Pan's Labyrinth
dir. Guillermo del Toro
2006



"The prophecy was a lie, Morpheus. It was all another system of control."
- Neo (Matrix Reloaded)

"The (pills) that mother gives you don't do anything at all."
- "White Rabbit"

"We will be greeted as liberators."
- anonymous

Early in my career in game development, I was working at a badly mismanaged start up. As the business failed, some of us who had seen the handwriting on the wall split off to start our own company. We'd watched for months as mistake after mistake, lie after lie, brought our little start up down and we knew, knew, that we could do a better job on our own.

Of course, within months, we too failed (though benigningly, not having burned through millions of dollars.) So long as we had a common enemy, we could stand united opposed to the stupidity around us. Once it was our own stupidy in question, well, it turned out we didn't agree on as much as we thought we did.

In Pan's Labyrinth, Ivana Basquero plays Ofelia, daughter of a widow who recently married a cruel and sadistic captain in Franco's army. At the beginning of the film, Ofelia and her mother (pregnant with the captain's child) arrive at the captain's station in the woods where he is viciously prosecuting a campaign the against anti-fascist resistance.

To escape the sadness and brutality around her, Ofelia creates a Lewis Carroll/CS Lewis-like fantasy world, wherein she is a long lost princess who must complete various dangerous tasks to reclaim her throne.

As visually stunning and emotionally gripping as the story is, the real surprise is the nuanced view the film gives us of the role of fantasy and myth in our lives. Myths, fairy tales and folk stories can help us understand the world, but they can also help us misunderstand the world.

As the campaign against the resistance comes to a head and the strains within the captain's household increase, Ofelia's fantasies take her further and further away from understanding the reality around her. The comic boogeymen and magical thinking that children use to cope with fear and powerlessness become increasingly difficult to relate to. Alienated from both the real and fantasy worlds she inhabits, Ofelia truly becomes a lost child.

A strong comparison can be made to Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, in which the fantasy world of two Australian school girls spills into reality with murderous result. In that film, however, there is little ambiguity about the role of fantasy. The pas de deux of the two central characters cannot be seen as anything but insanity.

In Pan's Labyrinth, things are not so simple. Indeed, we can see that what understanding Ofelia does have of the world has been well-served to this point by her imagination. In the beginning, she seems more articulate, more perceptive and more in touch with the world around her than the adults. For all their dismissiveness of her "children's stories," it is they who are living in a fantasy.

And had this been The Chronicles of Narnia, it would have stayed a pre-adolscent fantasy. But del Toro doesn't let us off that easily. As the events of the real world reach their violent conclusion, it is adults who drive the story, adults who set the agenda, and Ofelia who finds herself increasingly trapped by the fantasy she has created.

And that's the warning the film has for us in our time. The world is complex, messy, irrational, weird, contradictory and difficult to pin down. We use narrative and myth as a kind of Fourier-transform, dissecting the messy signal of reality into neat, discrete components. This helps us make sense of the world around us by allowing us to glimpse it in parts and integrate the whole in our minds.

But, when you become more invested in the story than in the reality it reflects, when the outcome of your fantasies means more to you than the reality on the ground, the scanner which showed you the world so clearly now renders that same reality quite darkly.

Four stars. Little Red Jason Hood sez, don't let the bed bugs bite.

Snakes on a Plane
2006
dir. David R. Ellis



"I listen to stories and decide if they'll make good movies or not. It's hard, and I guess sometimes I'm not nice."
- Griffin Mill The Player

Mozart: "Why must we go on forever writing about gods and legends?"
Von Swieten: "Because they do; they go on FOREVER."
- Amadeus

Striker: "Surely you can't be serious."
Rumack: "I am serious. And don't call me 'Shirley.'"
- Airplane

There are two things that can make a film a classic: being timely and being timeless. Scoring one or the other is good, but both, now that's something.

Like most internetroids, I was initially delighted, then somewhat bored and then finally disinterested in Snakes on Plane. It seemed like a Zucker and Zucker sketch played way too long.

When the film finally came out, despite my affinity for Samuel L. Jackson and absurdist theatre, I somehow found myself with, uh, Stuff To Do(tm) that didn't involve going to see this film. And I wasn't alone: the public stayed home in droves.

But overexposure is a failure of marketing, not art. Still, the appeal of this film was all in the group dynamic. How well could it play on DVD? Had I simply missed the boat?

No. Snakes on a Plane, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is a brilliant film in its own right, NOT just as fun cultural phenomenon.

The first moment of brilliance was Sam Jackson's. Purportedly, he agreed to do the film if and only if the title remained Snakes on a Plane. It's funny, but it walks the line perfectly between Michael Tolkin's hip, insider Hollywood jokes on the infamous "25-word pitch" ("The Graduate....Two!") and Z&Z's obvious schoolyard yucks ("Airplane II: THE SEQUEL!").

So, out of the gate, they're both insulting AND complimenting the audience. They're saying "you know you see a lot of bad movies and we know you see a lot of bad movies...and here's another one!"

The other great appeal of the title is that it becomes an immediate and understandable metaphor. In the season finale of 'Weeds,' a child speaking at a junior high school graduation implores the audience to wake up and see the real trouble our society is in. "There are," he concludes, "motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane of state."

The next bit genius was the absolute pitch-perfect production values, acting and writing. Not to say that any of these were top-notch. Rather, as you watch, you realize that just as much effort went into the production of this film as was justified. It's not the over-produced snoozefest of, say, Posideon, but neither is it The Blair Witch Project.

Of course, the absurdity of The Cavernous Plane(tm) (also see Flightplan and Red Eye), the ridiculousness of the bad guys' plan (hint: if putting snakes on a plane is part of your brilliant scheme to avoid going to jail, you've made some bad choices) and the Buffy-like earnestness of our world-weary heroes plays about as well as you'd expect.

But the final piece of the cake was something I've only ever seen John Waters do well. Waters, and let's be frank, is a bad director. He's gotten better over the years, but he started out bad and he knew he was bad so he made the bad into good by going to high camp.

David R. Ellis may be a good director (his solo work is on the light side, but his second unit work is impressive), but he knew he was better off directing this particular film poorly.

The interrogation scene, where Sam Jackson plays both good and bad cop, is blocked with a bare lightbulb in the top center of the screen, leaving Jackon to scream his usual Eziekel 25:17 style monologue into a raging hotspot.

On the plane, when reassuring his witness that all is well, center frame is dominated by his bulging crotch.

Round this out by a supporting cast of pilots, flight attendants and snake experts all gesticulating with wild vaudevillian abandon and the whole film takes on a surreal, Waiting for Guffman feel.

If great cooking is defined by choice of ingredients, skill of preparation and beauty of presentation, then a good hamburger will always be better than a bad filet mingon.

Snakes on a Plane is a good hamburger.

Three stars. Motherfucking Jason sez motherfucking rent it; it's motherfucking better than you motherfucking think.