Pan's Labyrinth

[SIZE=-1] This is one of the best films I have ever seen. The layers of meaning and blurring of fantasy and reality are truly masterful. I had further not known anything about director Guillermo Del Toro, but he will now be up there with my list of great directors.

From the very beginning, I went into the film and the story and never came out. There was this sense of mixed beauty, melancholy, and youthful innocence or tenacity. At times, I was literally talking to the characters, telling them to do or not do something. I am not usually that person.

The film is about good and evil, relationships, and most importantly transformation. It also has a historical text that few get exposed to. And of course, it is about contemporary times, and what can happen if a society does not keep its tyrants in check :kali:.

If you do not already know, I would suggest that you go to a site like Wikipedia and look up the history of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco government in order to truly appreciate the historical context and meanings.

If you are ready for a great transformative film, go to the theater immediately, and sit back and experience a great work of art.[/SIZE]
 
When the credits came up at the end of this film I turned to friend, shivering, and said, "is this the best movie I have ever seen?" I answered my question before she could open her mouth. "Yes."

This masterpiece is the reason I go the movies. I think perhaps anyone who finds fault with this film must surely be a mongoloid who slobbers at every Hollywood abomination that is released.

The anxiety of war battles; a villian played by the superlative Sergi Lopez; other brilliant performances; evil/good fantastically thrilling humanoid and insectoid creatures which are at once creepy and vulnerable; a touching girl's oppression-you root for her from the beginning; breathtaking cinematography; moments which wonderfully render you a child again, then slap you into back to your numb reality.

Throughout there was hardly a second in which I wasn't cringing with gooseflesh, crying with gooseflesh, or laughing with gooseflesh. Usually all three. Of course it's easy to cry at the sight of a bleeding child you have fallen in love with. I cried at the exquisite world I was a part of for two hours.
 
c.g._eads said:
Are you saying that the amputation scene, in order to convey the situaton and the importance of the renegades, required them to actually show the saw going through the bone? Of course it didn't. He could've conveyed the exact same meaning by cutting to the actor's face, giving a sound effect, and then having the actor reel in pain. But he wanted to make the audience squirm, for no reason.
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Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but there is no sawing of the bone shown. I think they cut to another scene immediately upon the doctor's starting to saw.

I don't quite get your point anyway. Just close your eyes and ears like all the other girls.
 
Pale Rider said:
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I think the film suffered from the split storylines.
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The split storylines were actually mirrors of one another ... both had keys ... both had untouchable food ... etc. Really brilliant execution all around.
 
i just watched this film and wanted to chime in on this thread, particularly post oscar nomination.

this was a good film. i really liked a lot of things about the story: aforementioned split storylines, the religious metaphors, and the overall attention to detail.

and here are the things i really liked

1. we believe the girl's fantasy, and it makes us feel better about her death. instant religious experience. mmm, the power of cinema.

2. spanish civil war. brought back memories of for whom the bell tolls. great treatment of this subject. and extremely depressing.

3. cg was good.

4. i wish more people were making up fairy tales from scratch instead of resurrecting old ones. thankfully someone is.

5. that little girl ofilia did a great job. very believable performance.

but i also have qualms.

1. lazy sound design, particularly foley sound. sounds, although well-recorded and mixed, don't match correctly with image and are recycled over and over without variation. watch it again and just pay attention to the sound. maybe i should view this film in a different theatre though...

2. costumes looked cheap. seriously. i can't be the only one that thinks the prosthetics in this movie looked like a failed art-school project. the faun's face looks like a plastic mould. the animatronic frog looks like an animatronic frog. in fact, i can't think of an instance of prosthetics that actually looks good.

3. lighting was distracting at times. like theatre lighting. perhaps that was the intent, but i found it to be poor. lighting for night interiors always included a super-hot backlight/extreme key. and just too much blue. just because it's blue doesn't make it night. not that i could do a better job.

4. music. a different composer could have potentially blinded me to the above issues. but this music was so GENERIC. sure, it was ok. but come on. this film deserved more than over-simplified string themes. drab music.

5. overuse of long moving-camera shot transitions. this was clever the first time we dollied behind a tree and into a different shot, but started happening so much that it lost its effect and became gimmicky. maybe it's just me. anybody else notice that?

6. gratuitous violence. death by wine bottle. stitching the lip cut. amputation scene. torture. it didn't really bother me that much to be honest, but i just don't think it was necessary. shock-value is nice though. i'm actually on the fence. maybe i shouldn't have mentioned it.


sorry for the long post. so many posts about "the best movie i've ever seen" and i just can't overlook the issues.
 
I believe del Toro only had a budget around 5 to 15 million to make this film so you can't really expect it to look like a 100 million dollar film.
 
Okay, just pulling on my Kevlar vest....

Didn't like Pan's Labyrinth. So disappointed. And here's why: it's a B-movie in a poet's clothing. I think it has the veneer of a "meaningful" film, but in fact it's just a pretentious Alien vs. Predator. Now, I did really love Alien vs. Predator (so shoot me, I am wearing Kevlar after all), because it was just good monster movie fun. It wasn't pretending to be anything more than that. But Pan's Labyrinth imagines itself as insightful drama and it's just not. In fact, the dramatic portions verge on bad TV movie-land (evil army captain keeps innocent woman and daughter locked away in some frontier hideaway). If not for the beautifully imaginative fantasy sequences and solid performances by a refreshingly non-Hollywood cast, this movie would be pretty empty. If you wanna see a movie with meaning, check out Babel, which blew me away. That's poetry on film and it has something coherent to say about life and human nature. Pan's Labyrinth doesn't have much to say (not coherently anyhow), but it pretends so well that a lot of critics think it's really deep. And as a result it never really amounts to horror/fantasy, nor compelling drama. I didn't care about anybody all that much. The in-your-face gore just underlined for me that the movie was trying hard to make me feel something, and it had to stoop sorta low to get there. I wanted to love it. I really did.
 
Wow Sean I can't disagree with u more. Please explain about "bad TV movie-land"
Babel should be next to the word "incoherent" in the dictionary. U wanna talk about a B-movie, what about the ridiculous Mexico story and the Japanese story that should have been thrown away all together. I don’t even think these movies should be compared. Babel has all the problem of 21grams and more.
 
deedive said:
Wow Sean I can't disagree with u more. Please explain about "bad TV movie-land"
Babel should be next to the word "incoherent" in the dictionary. U wanna talk about a B-movie, what about the ridiculous Mexico story and the Japanese story that should have been thrown away all together. I don’t even think these movies should be compared. Babel has all the problem of 21grams and more.
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Heheh. One thing amazes me about filmmaking more than anything else, and that's how subjective the experience can be. My favorite films are another person's most hated. Just look at Rotten Tomatoes to see how supposed "experts" disagree on the worth of the very same movies. So all I can say is that in Babel, the Mexico story was the most powerful part of the film, followed closely by the Japanese story. I just loved Babel. I thought it was brilliant and original. The dramatic component in Pan's Labyrinth felt TV movie to me because of the un-nuanced extremes of bad guy and good guy. It was a fairy tale I realize, and good is good and evil is evil. I guess I simply found these extremes to be a bit cliche. In the end, the movie didn't have anything to say to me. Babel spoke to me about the interconnectedness between us and the shocking flip-side to the equation: our complete inability to communicate with one another. Just as you and I can't see eye-to-eye on these two movies--our experiences really are so subjective--and it takes efforts to find the common ground. That's what Babel meant to me. I just don't know what Pan's Labyrinth had to say, which is why I don't think it's successful as "drama." That some people are really bad? I don't find that insightful (and I don't really believe anybody's ALL bad). That fantasy is a handy anesthetic against the world's harsh cruelty? If so, it just didn't deliver that message to me successfully, and I'm not sure it's really that interesting a message.
 
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**spoilers??**


i saw this movie a few nights ago and i'll admit i was dissapointed. I heard so many great things about it and I really really wanted to like it, but just couldn't. While there were parts of it I did really like (I liked that they threw in violence and cursing to contrast fantasy with harsh reality), overall I didn't feel like I could take anything away from the movie. It kind of reminded me of Chronicles of Narnia, but I think it failed where Narnia suceeded. For me Narnia did a great job of establishing the real world, establishing the fantasy world, and then mixing the two just enough to remind us that both worlds exist, but then focused most of the story uninterupted in the fantasy world allowing the viewer to completely accept the rules and reality of the fantasy world. Personally, I think Pans mixed both fantasy and reality too much and by doing so it wasn't able to create a clear set of rules that each world abides by. For example, the captain and the mom can see the "baby" root/plant that she kept under her bed, but then the captain can't see the fawn at the end of the movie? Also, the fairies tell the girl to open the wrong door, but she disobeys and gets the knife from the "correct" door?
 
The root plant was real that's why the captain could see it. The little girl is the only one that thought it was alive just like she was the only one that could see the faun.
 
sean90291, i understand your position but i agree to disagree.

*spoiler*

A woman and man have a vague and cliché argument. Get on a bus and some kids shot as a bus. Shot the wife, no one speaks English so this means no one can help them. While there kids go to mexico and get get stuck in no mans land. Unrelated Japanese deaf girl just wants to be loved = B-movie

Military look for rebels. Toture people to find rebels. Girl thinks of a “happy place”

Which sounds more contrived to you.

But we look at movies differently. I am not looking for a message in a movie because “what does the director know?”. Usually if i see a movie sayin MESSAGE I usually end up hating it. There are exception. (clockwork orange)
 
Both BABEL and PAN'S LABYRINTH succeed on their own terms ... and for me films should be judged based on whether or not the artist succeeded at achieving his vision - not whether or not it worked for you as a member of the audience.
 
Hairy Lime said:
Both BABEL and PAN'S LABYRINTH succeed on their own terms ... and for me films should be judged based on whether or not the artist succeeded at achieving his vision - not whether or not it worked for you as a member of the audience.
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:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

here's to critiquing a film based on what it is, and not what it isn't.

:beer: :beer: :beer:
 
Hairy Lime said:
and for me films should be judged based on whether or not the artist succeeded at achieving his vision - not whether or not it worked for you as a member of the audience.
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arnt these the same thing alot of the time. If a story is not well put together, or has gaps or does not hold together the audience will see that. May people who i know think it is a "OK" movie. not great. Some peoples bad movies are better then some people best. i would say this is a ok movie done by a good director.

Filmmaking is storytelling, telling a story to people. not to yourself.
this is why i dont totalling understand your "artist suceeded at achieving her/his vision"

How would i know what inarritu's vision?

I guess this is the same debate with fine art, do u need to talk or hear what the artist says "explaining their creation" before u can say it is bad?
 
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A well crafted story/film will have a self-evident set of terms. For example, there has recently been a plethora of films examining the after-effects of 9/11 on the American psyche. If you watch each of these films it quickly becomes obvious which work and which don't. Some are trite and cliched with little insight into the psychological aftermath of 9/11 while others are brilliant portrayals of this same subject.

Babel and Pan's Labyrinth both have clear themes explored by masterful storytellers.

I suspect the "cliched" bad captain antagonist in Pan's Labyrinth was a conscious choice by del Toro, because children see the emotional/analytical world in black and white and at its heart, this was a children's story - told through the eyes of Ofelia. She saw the captain as a "bad man" and that's all we are ever given privy to through her eyes.

You may or may not agree with del Toro's choice in that matter, but as long as it is clear that he had a rationale for doing so, it's really hard to judge him too harshly for it. It's not as if it was sloppy, unimaginative filmmaking. Rather virtually every frame of that film was full of careful decisions. Same with Babel.

I think on a whole both films worked ... maybe not for individual viewers but for audiences as a whole. You'll never please everyone. And as a viewer you'll never like everything. But as a critic - it's important to acknowledge the difference between your own personal preference and the artistic ability of the filmmaker you're critiquing.
 
I'm glad to see there are others who aren't buying into this film. It reminds me that I am not alone. :)

Now, reading through these posts, I've learned a couple of important things. The Spanish Civil War (or was it Mexican) is the backdrop for this movie and I know absolutely nothing about it. As a result, I had absolutely zero interest in that storyline, which obviously affected my opinion. It's the equivalent of us sending a movie about our Civil War to another country. They don't know anything about it. Therefore why should they care? Sure there is something universally relateable about war, but each war has a purpose and its own little peculiarities brought about by an abundance of historical minutia. I felt out of the loop. And if I would've been in the loop, I would've had a different opinion.

The other was the proposal of escapism. What we do to cope. I think that is a very powerful theme and while I considered the possibility that what she was experiencing wasn't real, because this fantasy world started almost as soon as she arrived, and before the war story took hold, I assumed that meant THAT (the fantasy world) was the real world. So going back and looking at the movie as this was all just in her head... well, that changes things a little. And I definitely give the movie more credit. I may check it out again when it comes out on video.

Side note: Deedive - I still deem the leg cutting scene as unnecessary. Sure you haven't seen it before. That's because most directors have the tact to not subject you to it. Anytime you make a choice onscreen, you ask yourself, "what's my intent?" If the intent is to make the audience suffer through what this old man is suffering through, cut to his face, hear the sound effect, mission accomplished. The audience will feel it. But if you want to make the audience sit there and go, "ohhhh yuuuucccckkk. Ewwwwww." That to me is the equivalent of some guy grabbing another's guy's balls on Jackass and twisting them so the audience can squirm in their seats. It has no meaning. No point. It's Howard Stern shock-jock theatre and nothing more. You havne't seen graphic animal torture in any movie lately. Does that mean you want to see it? Anyway, for a movie that was aspiring to be deep and meaningful, I just didn't feel it belonged in the film.
 
chris f said:
**spoilers??**


i saw this movie a few nights ago and i'll admit i was dissapointed. I heard so many great things about it and I really really wanted to like it, but just couldn't. While there were parts of it I did really like (I liked that they threw in violence and cursing to contrast fantasy with harsh reality), overall I didn't feel like I could take anything away from the movie. It kind of reminded me of Chronicles of Narnia, but I think it failed where Narnia suceeded. For me Narnia did a great job of establishing the real world, establishing the fantasy world, and then mixing the two just enough to remind us that both worlds exist, but then focused most of the story uninterupted in the fantasy world allowing the viewer to completely accept the rules and reality of the fantasy world. Personally, I think Pans mixed both fantasy and reality too much and by doing so it wasn't able to create a clear set of rules that each world abides by. For example, the captain and the mom can see the "baby" root/plant that she kept under her bed, but then the captain can't see the fawn at the end of the movie? Also, the fairies tell the girl to open the wrong door, but she disobeys and gets the knife from the "correct" door?
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sersiously, I was thinking the same thing. Can anyone explain this?
 
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