Pan's Labyrinth & Hellboy

Did anybody else notice that in Pan's Labyrinth, when the faun is telling Ofelia about her heritage, he says that her parents are the king and queen of Bezmorra? If anybody's seen Hellboy 2, then it should sound familiar...del Toro uses Bezmorra as the kingdom that the elves are from in Hellboy 2. Which could be used as an argument for the faun and Ofelia's whole adventure actually happening as opposed to just being a fantasy that a little girl used to escape from the harsh reality of the Spanish civil war.

Family revisited

As I just wrote the last lines of my paper, I have come to the conclusion that "Family" is one of the more disturbing stories we've read. If you read it and pay attention to the details of the world around the compound, it's pretty clear that this is a portrait of world falling apart at the seams. It's a world ravaged by ecological disaster and social upheaval. I know this is random and a couple of weeks removed from the original discussion, but I thought it was very interesting, and as I found in doing the research for my paper, dystopian literature can be used as a way to critique a current society's policies by showing a possible future these policies could lead to. When looking at some of our environmental policies and most US citizens lackadaisical approach when it comes to keeping the government accountable for its cations, is it not possible that our society could be heading in such a direction? Just a random thought.

Narnia & Pan's Labyrinth

While watching Pan's Labyrinth, I noticed similarities between it and The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically The Lion, The With and The Wardrobe (which I absolutely love, by the way). Both tales involve a secret world and children escaping war. The two films also have a faun-type creature. Apparently, del Torro was asked to direct Narnia, but decided to work on Pan's instead. This is mentioned in the wikipedia article on Pan's Labyrinth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%27s_Labyrinth

Spanish is still scary

I watched both of these movies for the first time in high school. First I watched Pan's Labyrinth, not realizing it was in Spanish, but decided to stick the movie out. I was really surprised at how scared and creeped out I got, even though, as a French student, I knew about two sentences of Spanish.

When deciding to watch The Orphanage, I based my experience off the one I had with Pan's Labyrinth and was really excited about the movie. Again I stayed interested the entire time and definitely felt allot of suspense.

I don't think I would have ever chosen to watch either of these Spanish movies if they had not been horror films. I would never sit through a Spanish love story or action movie. I was wondering if ya'll felt the same way about foreign films and if you felt that it says something about the ability of the genre to draw in viewers.

The Orphanage

I don't know how many of you guys have seen the Orphanage yet, but I wanted to post something I found interesting about it. The mother in the movie is played by Belen Rueda, who is a pretty well known Spanish actress. She's really well known for dramatic roles, though; she even won a Goya prize for Mar Adentro, which was most definitely a very different kind of movie than the Orphanage. She'd never been in any kind of horror or thriller type flick before.
I just wanted to see what people think about the director choosing a non-horror actress to play the lead in the movie. I can't decide whether I think that makes her reactions more genuine, as somebody who hadn't encountered that kind of tense situation before, or less genuine, since she doesn't have the experience from other thrillers.

Also, fun fact, the actress that plays Aurora is Geraldine Chaplin, who is American. She was in Cría Cuervos, arguably one of the more interesting films to come out of Spain in the 1970s. I completely recommend it for anybody that liked the Orphanage.

Don't judge a book, or movie, by its cover

I definitely was not ready for "Pan's Labyrinth." I don't want to spoil it for anyone hasn't watched it yet, but I was surprised how gruesome it was. I looked at the cover and was like, "Awww, look at the cute littler girl. This will probably be pretty tame. I wonder why it's rated 'R'." That question got answered real quick.

Did anyone else catch that Ofelia mentioned a black stone in the story she told her unborn brother? It made me think of Howard's story, but only for a second since this movie had so many unique elements.

Searching for the Opposite of Perfect

Well after searching Gorgas' oddly organized shelves of books I was able to find two volumes of criticism on dystopia in literature. After brining them home and cross referencing them with the stories in our anthologies and the list Andy gave me, it was found that none of the stories or authors were mentioned in these two volumes. Lame. However, the introductions and first couple chapters of each book deal with dystopia in literature as a whole and will give me a good bit of material to write on and then perhaps apply to my own analysis of "Family", "The Repairer of Reputations", and perhaps a couple more from the Straub anthology.

Oh, and for anyone interested these two sources are:

Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide - M. Keith Booker

The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature - M. Keith Booker

They both seem interesting, and I'll probably read the 2nd in full length after writing the paper as the first mainly deals with analyzing many works I've never read.