Pan's Labyrinth

Wildly imaginative, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie that nobody should miss.

The story takes place in one of the darkest periods in Spanish history – 1944, right after Franco’s victory. Del Toro deftly mixes a young girl’s fantasy world with the dark reality around her. A good script is a foundation to any good film; Pan’s Labyrinth is no exception. Del Toro’s screenplay is simply superb. Where does this guy come from? His only credits in Hollywood so far have been a few big studio productions. I saw the horror movie Mimic directed by him years ago and was not impressed at all. When Hellboy and Blade II came out, I scoffed at them and didn’t think they would deserve my time (maybe I should check them out). However, in his native tongue, del Toro seems to be able to let go of all his inhibitions and let his imagination run wild.

The movie appears to have two separate stories run parallel to each other. Ofelia has to follow her heavily pregnant mother to a military post so that her baby brother can be born where her stepfather is. Faced with a cruel stepfather, her mother’s poor health and sadness, and a completely new environment, she relies on her fairy tales for comfort. The two worlds del Toro creates complement each other perfectly: when there is menace in Ofelia’s fantasy, del Toro would turn to danger and evil in the real world; when the real world is too grave for us to watch, the scene would quickly switch to Ofelia’s imaginary quest. Del Toro combines so many different genres such as fantasy, drama and thriller all together, but the movie never becomes just a big stew of clever tricks and special effects. Indeed, the story is so interesting, the characters are so fascinating that I hardly thought about all the digital effects that del Toro might have used in creating all those fantastic creatures. Watching Pan’s Labyrinth is a completely different experience from watching, say, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. Watching those movies make one marvel at the spectacular visual created by computers while the eye-opening sights in Pan’s Labyrinth do not distract one’s mind from the story and are only secondary in the whole structure of the movie. Which is not to say the movie doesn’t have an impressive visual component. To the contrary, the movie is absolutely visually stunning. Del Toro paints a dark picture shrouded in a somber hue to match the Fascist repression depicted in the movie.

Don’t be fooled by the girl in the movie poster and the word – fantasy written on it. It is not a family movie, but rather a fable for grown-ups. Sometimes kids have the luxury to hide behind their fantasies while adults have to face the ugliness in the read world. Unfortunately sooner or later the innocent has to face the real evil. In the end climax, when two parallel worlds finally clash and a most terrifying episode in Ofelia’s fantasy has eerily become a reality, the actual threat is hundred times more sinister than what Ofelia has conjured up in her fancy.

The movie is well-acted. Ivana Baquero is sweet and guileless as Ofelia. Maribel Verdu of Y tu mama tambien fame surprised me by making herself look very plain as the servant Mercedes. She shows a completely different side of her as an actress. Sergi Lopez plays the sadistic stepfather, Captain Vidal. Every time when I see him on screen, he plays a villain and he only grows eviler and eviler as he appears in more movies. Captain is another notch up on his evilness when compared to Harry in With a Friend Like Harry and the organ profiteer in Dirty Pretty Things. He is a master at playing at all these despicable characters, but for once I wish I could see him play against type in the future. Captain Vidal is a relatively weak point to me in this movie. He is pure evil without any redeeming quality. I always love to see more complicated characters, but in the whole fable mode, I could live with the one-sidedness of this character. Del Toro touches on Captain Vidal’s upbringing as one reason for his tough military way. When Captain Vidal is in battle, we can sense the pressure he is under trying to live up to his father’s bravery.

In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro has reached a new peak in ingenious movie making. Bravo, del Toro! Bravo, Mexican cinema!

The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil proves that Naomi Watts is the most underrated Hollywood actress and Edward Norton should be used more often as a romantic leading man (if The Illusionist hasn’t made that clear).

The movie is based on a 1925 same name novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham was one of the most popular authors in the 1930s and had quite a few of his works adapted by Hollywood during his lifetime. His most famous work may be The Razor’s Edge and it affected me deeply when I read it years ago. I have not read The Painted Veil, but Kitty Fane in the movie has some similarities with Isabel, the heroine in The Razor’s Edge. They are both selfish and manipulative; they cannot live without love, but also cannot live without life’s luxury.

It took Edward Norton more than seven years to make this movie and I desperately tried to love this movie more. However, it simply seems that this specific book by Maugham may not be worth all the trouble to be made into a movie. The story is too predictable and the characters are not that interesting. Kitty Fane (played by Watts), the unfaithful wife of the good doctor, Walter (played by Norton), is forced to embark on a journey with her husband to inland China. It takes a cholera epidemic and national uprising to have her fall in love with her husband, but is it too late?

Norton and Watts are the two big reasons for anyone to endure this two-hour melodrama. Maugham was an expert at writing female characters and here Kitty is a much richer character to play. Watts, who was totally overlooked in King Kong by the Academy, was overlooked again this time around. She is so good at expressing every emotion Kitty goes through that she completely makes the character her own. Norton may have been miscast as Walter in this movie. Maybe I am just so biased towards him. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries to be a stiff and slightly boring doctor, I still find him irresistible and cannot understand how Kitty is able to see him differently. British actor Toby Jones also gives a warm-hearted performance in this movie.

The movie is entirely shot in China. Norton and Co. have found some beautiful and untapped territory to film. The result looks fantastic on screen and Gui Lin could easily vie with Paris for romantic capital of the world. Director John Curran has also shown some promises as a director with only a few movies under his belt. The opening shot establishes the two characters’ relationship clearly without their uttering a single word. We see Kitty and Walter with their back to each other. The short distance between them seems to be longer than thousands of miles that separate them from their homeland. Then the camera moves to the native people staring at them. In that one shot, we feel both their isolation from each other and from this strange new place. In flashback, we see how Kitty and Walter meet, Kitty’s affair in Shanghai and why they decide to come to the God-forsaken Chinese town that is plagued by cholera. Curran and screenwriter Roy Nyswaner trust the camera to do most of the talking for them when it comes to showing Kitty and Walter’s life in Shanghai. When they first arrive in Walter’s Shanghai residence, the rooms look bare. Later when Walter and Kitty have their confrontation, the house has been much more furnished and there is even a piano for Kitty to play. One could sense that Walter has probably been bowing to Kitty’s every demand and has tried hard to please her. That makes Kitty’s betrayal even more heartbreaking for him. When it comes to Kitty’s lover Charlie and husband Walter, Curran simply uses two shots of their shoes to contrast these two characters: Walter’s shoes are well placed even when he is ready to make love to his wife while Charlie’s shoes are scattered around by the bed. One can probably guess what attracts Kitty to Charlie. Unfortunately for some reason, Currant loses his subtlety for the ending. Kitty’s transformation is pretty obvious near the end of the movie and that renders the last scene quite unnecessary.

At various times the movie attempts to have the audience contemplate some serious issues such as foreign government intervention and the Catholic Church’s dubious role in helping the poor, but it has little room to go any further. Overall The Painted Veil is a well done melodrama, but a melodrama all the same.

Children of Men

The trailer for Alfonso Cuaron’s new movie, Children of Men, looked like a ridiculous sci-fi melodrama, but all the talk about that ambush on a car, shot in one long take, got me interested in seeing this movie.

I am glad that I did, because so far this movie, along with The Queen, is the best 2006 movie I have seen. 2006 turns out to be another big year for the Mexican invasion in Hollywood. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel is currently generating a big Oscar buzz, but Cuaron’s Children of Men has elevated him in my eyes far above Inarritu (I am also dying to see Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth). My two prior exposures to this promising Mexican director had been unpleasant. His modern day interpretation of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece Great Expectations was a total mess; 2001’s Y tu mama tambien was amateurish but got a lot attention because of the explicit sex scenes. However, this time around, Cuaron shows an unbelievable craftsmanship in both his writing and direction.

Based on P.D. James’ same title novel, Cuaron depicts a futuristic time when the world has pretty been destroyed – mankind has become infertile, England is the last stand for the entire civilization (P.D. James is a British author, hence the wishful thinking that Britain regain some kind of prominence in the future world affair) and immigrants are deported by the menacing Homeland Security (sound familiar?). Richard Roeper in his weekly Ebert & Roeper show made a slight complaint about filmmakers always making the future look so dark, gray and terrible. Trust me, with everything going on in the world, I am no optimist myself, but I am always wary of any sci-fi project. They usually end up being preposterous and illogical, but Cuaron’s script seems so well thought out. He lets the story take place in 2027, a near future, so that we can connect some incidents around that time to our current events. One may feel some comfort to know that rap music can still be heard and the dog races still use mechanical bunnies to guide those poor greyhounds. Cuaron painstakingly sets up the entire world situation through characters dialogue, news reports on TV and all the background drops. The story is so tightly organized that even the characters background stories play a certain role in the plotline. Cuaron writes the story for the sake of the story instead of some main characters. When the story comes to a sensible place for any character to disappear, Cuaron is not shy about letting them go, even if they are played by stars. He also doesn’t give the audience much breathing room to change from one mood to another. At one moment, the characters may be laughing and playing; right next they will face extreme danger and plunge into deep sadness. Cuaron’s script is totally unpredictable. Kindness and evil may come from unexpected sources. One cannot make any presumptions about any of the characters. It is simply rare and refreshing to see such a director going against the usual cinematic establishments.

I have to admit that I was disappointed by the car shot that got me into the theater, maybe because I had too high expectation or maybe I am just not technical knowledgeable as many professional critics. It was a lot shorter than I imagined and at one point even had me confused about the direction the car was going. However, I was completely amazed by the long take of the final combat scene. I don’t know how they did it. The lenses even got blood on it in the middle of the battle and it was poetic to see those red spots dancing in the lights. In an interview, Cuaron said, "The blood was great, but after a while, it started to feel like it was on your face." He was completely right and the blood became distracting for me after a while. Here Cuaron showed his masterfulness – he had a digital artist remove the blood from some later frames, so in the middle of the take, the blood disappeared. Cuaron’s combat scene actually reminds me of another completely overlooked 2000 movie Harrison’s Flowers, a movie about war-torn Yugoslavia. Cuaron’s scene is very similar to the street fight scene in that movie, but ten times longer and on an even larger scale. In Children of Men, there is also a most beautiful birth scene. I think Cuaron purposely put that scene at night for both symbolic and MPAA rating issues. When Kee, the world’s only pregnant woman, is ready to give birth, she has to lie in a dark decrepit room with only one lantern to help her protector Theo. The darkness not only helps to hide the actress’ private parts, but also shows the state that the world is in. That one bright lantern, of course, is the mankind’s only hope, this new infant. Theo, himself a father who lost his only child years ago, is able to help Kee a little because of his former firsthand experience (Cuaron has thought of everything about his characters and the story).

The cast of this movie is a who’s who of current British cinema. Clive Owen, with his -world weariness, is credible as ex-activist Theo. My favorite actor from Dirty Pretty Things, Chiwetel Ejiofor is unfortunately quite flat as a revolutionary. Great Michael Caine plays a best written original character of 2006, future hippie Jasper. Cuaron said that Caine based his character on John Lennon, but ironically a Rolling Stone remake Ruby Tuesday has played often in Jasper’s scene. Caine offers the only and much needed comic relief in the movie. His Jasper is a clown, a hippie and a philosopher, but above all, he is a loyal friend. Julianne Moore plays Theo’s ex-wife and a rebel leader. Chicago Tribune’s film critic Michael Phillips seems to be on a mission to expose all Hollywood actresses on Botox. He mentioned about Moore’s immobilized forehead in his movie reviews for both Children of Men and Freedomland. Anyway, Moore is far outshined in this movie by the newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey who plays Kee. She is a nice, fresh, natural breeze in this dark movie about the future.

Cuaron points out in this movie what many have already learned but failed to remember: revolutionaries are often just as cruel and repressing as governments they try to overthrow and they differ only in their political views. There are some sappy moments in the movie, especially the reactions on people’s faces when they see the new-born baby, however, those mushy moments moved me to tears. Maybe I am not too much of a pessimist after all.

Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal is a writer’s movie that provides sharp dialogue and tight plot development. It is also an actor’s dream with rich and ambiguous characters. Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Zoe Heller’s novel is perfectly realized by two of best working actresses in our time – Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

The movie is a character study surrounding two female teachers in a London public school. Barbara (played by Dench) is an old spinster with a cat who has been teaching at the school for years. Her lonely life is temporarily lightened up by the appearance of a new art teacher Sheba (played by Blanchett). With a name like Sheba, one can probably guess that she is some sort of flirt and tramp.

The story is mainly narrated by Barbara who confides all her thoughts to her diary. Dench has never been so deliciously evil and Blanchett shows us a side of moral corruption with a sense of vulnerability. The two actresses’ performances and Marber’s crisp script set this movie apart from the usual Fatal Attraction stalker genre. Despite Barbara’s deviousness and Sheba’s morally repulsive acts, the audience could still feel the pain on Sheba’s face when she realizes that her love affair is simply a teenager’s wet dream and emphasize with the hurt Barbara must be going through when Sheba completely rejects her company. Barbara and Sheba are both such complex people that it is hard to simply condemn them for their behaviors.

There are some other nice touches in Marber’s screenplay and Richard Eyre’s directions. When Sheba’s husband (played by the always wonderful Bill Nighy) tells her that he has always been there for her and asks her why she didn’t tell him about her loneliness, Sheba leans in for a gentle contact, but Nighy quickly moves his body away. The discrepancy shown between his words and actions is an instant explanation for why Sheba did what she did. Still in spite of all the dysfunctional dynamics in Sheba’s family, we can see the secret envy and longing in Barbara’s heart for any kind of family connections. I guess even a dysfunctional family beats a lonely spinsterhood.

Dame Dench may have delivered the only 2006 performance that could compete with Dame Mirren’s Queen Elizabeth II at the Oscar time. It will be delightful to see either one of them win. Blanchett is not a traditional beauty according to Hollywood standard, but her looks have an exotic quality that makes her very sexy as an object of desire. Dench and Blanchett’s performances alone have already made the whole movie worth seeing.