Movie Weekend

I saw two completely original and entertaining (albeit in completely different ways) movies this weekend, which was fairly remarkable. On Friday Noelle and I went out and saw Pan's Labyrinth, a fairy tale story set in Civil War-ish era Spain, where a young girl and her mother are going to a remote mill in the country to meet her new step-father. As it turns out, El Capitan (her step-dad) is the sadistic local army command bent on removing some rebels from the hills nearby. The story turns around his campaign against the rebels and her quest to go into the fairy kingdom revealed to her by the enigmatic Faun (pictured above). It's kind of a strange story in that the two parts are almost complete separate, yet occur at the same time. The graphics in the movie were really cool and story was quite involving. I was a little surprised (though not unpleasantly so) to see that all the dialog is in Spanish. The Civil War story was also more important to the overall story line than I had imagined. All told, this is a really great movie that actually (IMO) lives up to the hype in the ads.




The next night we went to see Perfume: The Story of A Murderer which is also somewhat fantastic in that it revolves around Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man born with a preternatural sense of smell in 18th century France. Jean-Baptiste can smell (for instance) frog eggs in the stream running past the orphanage where he was raised. He becomes a perfumer with a desire to preserve forever certain smells, which leads to a series of, um, unfortunate events, as the smells he wants to preserve come from beautiful women. This Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run) film really shows the filthiness of European cities of the time, to the point where I was somewhat repulsed. The ending was a bit unconventional, I thought, but I suspect some might not like it. Still I think the movie was really worth watching even if you don't like the last few minutes of it. The cinematography is excellent, there are a lot great actors (Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman), and the story is like nothing I've ever heard before.