I saw Pan's Labyrinth on the weekend - you know, Guillermo del Toro's film that reviewers have been busy having a huge collective orgasm over. (It already won the National Society of Film Critics' Best Movie award and has garnered an amazing 97 % rating on review database Rotten Tomatoes.)
You know what? (You might have seen this one coming...) I think it's terribly overrated. For starters, it is not, as suggested, a fantasy film with political or dramatic overtones; it is a rather harrowing war drama with some fantasy elements. So, of course the critics loved it - they simply adore that sort of thing, that thing being period war drama with maybe just a little twist of something unusual (but not too unusual).
It is like the post-WW II drama and the fantasy story are two different movies; there are only a few short passages where the film successfully manages to interweave these two elements. Lucky, then, that it doesn't have to, since the fantastical elements are abandoned for what seems like forever during the second and third acts, only to be brought in again at the very end.
Let's see what the critics had to say. "It's dark poetry set to startling images", gushed The LA Daily News reviewer. "This morbidly bewitching fantasy is an enchanting, escapist fairy tale", raved another. Well, it's not. Too grounded in reality for its own good, it lacks a sense of wonder and transcendence. Moreover, it is anything but escapist. In fact, the film is so bleak with so few breaks for the protagonist and her loved ones that the viewer may find him- or herself actively waiting and wishing for an escape of some kind - for the character as well as for him/herself.
My main beef with the movie, as you may have gathered by now, is that, for a flick heavily advertised as a fantasy film, there is surprisingly little fantasy involved. Reading some of the reviews, you'd think the film takes place mostly in a fantasy world, when in actual fact the protagonist never escapes the film's here and now. According to some, though, it is a "special universe", even an "entirely different universe", which "relies heavily on special effects". Did these people see the same movie as I did? Brushing aside the fact that maybe 80 to 90 percent of the movie's duration is realist drama, in this CGI age Pan's Labyrinth's special FX actually seem almost quaint.
But that's film critics for you. Not always terribly bright or cultured, but never ones to miss a chance to spout pseudo-profound high-school essay platitudes. New York Times' A.O. Scott, for instance, had this to say: "Pan's Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or is it the other way around?" Very cutesy, if a bit empty.
Then again, I'm probably just too shallow to grasp the film's deeper meanings, of too mundane a disposition to appreciate its wondrous elegance, let alone the subtexts (of which there are none, since its messages are so heavy-handed).
Moving on to other inexplicably revered phenomena. Mischa Barton, previously of the O.C. I keep hearing over and over again she is one of the "hottest young females in Hollywood"? What? That gangly, fidgety, flat-chested, asexual child? Are you fucking kidding me? She is about as hot as Alec Baldwin - although not for the same reasons.
Bob Dylan. Visionary poet, blaah blaah blaah ... longevity, blaah blaah ... versatility, blaah. Blaah blaah. Blaah. For once, I agree with Simon Cowell on something.
U2. Oh, please; don't even get me started on those pompous twats. Their music is the most horrific kind of portentous-yet-hollow middle-class MOR shite. In short, it's directly antithetical to all that is genuine and beautiful about music.
Joanna Newsom. She topped all kinds of critics' lists with her latest album, Ys, but left me cold, nay, frozen. If U2 are the squares even your grandma likes, Newsom is the type of wilfully weird artist who wears her supposed idiosyncracies like a crown. I certainly don't have anything against original, distinctive artists, but believing your own press and consciously feeding an idea of yourself as a stardust-sprinkled pixie just chafes me something fierce. "Oh, look at me; I'm so special and eccentric!" Freak folk, my ass.
I also hate Björk. And hippies.
Clint Eastwood. Hey, peoples; he's not the second coming of Jesus, or even John Ford. The amount of praise lavished on all of his recent movies is absurd and unfounded. Yes, his 90s/00s movies are almost uniformly decent, it's just that they aren't the ingenious masterpieces they are purported to be. That pathetic, cliche-ridden TV-movie-of-the-week, Million Dollar Baby, though, should never have won anything. I absolutely hate that movie, and the knee-jerk, sentimentalist consensus Hollywood thinking its win represents. (And of course it also greatly vexes me that he always seems to be standing in the way of one of the few true masters of modern cinema, Marty Scorsese, who is far, far more deserving, getting his due.)
What is more, now the Americans have found a way to spare themselves the unalluring task of giving awards to foreign films altogether. It's brilliant! Just give the foreign language awards to Eastwood's Japanese-speaking Letters from Iwo Jima! Moreover, both of his "opposing view point of the same war" films have been nominated for several awards. So let me get this straight: from all the films made in all of the world in 2006, Clint Eastwood made two of the best five? Yeah, right. He's gotten his props already, give them to someone else. For God's sakes.
