Uselessness and Movie Review of Pan's Labarynth

[shaftowitz]

So I have almost let January slip by without posting anything. There is no good reason for this, I simply have allowed life in general to lapse in favor of the Wii and sleeping in and just generally being useless. I have entirely failed to write anything this month which makes me a bad bad monkey. Among many other reasons I am a bad bad monkey. I

Comments

[monkmunk]

I quite liked the movie, though several of my friends were underwhelmed. From what i gather, their sense of dissatisfaction also came from a sense of being cheated at the end, a sense i simply didn't share.

[monkmunk]

So, your main problem with the movie stems from the fact that she wasn't bodily transubstantiated into the fairy world? I think i disagree with the idea that if her transport was ‘purely spiritual’ that it necessarily affects nothing but her own perceptions.. but then, i tend to conflate ‘fantasy’ and ‘spirituality’. Of course, i understand that your tendency is to believe that nothing is real unless it affects *your* own perceptions… ;)

[shaftowitz]

I don't know that I required bodily transubstantiation, but I think I did require an effect manifest in the mundane world. Especially with the mundane world made manifest in the fantasy realm (the rebel's lullaby in the background). And I would say that the conflation of fantasy and spirituality would be a deciding difference between our perceptions of the film. For me spirituality can be either internal or manifest, but fantasy, as a genre, is marked by magic being manifest. I think it is almost definitional, even if the main characters possess no magic. If the magic is not manifest in some manner I think you have a different genre of fiction going on. And yes :) I do only percive to be "real" what effects my own perceptions. As a movie goer, I have to develop the reality of the story from the evidence given to me and the history of my movie going. In my experience the bright light and images are either a) unreal imaginings at the moment of death (there was some horrible movie I was forced to watch in highschool where the entire

[lumpy_scrote]

I just remember wishing they'd had the balls to make it a proper fantasy movie, and not bothered with all the little deathbed caveats. Part of a personal vendetta I have against films that over-justify themselves: I'm quite alright with Peter Parker just being Spider-man when the movie opens. Getting bitten by a radioactive, GM spider didn't really make it any more believable for me. I'm in the cinema to see webby-jumpy-red tights-man, I'm already sold, much like I'm in Pan's to see peeper-handed wrong-monsters. Mind you, the ending of Brazil trod similar territory to Pan's, a whole lot more successfully I reckon.