Pan’s Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth
Last week I got my usual Kinokuniya monthly newsletter and noticed that they were having a contest to win free movie tickets. I wrote back immediately but didn’t get a reply, so I figured I wasn’t quick enough. Lo and behold, two days later they arrived in the mail! I won two free tickets to see a sneak preview of Pan’s Labyrinth. Other than Kevin’s review, I really didn’t know much about it other than it was some sort of fantasy. I was expecting sort of a dark, “Alice in Wonderland” type adventure. Yowza. Instead it’s more like 2/3 war story, 1/3 fantasy. And the war bits are really, really gruesome. I found myself hiding behind my hands more than once, and the “lip stitching” part had the whole audience audibly wincing. That said, both parts of the story were compelling and I wasn’t bored at all. The actors are all fantastic, and the effects are convincingly creepy. I did find the ending a little depressing though… (Spoilers after the jump.)So she friggin’ DIED? Does that mean that the underworld is real, or was it just all in her head? I figure it had to have been real, because she obviously got out of her locked room somehow. But I really hate stories where the characters have really crappy lives and then die, and we’re supposed to somehow think it’s a happy ending. (See: CS Lewis’s “The Last Battle”; that “Sliding Doors” movie with Gwyneth Paltrow.) Snookums thinks I’m too much of an atheist to like these stories. I guess I must be. I just find them really depressing.