quick and dirty why-i-disliked-pan’s-labyrinth post (stolen from facebook message)
Tuesday 23 October 2007 | I like a cookie
My new acquaintance wrote:
I liked how the forest provided an apt venue for the duality of clandestine activity. I was pretty disappointed in the level of historical content, which seemed to function only on a superficial level. *But* I liked the confused exchanges of food and body parts, which I suppose is par for the course in a film that draws from that myth. I’m interested to know exactly what you disliked. Did you think the girl’s psychology was too easy a hinge between reality and fantasy?
And I responded vehemently:
Ah, agreed: definitely eyes = grapes = fairy heads = one of the scenes that’s kept involuntarily repeating itself in my head ever since. Which I suppose means I grudgingly upgrade my take on the film from two stars to three, since it’s so firmly lodged itself in my brain despite my purported distaste for it. And the ending has stayed with me too, though I found its version of paradise beyond silly (e.g. everyone is blonde in the fairy world).
But yeah, I get tired of cinematic evil that can’t just be bad enough (like Winnicott’s “the good-enough mother”) but has to be Nouahahahah EVYLL!!! so we don’t miss the point. The binary irritated me in Schindler’s List and irritates me still; I think it’s cultural misinformation that actually has a powerful stupidifying [sic] effect on the audience. So I found the film’s politics I suppose prohibitively superficial.
Further….I couldn’t ever even reach the level of *caring* about whether Ofelia’s (oh please) labyrinth world had psychological or literal reality. I thought the movie signalled all its moves well in advance of actually making them, that the touted visuals were pretty weary and adolescent and a pastiche of stuff from the last 30 years of filmmaking (The Shining? Peter Jackson?) and maybe worst of all, that the only people who could act were the little girl and that chick who played Mercedes (from Y Tu Mamá Tambien).
And FINALLY I am tired of torture being presented as entertainment, pace Foucault’s Discipline and Punish….as one brave anonymous Metacritic dissenter offered, “I could have used a lot more labyrinth and a lot less captain-shooting-people-in-the-face.” By the second time said captain was rolling up his sleeves and making his these-tools-are-my-little-friends speech, I was about ready to stab him myself.
Well, obviously the film critic is still alive in me somewhere; I thought I’d completely burned out after three on-and-off years of X-Men III and The Wedding Crashers. But next in my Netflix queue is Five Easy Pieces *yay* so I should be recovering from Guillermo del Toro soon.
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