{"id":488,"date":"2007-02-12T15:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T19:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/?p=488"},"modified":"2007-02-12T15:03:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-12T19:03:00","slug":"pans-labyrinth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/2007\/02\/12\/pans-labyrinth\/","title":{"rendered":"Pan&#8217;s Labyrinth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let me begin this semi-professional review with a discourse on reviewing etiquette.  If you don&#8217;t like political dramas, then by all means do not review movies like &#8220;The Last King of Scotland\u009d&#8221; and &#8220;Syrian\u009d&#8221;.  The material can&#8217;t compare cross-genre.  It is my feelings that force me to confront my own personal biases when reviewing movies like Pan&#8217;s Labyrinth.<\/p>\n<p>I hate horror.  I have despised the genre from the beginning.  I am a firm believer in the idea: &#8220;Just because technology gives us the tools to demonstrate things of a egregious violent nature, does not mean we should indulge in their uses.&#8221; Let me begin by listing what I believe to be the major flaws with the film, <\/p>\n<p>A:) The movie was exceptionally blatant as to its plot progression.  This isn&#8217;t a horrible flaw.  In fact it is a flaw that most fairy tales suffer from.  You know what is going to happen in the story far before it actually occurs.  For individuals like me, it gives you a massive power to know when exactly you should avert your gaze.  I think this has to do with the fundamental plot points that must happen to maintain fairy tale status.  You must have points A, B, C, an D in order to have a plane, and so you must have a standard plot progression to have a fairy tale: usually originating from the real and moving to the super-natural\/fantastic.  <\/p>\n<p>B:) Visual Assault.  I read several reviews before watching the film, and to be honest this feature was one of the major reasons I&#8217;ve put off watching the film.  There are a lot of scenes that made me so uncomfortable as to want to stop watching the film.  I endured through the film, but it was tough.  Of course everyone has their own definitions of what thresholds exist as for violent content and gore.  <\/p>\n<p>C:) Mary pointed this out, the translations we saw were slightly eschewed and made me wonder how the original language interpretation differed from the story.  You see even the title invokes a possible perception alteration.  I know a lot about Pan and how the image of Pan has been distorted during the Christian &#8220;indoctrination&#8221;\u009d and &#8220;re-definition&#8221; of religious artifacts.  minor primer: Pan was not evil originally and in fact a lot of the negative interpretations to his character was adopted to give the religions that used Pan as a figure would be discredited as worshipers of a false (evil) religion.  This led me to automatically distrust the Satyr\/Faun.  Which wasn&#8217;t necessarily wrong in retrospect, but could have given a very distorted view of the story.  I also would like to interpret the &#8220;ending&#8221; of the movie in terms of Christian stories.  The father looks very god like on a beacon in the center, whereas the mother has the suckling babe in her arms which is exceptionally iconic of the Virgin Mary to his left.  And where is Christ&#8217;s seat? at the right hand of god.  at least Christ was female in this story.<\/p>\n<p>Ok so the above points are not all necessarily negative.  The movie is gorgeous by far, and the acting is as dead on and passionate as I could ever expect.  There were no suspension of disbelief issues, and the story itself was very beautifully written.  I certainly don&#8217;t regret seeing the movie, I just have my own personal issues with the film as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let me begin this semi-professional review with a discourse on reviewing etiquette. If you don&#8217;t like political dramas, then by all means do not review movies like &#8220;The Last King of Scotland\u009d&#8221; and &#8220;Syrian\u009d&#8221;. The material can&#8217;t compare cross-genre. It is my feelings that force me to confront my own personal biases when reviewing movies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/happypoet.com\/arglor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}