4 posts tagged “movies”
Video: Show us a movie or show that you absolutely can't stand watching.
Submitted by Ross.
I'll show you one of each. Both these things irritate AND nauseate me, which is a very special combination.
Hocus Pocus is, at least, creative, not smarmy... it just happens that the witch characters in it are like nails on the chalkboard of my mind in almost every possible way. (Well, except for the part where Sarah Jessica Parker starts shouting, "Amok! Amok!" - that's kind of entertaining.)
7th Heaven, on the other hand, is a pernicious, pandering piece of crappy pablum that should have been cancelled years ago, but managed to sludge along for more than a decade. As far as I know, it's gone this year. GOOD RIDDANCE. (I do have a few friends who used to love to watch it... to make fun of it. I've only just started to forgive Jessica Biel for her appearance on this show, and only because she's been good in everything else in which I've seen her.)
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go clean my brain.
I've been waiting excitedly for months to see Pan's Labyrinth, and I finally had the chance last night. Certain things about it surprised me, despite the fact that I'd heard it was an adults-only fairy tale. I would like to be able to discuss them here, without giving away the ending per se, and share a few stills, so if you are avoiding spoilers assiduously, you might want to skip looking at the full version of this post until after you've seen the film.
First of all, the ad campaign has been saturating American TV so heavily that the theater was packed, which I thought was notable, given that it's a Spanish-language film with subtitles. The complex chose to use the same screen they'd used for Pirates of the Caribbean 2, which has a fairly large seating area, one about standard for a stadium-seating multiplex. It was nearly full. I think this is going to wind up being one of the more successful foreign-language films in recent history.
The subtitles are white, not yellow, which in a general sense can sometimes make subtitles hard to view - I didn't have that sort of problem with this film, though. I did have a problem with the subtitles occasionally flashing too quickly, but that might have been because I was sleep-deprived.
The ad campaign has been somewhat dishonest, glossing over the film's extensive horror element and making it look perhaps more fantastic than it actually is (also glossing over the fact that it's not in English, but I knew that). The truth is that there are only two otherworldly fantasy sequences, except a brief one near the end, and that both are pretty disturbing (the first only because it's a bit disgusting, not scary). My only other major criticism, except for that, is the fact that the otherworldly elements do not tie in well with the real-world events of the film - they don't seem to affect each other at all until the very end.
Most of the film is grounded in a realistic setting, Spain in 1944; the fantastic element occasionally intrudes on it. Franco's fascist regime is trying to retain control; local leftist guerrilla revolutionaries fight the regime whenever possible.
Ofelia is a 10-year-old girl whose widowed mother has recently married a fascist Captain. Ofelia's mother is very pregnant at the beginning of the film, and Captain Vidal is obviously much more enamored of his putative "son" than of his new wife, who he seems to view as the vehicle for his offspring-based immortality. The new family is staying in an old mill in a rural district. The mill has an impossibly old stone labyrinth on its grounds; the whole complex has a strange, decrepit grandeur (in some ways comparable to the abandoned convent inhabited by most of the major characters in the film version of The English Patient).
Reviewers have, in their plot summaries, tended to paint the Captain as a different sort of monster than he actually is. While he is indeed "brutal," and squarely the film's villain, he isn't actually physically or sexually abusive to his family. Aside from some unpleasantry at their first meeting, where he squeezes her hand tightly because she offers him the "wrong one," it's 3/4 of the way through the film before he touches Ofelia again, to slap her once across the face at a time when he is understandably upset. His brutality is expressed more in his official capacity, where he tends to kill prisoners before asking questions, and functions as a very efficient torturer. This doesn't mean that he adores Ofelia by any means: his disregard for her becomes increasingly clear as the film builds to its climax. But if you're expecting that he beats or molests her, from what reviews have suggested, it's not the case.
I also haven't seen it mentioned very much that the film actually has two heroines: Ofelia is the obvious one, the mythic child heroine, but there's a more grounded and conventional heroic figure in Mercedes, the revolutionary spy in the Captain's household. Mercedes aids the local resistance by acting as a courier; she also smuggles medicine to them and makes it possible for them to steal supplies. She's the only person to effectively stand up to Captain Vidal in any capacity through most of the film. One wonders if Mercedes was also tested by Pan as a child; if so, she failed the first test and was abandoned by the otherworld thereafter.
For me, interpretation is based on the question: is Ofelia delusional? It seems like she may be, except for the fact that the mandrake root that the Faun gives her is definitely real. If she is delusional, or dreaming, the film's denouement is almost unbearably sad.
There are some other questions, which won't make sense to those who haven't seen the movie. (Ex: why does she eat the grapes? She didn't go to the Ogre's hall until several days after she was sent to bed without dinner, so it can't be that she's starving. If the reasoning is that she loves grapes and they are almost impossible to get in her daily life, it's not established in the film. The best explanation I can muster is that she was "correct" about which lock to use, in spite of what the fairies were telling her, so she got cocky and decided to disobey the other instructions. One of the unanswered questions is what would have happened if she had followed the fairies' instructions and opened the central lock - was what she actually needed behind that door, and the dagger she retrieved a setting onto a different path? Or was the misdirection part of the test, as it seemed to be throughout the rest of the story? Pan is a trickster god.)
The scene displayed in these two photos, which is also the one with the grape-eating, is one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a while. There's a commentary by Frank Darabont at deltorofilms.com, discussing a party thrown for the director Guillermo del Toro on his return to Hollywood from a lengthy stay in Spain, where the film was made. Pan's Labyrinth was shown at the party, and a few "celebrity reactions" are mentioned, including "Clive Barker was smiling like a proud papa." Well, much of the movie is very Barker-like, in some ways comparable to his book The Thief of Always (I own, but haven't yet read, Abarat). Baroque, gothic fantasy elements combined with grotesquerie and a creeping sense of unease.
The comparison is most appropriate to this Ogre scene. The trailers make it look like a thing of wonder, "Ofelia meets a whimsical creature that sees out of the palms of its hands!' - but no. Ofelia meets a child-eating Ogre who she has to avoid waking up while she steals an artifact from him during a test that will determine whether she is a reincarnation of the lost Princess Moanna, daughter of the King of the Underworld.
This is a sequence that, while it's beautifully done, I could have lived approximately forever without seeing.
I loved this movie, but I found it deeply upsetting and increasingly difficult to watch, between the various torture scenes and casual point-blank shootings and shambling ogres and bloody obstetric incidents and faunic tantrums.
Even so, even if it's not for everyone, I think all creative people and people interested in myth and/or fantasy should see it, because I think the imagery and storytelling is inspiringly rich. Not as a lesson in creativity, but as direct inspiration.
Sure, most sequels stink, but what movie really needs a sequel?
Um, Pretty in Pink.
Duh.
Maybe Labyrinth, but not necessarily one based on the manga sequel that came out relatively recently.
If I actually felt like thinking about this more, I might come up with something. I've been sick for the last few days with that stomach flu that's been going around, though, so... thinking? Pah! I'm just trying to get up the final version of a post that's been sitting here in draft for the last couple of days... I'm having trouble with photo uploads.
What are your top 5 movies/DVDs of 2006?
I'm far too lazy to sit down and write out a codified, well-reasoned "Top 5" list. These are, in no particular order, some movies that I saw for the first time this year and liked. I don't know if they're my "Top 5" or not. I saw movies that I know are better than these, in technical terms, but I didn't like them as much.
- The Seven Samurai
- Brick
- Diary of a Lost Girl
- V for Vendetta
- Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
Some also-rans that I can think of: Borat, The Illusionist, Jesus is Magic (Sarah Silverman's movie), Marie Antoinette, The Prestige, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Tristram Shandy (omg, the part with the chestnut! funniest thing I've seen in years), The Leopard... all were good. The Notorious Bettie Page was decent. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend them all to the same people, and I'm sure I'm leaving some stuff out. The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D was fun, too.
(What I mean by the "I know some movies were better than the ones on the list" is just that I know that, in technical terms, The Prestige has it all over Dead Man's Chest. But I just enjoyed Dead Man's Chest much more.)
Some of the best things I saw were on TV or were originally made for TV, like the BBC's Bleak House miniseries, and the BBC/HBO production of Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren. Veronica Mars was great as usual, though it slipped a bit at the beginning of the new season and is still recovering. Heroes is amazing, looking like a big-budget film every week, and carrying on a compelling story (hopefully they won't fall into Lost's overexplanation trap... though I realize I'm one of the few people who think that things on Lost are being overexplained. I still love it, but I'm disappointed in the direction it's taken).
There's also a lot I wanted to see but haven't yet: The Fountain, Casino Royale, most of the animated movies, etc.
I'm watching a movie about midnight movies right now... it's a little distracting to try to talk about good movies with Pink Flamingos running in the background. John Waters just said, "It shocked Andy Warhol!"
