New Roof - Summer 2019
4 years ago
Friday, January 12, 2007
Buzz Buzz Buzz
We watched Pan's Labyrinth last weekend. It _is_ as good as they say. It's a Spanish film, so look for it for sure in the foreign film category at the Oscars. Maybe even in the best actress category for the 11-year-old lead. Here's an interview with the director. It's definitely one to check out when it comes out in your area.
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9 comments:
awesome! we're going to see it today! i'll post my thoughts after we see it.
i thought it was very, very good. though not life changing. and even though i'd read many reviews that used the adjective "horrific," i was still struck by how dark and disturbing it was at times. death of childhood, indeed. good thing we snuck into dreamgirls afterward to lighten the mood.
Definitely not life-changing, but, then again, most movies aren't. Yeah, I was really bummed after the movie. I was going to warn you about that, but I didn't want to spoil it. Brian said the ending was happy. I was like, "Dude, you're on crack." I'm always looking for unique with movies. This movie was so clever and unique, I thought, with its whole dark fairy-tale, Spanish Civil War thing.
i read the ending as saying that you can either be happy, living in a fairy tale, or miserable, living in reality. depends, i guess, on whether you take the fairy tale portions of the film at face value, or whether you question their existence in the first place. being in the latter camp, the ending, to me, is definitively miserable. (which is to say, i agree, brian is on crack.)
I'm in the latter camp as well. No kingdom. No princess throne. Just things sucking and then sucking some more. Brian is more the optimist-type.
***SUPER SPOILER ALERT***
I don't know about all that moral ambiguity stuff. I mean, things didn't all suck in the end in real life. The little baby lived. And the evil captain died. And the rebels prevailed.
I think the ultimate goal of the movie was to get the viewer to decide whether they believed in fairy tales. It's two totally different films depending on which camp you're in. So are you more like the whimsical heroine or the evil stepfather?
Another possible thesis is that the fictional "story" is an exaggerated, glorified re-telling of the real story after the fact. So it could have been Mercedes' way of telling Ofelia's little brother about his amazing sister (the princess) after she was dead and gone. The point being that this is how fairy tales come to life out of real stories. Like what the movie Unbreakable was saying about superheroes.
well, again, in order to see the ending in any sort of uplifting light, you have to see the fantasy element of the film as real, in some way, and i don't see it as real at all, not even within the world of the film. i think the fantasy world is entirely of the girl's creation. the film, according to the director, is about the death of childhood. the little girl can never quite grow up, never quite leave the fairy tales behind, and therefore cannot make the transition into adulthood. which is a pretty horrible place, at least in this film it is, but it's reality.
i didn't see what you wrote before i posted, claudia, but that "retelling" theory is interesting. because isn't that what fairy tales are, ways of explaining reality to little kids who can't understand it like an adult can?
And they're hero tales usually too. She was really into fairy tales, so the best thing to do to honor her memory I think would be to preserve her memory as a fairy tale.
If the director said it's about being stuck in childhood, then he's pretty much saying he's in the non-believer camp. Stuck in your childhood is a good theme too. Since little kids who die get to stay kids forever (assuming there's some kind of afterlife, if you're the type to believe in it).
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