The Ending of Pan’s Labyrinth

SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT

Now that’s out of the way…

I was going to write a full review of Pan’s Labyrinth, but time constraints and laziness got in the way. Besides, what more is there to say? I agree with the other critics. It’s a masterpiece. So I thought I’d focus on the ending, which popular critics are barred from discussing.

The Best Movie of 1946?

I’d been hearing great things about The Best Years of Our Lives for years. It’s gotten a little bit of a bad rap in some circles as the movie that beat out It’s a Wonderful Life for best picture in 1947, but that shouldn’t take away from what is a classic in its own right.

Inspired by a story in Life magazine, The Best Years of Our Lives is about three veterans who return from World War II and have trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. One is a captain in the airforce (Dana Andrews), one is an older man, a sergeant in the Army (Fredric March), and the other is a young kid, a former Navy man who lost his hands in a ship fire (Harold Russell). They meet on a military plane flying them from Long Beach back home to Boon City, one of those make-believe Hollywood cities that probably was shot on the same lot as It’s A Wonderful Life. You know the kind–it has an airport, numerous bars, a bustling downtown, rich areas and poor areas, but somehow, whenever you walk down the street, you bump into somebody you know. Small-town intimacy with big-city amenities. God bless Hollywood.

Strange Magic?

It’s commonplace to refer to the magic of movies, but, as arts, movies and magic have little in common. Movies ask us to suspend our disbelief. Magic courts our disbelief. Puzzling over how a movie did what it did is, at best, a subsidiary pleasure of watching a movie. Puzzling over how a magician does his tricks is more often than not the only pleasure of watching a magic show.

Magic, in the sense of a magician’s performance art, does not hold up well when transferred from stage to fictional film. An effect that is astonishing on stage becomes pedestrian on screen. (There’s a reason nearly every kind of celebrity in America has been in the movies, except magicians. We know how the tricks are done in movies.)

The trick, so to speak, that any good movie about magic must pull off is to create a reality so believable that we’re willing to buy into the magic. We need to be so engulfed in the film’s reality that we watch the magic tricks like the spectators in the film, not the spectators in the film’s audience. Like sports movies, movies about magic must be totally convincing just to be good.

Notes on The Wire

So one of the reasons–although certainly not the biggest one–why I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks is that instead of renting or watching movies on-demand, I’ve been addictively watching The Wire. I watched all of Season 4 late last year, and since late December, I’ve almost made my way through all of Seasons 1-3.

Beyond the observation that this is probably the best TV show ever, it’s also interesting to watch the first three seasons after watching season 4. For those who watched the seasons in order, it probably never seemed that a gang could be more ruthless than the Barksdale crew: killing witnesses, mutilating their enemies, killing off people just because they’re worried they might snitch. But Marlo Stanfield and his attack dogs, Chris and Snoop, the criminals in season 4, blow Barksdale out of the water. They don’t kill for sport, exactly, but they extinguish anyone that could remotely be a leak, even soldiers who’ve shown no indication of disloyalty.