Winter's Tale
Narnia for adults, since it deals even more explicitly with death of young girls and children, plus sex, but then it’s PG-13 for no fucking reason whatsoever. Just because it’s magical realism, doesn’t mean it’s for children.
This was adapted from a massive book and it shows, the world building is there, just glossed over. At the turn of the century, Russian immigrants are barred in Elis Island (located in Grand Central Station for some monetary reason), but they push their kid in a model boat, like Moses.
Decades later, he’s a street urchin/cat burglar running from a Fagin figure, when a horse flies him out of troubles. Not even a regular horse, it’s both Pegasus and a dog (some Orion Belt star?). He is about to lay low outside New York for a while, when the horse makes him rob another wealthy manor.
As he opens the safe, he hears Brahms in a piano, meets his destined soulmate, it’s love at first sight for both. She prepares some tea and they just hang out. She mentions her consumption, she is dying and sleeps on a tent in the rooftop. Her body needs to remain cold at all times. She also mentions she’s a virgin, her condition means she can’t know anyone. Since they are both leaving town, they might not see each other again.
Our boy is infatuated now, the bad devils go after the girl to kill her, but the horseman saves her, takes her back to her father, asks for her hand basically, even thought he has no money, and hangs out in their tents for a while. She needs to sleep in the tent on the roof, but our boy is constantly watching her, and gets flustered when she comes outside wearing nothing. He correctly interprets that as an invitation and she demands sex, before she dies. He gives her the requested dick, but she dies afterwards, even after he brings her lifeless body to the special Sleeping Beauty spot.
Fast forward 100 years to New York and the same guy is an amnesiac hobo, drawing his lover in chalk on Central Park. He finds a woman with a small child which is also dying of cancer. She works on a newspaper, owned by the lover’s sister. Good thing he loved a rich girl, or the family would be scattered.
He keeps remembering more stuff, but the devils are still around, but work in Wall Street now. The dying kid also has red head (hair and chemotherapy? What?), so he things she’s some reincarnation of his lover, and takes them to the Sleeping Beauty spot for saving.
The devils chase them, and the main one resists the horse’s attack, so our boy goes mêlée on him, shanking him in the neck. He did a deal with Lucifer to make this battle count, so he turns into snow.
The little girl is saved, the guy rides the horse into the stars, the final voiceover might as well be reading from the bible. But this is PG-13 for the cash, so Christ and God go unmentioned.
I think the meet cute is supposed to be with two very young people, and not a teenage girl and a guy 30 years older. Then he needs to kiss a toddler, I feared the worst.
The cast is absolutely insane. The older couple are Jessica “The Banishing” Brown Findlay and Colin Farrell in his natural accent. Then she dies, and 100 years later Jeniffer Connelly just shows up for a bit part. Lucifer himself is Will Smith, and his daemonic enforcer is Russell Crowe, also in his natural accent. The old lady is Eve Marie Sant, from North by Northwest, she must have been 90 years old, perfect casting.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.