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[Nabubrush]

Somebody nice is right - there is plenty for all.

Wombles, have you seen A Better Tomorrow or any other of the earlier John Woo movies, before he came over here and sort of did the Hollywood thing? It's pretty fun if you like that sort of thing. Kind of chop-socky versions of Tarantino movies.

[linnea]

Somebody nice is right - there is plenty for all.

Wombles, have you seen A Better Tomorrow or any other of the earlier John Woo movies, before he came over here and sort of did the Hollywood thing? It's pretty fun if you like that sort of thing. Kind of chop-socky versions of Tarantino movies.

Oh man, I love John Woo movies... The Killer, Better Tomorrow I&II... the Mayan theatre here in Denver used to show double feature martial arts movies at midnight. That was one of my favorites, and I used to go quite a bit.

[theinevitable]

here in Denver

That is probably a kind of satisfying phrase to say right now, yeah?

[side_show]

I just saw The Queen, and it was surprisingly engrossing, and quite good.  I do recommend it.

[wombat]

The wombat household just saw Pan's Labyrinth. I can't remember if this has been discussed here and the thread has gotten too dang long to look back through.

The Technical Staff loved it.  Mrs Staff was not so pleased.  It was a lot more bloody than I expected and there was a lot more sepia-toned fascists and Spanish resistance than there were magical underground characters. Which is too bad because the creatures were really good (and didn't go around constantly shooting people.)  But the biggest flaw to me is that the central character seemed to have nothing to her. It's like the moviemakers thought that all they had to do to make her a sympathetic character was to have her be a little girl with a pretty face in a terrible situation. She didn't seem to have much of a personality and was always being forced to screw up at crucial points in order to move the plot along, which made what personality she did have look like that of a fool if not a total fuck-up.

But hey, I am culturally retarded, so don't listen to me.  But also don't listen to, say, the Village Voice, whose review said "Pan's Labyrinth itself may be too cruel and bloody for children."  MAY be?  Hello? I am am afraid that I am going to have nightmares at my age, what with all the shooting and stabbing and torturing and smashing a guy's face to a pulp with a wine bottle.

[linnea]

omba, thanks for the heads up. I hate violent movies. I don't think I'll ever get to a point where they don't bug me.

[KeithHernandez]

I don't remember the violence, but I found it boring and cliche, especially the ending.

[theinevitable]

I liked it. Until I got in a big argument about it with a guy I know.

[KeithHernandez]

Everyone I know who saw it loved it, and that weirds me out a little.  Whatever, I don't argue about movies, especially not in real life.

[wombat]

Wow, it weirds me out that you don't remember the violence. Nothing personal  - it just really worries me to live in a society where it's so normal for, like, a couple dozen people to get shot and otherwise violenced-upon in a movie that it didn't make any impression on your memory.  And really, it IS so normal that why should you remember... but isn't there something wrong with that?

I also thought it was pretty cliched but one of the things there's no point in arguring about is where you draw the line between cliche and being part of a long tradition making reference to profound cultural archetypes blah blah blah.  It's all in the execution and the execution didn't do it for me.  It would certainly be possible to make yet another story about a hero who has to pass three tests and have it be great.  But you'd have to make more of an effort than having one of the tests be 'don't eat the feast in the monster's lair' and having the hero just go ahead and eat some of it without even apparently thinking about it or having a struggle about it. If you need her to screw up for plot purposes, at least justify it. Give her a personality and make the act consistent with it - how about setting up the character as being unable to resist the grapes because there's a war on and she hasn't had fresh fruit in years? Or make it make a little more sense in the situation - how about making a point of the fruit's magical attraction?  Instead of her just grabbing it and saying later 'I thought no one would notice.'  Did somebody sleep though a lecture in screenwriting class here or what?

[side_show]

I liked it, and think it's really well done.  I like things that tap archetypical forms and the collective unconscious though.  I really appreciated the use of the little girl as a much more traditional Everyman figure who is a conduit for the story, and liked that the film was driven by the story rather than by character.  Character driven film has become such a standard these days (The Queen, Ray, Monster, etc), and while I really enjoy watching a good performance, there's not a lot of storytelling craft in films of that sort.  I loved Pan's Labyrinth because of its structure and how it drew from a mix of fables and subconscious fears.  There's something very satisfying about that to me. 

The violence is very extreme.  The SO occasionally has these movie theatre seizure/blackouts when the tension builds too much in a plot (during Kill Bill he passed out and started speaking in tongues) and this one did it to him.  But traditional fables are often extremely violent as well, and while we get a cleaned up Disneyfied version in North America, brutality is actually an important part of storytelling tradition, related to teaching about the dangers of life within the "safe" structure of fiction.  This is probably why the majority of the artists I worked with at the children's theatre enjoyed the film so much.  We're pushed almost constantly to present sanitized, inoffensive content to young people, while we know that childhood is never like the picture we're pressured to present.  Kids are drawn more and more to stories intended for adults because children's entertainment lacks honesty.  I'm not saying Pan's Labyrinth is a children's film, but the film makers are saying something with their violence.  *SPOILER ALERT*  When the stepfather is sewing his mouth shut into the almost cartoonish grin, something is being said to the viewer, it's not done simply for gross-out factor,  the shot is steady and it's left to audience members to look away if they must, and consider why they are being show this moment. *END of SPOILER ALERT*

On the other hand, I can easily understand why people might not enjoy this movie.  It's very far outside the Hollywood tradition of filmmaking, yet it was marketed in a way that presented it as a flight of fancy on-line with Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.  I've certainly talked to a lot of people who were expecting something very different from the film.   Also, while I defend the violence because it was purposeful in the structure, I can't deny that it's extremely brutal, which can be way too much for some people.

[Doc]

I'ma throw my weight behind PL as well. It is rather graphically violent but I would argue (though it's been a while since I've seen it) that it is not continuously violent and it is appropriately violent. What I mean is that while the violence is pretty extreme it comes in short bursts rather than throughout the whole movie and since most of the violence comes from the stepfather I think it is appropriate since he is representing a very particular world (with Pan representing the other more mystical but still dangerous world). That said it's not a kids film, I believe it even had an R rating over here and (I'm not trying to be a dick to Wombat here) when you're going into an R movie you should probably trust them that it deserved that rating.

The reason I love PL most is that it is just a pleasure to watch, there's such variety and some really cool and weird scenes that just make it enjoyable to look at regardless of the story. Is that weird to say? So many movies these days just use the camera to show the story, not to provide any stimulation in it's own right if that makes sense. Hero was another movie that made me feel like this.

[wombat]

Well, as for the rating, I went into this movie knowing nothing about it - it was just something the Technical Staff had ordered me to add to the Netflix queue.  So I was kind of surprised when the rating came up on the screen - just from looking at the box it looked like some kind of fantasy, which is not the kind of movie which usually involves people getting shot in the face.

Oh, and now I remember, they kind of fooled us at the beginning - we thought the rating was because of the cussing - we had several conversations about "Did they really say fuck" wherein my Spanish vocabulary was tested, and about whether you could get a lower rating by translating the curses wrong or whether the raters would assume that some of the viewers understood the Spanish.  But then they stopped cussing and started shooting.

Well, you know, you can tell from many of my previous posts that I totally don't get the whole business of violence in movies. There were plenty of other ways to show how evil the stepfather ways - and they did use them to the extent that I thought they were beating a dead hoss at some points.  I was quite sufficiently repulsed by that character before the blood started - at which point I become more distracted by wondering why the moviemakers do this than I'm understanding anything more about the character or situation.  So what does it add?  I have enough opportunities to be nauseated in real life - I don't need a movie for that. I will just never get it.

[Nabubrush]

Wombles, remember when I recommended John Woo? Yeah, you should probably ignore that.

[wombat]

I saw some funny martial arts movies once. That one with soccer in the title? I think Cort recommended it.  But if 'chop-socky versions of Tarantino' means that karate chops are causing fantastical bloody injuries.... yes, better not.