Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

Last Friday, I played hookie from work, and George and I caught the afternoon screening of Guillermo Del Toro's new film Pan's Labyrinth at the AFI Festival. I'm pretty behind on my movie watching, but I can't imagine that I will see a better movie than this this year. It's such a beautiful, original, and yet simple film that I find myself at a loss to say much about it (I'll probably have a review up on The Fake Life next month, closer to the release). As a work of fantasy, it can stand next to any of Miyazaki's work, it's visuals rival any of Gilliam's films (and it makes me want to catch Tideland just to compare the two), and in many ways it reminds me of Heavenly Creatures, one of my favorite films of all time.

And, OK, that thing, The Pale Man? He looks pretty fuckin' creepy in that picture, but it doesn't give you any indication of how goddamn scary it is to see him in motion.

Del Toro spoke after the screening, and he gives a great speech. He said that he was trying to bring fairy tales back to their roots with this movie. "Fairy tales now are so sanitized and castrated. If you read the original Hansel and Gretel, it took place during a famine, and it has murder and incest and eye-gouging." He refered to a book called The Science of Fairy Tales, which he used as a primary source while doing research for the film.

I'll skip the spoiler that lead to the following rant, but he was speaking about the logic of fantasy. "If they were making Warner Bros. cartoons in Hollywood today, there would be some executive standing there saying 'Why does the Coyote use a rocket?' 'Because that's what the Coyote does!' 'Well, why don't we have a scene where the Coyote flashes back to his childhood, and we see his father using a rocket...'" He also mentioned that he was giving a talk at a film school, and one of the students asked him "What was the target audience for this film?" "I said, 'shut the fuck up! Why are you asking about that when you're a film student?'" Speaking of which, for some reason, someone asked him what his favorite English word was, and he said "Fuck," then went on a five-minute routine about all the different usages of fuck, while the moderator kept trying to call on someone to ask another question.