I went with Leslie, Dave, Ben, and Mike to see 300 this evening. It was disappointing. That's saying a lot, because I expected to dislike it. I wasn't a fan of Sin City (another film based on a comic by Frank Miller), so I was expecting have similar feelings about 300. I expected to think it was neat looking for the first fifteen to twenty minutes and then have a strong desire to either take a nap or leave. Both films are entirely devoid of any kind of meaning, relying entirely on creating a unique visual experience and lots of “cool” deaths. I'm rarely impressed by “cool” deaths, they just feel pathetic. I'm slightly more swayed in a video game like Prince of Persia, but for the most part I find them dull at best and barbaric and pathetic at worst. I am, however, willing to take a peak at truly good visuals. Both Sing City and 300 are all about the presentation.
Unfortunately the visuals in both films can't hold my attention for very long. I saw everything I needed to see in Sin City after the first scene and the same holds true for 300. My hope with 300 was that I would get to see poetry in motion. Unfortunately this only happened once. They rest of the film was a series of tableaus. Tableaus are great, but what's the point of film if you have are stationary pictures? Why not sell me a really neat PowerPoint presentation? I'll take ballet over this stuff any day.
A few nights ago Beki and I had a conversation about whether or not there was really a place for “escapists” films. I get frustrated by folks saying, “It was just a silly movie and that's all it was trying to be. I don't always want my entertainment to be serious or important.” I certainly understand this sentiment; I've said it myself, and I certainly have a love for mindless films (I'm a huge fan of the The Transporter movies and look forward to seeing Crank). But I'm not sure that we should demand nothing of our escapist films. I think we ought to demand that they not be demeaning and condescending. Beki held up the new Hugh Grant film Music and Lyrics as a good example. One of my favorite bloggers also wrote a post that made a similar argument. I think they're both right on. A film like 300 is nothing more than two hours of harmful stereotypes about what makes “men” “Men” and “women” “Women”, stupid platitudes, and stupid amounts of blood.
I'm all for pretty movies, but let's keep them to twenty minutes if that's they are.
Pan's Labyrinth is an impressive film that doesn't quite reach it's full potential. This post will be a little critical of the film, but that's only because it was good enough to be taken seriously. The story centers around a little girl living in Franco's Spain. She and her pregnant mother have been taken to her step-father's (The Captain) army base in the country. The Captain is busy waiting for his son to be born and trying to kill off the rebels. He's a horrible human being. To escape her lousy life, Ofelia creates a fairy tale in which she is a lost princess trying to get back to her thrown. The film alternates between Ofelia's surreal, grotesque fantasy and the horrors of her reality.
Part of the goal of the film seems to be to juxtapose the unsettling images of Ofelia's fantasies with even more unsettling reality of the war and The Captain. She is confronted with all manner of disturbing images in her daydreams, but none as difficult to handle as her everyday world. At first the filmmakers seem to be trying to get at the horrors of Ofelia's surroundings by ironically having her to confront grotesque, frightening fantasies that can never live up to the horrors of The Captain. The monster with eyes in its hands that eats little children who taste of his banquet is nothing compared to The Captain who beats an innocent man to death with the butt end of a wine bottle. This kind of irony only takes us so far. The filmmakers want us to experience the horrors of human interaction by contrasting it with the most upsetting situations they can think of for a little girl to invent. But in the end they must rely on showing The Captain stitching his own mouth in order to make us cringe at the ugliness of man.
The director, Guillermo del Toro, never quite lives up to the promise of his concept. Films like this are trying to get us to understand, through art, what it is confront inhumanity as well as ultimate sacrifice. The problem is that showing us depraved acts doesn't get us there. I think his contrast of fantasy and reality has a great deal of poential, but del Toro isn't convinced by his own idea, and so resorts to just the kind of things that everyone else has for 100 hundred years. The opening battle in Saving Private Ryan is the rare film that offers an experience solely through recreation (and after that first fifteen minutes turns into a mostly cliche war film). Perhaps some one will be inspired by del Toro's attempt and give it another go.
I'll reiterate that I think there's a lot to admire in Pan's Labyrinth. I've focused on only one aspect of the film. I'd recommend it as one of the best films I've seen in the last year. Check it out on the big screen if you can. It reminded me of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle without being seven hours and chock full of endless, impossible symbolism and mythology.
I just gave Alba catnip. We keep in a sandwich bag. She likes to stick her head all the way in the bag, inhale, and take a bite. She does this for a few minutes and then runs around rubbing herself on things and trying to play with my feet.
Yesterday Ben, Dave, and I went to Bobcat Bite for a burger and The Screen to see The Holy Mountain.
The burger was amazing. It is a green chile cheese burger. I got mine with grilled onions. Bobcat is in the middle of nowhere (see the post about The Red Elvises for more about places in the middle of nowhere). It's just far enough outside of Santa Fe to make it annoying, but not far enough to call it “a nice drive.” The building was originally some kind of trading post (“I bet you could just come here, get drunk, and shoot stuff,” said Dave), but became the Bobcat Bite in 1953. It's a tiny place with a counter and six or seven tables. The walls are adorned with horrible but oh-so-perfect paintings of bobcats. We were early, so we got a table right away. What makes the burger so good? I imagine that they haven't cleaned their grill in the fifty-four years of its existence. The burgers are just the right doneness. I like mind medium rare, although Dave and Ben both approved of their medium burgers. It was probably the best burger I've ever had. The onions and home fries were not to be overlooked. I took most of the onions off the burger so as to enjoy the perfect meat and chile, but they were delicious on their own. Top it off with some ice tea (they don't serve beer) and you have yourself a perfect meal.
From the Bobcat we headed to a sporting good store to buy racquets for racquetball. We've started playing a couple times a week, so it was time to step our games with our own equipment.
We then drive over to The Screen at the College of Santa Fe. It's a great theater that shows lots of stuff you won't seen anywhere else. We were there to see Alejandro Jodorowsky's, The Holy Mountain. It's truly a bizarre movie in the mode of the more surrealist works of Godard and Bunuel. I can't say it's a great film, but it has it's moments. The first half has almost no dialogue and is filled with a mostly naked man carrying a partial limbed dwarf around a Mexican city. Just read the link to the Senses of Cinema sight and scroll down till you find the photo of crucified, skinned chickens. In the paragraphs surrounding the photo you'll find a pretty good synopsis. Much of the film was just silly and unenlightening, but there were moments when the whole experience of the images really comes together. You start doing away with the kind of logical truth statements that usually represent ideas and start to really understand the importance of experience over semantics. I also like how he gives up on trying to portray the horrors of violence and instead gives a good sense of why art will never quiet get it right. I think these kinds of films are worth seeing from time to time. It really puts a lot of other art and experience in a new context, even if many of the ideas and experiences don't hold water.
I don't know what to make of the rather warped portrayal of sex so prevalent in these kinds of films. Very rarely, if ever, did you see a woman who wasn't either topless or having some kind of sex. There were some women in the film who were powerful and part of the elite ten that the second half of the film focuses on, but so much of the film centers on the depravity of sex acts. But in nearly all the sex acts it is the woman who is the object. Men don't get off easy, but they're almost always in control. Part of this is intended to be satire, but I wonder at what point it stops being satire and starts to be part of the problem. The same thing happens in David Lynch films.
Overall it was quite a strange day. When I came home Beki had gone to see the new Hugh Grant film, leaving me alone to play Wii.
