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Labyrinth

David Bowie in tights

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | June 27, 2007

4.0 Stars

VIDEO: Watch the original trailer for the Labyrinth.

Of course I imagined I was Jennifer Connelly. Of course I wanted to be whisked off to a fantasy realm and charged with saving my baby brother from the Goblin King. Of course I wanted to be the girl — tough and smart and beautiful — to tackle the labyrinth, fall down a tunnel of Helping Hands, watch a warty dwarf kill fairies, outsmart a pair of deaf-mute doorknockers, and dance with fire-starting limb tossers. But I did not — as a 10-year-old girl otherwise entranced with Jim Henson & George Lucas’s 1986 film — want anything to do with David Bowie’s Goblin King, all frosted eyelids and predatory gaze, lip-glossed, sinister, and ambiguously male. (His songs for the movie rule, however.) A seduction takes place when Connelly’s Sarah eats a drugged peach and hallucinates a costume ball, dizzy in a scene of sexual awakening. She’s dressed all womanly, and she dances slo-mo with the Goblin King, her expression one of fear and lust. I didn’t register it then, but what’s special about Labyrinth isn’t just the quest and the puppetry but the way it depicts, subtly, a girl struggling with leaving kid-dom.

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Topics: Reviews , David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Jim Henson, More

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