two fantasy films
Jul. 29th, 2007 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI'm not itching to see Harry Potter V. My feeling after III was that if that was a good movie, then the definition of "good", insofar as it applies to Harry Potter films, has been downsized too far for me.
But there are two other recent fantasy, or quasi-fantasy, films that have been getting a lot of attention and praise, and which I thought it would be good to see before Mythcon: Pan's Labyrinth and Bridge to Terabithia. So as they're both now on DVD, I watched them this weekend. Both were pretty good; but both seemed to me to say a lot about the state of fantasy film, and not complimentary things either.
Pan's Labyrinth is an object lesson in the low expectations we have for quality in fantasy films. It's an impressive, sometimes awesome movie. Yet if the same story were told in a novel, it would be a run-of-the-mill, average quality, nice but unimpressive fantsy novel. It's the difficulty of getting a simply nice, unimpressive, average quality, run-of-the-mill fantasy story to film, or if they do, refraining from mucking it up, that makes Pan's Labyrinth so outstanding merely by its rarity.
Still, when a story begins with a little girl stumbling into a magical realm where she meets an implausibly friendly faun, and it ends with her death in the primary world while she lives on in glory and happiness in the secondary world, I am moved to ask rhetorically: where have I read this before?
It's not as scary a film as I thought it would be. The only moment when I winced and turned away was when the doctor started amputating the patient's leg, not a fantasy moment at all, alas. But there were some things that bothered me, and I suspect would have bothered Tolkien as well.
Most serious is the arbitrariness of the fantasy plot. Why do the three magical tasks have to be accomplished before the full moon? Because they do. Why does Ophelia eat the grapes when she has no reason to disobey clear orders? Because if she didn't, task 2 would be no more exciting than task 1. Why does the portal have to be opened by an innocent's blood? Because it does. (Although it turns out that it doesn't, and apparently Ophelia herself is not an innocent.) Why does Ophelia have to learn to disobey instructions at the right moment, when all her previous lessons have been to obey them at all costs? Because she does. This isn't timeless fairy-tale trope, it's modern storytelling plot manipulation.
I was also bothered by what felt like a complete disconnect between the fantasy plotline and the soldiers-and-guerrillas plotline. In fact, the latter didn't make much sense at all. If the guerrillas are so close, why is Ophelia allowed to wander off in the woods? Not all of her expeditions are secret nightime ones. And while I confess lack of familiarity with the history of guerrilla resistance to Franco after the end of the civil war, the idea that a ragged guerrilla band could outnumber, outwit, and essentially wipe out a unit of Franco's army as late as 1944 strikes me as a little unlikely. (For that matter, why does the chief guerrilla tell his sister he wants them to escape over the border? To where? Nazi-occupied France? That's a safe haven for a leftist guerrilla, all right.)
Lastly: as in every other live-action secondary-world fantasy film I see - but more painfully here than in most, because this film is better than most - the secondary-world characters look like they're made out of plastic and rubber. Whether they actually were or not. Please, when will this stop?
Bridge to Terabithia is an object lesson of a different kind. When a well-loved fantasy book is adapted into a movie that loses the soul of the original, the problem isn't what's left out, it's what's put in that doesn't fit the spirit of the story. Much of the scripting of Bridge of Terabithia - not all, but much - is a demonstration of how to expand the story properly, in the spirit of the original. Jesse's artistic talent and his love of running, topics raised but not really developed in the book, are here actually tied in to the creation of Terabithia. Terabithia itself becames more than a sketchy notion, and the fantasy imagination sequences are more attractive and less unintentionally grotesque than the ones in Heavenly Creatures. The only thing seriously skimped on is Leslie's sense of alienation, particularly from her parents. Jesse's relationship with his parents and sisters is very well done. A scene visible in one of the special features, in which his father comforts him with some platitudes, was wisely cut.
In fact the only place the script really fell down was at the very end, which was overblown. In the book, when Jesse takes his little sister to Terabithia, he merely tells her that rumor there has it that the girl arriving today is the new queen, and that's the last line. In the film she's changed to a princess, a word which today has self-aggrandizing overtones, and the girl starts chattering about how she wants purple flowers and a big castle. She's like a greedy monster in a toy store, not the wide-eyed wondering innocent she should be.
Oh well, nothing's perfect. But I'd prefer to end a good film with a satisfied feeling, not with grumblings at its flaws.
But there are two other recent fantasy, or quasi-fantasy, films that have been getting a lot of attention and praise, and which I thought it would be good to see before Mythcon: Pan's Labyrinth and Bridge to Terabithia. So as they're both now on DVD, I watched them this weekend. Both were pretty good; but both seemed to me to say a lot about the state of fantasy film, and not complimentary things either.
Pan's Labyrinth is an object lesson in the low expectations we have for quality in fantasy films. It's an impressive, sometimes awesome movie. Yet if the same story were told in a novel, it would be a run-of-the-mill, average quality, nice but unimpressive fantsy novel. It's the difficulty of getting a simply nice, unimpressive, average quality, run-of-the-mill fantasy story to film, or if they do, refraining from mucking it up, that makes Pan's Labyrinth so outstanding merely by its rarity.
Still, when a story begins with a little girl stumbling into a magical realm where she meets an implausibly friendly faun, and it ends with her death in the primary world while she lives on in glory and happiness in the secondary world, I am moved to ask rhetorically: where have I read this before?
It's not as scary a film as I thought it would be. The only moment when I winced and turned away was when the doctor started amputating the patient's leg, not a fantasy moment at all, alas. But there were some things that bothered me, and I suspect would have bothered Tolkien as well.
Most serious is the arbitrariness of the fantasy plot. Why do the three magical tasks have to be accomplished before the full moon? Because they do. Why does Ophelia eat the grapes when she has no reason to disobey clear orders? Because if she didn't, task 2 would be no more exciting than task 1. Why does the portal have to be opened by an innocent's blood? Because it does. (Although it turns out that it doesn't, and apparently Ophelia herself is not an innocent.) Why does Ophelia have to learn to disobey instructions at the right moment, when all her previous lessons have been to obey them at all costs? Because she does. This isn't timeless fairy-tale trope, it's modern storytelling plot manipulation.
I was also bothered by what felt like a complete disconnect between the fantasy plotline and the soldiers-and-guerrillas plotline. In fact, the latter didn't make much sense at all. If the guerrillas are so close, why is Ophelia allowed to wander off in the woods? Not all of her expeditions are secret nightime ones. And while I confess lack of familiarity with the history of guerrilla resistance to Franco after the end of the civil war, the idea that a ragged guerrilla band could outnumber, outwit, and essentially wipe out a unit of Franco's army as late as 1944 strikes me as a little unlikely. (For that matter, why does the chief guerrilla tell his sister he wants them to escape over the border? To where? Nazi-occupied France? That's a safe haven for a leftist guerrilla, all right.)
Lastly: as in every other live-action secondary-world fantasy film I see - but more painfully here than in most, because this film is better than most - the secondary-world characters look like they're made out of plastic and rubber. Whether they actually were or not. Please, when will this stop?
Bridge to Terabithia is an object lesson of a different kind. When a well-loved fantasy book is adapted into a movie that loses the soul of the original, the problem isn't what's left out, it's what's put in that doesn't fit the spirit of the story. Much of the scripting of Bridge of Terabithia - not all, but much - is a demonstration of how to expand the story properly, in the spirit of the original. Jesse's artistic talent and his love of running, topics raised but not really developed in the book, are here actually tied in to the creation of Terabithia. Terabithia itself becames more than a sketchy notion, and the fantasy imagination sequences are more attractive and less unintentionally grotesque than the ones in Heavenly Creatures. The only thing seriously skimped on is Leslie's sense of alienation, particularly from her parents. Jesse's relationship with his parents and sisters is very well done. A scene visible in one of the special features, in which his father comforts him with some platitudes, was wisely cut.
In fact the only place the script really fell down was at the very end, which was overblown. In the book, when Jesse takes his little sister to Terabithia, he merely tells her that rumor there has it that the girl arriving today is the new queen, and that's the last line. In the film she's changed to a princess, a word which today has self-aggrandizing overtones, and the girl starts chattering about how she wants purple flowers and a big castle. She's like a greedy monster in a toy store, not the wide-eyed wondering innocent she should be.
Oh well, nothing's perfect. But I'd prefer to end a good film with a satisfied feeling, not with grumblings at its flaws.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 04:09 pm (UTC)If all the fantasy elements in Pan's Labyrinth are in Ophelia's head, she is never in any danger (from them, at least) at all. So it's more exciting to imagine being chased by, and escaping from, the monster, than it is to imagine just sneaking away. So, she eats the grapes. There's no rational reason for this, even in her fantasies, so she has no excuse to tell the faun. But it doesn't matter. It's just a story told by a child. And told only to herself, and not anyone else.
Now, if del Toro were trying to say the fantasy elements actually happened to Ophelia, then it should have been better thought out. But in my take on the film, it's not a flaw. Del Toro may say that both ways of looking at it are legitimate, but I chose the more mundane explanation simply because it made more sense.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 06:42 pm (UTC)There are some types of films I know enough to avoid from the start, or if I do see them because I want to be au courant, like the Lord of the Rings films, to brace myself. The last "summer blockbuster" type film I actually liked was the 1978 Superman film, and that's almost as far back as "summer blockbusters" go.
If a film has the name of Steven Spielberg on it, I know that I will loathe it to its very bones.
Going back to Pan: again, the question isn't whether the elements are "really" in Ophelia's head or not. The question is how she treats them, and she treats them as real. There is ambiguity in the first question; there is no ambiguity in the second. If she had eaten the grapes because she wanted a more exciting story, she would have said so to the faun, or at least something on the lines of "I just wondered what would happen, and why you were so insistent that I shouldn't." Instead she said, "It was only two grapes. I thought no one would notice." (This is not a paraphrase, but a quote from the English subtitles.) These are not the words of someone who wanted to see what would happen, they're the words of someone who thought nothing would happen. And the hypotheses that she's speaking to a nonexistent creature, or even the hypotheses that she knows she's speaking to a nonexistent creature (the latter of which is not credible), does nothing to change this.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 07:08 pm (UTC)Good luck with Mythcon.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 11:22 pm (UTC)I hope you're not upset by this disagreement. Some people do take offense in such cases, so I find it wise to ask.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 12:20 am (UTC)Certainly, since I feel there are two possible interpretations and I prefer one over the other, I'd be more comfortable if you felt there were two possible interpretations and you prefer the other, instead of feeling there's only one possible interpretation and it's not mine. But that's okay, I can live with your wrong-headed-ness.
I thought of you last night while watching Simon Schama on PBS extolling the virtues of Mark Rothko...
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 05:56 am (UTC)Rothko! Thanks for reminding me. Read this, if you please.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-01 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-31 09:51 am (UTC)I was thinking that perhaps she eats the grapes because they look so delicious to someone who has been deprived of such treats during wartime. Also, while getting caught by the pale creature might be scary, it could be a different sort of scary than the dangers she faces every day from her stepfather and his cohorts. The danger from the fantasy creature might actually be preferable to the danger from the real world. Eating the grapes was part act of defiance, part an escape attempt, and part the maybe-no-one-will-notice rationalization of a child starved for food and affection.
Also, children are not necessarily known for choosing strictly rationally.
As for books versus movies, I'm reminded of Peter Greenaway. He doesn't want to make movies based on books. After all, if they were perfectly good books, they may not make such a great movie. Instead, he makes stuff like The Pillow Book, which takes advantage of the medium in all sorts of ways. So in some ways, no I don't necessarily expect the same things from books and movies. But that's a different comment...