About a year after it was relevant. And therefore with lots of spoilers. If you don't want to know the end, don't read it.
Oh how I wish I could go back in time and not watch this movie. I have often observed to friends and acquaintances, that there's nothing worse than a movie that wastes a good idea. Which is pretty much what Pan's Labyrinth was.
It wasn't a terrible movie, but it certainly didn't live up to the hype. First of all, the main character is set up early on as having pretty much spent all her time reading fairy tales. Yet when she is dropped into one, she does such unforgivably stupid things, I wanted to strangle her.
She has to go to some underground world to retrieve a key. She's warned not to eat anything. Yet despite multiple murals of this mysterious sleeping eyeless man mutilating and eating children, and a giant frickin heap of frickin childrens' shoes in the corner, she still eats two grapes, and gets two of her helper fairies killed in the process.
Then when the faun (understandably) gets angry, she says she didn't think "two grapes would make a difference." Anyone who has read any fairy tales has to know that two grapes make all the difference. Hell, just read a Greek myth or two.
The final straw was really when she goes back for her little brother. The faun gives her this magical chalk that will cause her to be able to draw a door to wherever she has to get to. So she enters her evil, facist, torturing stepfather's lair. Where he's keeping her baby brother. And as she's hiding from her stepdad, she somehow manages to leave the magic chalk ON THE TABLE. Which of course the evil stepdad sees, and hilarity ensues.
Really, she was doing such stupid things, I was actually glad when he shot her. I'm generally quite a grumpy person, but I generally do not root for facist soldiers over cute Spanish child actors. But this was really a relief because it meant she would shut up and stop doing stupid stuff.
So in short, Pan's Labyrinth=disappointment.
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7 comments:
Ick. I'm glad the boyfriend watched it without me, then. I can't abide that sort of willful stupidity.
aww--i *loved* this movie. another big lesson in fairy tales--you have to figure things out for yourself, and that means making mistakes--many times, very stupid ones. harry potter forgot his two way mirror until it was too late, you know?
Whoa, bfp reads my blog? This has got to be another bfp.
I know that Harry Potter does silly things sometimes, but you know, let's face it, Harry Potter is kind of a jock and didn't really spend his whole life reading about magic and wizards. So it's more consistent for his character to make those types of mistakes.
I really wanted to like Pan's Labyrinth. Really really! So that's probably why I was even more disappointed to not like it.
haha, bfp in the flesh baby!!! :p
ok--so harry might be less inclined to pay attention to particulars--but what about people like spider man? in the second movie, there is a specific piont made that he was looking for his old comic books--which means that he is aware of super hero mistakes and the such, at least on a superficial level--but yet he's not smart enough to know the old-distract-the-hero-by-messing-with-his grandma-so-you-can-get-to-the-love-of-his-life-trick?
I felt the same way about this movie.
Maybe she has the same attitude as my students - "I thought two orders of magnitude off wouldn't make a difference" - "it's only Spanish and it isn't white people speaking it, so why do I have to spell it right?" ...
etc.
well bfp, setting aside the fact for the moment that I disliked Spiderman intensely as well, I'm not sure that Peter Parker was a comic book nerd rather than a science geek.
Also, when he messed up it was usually fell (for me) in the realm of common sense that I could accept. I honestly don't remember much of Spiderman 2 anymore. Except that there was an evil guy with multiple mechanical hands. But I don't remember feeling like strangling Peter Parker for being stupid. Maybe for being dense and too goody twoshoes for his own damn good. But not for being stupid
oh and Professor Zero, hahahaha, two magnitudes don't make a difference? Oh that's good.
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