Pan's Labyrinth [spoilers]

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=338067

 

I think you need to learn how to use spoiler tags.

Greg

 

I also thought it was a great movie. 5 stars for me. I am not a fan of subtitles but this one (and Letters from Iwo Jima) were just so unobtrusive that I didn't even notice them. Not sure where spoiler tags factored into this

 

Advertisements

It was her way of dealing with the General and her circumstance - it was imagined

 

I totally disagree that that is the definitive answer. It's left open to the viewers interpretation and I think how you decide speaks a lot to some personality aspect or other.

 

Speaks to personality ??? Sorry - even the director states her world is imagined - http://www.panslabyrinth.com/

 

It's not intended as an insult. I read an interview where he said it was up to the viewer to decide. My opinion is that people of a certain disposition feel it's one way, and people of another disposition like to think it's the other. Me I don't care, it was a good movie

 

Fair enough - it was a very good movie indeed, and I appreciate their ability to tell this story in a fantasy way aimed at adults.

 

I thought it was a big Bore. so did the wife.

 

(just watched this also; since I didn't see it in the theaters, I waited for an HD movie channel to show it--in this case, MAX-HD)

It was an interesting story, but I thought it really dragged at times. There were scenes that took soooo long to play out, that decent editing (IMO) could have halved the time. I found myself watching at 1FF speed for several minutes at a time (which is easy to do when subtitled, if you can read fast).

I also thought it was clear that the fairy tale was in her head, but YMMV.

 

I doubt if many of you care but it won the best Long Form dramatic presentation Hugo at the recently held World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convetion at Yokohama, Japan.

I enjoyed it. I watched the DVD because it was nominated for the Hugo but I realized that it was a very good movie, not just a good fantasy movie. Any movie that makes me get onto the internet to learn more about a subject (in this case the Spanish Civil War) is a good movie.

 

I personally believed the dream world to be real, as evidenced by her mother reacting to the burning of the mandrake and her escaping from the room with the chalk outline.

And nedthelab, in interviews Guillermo has stated that not only is it up to the viewer to decide, but he was the writer and he's not even sure what he believes.

Can't wait for some kind of HD release (with English subs.) Looks like it'll be a UK import of the HD-DVD this November.

 

Since the entire thread has (spoiler) in the title, I won't worry about tagging this...

My take on the movie is that all of the 'fantasy' elements were a dream/hallucination in her mind -- specifically, during the brief period between when she was shot and when she died. The reason I believe this is that the movie *actually* begins with her on the ground, in the position she would be in after being shot, but with the blood coming from her mouth *running in reverse*.

In other worse, the framing for the film is that we're moving into the mind of a dying little girl, and everything we "see" (given that it is told in flashback) cannot be trusted in the sense of 'literal truth'. For all we know, the literal truth is something entirely different.

The confusing elements (the adults that see portions of her fantasy world; the remarkable coincidences between the fantasy world and the 'real' world) can all be viewed through this same lens: in her mind, she's building every part of the story, including the confirmatory 'real world' evidence. And since that's the story we're seeing, we're swept along for the ride without any guideposts for what is actually happening.