Movie Review: Pan’s Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth officially makes the third story I have seen in my life set during the Spanish Civil War.  For those of you who want the briefest of backgrounds, in the late 30s, a Fascist government came to power by overthrowing the Republican government, and a lot of the Republicans became fled or (in this particular film) became guerilla freedom fighters.

The first story I saw set in this era was Elke Neidhardt’s staged opera production of Il Trovatore, which I saw in Brisbane some years back.  This was an interesting production and worked rather well because there were two opposing armies in the opera, so the revamp worked well.

The second movie was also by the director of this film, Guillermo del Toro, and was called The Devil’s Backbone.  I don’t know many other people who saw it, but it was about a little boy who was left at an orphanage in the last days of the war.  So while the fighting was raging outside, the boy was being haunted by the ghost of a murdered child.

And now we have Pan’s Labyrinth.  In this particular case, the boy has become a little girl, Ofelia, who is heading up into the mountains with her pregnant mother, to join her mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal.  Vidal is a fascist, and absolutely obsessed with killing the last of the rebel guerillas hiding in the mountains.

While Vidal spends his time tracking down the rebels, young Ofelia becomes more obsessed with fairies.  Pretty soon, she’s seeing them, and one night, a Faun (who alternates between being friendly and menacing), gives her a series of tasks to do: tasks which, in the tradition of the old fairy tales (not the latest sugar-coated Disney versions) become increasingly more frightening as the movie rolls along.

I was a bit disappointed with this film, because I was hoping that there would be some sort of connection between the fairy story and the real world story.  (Perhaps even an allegory.)  But it seemed a little bit more disconnected than that.  Basically, imagine that during The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe movie, the film kept switching between the kids in Narnia and a story about British troops being stationed at the old house who are hunting for Nazi spies hiding in the woods. If that seems like an odd mix, that’s what Pan’s Labyrinth seemed like to me.

At the end of the day, I think this film was more style than substance. Beautifully shot, with every scene being great eye-candy, you were certainly never bored, but nonetheless, the film was populated with stock characters.  The ailing mother who doesn’t see what’s really going on, the innocent child, the nice doctor, the caring maid, and absolutely chewing up the screen, Sergi Lopez (who similarly chewed up the screen in the very Hitchcockian Harry, He Is Here To Help a few years ago) as Captain Vidal.  I don’t think we’ve seen a psychopath like this since Ralph Fiennes’s random Jew-shooting in Schindler’s List.

Which of course brings me to what really ties this film together, fairy tale and real story: they’re both gross.  The special effects guys who work on the gore have gone to town on this film, with ever-escalating new ways to be unsubtle.  Where other films move the camera somewhere else once the amputating surgeon pulls out his hacksaw, this camera moves in to show you the action.  All this culminates in what is without doubt, the mother of squeam-inducing scenes: a scene where, to spoil as little of it as possible, a character sews up their own wound.  The scene dragged out for something 30-45 seconds, but I doubt very many of the audience I was with watched the whole thing.

Was there a point to any of this extra blood and guts? I don’t think so.

So, all in all, a fascinating piece of film-making an an engaging story, but I’m not sure this is the great fantasy masterpiece of the decade.  3 1/2 out of 5.

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DVD Review: Grease

This is really one of those films that have been on my list to see for I don’t know how many years, but never gotten around to it.  You know how when you’re growing up, there’s always that one movie that everyone else has seen except for you?  This was the one for me.

Now, that I’ve seen it, it makes some past recollections of people talking about it seem more amusing.  I remember one person telling me that their school was doing it as a musical, but they were cutting out the off-colour moments.  Having seen the film, I think that might leave you with a set of end credits . . .

Anyway, on to the film itself. This is, just in case you’ve lived on another planet for many years, a musical set in an American high school during the rock’n'roll era of the 1950s.  It’s mainly concerned with the love story between Danny (John Travolta), the leather jacket wearing macho tough kid, and the rather pure Australian girl Sandy (Olivia Newton-John).

Danny’s a wild child, Sandy’s rather conservative.  And considering that everybody else is seems to be concerned with having sex with somebody (anybody, really), she’s obviously going to stick out like a sore thumb.

At first it looks as if the film might be trying to have a message about the dangers of the good old days of parking and promiscuity, with a subplot about a girl called Rizzo (Stockard Channing) who finds out she’s possibly pregnant after a night out with her boyfriend.  However, just before we get to find out whether this would mean that she would perhaps regret her wildness and he would grow up a bit, it turns out she’s not pregnant, so I guess that means everything’s okay?

In the meantime, Danny attempts to clean up a bit and become a sports jock to impress Sandy, but this fails miserably.  Sandy meanwhile, decides to give up the conservatism and try a bit of wildness for her famous last song, but unlike Danny, she makes the transition rather perfectly.

So does this mean that she too might end up possibly pregnant?  Hard to say, because with a quick final number and an ending that was ripped off of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (of all things!), the film’s over before anybody really has to worry about any really serious issues of life.

But, really, who was watching it for the story?  It is the music that has made Grease become immortal and even after the passage of years, the big songs (and even if you haven’t seen the movie, you know the songs I’m talking about) are still just as catchy as ever.  They stick in your head, they make you want to dance, and the cast pull off the singing and dancing with such enthusiasm, that this is going to be remembered as one of the most popular (if not also one of the most ridiculous) musicals of the 20th century.

3 out of 5 from me, but there are going to be fans out there who will take me to task, I’m sure.

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Rachel Review: Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

Sorry, we forgot to post Rachel’s thoughts about Glenn Gould the other day.  They are:

“It’s a clever film because you come away a bit confused because you don’t really know who he was.  But I think that’s good, because I don’t think anyone really knew what he was like, because he was a recluse.  So how can you make a clear and understandable film about someone who nobody really knows very well?  3 1/2 out of 5.”

Book Review: By the Pricking of My Thumbs (Agatha Christie)

Some of you may know that for a period of – I don’t know really – probably two years – I was collecting The Agatha Christie Collection.  This was a partworks collection that came out at the rate of one book every fortnight from the newsagent, with a nice hardbound edition of the book (which I haven’t got pictured here, because it wasn’t sold in bookstores) and an accompanying magazine.

Originally, there were just going to be 45 issues, containing the 45 best Agatha Christie stories.  However, the collection was so popular, that it kept going to 65 issues.  Then, by that stage, it was still so popular that the publishers decided, “Why not do it all?”  So they went out and chased up copyright for her plays and her autobiography and they published absolutely every last thing she wrote under the name of Agatha Christie, bringing the collection to a whopping 85 books.

I think it was somewhere in the low 60s that I had to take a break from reading one every fortnight.  Especially because, as the really classic ones were in the first 45, there’s a sense in which there’ s a bit of barrel-scraping going on here.

Anyway, I’m not going to review the 60 or so I’ve already ready here, because that would be a test of my patience trying to remember exactly what happened in each one and a test of yours reading it all.  However, I did just finish this one, so I can comment on it while it’s fresh in my mind.

This book is another in the Tommy and Tuppence series.  T & T are a little bit more obscure than Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Christie’s main sleuths, and they’re not quite as outlandish.  But they are interesting, because they’re the only characters that really aged in Christie’s books.

The first time we met them was in a very early book called The Secret Adversary, where they were a couple of young adventurers caught up in a spy plot.  (By the way, Tuppence’s real name is Prudence, in case you were wondering. ) Then, in their next book (whose name escapes me) they were now married and middle-aged middle-aged couple helping in an undercover operation during World War II, sussing out a spy at an English boarding house.  And now, in this book, they’re now in their early 60s with grown-up married children.

Nonetheless, this in now way stops them from having adventures.  The story starts with the pair visiting Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at the Sunny Ridge nursing home.  While there, Tuppence meets an old lady, Mrs Lancaster, who drops some hints to a dead child in a chimney.  Tuppence feels that there’s something unusual here, but doesn’t think anything of it.

Until a few weeks later, when Tommy’s Aunt Ada suddenly dies in her sleep.  They return to the nursing home, only to find that Mrs Lancaster has been taken away suddenly by mysterious “relatives” and seems to have disappeared.  To make things more complicated, before Mrs Lancaster left, she left a painting of a house by a canal with Aunt Ada.  The painting now falls into T & T’s hands.

Tuppence has two suspicions: 1) That Mrs Lancaster has been kidnapped somehow.  2) That she knows that house in the painting.  While Tommy goes away to a conference, she sets out to investigate the mystery, and the story just takes more twists and turns from there.

I didn’t see the end coming on this story, to tell the truth, and it was actually a stronger story than I expected.  As usual with Christie, the characterisations are light-on and fluffy, and nobody really seems to take anything terribly serious, but the plot is, as always, brilliant conceived. (It is truly amazing how many different stories she could tell without getting repetitive with her endings.)

3 1/2 out of 5.

Video Review: Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

For those of you who’ve never heard of him, Glenn Gould was an eccentric but very gifted Canadian pianist, who died in 1982 at the age of 50. Widely regarded as one of the great classical pianists of the 20th century, his career took some strange turns.

At the age of 32, he decided that live concerts were too imperfect, and so took to only playing the piano in the recording studio, so a lot of people never got to hear him live. Also, he was a recluse and seemed to like to keep to himself.

But, despite that, he wrote quite a lot of articles and things to show us that he had quite a quick and well-developed wit (in addition to being an insightful musician). Also, those who knew him, told stories of how he would ring them on the phone and chat for hours and hours. So this over-clinginess on the one hand, seemed to balance off his reclusiveness on the other.

So how do you make a film about a guy like this? In the end, the approach Canadian director Francois Girard took is rather unorthodox, but also somehow fitting. He made 32 short films (one for every 32 of Bach’s Goldberg Variations), each of which shows various facets of Gould’s life.

Most of them are dramatised, with Colm Feore playing Glenn Gould, but there are a few which just consist of talking heads of real people who knew Gould when he was alive.

One of my favourites that I could mention is one where Glenn is in a hotel in Hamburg, Germany. A maid is cleaning the room, while he’s sending a telegram over the phone. In the middle of all this, a package arrives containing his latest record. The maid is about to leave, but Glenn grabs her, asks her to sit down, and puts on this record.

It’s interesting, because as a beautifully played piece of Bach starts to play, we see the maid move from being rather perplexed by what’s going on, to visibly enjoying the music, to finally realising that this strange man is actually the pianist she’s listening to.

Some of the others are more unusual – such as one that just consists of Glenn narrating all the different medications he’s taking and what their side effects are (towards the end of his life, he was on large amounts of medication for his blood pressure and other things that ultimately killed him.

Then there are poignant ones – we see the Steinway piano that he played at his live concerts. As we hear Bach being played, the camera moves across the strings, zooming in on the moving keys. Then, at the end, we see two stagehands packaging the piano up – never to be played on stage by Glenn ever again.

All in all, it doesn’t really take the place of a conventional linear film about the man. But then again, if it was linear, we’d have to have things like plot and character development, and tension, and all of those things that we need in Hollywood biopics. By taking this approach, this film avoids all of those cliches. However, as a consequence, I think it leaves us a little too distant from this man. That said, though . . . I think that’s kind of the way Glenn would have liked it.

3 1/2 out of 5.

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Confessions of a Former Opera-Hater

I have been meaning to do a CD review for a while, but the CDs that I’m currently working through are part of a 10-CD box set, so with weekend time a bit scarce, I haven’t yet finished the box set, and so cannot do a review.

So I thought to fill in time and spice things up a bit, I’d do a few posts on opera in the meantime.  To start with, though, I thought I should tell my conversion story (I think that’s the corrrect term) of how I changed from hating opera to absolutely loving it.

We’ll start with the hating.

Opera was never something I liked.  It was in the same sort of class as lieder, really.

However, it must be stated, that nobody else in my family liked opera either.  So I didn’t actually hear too much of it growing up, because it was never on the record player or anywhere else.  We didn’t own any operas.  But I must have heard bits and pieces on the radio, because I came to hate the sound.  It always just sounded like some singer bellowing at the top of their lungs, accompanied by a loud orchestral blast from behind.

I liked pure orchestral music, and I didn’t mind choir music.  But this loud bellowing in Italian was getting too much for me.

I realised now that there were two main problems (and they really are the two main barriers to liking opera): 1) not liking the opera sound and 2) not understanding what the singers were singing about.  Actually, a third issue in my younger days was 3) not having enough money to get into opera – but that’s a different issue.

Believe it or not, if you really want to be an opera fan. However, Barrier Number 1, Hating the Opera Sound, is something that must be conquered if you wish to do so.  And not everybody can.

The operatic style of singing involves using your throat and voice in a different way from contemporary singing (which is why, for instance, musicals sound much different from operas, even though they’re essentially the same thing).  This style of singing has a few pros and cons.

The pros are that a good opera singer can project his or her voice out into a theatre full of people with no microphone whatsoever, and be heard perfectly.  (Remember, also, that the singer is also trying to sing over the top of a full-size orchestra that is accompanying.) The pros are also that this sound can vary dramatically depending on what type of singer you have.  Working up, there are the basses, who usually play the baddies in an opera because they have low, menacing voices. Baritones are next up.  They’re higher than basses, but still not tenors, so they tend to get the sidekick roles, or the wise old men roles.

Tenors, of course, with their soaring vocal range, become the heroes of the piece.  If a tenor is an opera, he’s going to probably a) get all the women, b) wipe out the bad guys, c) get heartbroken, d) possibly break some hearts himself and e) die tragically.  And in most cases, he’ll do all this on the one night.

Then, next, we have the mezzo-sopranos.  They’re not as high as the sopranos, so they tend to get female sidekick and wise old women roles.  They also get to play the role of the operatic female tyrant. If you’re going to have a mother-in-law, evil queen, you name it, she’ll be a mezzo.  Finally, sopranos, who are always going to be the heroines of the piece, with their high gliding notes.  If you really want to get specific, there are also coloratura sopranos, who specialise in being able to rattle off long strings of very high, very fast notes, all without breaking a sweat.  Truly amazing to hear.

However, the cons of this sound are: 1) these voices all vibrate, which largely separates it from straight normal singing.  And, usually, the higher the voices go (especially sopranos), often the louder and more noticeable this vibration becomes.  It is this sound which most people can’t stand.

The only way to get used to it is just to listen to some opera and grow to like the sound.  If you try it enough times, you gradually will come to like it.  The second con of the opera sound is 2) to get the power in the voice, regular vowel sounds get squashed a bit.  So, even if a singer is singing in English, it can still be difficult to make out the words. (Unlike a musical, where these things are fairly clear.)  So, without a set of the lyrics, it can be quite difficult to listen to it.

Anyway, for all those reasons above, I never liked opera.  However, during my teenage years (15-18 mostly), I started getting to like oratorios, which are long pieces for choir and soloists, usually on Christian themes. (Two of the most famous ones, and two of my favourites, are The St Matthew Passion, which tells the story of Christ’s death and The Messiah, which tells of Christ’s whole life. More on that another day.)

Unbeknownst to me, listening to these oratorios got me used to that operatic voice sound.  The first barrier had been crossed.  But I still could never really get into opera.  Whenever I listened to bits and pieces of it on radio, it just never interested me.

But all of that was to change . . . and I’ll post about that another time.