Pan’s Labyrinth (***3/4)

? Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director who’s alternated between dark Hollywood fare like Hellboy and Blade II and more individualistic Spanish-language movies such as The Devil’s Backbone, a mixture of social tragedy and fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War. This follow-up of sorts mixes similar elements. It is 1944. Even as the fascists are losing ground in the rest of Europe, dictator Francisco Franco is consolidating his power in Spain. An army captain (Sergi López) commands a small outpost that is trying to rid the area of a small band of rebels that stubbornly remains. Meanwhile, a girl (Ivana Baquero) unhappily arrives with her widowed mother, who has married (and become pregnant by) the captain. As the horror of her surroundings become apparent, the girl is led by a fairy to a strange world in which she learns she is the reincarnation of a princess.

+ Del Toro brilliantly sets a brutally realistic historical drama against a grotesque netherworld where a girl can become a heroine and control her own destiny. The historical part is fairly straightforward but suspenseful all the same, and López is a fine villain. The fantasy element is more appealing than the one in Devil’s Backbone. It’s weird and fun and gruesome and whimsical. Pan’s Labyrinth is like The Fountain if it hadn’t been incoherent and pretentious, or Lady in the Water if it hadn’t been dreadful. Del Toro visually contrasts the literal and the fantastic to great effect, and has a real find in the twelve-year-old Baquero.

- More literal-minded people might wonder why the netherworld creatures look the way they do, and I’m usually that sort of person, but mostly I just accepted it all.

= ***3/4 In a holiday season full of terrific movies, this one stands as among the best and most original, a modern Grimm fairy tale that takes you somewhere that only fiction can.

IMDb link

Primeval (*3/4)

? As if avoiding the crossfire in an ongoing civil war weren’t enough, the good people of Burundi also have to contend with a killer crocodile named Gustav wending the waters of Lake Tanganyika. But the real question is, which of the American journalists sent to investigate will end up as a reptilian aperitif?

+ It’s not every movie that incorporates ethnic warfare into a story about a bloodthirsty beast. If you watched Anaconda or Cujo and said to yourself, yes, but how does this play into regional geopolitics, this could well be your movie. The star of the movie is Dominic Purcell of TV’s Prison Break, but cameraman Orlando Jones gets the funny lines. Sample: “This is Africa, the cradle of civilization. This is where Bryant Gumbel comes from.”

- Unfortunately, even though the dangerous men and dangerous animal provide dual sources of peril, the whole thing comes off as kind of toothless. True, a subplot involves the crew getting the goods on a local warlord, but as a thriller it’s extremely tepid. The best thing about the exotic setting is that it provides nice scenery. (Filming was in South Africa.) As for the horror aspect, there are surprisingly few opportunities for the crazy creature to bite. This is just as well, since the glimpses we do get aren’t especially impressive.

= *3/4 I saw Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid a couple years ago, and say what you will about silly plots, it delivered the scary goods. This comes off like someone got a hold of a few pages of the Blood Diamond script and decided to make a horror ripoff. An on-screen title tells us this is actually “based on true events,” but it’s a croc.

IMDb link

viewed 1/13/07 at Moorestown

King Kong (***1/2)

 Beauty and the Beast meets Jurassic Park in Peter Jackson’s remake that brilliantly updates the special effects while retaining the essence of the 1933 story.

I guess I’m in the minority who thought Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy pretentious and overlong. (Heavenly Creatures, his 1994 psychodrama is to me his masterpiece, and this comes close.) Though featuring the same screenwriting trio (including Jackson) as LOTR, Jackson’s remake feels altogether less serious, and that’s all to the good. For those who missed the 1933 classic, it’s the story of a New York City filmmaker (Jack Black) who hopes to shoot on an uncharted island that turns out to be inhabited by a huge ape. (The ill-regarded 1976 version made it an oil company that goes there.)

The epic (at 187 minutes nearly twice as long as the 1933 version) divides into three parts. There’s the part before they get to the island, mostly the tale of Black’s character, P.T. Barnum crossed with Cecil B. DeMille. He cajoles, lies, and bribes to get his leading lady (Naomi Watts), his writer (Adrian Brody), and the ship’s crew to do his bidding. Then there’s the longest section, the tale of beauty meeting beast on some sort of freak Galapagos island. (The black “savages” present in the earlier versions are there too, though they disappear as soon as they’re no longer necessary to the plot.) About an hour is pretty much an orgy of CGI effects at least the equal of Jurassic Park, of which you might be reminded.

Finally, there’s the climax back in Gotham, the tale of tragic romance. The smitten Kong, enraptured by Watts, spurns other women (“spurns” in this context meaning “flings to certain death”) and wreaks general havoc. He says, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of a beast and a girl don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Okay, he doesn’t say that, and, as tales of problematic romances go, it’s not Casablanca, but is in its way touching. “We’ll always have Skull Island,” his computerized face seems to say. The decision to retain the 1930s setting (unlike the 1976 version) is wise, as it retains overtones of an old adventure film, and the story would be less believable set later on.

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/22/05 and posted online 9/20/13