Y Tu Sapo Gigante También
Posted on | April 1, 2007 at 7:02 pm | Comments Off
Finally got out to see Pan’s Labyrinth in a theater today, and was very impressed. I was lead to believe that the fantasy sequences comprised the larger part of the movie, but it was actually the “real world” scenes that took precedence. The real world stuff was also more riveting, although one of the fantasy sequences was extremely suspenseful. There is a lot of violence and some gore (again, mostly in the non-fantasy scenes), so it’s not for the squeamish, but it serves the story well. If I was still doing the “nod-o-meter”, this one would get a zero, as I didn’t start to doze off even once. The cinematography was breathtaking, even in the dirty mudcaked reality scenes. The visual effects were very well done, though the fairies looked a bit too CGI for me. The sound effects were amazing, especially the ones involving those self-same fairies.
The story takes place in 1944 around the end of WWII and revolves around a little girl caught in the middle of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. She flees into a fantasy world to escape her fascist, sadistic army captain stepfather. The plot is well conceived with a few twists that don’t seem too out there. This movie deserves all the accolades it got.
The theater-going experience was actually quite good this time. I went to an early Sunday show. Since it was early and the movie’s been out for awhile, it was not very crowded (I counted 9 people including myself). Even though it’s been playing for awhile, the print was a good one with no blemishes. And all the speakers seemed to work okay, so those exquisite sound effects came through well.
Latre.