Entries associated with the tag "Pan'S Labyrinth":

"I see what you mean," my partner for life said after sitting through a screening of Hellboy II: The Golden Army last weekend. She's a fan of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, or at least had been until just then, for what usually passes as the maudit "poetry" of that weenie bit of business. Whereas I'd stubbornly insisted there was more complex emotionality in a single handprint on the aquarium glass in Hellboy number one than in all the wan aestheticizing of Pan. Ramp up the prefab sensitivity, rake in all the praise, even if the work's patently innocuous and/or inferior. "He really loves what he's doing, doesn't he?"

Like a cat with a fuzzy Nerf toy and just about the same attention span. Andrew Tracy's complained that del Toro's Hellboy II stagings are too ham-fisted, lumbering and abrupt where they ought to be ... well, I don't know what they ought to be, aside from not existing at all, since I can't imagine anyone bringing more keenly tuned awareness to the meticulous ins and outs of this fabricator's art, all the precision-crafted mini motifs that, as seems to me obvious from the get-go, most contemporary pulp directors couldn't begin to emulate, much less think of in the first place. Of course, Peter Jackson might, though with Jackson narrative's a necessary form of discipline: there has to be a through line to bring the proliferating effects together. But Del Toro'd rather wing it: this I like, and this, and this, like one of Brian De Palma's mad, free-associating frenzies (a la Raising Cain), only del Toro does it better, his this 'n' that balancing act more exactingly executed and felt. And there's no sitting back to admire the spectacle, since already he's pushing to the next effect, and the next one after that. (For intelligent critical back-and-forth addressing many of Tracy's points, see Jim Emerson's Scanners link here.)

So no, not "absolute" creativity, I can see where Tracy's coming from—but so the hell what? Since the affection's both palpable and generous: this guy's really into his epiphanies, like Bach turning technical somersaults in one of his elaborate keyboard inventions. Which of course is sacrilege to suggest, since by definition Bach's, uhh, "profound," whereas del Toro, per Tracy fiat, is just a commercial hack. Another prime example of genre conferring status, more or less automatically, determining where we do or don't get to stick the tendentious label aaarrrttt. Which is something Jeff Koons could tell you about too ... can't get those category boundaries muddled!

But where Tracy sees hackabout, I see, e.g., Minnelli and Miyazaki—in the elegantly confected beanstalk creature, delicate, graceful, and menacing at the same time. Or Brakhage, in the resurrected robot armies: all those compositional curlicues in elementary reds and blues. Or Joseph H. Lewis and the B studio auteurs of the 40s and 50s, termite energies burrowing into their finest—as in most demented—work. Which of course was and still remains resolutely commercial, ergo, in Tracy's cleansing, puritanical light, "corrupt," just another co-opting product of Hollywood Moloch, Inc.

Meanwhile our Hellboy delirium continues, its echt termite consciousness never backing off. Is it aaarrrttt or just another case of death by CGI technology? I sure can't tell you—except we're not getting this kind of work anywhere else. Michael Bay anyone?

1) A little late for dinner, though it's just after seven and already the restaurant's deserted. Not Super Bowl Sunday, so it can only be ... "The snow," my partner for life insists, "plus maybe it's always like this on Sunday night." In any case, we're out of there as quickly as possible so Cheryl can catch the Oscars: updating an encyclopedia article on same, wants to do all the primary research firsthand. Meanwhile, I've decided it's time to ...

2) Attack the snow on the walks. Shovel the pavement behind our unit ... then the pavement in front of it ... then the neighbors' walks on both sides, front and back ... then all the walks and street frontage along the north end of the courtyard. Which unfortunately will come to an end before the Oscars do, so it's inside again to find the cat's fuzzy ball and ruminate profusely on ...

3) A very stupid op-ed by David Brooks, published originally in the New York Times, that's been e-mailed to me by a friend. "Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared," Brooks blusters on. "Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness. ... Today parents don't seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. ... People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts. ... Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state." Don't see why he wants to drag in that "goodness" notion--perfectibility's the usual Enlightenment-hating rubric--when all that's actually at stake is a kind of ameliorative response: better to have food than not, a job than not, an economy that's not a priori punishing to more than 30 percent of the people subject to it, and so on and on. Plus now we learn that Ronnie the Gipper was actually an "Emersonian liberal" in disguise: so what's the effect on Brooks's pantheon of "Tragic Vision" thinkers, "many of them ... conservative"? But I'm sure he'd be more than willing to welcome the "strong order-imposing state" into his own presumably upscale, comfortable life ... What, you mean it's not just for all "those others"?

4) "Pan's Labyrinth won for Best Cinematography," Cheryl's come down to tell me. O crap, that cinematography's just plain bad. "Yeah, I know," she agrees with me for once, "and I liked another one better." Except she can't remember what the other one was.

5) Back in a couple minutes: "So guess what won for Best Foreign Film?" Obviously Pan's Labyrinth. "Nope, guess again." Jeez, I can't even tell you what's been nominated. "The Lives of Others!"--which is like sticking in the needle, since we've been fighting over this movie for almost a week: a real stinker, in my opinion, with a big, hulking tomato-can target, like the broad side of the morality barn, but for Cheryl it's close to divine--and where's your human sympathy absconded, tough guy? No emergency counseling for us yet, though ...

6) "What about Best Supporting Actress?" Abigail Breslin on that one--in fact I hope Little Miss Sunshine sweeps in every category it's nominated for. Pure schadenfreude on my part there, like letting "the terrorists" win one for a change ... and why do you hate Oscar so much, Pat? But, fortunately or unfortunately, it's somebody else and we all know who by now, though Cheryl couldn't recall right then ...

7) Finally upstairs to witness the rest of ordeal, and it's Dreamgirls medley time. Pretty appalling stuff at this late stage of our racial disenchantment, more like a throwback to Josephine Baker-style negritude, all that fetishistic sass and shimmy, which seems to me pretty much a white-bread fantasy of what life-affirming "blackness" ought to be about. Must we really go there now? But Forest Whitaker pretty well recouped the disowned territory with his awkwardly charming and disarming Best Actor's acceptance speech: so maybe it's a shared culture after all, where we recognize ourselves in whoever the imagined other is. Didn't like the film much though, also thought Whitaker's work in it way too obvious and overscaled, but damn if I didn't want to shout hooray for the guy!

8) Learned that a lot of obscenely rich male types really do grovel and groove over their new Mercedes Benzes. So what about soccer moms? Not their own fantasymobile, I guess ...

9) Emcee Ellen DeGeneres applies the vacuum to the carpet in the theater's front row and Penelope Cruz obligingly shifts her feet. Hoping against hope that everyone else in the row sits tight ...

10) Well, it's The Departed--and not Little Miss Sunshine--that's sweeping away everything in its path, so it's just about time for me to do a little sweeping too, take out the Sunday trash, the cat litter and recyclables ... Plus I think it's starting to snow again.

In defense of his picking Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential as number ten film on his 2006 best list in the IndieWire critics poll, IFC News's Matt Singer confessed that "if I wasn't so afraid of being laughed out of the critical community, it'd be a lot higher." Well, I can relate to that--as maybe we all can in a variety of ways--except right now I'm starting to feel a little antsy about my own critical delights. Immediate case in point: my "favorites list" for 2006 posted January 2--what's on it that even remotely challenges the consensus, that thumbs its nose at the unofficial "hipper than thou" avant taste machine? Not a lot actually: Happy Feet, Manderlay, Miami Vice, arguably Caché ... though even these balky mavericks have enough high-end endorsement ("ooh look, Dave Kehr likes Manderlay!") to reinforce the feeling of incestuous complicity, like the monastic seeker in Raul Ruiz's Snakes and Ladders who stays buried in the theological trenches even as he strives to extricate himself, every fitful act of resistance (even atheism!) ultimately co-opted by the discourse. Or maybe Taxidermia, which didn't get a single vote in IndieWire's "best undistributed films" roundup--though maybe all that means is that whenever I'm set loose on a film that nobody else has seen, much less reviewed, then critical discernment flies out the window ... So what does that make me: an almost too perfect mirror, like a straight-A student mastering the art of regurgitating what teachers want to hear, the ideal standardized test taker? And is any "independent" critical personality there at all, or are we all simply perpetuating each other's biases to infinity? 

Which is partly why I'm grateful for Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth--on the 2006 best lists of "more than 100" critics, including any number I value highly--since I really don't understand what the hyperbolic fuss is all about: drab, gray CGI embedded in yet another Spanish civil war run-through (shades of del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, an altogether subtler psychological confection with similar blue gray mood), where again we're invited to hiss the bloody fascists and cheer on the partisans (except the partisans are committing atrocities too, albeit with more discretion, plus viewer-friendly doses of moralizing attitude). But maybe it's a case of no one (OK, hardly anyone) bothering to watch del Toro's Hellboy of two years past--too disreputable to contemplate, just a pulpy comic knockoff, ergo beneath our notice if not literally our contempt--so the level of expectation, the precedent established for exquisite detailing and expressive tonal flourishes, was never there to begin with. Yet there's a single caressing moment in Hellboy, involving a green handprint on an aquarium glass, that's probably more tenderly inflected than any of the chromatically challenged CGI work to be found in Pan's Labyrinth. Not to mention an impossibly delicate snowfall in a churchyard, deftly one-upping the would-be poetical climax to Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 ... or the ubercluttery mise-en-scene, Mesoamerican bric-a-brac and wonder-cabinet detritus coalescing in a musty baroque stew ... and yes, even the explosions, handsomely appointed with micromanaged detail--what few other filmmakers would even bother to attempt since, well, they're only explosions after all. So: number two on my list for 2004, and of course I could go on ... but obviously there's a more palatable alternative than that.

One way in which I feel estranged from portions of the mainstream movie audience is my total aversion to scenes involving torture, which makes me avoid films involving them as much as possible. (I wound up seeing Pan’s Labyrinth, currently picking up lots of deserved annual awards, which opens shortly before the end of the year, anyway, but this is one of the rare cases where I consider the depiction of torture artistically defensible on some level.) I assume that a lot of people must like scenes of torture because of the success of Saw, Saw II, and presumably even Saw III. One can also derive the rather alarming impression from reading a lot of polls that much of the American public, while currently regarding George W. Bush as a liar and an incompetent, still seem to admire him for standing up for what he believes in even when he’s proved wrong, e.g., believing in torture even though it’s been demonstrated that the results of torture in extracting information are practically worthless and that most of the people being jailed in Abu Ghraib and perhaps tortured as well turn out to be innocent anyway.

This suggests that significant portions of the American public are quite happy to tolerate innocent Iraqis being tortured, at least as long as the details and the injustices of this practice aren’t being rubbed in our faces. But it seems like quite a few like fictional scenes of torture to be rubbed in their faces repeatedly. Not a very comforting thought to usher in the holiday season.

Or maybe they just seem longer at Christmas, the trailers for all those year-end movies—since most manage to fit comfortably into the two-and-a-half-minute maximum time slot the MPAA mandates for theater promotional materials (what standards apply to the TV variants I've no idea). On the other hand, there are some notable exceptions—one a year per studio, according to MPAA guidelines—so if ever there's a time of year when exceptions tend to become the rule, right now's probably it.

Not that I'm put off by this, since for the most part I eagerly look forward to trailers—the more of 'em the better. At the old, depressing Plaza Theatre (part of the former Plitt chain before reincarnating itself—twice—as a discount outlet store, now mercifully demolished) at Devon and McCormick just west of the North Shore Channel, there'd typically be half a dozen or more per show—a lot of 'em more technically accomplished than the B-movie flotsam and Canadian tax-shelter dregs that made up the weekly playbill. And why not? With everything unwatchable scrupulously edited out, all that remained was pure kinetic rush: accelerated mayhem, hysterical foreshadowings, cars inexplicably hurtling out of everyone's control . . . . Though even then, Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn couldn't quite hack it: was it ever released theatrically anywhere in the world? Your guess is as good as mine.

Which brings me to the main point: what trailers do you find worth remembering, assuming you remember any? My own favorite—embarrassingly, since it's attached to an utterly wretched hack job—is for the Bruce Willis action vehicle Tears of the Sun (with Training Day's Anthony Fuqua the ignominious director of record), though which of a myriad of theatrical variants it might have been (since any number get screened before the commercial run starts) I really can't say. But the choreographic chutz that can shoehorn 90-plus minutes of staccato slam (no dialogue, please) into one delirious rococo-inflected bauble—with intercuts and overlays, assorted lap dissolves, even a couple shots matted in, fercrissake!—seems the height of commercial artistry to me, something that, e.g., Tony Scott, reigning avatar of the outtake style of filmmaking, could stick at the head of his resumé with pride.

As for trailers screening right now, the pick of the litter (save for Pan's Labyrinth, which—I'm guessing—should comfortably one-up its own elegant stylistic tease) seems to be the one for Rocky Balboa, the retired blue-collar fighter's comeback film, with our half-punchy, out-of-condition hero hurling 50-pound beer kegs against walls and punching out frozen sides of beef in meat lockers, the better to train for yet another inspirational march to the top. The trailer ends with some poor chump getting whaled, then it's freeze and cut to an all-black screen with the single word "Christmas" staring you in the face. All in the spirit of the season, I'm sure ... isn't Boxing Day the 26th?