Midnight in the garden ...

When I went to see Pan's Labyrinth, I actually didn't know it was going to be in Spanish with subtitles. I saw the preview a few months ago, and come to think of it, there were no speaking parts in the preview. None of the reviews I read mentioned it was subtitled either, so it was a bit of a pleasant surprise. Watching it underscored that I can understand Spanish Spanish better than other dialects. And by that I mean the few sentences I got on my own without reading the subtitles ("¡No!" being one of them.)

The film skillfully connected, and then switched between, two main stories. The main story is Ofelia, a little girl accompanying her pregnant mother to a remote outpost of Spain in 1944 to live with her stepfather, the captain of a unit that is squashing the anti-Franco resistance movement. (The stepfather, plainly and simply, is a bastard. A violent, condescending, smug bastard. Ofelia's life becomes hell living in the military outpost.) The other story, a fairy-tale one, involves a princess of the underworld who runs away to earth and whose soul must someday return. The quiet and lonely Ofelia stumbles upon a portal to this fairy underworld.

The religious metaphor is a little obvious (human experience is full of suffering, to the earth we will all return, one day there will be a homecoming to father the king in a different world, etc, etc).

Though it was disturbingly violent and macabre, I really liked Pan's Labyrinth. It was sheer brilliance. The story was really dark and really depressing, but the film was incredibly well done. The colors and the set were equally as dark and depressing, reinforcing the isolation and dreariness of the story.

I hope it wins more awards. And speaking of award-winning films...

Before being awed by Pan's Labyrinth at the theatre, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's for the first time. I hate to say it, given that almost everyone I know loves this film, but I was ... underwhelmed. It reminded me a little too much of Butterfield 8, where the woman running from her dubious past meets a nice, boring guy who can redeem her if she is only willing to change her ways.

Not even going to start on the whole Mickey-Rooney-in-yellowface deal. (I yelled "Oh hell no!" in stupefied amazement at the TV in the first five minutes of the movie, so perhaps that colored my judgment for the rest of it.)

I'm sure the Truman Capote novella was good. I understand that this is one of the iconic films in American culture. And I do like Audrey Hepburn. Not saying there weren't some good scenes. The opening scene, for instance, was great: eating a pastry outside Tiffany's, early in the morning, on an empty Manhattan street. Symbolic of the character, brilliant scene in and of itself. I just didn't find the characters very compelling or the storyline very interesting.