Hold My Hand, Mommy, The World Is Scary

Sigh. The posters, trailers, and of course the movie theater marquees, all say Pan’s Labyrinth is rated “R” — “restricted.” This rating generally means there’s either lots of sex (with bouncing boobies, rampant pubic hair, lots of thrusting and gyrating, and simulated oral sex) or lots of violence, or a lot of fucking bad words, or lots of violent fucking by foul-mouthed actors.

Naughty, naughty.

The marketing for the movie itself suggest that its basic story involves a young girl, dragged into post-civil war Spain, where her mother has married someone else (having lost her husband/the girl’s father). She dives into a fantasy of her own to escape the general nastiness of what’s going on around her.

So, we’ve got a movie rated “R”. We’ve got a plot that involves a war. We’ve got escapism. We’ve got a “new guy” taking over the role of “father” for a young girl.

Well damned if that doesn’t sound like a setup for a sugar-coated trot through candy land to me!

Sorry, I’ll get that sarcasm dispenser checked next week, I promise. It’s leaking these days.

It sure seems like somebody thought it was meant to be a whimsical adventure through a wacky and goofy Disneyesque world, though, because we find morons complaining about the excessive violence in the film. You, sir, are an idiot.

But wait! There’s more; read on for a more in-depth rant about this (because believe me, there’s more stupidity lurking). Spoilers are contained within, so be content with this intro if you haven’t already seen the movie.

Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t already seen Pan’s Labyrinth, stop reading this and go see it now. G’wan, I’ll wait. S’okay. It’s really one of those rare pictures that actually is better seen without hints or spoilers about how it’s going to turn out as you walk into the theater.

By the way, it’s in Spanish, and it’s subtitled in English. If you’re enough of an ignorant fuck that this bothers you, don’t bother going to see the movie. The world will yawn at you when you bitch and moan about the language thing. Nobody cares.

Now, hopefully you listened; because I’m diving straight into spoiler territory here.

What kind of sex is there in the movie? None. There’s a hint here and there that perhaps one or more of the characters has “less than friendly” ideas in mind for the young girl in the lead role, but they do that on purpose. Nobody ever does anything dirty (or even tries to do so) to her. Any nudity? A bit. None from the girl, though — she takes a couple baths, but “strategically placed bubbles” and low camera angles avoid any and all possibilities of anything weird going on. The nudity comes from the fairies, and it’s fleeting. It’s weird to watch a topless, well-endowed fairy get her head bitten off, though; heh.

Foul language? Eh, there’s a couple “shits,” a few “fucks,” and a few “damns,” but Spaceballs was worse.

Violence? Oh hell yeah, lots of that. A surprising amount of it, and absolutely every single bit of it is precisely where it needs to be. Yes — it needs to be there.

You need to see the Captain break a glass bottle across a prisoner’s face, then repeatedly stab him with its broken shape over and over and over again as he brutalizes him (so you learn early on to hate him — not just because the movie wants you to, but because he is a character deserving of our hatred). You need to see his guards kill every survivor of every engagement as they lay helpless, begging for mercy. You need to see the lead character get slapped on the face.

You need to see that monstrous creature pluck a fairy out of mid-air (as it tries to distract the monster so the girl can escape) and, without skipping a beat, rip its fucking head right off its body with its mouth, cheerfully munching on the head … to remind us that yeah, this thing really is going to kill the lead if it can get its paws on her.

By the last act of the movie, we need to see Mercedes slice Vidal’s body up, and carve a new, wider smile into his face. Ironically, the movie teases us — he doesn’t die here, and neither does she. He dies nearly at the very end of the movie (and, amazingly, his death then is even more satisfying than it would have been had Mercedes’ ambush been fatal to him).

Without every scene in place, right where they are, depicting something less-than-pleasant, the movie wouldn’t work. It sucks us in and gives us more reason to empathize with the young girl who didn’t ask to be thrust into any of this.

You’re probably reading over my description of some of the violence in the movie and thinking “good grief! I’d never take my kids to see this!”

Good! You win a cookie — it’s rated R for fuck’s sake, folks Smiling

We have this odd misconception of how “fairy tales” are supposed to work, at least here in America, because what we’re shown as kids is all sanitized and neat and clean. This movie hands us a proper fairy tale — one with an honest, happy ending. The lead character fucking dies. She gets shot in the belly and dies. Dead. Kaput. You want to cry when you see it. When she collapses and dies, you want to scream “what the fuck are you doing to us?!?!” at the screen.

Her spirit, though, claims its place in the “underworld” — the “fairy tale” ending is that she, in some form or another, “lives happily ever after,” but only after intense suffering, pain, loss, and she has to fucking die to achieve it. And this isn’t a bullshit “resurrection” thing either — she’s really dead. Just her spirit’s doing its thing. Not on Earth (though she’s able to leave a few “marks” here and there for “those who know what to look for”). Not as a ghost. In an entirely different plane of existence.

It’s the best movie I’ve seen in a long damned time, but it’s not something I’d have taken a ten year old to see. But then again, I’m not a fucking moron — the “R” rating tells me something that apparently others miss.

I pray that every idiot who went to this movie expecting a whimsical fantasy with a few dirty words and gets offended at the violence ends up watching an episode of La Blue Girl — make it the fifth episode of the original series — expecting it to be a “whimsical fantasy” anime. We’ll ask them again, after they’ve watched a monster’s phallic tentacle melt away after being coated with acid released involuntarily by the sex organs of the woman it was violently raping, if they think Pan’s Labyrinth “misled” people with its “R” rating and “fantasy” setting. La Blue Girl, by the way, is labeled “adults only,” with big red warning stickers, police tape-style warning panels, and censor bars, along with huge warnings in all capital letters: “absolutely NOT for children!” I bet somebody, somewhere, bought the damned thing for his kids at some point.

What Language Barrier?

The other astonishing complaint I read made me laugh. Seriously laugh. I love these reminders that, yes, people really are this stupid sometimes.

The movie’s original title is El Laberinto del Fauno. It has been nominated for a “Best Foreign Language Film” Academy Award. In all the trailers for the movie, spoken dialog is mysteriously absent. The reviews all talk about how this takes place in 1940’s Spain. The movie is made by a Spanish director and acted by Spanish actors and actresses.

Well obviously it’s gonna be done in English, the One True Language(tm), right?

Heh. Well, this dolt sure thought so. He’s so pissed that “NO mention was made at all” that the movie was subtitled, that he sat through that entire god damned movie, stewing and simmering throughout, being forced to read those fucking subtitles, and (having consumed all that his movie ticket price paid for) wants a refund.

I don’t know how in the hell you can miss the fact that this was a Spanish-language film. It being nominated for a “Best Foreign Language Film” wasn’t a clue? The “original title” (in another language) wasn’t a clue? Oh, wait, right — they translated the title, that must mean they’re gonna translate the whole thing from that filthy “other” language into good ol’ American English for us “better offs” here in the States, right?

I can’t begin to fathom just how arrogant and xenophobic you have to be to expect the entire fucking world to create works like these in our preferred language and act offended when somebody doesn’t.

I love the guy’s comment that “he reads books when he wants to read,” implying that he reads lots of books. Then he complains that the subtitles move so fast in the movie that he couldn’t read them all. Heh. I guess he’s the star reader of his first grade class because this movie’s dialog generally ran so slowly that there was plenty of time to read subtitles and catch everything else in the frame.

In fact, after about 10 minutes into the movie, I didn’t even realize (consciously) that I was reading the dialog; it felt natural and it certainly wasn’t noticeable at all. I mean that — it became second nature. It was nothing. I honestly appreciated the movie more because I couldn’t just instantly “parse” the spoken words with my ears and brain — bringing in the words from the bottom of the frame with the corners of my eyes as I soaked in the rest of the picture made it come to life and it became very real.

Shrug. Go see the movie anyway, and ignore the ijits whining about it being subtitled. Dubbing it in English would completely wreck it — there’s an entire scene where the depth and cruelty of the torture a character undergoes would be destroyed by translation. You just couldn’t do it the same way (specifically, stutterers tend to stutter on the letter “t,” and in English, a stutterer would stumble saying “two” in the series “one, two, three”; in Spanish, though, you don’t hit a “t” until you hit the three — “trés,” and in the movie, the character being tortured is promised he’ll be set free if he can count “1, 2, 3” without stuttering … the cruelty doesn’t come across nearly as effectively).

I will be posting a proper review of the movie itself shortly. I just wanted to rant about a pair of idiots first Smiling

In case you hadn’t guessed, though, I loved the movie. It’s on my favorites list now, permanently. Go watch it. Yes, even if that means breaking your movie industry boycott (this one’s foreign anyway, hehehe). Just don’t buy any snacks, drinks, or popcorn. I’ll forgive you, just this once Eye