Pan's Labyrinth dvd movie.|
Pan's Labyrinth buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $13.99 You Save: $5.99 Features • AC-3 • Closed-captioned • Color • Dolby • DTS Surround Sound • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 2006 DVD Release : 15 May, 2007 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Pan's Labyrinth description Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro's own unlimited imagination, Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale for adults. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) may only be 12, but the worlds she inhabits, both above and below ground, are dark as anything del Toro has conjured. Set in rural Spain, circa 1944, Ofelia and her widowed mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil, Belle Epoque), have just moved into an abandoned mill with Carmen's new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi López, With a Friend like Harry). Carmen is pregnant with his son. Other than her sickly mother and kindly housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También), the dreamy Ofelia is on her own. Vidal, an exceedingly cruel man, couldn't be bothered. He has informers to torture. Ofelia soon finds that an entire universe exists below the mill. Her guide is the persuasive Faun (Doug Jones, Mimic). As her mother grows weaker, Ofelia spends more and more time in the satyr's labyrinth. He offers to help her out of her predicament if she'll complete three treacherous tasks. Ofelia is willing to try, but does this alternate reality really exist or is it all in her head? Del Toro leaves that up to the viewer to decide in a beautiful, yet brutal twin to The Devil's Backbone, which was also haunted by the ghost of Franco. Though it lacks the humor of Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth represents Guillermo Del Toro at the top of his considerable game. --Kathleen C. Fennessy |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Dark, beautiful, and violent, and very much a revisionist history from the European Left |
| Pan's Labyrinth is a beautifully made film, but very dark and violent.
However, as a big fan of del Toro's "Hellboy" movie(s), the obvious slant of this movie in the way it portrays the Spanish Civil War had to be its most dismaying aspect. After watching this movie, I did some reading about the history of Spain and the Spanish Civil War. Spain, like many European countries once governed by powerful kings, had an extremely messy and anarchic transition to democracy that started in the 1800's and staggered along into the 1900's. Many internal wars were fought, and lots of people were killed in the process. The once proud Spanish Empire came apart and all of Spain's colonies were lost by the mid 1800's (unlike England and France, which held on to them until WWII finally bankrupted the home countries). Regional and political differences emerged as the result of this anarchy that threatened to tear Spain apart as a country. The Spanish Civil War was the ultimate conflict that resulted from this long series of internal struggles. The Republicans vs. Nationalists war was a far more complex bloodletting than one can possibly get out of this movie. Moviemakers seem to invariably side with the socialists, leftists, revolutionaries, or guerrillas in any conflict, and Guillermo del Toro has done the usual "Hollywood" or European Left treatment of the Spanish Civil War. Republicans = good, noble, simple country folk. Nationalists = evil fascist killers. In truth, the Republicans were an extremely complex group of liberal democratic centrists, socialists, communists, outright anarchists, anti-Catholic church haters, poor people, Basque and Catalonian nationalists/separatists, etc., etc. They spent as much of the Civil War fighting and killing each other as fighting the Nationalists. During the Civil War, both sides routinely engaged in mass roundups and executions of anybody they did not like who had the misfortune of being caught in territory controlled by their side. Tens of thousands of people were executed by both sides in such fashion, and in all likelihood, the numbers of such executions were nearly equal on both sides. For example, thousands of priests and nuns were murdered by forces allied with the Republican side because the Catholic Church was allied with the Nationalist side. That part I found fascinating, and is something that is virtually ignored in almost all re-tellings of the Spanish Civil War. Now, for sure, once Franco and the Nationalists won, and started consolidating power, they rounded up and executed far more people. This movie does take place during that period of time, in 1944, when Franco was being threatened by a resurgence in the remaining Republican forces, since Nazi Germany, an ally of the Nationalists, was in the process of being defeated. And so if you were to just judge the whole conflict by looking at the scorecard for executed people, yep, Franco and the Nationalists sure do look far worse and more evil. But would the Republican side have done anything different, had they won? Their record for executions during the Civil War suggests that they would probably have done exactly the same thing afterwards to consolidate power. Remember Lenin, Mao, etc.? They led revolutions against corrupt, repressive regimes and were initially glamorized by the West, and then ended up murdering even more of their countrymen than the original regimes ever did. Had the communists (one of the main Republican factions) taken control, their history in Russia and China suggests that they would have committed far more mass killings than Franco. So many books, and movies, Hemingway, etc. have been made that have romanticized the lost cause of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War that all of this real history is what gets lost. |
|
|