Children of Men vs. Pan’s Labyrinth

[bad beetz]

It’s all about expectations for me with these two movies… Because of the expectations I had, Pan’s Labyrinth let me down and Children of Men delivered.

Pan’s Labyrinth: This movie let me down in the exact same way that “Contact” did. It was false advertising. With “Contact,” I wanted Jetsons walkways, multi-headed aliens, and new planets. What I got was religious conflict over who gets to go to outer space and if there really is a God or not. Boring. That wasn’t what I was there for, to see Jodie foster bicker with the religious right. “Contact” in my opinion, can suck it, and suck it hard. If you watch the trailers for it, you expect something COMPLETELY different. Weak sauce. However, if I had seen a trailer that made it out to be what it was, I probably would have thought it was a pretty darn good movie. This is why I never read reviews.
Pan’s Labyrinth is a movie about a girl in Fascist Spain where the realm oscillates between a reality filled with atrocities, and her fantasy world which she escapes to, filled with fantastic mythical creatures. The Trailers made it out to be a split in favor of the fantasy world, and that I would be awestruck with its extraordinary fairy-tale characters. [censored] that. You know what I got? A fawn, a couple fairies, a big ass boring frog, and…. OK, the eye-hand monster guy was [censored] awesome, but still, not enough. I came to see fantasy, and what I got was mostly hard painful reality. It was an 80/20 split that should have been flipped the other way around, just like “The Cell.”
I know it’s going to suck balls, but I’m really anxious to see 300M, cause I think it’s going to deliver what it promises.

Children of Men offers a creative vision of what the world is like with no one under 18 years old. It’s steadily gripping. The way its shot helps you experience violence in a new way, which is nice; because 27 years of violence on TV really helps you not feel anything when you see it. You have to shoot it in a new way to spark a feeling. I admit I’m hugely biased for this film, as anything post-apocalypse is my favorite (I just read “The Road” and loved it loved it). Anyway, it’s a fun movie, I wasn’t really bored. As a useless comment: I thought that the scene where Clive Owen is drinking around the corner while they’re talking about his lost son in the other room is sublime, because I didn’t think to myself “Oh god they’re doing ‘lost son’ character development, I should take this chance to go take a piss.” The ending’s a downer, but I don’t think there’s anything else they could have really done with it.


Anyway, both movies are pretty good, but Pan's Labrynth let me down. I was so excited for it.