At the Mooovies!

Oddly, I managed to see Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth within about a week of each other. At first, I was planning just to rave about CoM, but after seeing PL, it occurred to me that there was an interesting point of comparison/contrast. So you get a double review. ;)

I loved Children of Men. I had both laughed and cried inside of the first five minutes. Now, mind you, by "loved," I think I mean "felt uplifted, was horrified, felt positively ill, mourned, hoped, and generally felt like I'd been punched in the stomach." For me, these are actually positive indicators. The movie touched me at some very deep levels. (And Michael Caine has the best role in the film). It appealed to me in the way that certain older, post-apocalyptic science-fiction does: The Great Bad Thing has already happened, and I need to see the horror of it to really feel the hope that is offered.

With that in mind, not everyone reading this will get hope out of this movie. I know some of you well enough to know that y'all like your happy endings a little happier than this one. The people behind me in the theatre actually booed at the end of the film. I wanted to shout to them (as I sat there in my seat with tears running down my face), "If you're going to indulge in that kind of behavior, please see it on DVD and don't wreck other people's viewing experiences." And that may hold true for some of y'all (though I doubt anybody reading this is so ill-mannered as to actually boo in a movie theatre (well, unless it's RHPS)).

Another reason some people will want to see it on DVD: the violence. Most of us are used to violence in movies. Some violence is more visceral than others: there's a scene in Saving Private Ryan that comes to mind. CoM crossed a line for me on this. One part of that is bombs. There are bombs in this movie. They are not movie bombs, with lots of fire and buildings falling down. They are sound, a bright light, and pieces of people flying about. They did not register on my subconscious as movie bombs. The registered as real. Likewise, there was a point in the last third of the movie where, despite the seeming-reality of the street war that had broken out, it was all beginning to seem shiny and surreal to me. It occurred to me that that's how shock is described in some cases: You know it's really happening, but there's a certain unreality because you've somehow stopped processing in the ordinary way.

Sometimes, the small screen is not a bad thing.

Switching gears, Pan's Labyrinth started with small wonders and small horrors and escalated throughout. I went with it every step of the way, accepting each new horror and each new wonder and waiting to see where we would end up. And when we reached the end, the final wonder and the final horror were simultaneous, and the problem was . . . I only bought half of it. All of a sudden, after a whole movie of buying into the parallel that was going on, I bought the last horror. And the wonder missed me completely. So the whole thing struck me as an absolutely wonderful movie that I simply found horribly depressing. YMMV.

Ultimately, the two movies struck me as interesting in tandem because they both came down to the ending, and they both came down to whether or not the viewer went along for the last step. A mourning movie that ended with wonder, or a wonderous movie that ended with mourning? And I have a funny feeling that which is which is going to boil down to the viewer in each case, rather than anything inherant in the movie, itself.