the thing I really love and adore in those stories is that those people actually believe all the folklore things they're speaking about! It's grievous that there are less and less such people live in this world, of that kind who believe because of the purity of the heart, not because of fear or passion. Some call those people dark and unenlightened, some laugh at them, but the thing they actually have is the faith, whilst everyone else have only a ghost of it. That who knows cannot believe.
If that's what this movie should have been telling about then it certainly does not the job. Despite the wonderful and believable acting of Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl, the incoherent screenplay and direction ruin everything and only a shadow of the childhood magic remains in the dark corner pushed away by the social-drama clichés (they even managed to insert there a villain and the goddammit comic relief!). And the top-notch CGI doesn't help out. There's more magic even in ghost-story movies, such as 'Lady in White' or 'The Changeling'. Worth watching, but only once. I deeply hope that some day someone will make a movie worthy of this story's spiritual background, so you'd understand why some perfectly sane people believe in fairies, even without the photographs.
One of my favorite books is the collection of narrative tales, recorded in the middle of the 20th century among the Siberian villagers, mostly in the Chita region, by V.P. Zinovyev, and the thing I really love and adore in those stories is that those people actually believe all the folklore things they're speaking about! It's grievous that there are less and less such people live in this world, of that kind who believe because of the purity of the heart, not because of fear or passion. Some call those people dark and unenlightened, some laugh at them, but the thing they actually have is the faith, whilst everyone else have only a ghost of it. That who knows cannot believe.