Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Suede: The Best of Suede

A good review of the under-appreciated Suede:

When Britpop first began to cohere as a concept and a potential mission statement, no band defined its vague, abstract ideas better than Suede. By the time Britpop became an actual going concern, Suede were simply grandfathered in; and when the whole thing spittered to its post-Oasis peak, Suede were considered washed up. But in 1993, they were the creators of the fastest-selling debut LP in UK history and had been anointed as saviors of British indie before their debut single, 'The Drowners', even hit the shops. This made them a natural for the British press to create ideas around, and so when Select argued for a return to wit, artifice, glamor, and British art school traditions, Suede were easy avatars for those hopes.

Belle & Sebastian's If You’re Feeling Sinister | Music | Better Late Than Never? | The A.V. Club

I disagree with almost everything in this assessment beginning with the opening premise:

It seems impossible to describe Scottish band Belle & Sebastian without using words like “precious” and “whimsical,” which are the two adjectives least likely to describe any of my favorite bands. That precious whimsy (or whimsical preciousness) is the cardigan-sweater-wearing heart of twee pop, the fey subgenre that typically grates on my nerves—and the one Belle & Sebastian came to epitomize beginning with 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister.
When the album came out, I was in my junior year of college and spending a lot of time at my school’s radio station, KCOU, which opened my musical horizons beyond the steady diet of punk on which I subsisted for years. I was a budding indie-rock snob—Yo La Tengo had blown my mind at a show in late ’95—so I was primed to greet Belle & Sebastian’s delicate songs with open arms. Yet I have little memory of If You’re Feeling Sinister’s release. It’s like remembering someone from a party years ago, but not recalling much about him other than you weren’t very impressed.

The idea that B&S are less punk than Yo La Tengo, or somehow more fey and delicate than late 90s indie rock betrays a fatal chauvinism and a complete lack of imagination. And for a music culture that rejects "labels" and "genres", people seem awfully at ease with pigeon-holing Belle and Sebastian.

Because beneath the fey surface there's an awful lot of pain, violence, and disappointment in the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister. And what the band offers is not answers but ambivalence - a comfort with contradiction, and ultimately the notion that most of life falls somewhere between "fail" and "kick ass."

Belle and Sebastian write songs about youth for adults, and for people who understand or have lived through that gap between youthful expectation and adult reality. The characters in their songs are constantly shifting from identity to identity, from  innocence to experience and back again, and do so without falling into the cliched binaries of masculine/feminine, young/old, rebelliousness/conformity, sin/faith, strong/weak, gay/straight. Everyone, they say, is all of these things all of the time. As a band, they are communal and democratic, privileging no one member, and allowing the warts and occasionally weak singers to shine through. This, they seem to suggest, is an organizing principle for life.

Perhaps what's most subversive about their music (and this is true of Morrissey as well) is that the very idea of twee-ness is so threatening to your average unreformed and reactionary beta-male. And fearing that B and S will turn you into a pussy is the Calvin pissing on a Chevy sticker of music fandom. Whimsy is anarchy stripped of its fascist impulses. Preciousness is just emotional poverty made plentiful in song. If you can't rock to that, maybe you need to grow up.

Lance Mannion: All the mad men and all the mad women are about to go Galt

An analysis of Mad Men by way of Ayn Rand. Pretty great when you can read stuff like this:

Work, as far as they’re concerned, is not its own reward. They don’t take pride in a job well done because they can never be sure that they will continue to hold that job no matter how well they do it. Someone who can do it better will always come along to impress the bosses and where will that leave them? People who just work don’t have worth no matter how well or hard they work. People who just work are just useful to the people who produce.

Now, The Hobo Code is not an endorsement of their Randian world view. In fact the episode and the entire series is a refutation of the idea that the world of work and business is a world of solitary and independent heroes carrying the parasites along on their broad shoulders.

'Freedom' By Jonathan Franzen, Reviewed By Ruth Franklin | The New Republic

Ruth Franklin's take-down:

His slick and hollow work is premised on a despair of ever honoring all the aspirations. The commotion surrounding the publication of this pseudo-masterpiece reminds me of Orwell’s mordant observation that “to apply a decent standard to the ordinary run of novels is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants. On such a balance as that a flea would simply fail to register; you would have to start by constructing another balance which revealed the fact that there are big fleas and little fleas.” Freedom is a big flea, perhaps even a giant one. But if Franzen is the best we’ve got, he still isn’t good enough. His literary edifices have the look of greatness, but greatness eludes them. If my children someday ask, “What did you do in the culture wars, Mommy?” I hope I can come up with something better than “I read a novel by Jonathan Franzen.”

One wonders at the impulse to crown a genius, even when our current literary scene doesn't merit one, nor can it produce anything that will out live any of us.

Pitchfork: Album Reviews: M.I.A.: / \ / \ / \ Y / \

Had to know this was coming. There was no way M.I.A. was going to survive all of her new found fame with her Pitchfork cred intact.

Blur's Midlife Crisis

Damon Albarn and the gang get some well deserved respect from Pitchfork.

Donnie Darko - Quick Take

Donnie Darko is an amazingly effective and ambitious movie when you consider how modest and indie it must have been in its initial lease. Thus its cult status. Jake Gyllenhaal is really good as Donnie, the brooding, angsty teen and the plotline is so geeky that it can't even be contained within the movie's own context. So you have this nice pairing of teen alienation and suburban ennui married to eerie supernatural psycho drama and science fiction paradoxes. Like Lost or Twin Peaks at their best. What could be better?

Well a few things, because the story doesn't really make sense. We get way too much about conservative hypocrisy, way too much about the talent show, way too many scenes with Donnie's Therapist, and not nearly enough about the actual time travel, the book, or Roberta Sparrow.

But that's what makes the movie so interesting: it gives you just a small peek into a much larger and more complex fictional universe. The rest is left not only open to the audience's interpretation, but the audience's ability to imagine or project into the narrative all those missing but hinted at pieces of the larger puzzle. The experience is like placing a time/space portal over a movie screen as you watch Evil Dead.

A Vote for Secular Pluralism

(OK, so maybe "secular pluralism" sounds nicer than "anarcho-socialism" or "fragmentary collectivism." That's not the point.)

Here's Michael Bérubé reviewing a new book by Alan Sokal:

... we have a science-studies scholar criticizing postmodernism and stumping for creationism, religious fundamentalists calling on God to smite the infidels, and “ethical realists” arguing for a moral absolutism. Sokal is appropriately alarmed by the first two of these phenomena, but, unfortunately, his book’s closing argument—which, again, echoes that of Harris—is that all human beliefs should be judged by the degree to which they are supported by verifiable empirical evidence. That rationalist dog just won’t hunt; not only will this argument fail to convince the religious, it even fails to account for strange, counterintuitive utterances such as Thomas Jefferson’s.

In place of Sokal’s (and Harris’s, and Richard Dawkins’s) “secular dogmatism,” then, perhaps we might consider a form of secular pluralism—a pragmatic pluralism that knows the world contains billions of people who believe things for which they have no good evidence, and that honestly comes to terms with the abiding dilemma of how to sustain secular pluralist societies that include people who are neither secular nor pluralist. Whatever his shortcomings with regard to science, Richard Rorty saw his life’s work as an attempt to secularize philosophy, to wean it from the notion that it is an enterprise analogous to physics; and as Alan Sokal undertakes the necessary task of struggling against religious fundamentalists, he may want to reconsider the value of pragmatism in human affairs. Then, perhaps, we can all move decisively beyond the hoax.

It's not technocratic, it's pragmatic.

There Will Always Be a Morrissey

A four star review for Morrissey in the Times:

That he is comfortable with that legacy was confirmed by his decision to open his first UK show in nearly two years with How Soon is Now. The song was as you remember it, but the singer - who sang much of it while lying against the drum riser - bore only a passing resemblance to the effete young thing who sang it in 1984.

If the greying quiff, brown shirt and tie gave Morrissey the air of a hard-bitten Seventies football manager - in the Brian Clough or Don Revie mould - the parallels seemed apt. He addressed the crowd with a brisk: “Hello, West Ham”. His band, too, played with a fists-up zeal, redolent of football teams that emerge from the tunnel to a world that they're told wants them to fall flat on their faces.

Who even knows what half of that means? My anglophilia draws a line at futbol jibber-jabber. Still it's funny that Morrissey is criticized for having outdated notions of Englishness when you try to parse that description.

All the same, it's an astute review that reminds us that the Smiths were a long time ago, Johnny Marr wasn't all that, and these are the good old days when it comes to the world of Moz.

Reading Genre and How Not to Write a Review

I realize that blogs are for dashing off quick thoughts and first impressions, but too often this leads to really weak arguments, unexplained assumptions, and random leaps (I'm sure I'm guilty of all three most of the time).

For example, this blog post features a book review of the horror novel The Ruins by Scott Smith, a book that I haven't read but which has a high enough profile to have been reviewed in the Times. So one would assume that this is on the quality end of the genre spectrum. People should love it, right?

No such luck, as the blog review fails to engage in the actual story or themes of the book and instead complains about the missed opportunity to do something really cool with man-eating plants and Mayans. He concludes:

The only acknowlegdement of the strangeness of this fact comes when one of the characters suggests that maybe it isn't a plant at all. But what else could it be? An alien? A weird Mayan god? No one speculates. Furthermore, no one considers bum-rushing the Mayans who are keeping them on this hill, even when it becomes gruesomely obvious that they will quickly die there unless they get off. No one considers suicide until it's way too late. And the end is such a stunning horror movie cliche that I'm surprised Smith found the fortitude to write it at all. Was he truly that unfamiliar with genre tropes (unlikely, I think), or was he so focused on the movie deal with his buddy Ben Stiller that he thought he'd save the screenwriters some time and just tack on Generic Ending A right at the outset?

The book starts out with promise, but devolves into a cartoonish morass of illogic and cliche a little less than halfway through.

There are two problems with this.

One is the fanboy obsession with teh cool, the need to be able to imagine all situations as though they were action figures in a playset, avatars in a video game, in which the goal of any situation is to battle to the end and advance to the next level. Why not bum rush the Mayans? That's what we'd do if this was Halo. The purpose of a story, on the other hand, is to lock people in a situation and see how they fail to behave in the ways we would expect them to, or they would expect themselves to.

The second problem is the fanboy anxiety with regard to cliche; the fear that it has all been done and said before, because it has been done and said before (except for bloggers who are all tremendously original and gifted). The idea of a "genre cliche" is in itself redundant because all genres are cliched. You can't fix it by calling it a trope either. A trope is just a cliche dressed up for prom.

So to say that the ending is a "stunning horror movie cliche" is essentially meaningless. There is no information contained in that statement. We never learn what the cliche is, why it is unoriginal, why its worse than other similar cliches, or how the ending should have been different. The whole attack is designed to highlight the blogger's superiority to everyone reading the post as well as the poor published novelist.

Moreover, if it is the novelist's purpose to write a horror story, then he or she must make use of horror tropes and cliches, it is required that they do so, otherwise (by definition) it is not a horror story. In other words, at a very basic level, the purpose of a horror story is to be a horror story; genre is an end in itself. To say that someone ought to be more familiar with a vaguely defined list of genre tropes and then assiduously avoid them (except for the man-eating plants!) is just confusing.

There seems to be some unspoken assumption that each writer must re-invent the wheel, rework the cliches from the ground up, invert them, reverse them, make them familiar but not too familiar. But how would one do that without disappointing the audience? And who decides which cliches are cool and which aren't. Is there a Gawker for horror writers so we can keep track of what's Hot this week? Is there a Pitchfork for horror snobs?

I'm guessing that if the book is as bad as asserted it has nothing to do with the reasons mentioned in the review. Most stories fail for the same reasons: poorly drawn characters, lack of an empathetic main character, absence of an impact or obstacle character, no relationship story, incomplete plotting, etc.

But here's the Times reviewer:

One of the creepy pleasures of “The Ruins” is the way it combines genre clichés with the verisimilitude that is Smith’s great gift. Transylvanian law apparently requires every horror tale to have a “You vant to go to the castle of COUNT DRACULA?!” scene, complete with terrified driver, howling wolves and rearing horses. Smith’s version is characteristically convincing: the local truck driver who takes the six explorers to the end of the road warns Amy not to go, but grows disgusted when she insists and suddenly says: “Go, then. I tell you no good, but still you go. . . . Go, go, go.” He drives off, leaving her confused; the rest of the party doesn’t even know the conversation took place. Things then fall apart with appalling suddenness, but the characters’ brains keep on ticking like cheap clocks. It’s the contrast between the familiar and the unspeakable that makes this book so harrowing.

In this reading the cliche is not only identified (Dracula) but contextualized and dramatized to show how it enriches the project, reveals character, and advances the psychological aspects of the story. The cliche connects the story to the tradition of the horror story while placing it in an unfamiliar and wholly new situation. It's not just good writing, but good reading. And reading well, making meaning out of the visual and textual fragments that make a story, is the most difficult art to master.

Somewhere Over or In Rainbows

For the record, the new Radiohead album is pretty great. After telling myself I would ignore the hype, I ended up downloading it yesterday morning on a whim. It cost me just _.__ ? and was completely worth it.

The beautiful thing about the new album is how fresh it sounds on the one hand, and how easily it fits within the whole of the catalog on the other. Whereas Hail to the Thief and Amnesiac were often the sonic equivalent of walking through oatmeal, the new material has an energy and a briskness to it. It even rocks in places. Additionally, it gives long time fans an opportunity to rethink the catalog and see how it compares.

If OK Computer is still the peak, you'll find yourself asking how it fits when compared to Kid A and The Bends. For me, finally hearing Nude provides the missing link, the bridge, between Paranoid Android and How To Disappear Completely. Everything fits.

New Iron & Wine Today

Hurrah! At last something I've been looking forward to might actually be good. Pitchfork review. 8.6 score. Best New Music.

For an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd's Dog is so varied that it takes several listens for everything to fully sink in, but the individual details-- such as the dramatic steel guitar at the end of "Love Song of the Buzzard" or the cascade of banjo in the middle of "Innocent Bones"-- are nearly as rewarding as the overall sound of the album. The sequencing is also well-considered, setting contrasting songs against each other and ending on the stunning and starkly emotional "Flightless Bird, American Mouth". The vocal harmony as it rises into the chorus is shiver-inducing, and the song finally delivers the sense of resolution that much of the album purposely holds back.

I've been a big fan since the first album and it can only be good news that Sam Beam is exploring new territory. This will probably make it to my iPod before the end of the day.

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Listening to: Band of Horses - Is There a Ghost
via FoxyTunes

Rethinking Avalon

This article at Stylus is an interesting take on Roxy Music's Avalon and provides some good perspective and few historical tidbits that I wasn't aware of. They write:

Give Ferry this: Avalon is his masterstroke as a vocalist. The absence of Mackay and Manzanera pulled the herky-jerky out of Roxy’s sound, leaving even, considered crevasses for Ferry’s yolky tenor. “More Than This” is a true beaut’, and the patience he exhibits throughout “To Turn You On” is a marvel. The tremoloed oscillations of “True to Life” are as cozy a shelter for Ferry’s lilt as he’d yet seen; this slow waving is a better fit for him than “Virginia Plain” or “Ladytron." Somewhere between there and “The Main Thing” he sired Morrisey, Mark Hollis, and Antony Hegarty.

But overall they seem to fault Ferry for a) being a sleezy playboy crooner, and b) not being Brian Eno, which isn't really fair on either count. They also place far too much emphasis on the genre tics and the instrumentation, while overlooking the masterful way everything is constructed into a coherent whole. The album works as an album, and adds up to a whole lot more than a collection of songs and hit singles. It achieves a mood completely its own, at once romantic, graceful, and bittersweet. It's the sound of a band and a performer that has knowingly reached its logical conclusion and decided to make one last masterpiece. I guess I'll always be a fan of this one.

Cowbell, Or, The New Pornographers

The New Pornographers are getting a pretty lukewarm response to their latest effort: Challengers. Pitchfork gives it a 6.0 and Stylus gives it a B- comparing it unfavorably to post-cred Wilco and Shins. It also doesn't help when an enthusiastic four star review compares the album to comfort food: fish fingers and ketchup? I'm inclined to skip it.

I think we all know what the real problem is: needs more Neko!

They Fly Toward Grace

I have finished reading Pynchon's Against the Day. The final 200 pages are particularly strong, and I found myself loving the book much more than Mason & Dixon. In the end, the book becomes a meditation on family and relationships, and the many ways that people come together, form ad-hoc family units, reunite, say goodbye, and/or move on. It's really very beautiful.

The only person I really felt sorry for was Lake, who finds herself briefly caught up in a Raymond Chandler meets the Black Dahlia story without ever even realizing it. Kit ends up (finally!) with Dally, and seems to find Shambhala, only to discover that Dally may have gotten there first! Frank and Stray end up together and Frank raises Reef's son, Jesse. Meanwhile Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian form an interesting menage which inexplicably produces a daughter. Finally, Reef and Yashmeen make their way from post-war Europe to the states and meet up with Frank and Co. Reef finally meets his son and all in all the extended family of the Traverses seem well prepared to face the challenges of the modern world, however explosive those might be.

And thats how it goes: the good guys find happy endings, and the bad guys get their just desserts. The more fanciful figures realize that they are not suited to the modern world, or aren't part of this world, or transcend and become something else. The history of the Traverse family is a first rate family epic, and the Chums of Chance become one of the more charming literary inventions in Pynchon-land.

As I read, I felt completely immersed in this world, and patience allowed the story to unfold at its own pace, making each stop along the way that much more interesting. I am ready to begin again, and I'm sure I'll remember everyone's names this time around.

Stylus on Fleetwood Mac

Patrick McKay does a nice job of summing up and contextualizing Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. It's one of those rare albums that was both hugely popular and actually very good. McKay writes:

While the Clash and the Sex Pistols renewed rock with a shot of youthful danger, Rumours allowed for the possibility that rock could age gracefully, and take on subjects of an emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager. This may have begat adult contemporary, VH1, and Phil Collins, but at least with Rumours, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t trying to soften rock, but to blunt its edge, to create something more expansive in effect and broader in appeal. The consequence was a career spent in the shadow of that peak; the reward was a receptive audience—of 19 million and counting.

I think this is a continuing issue in contemporary music. On the one hand pop music is driven by watered down corporate concerns (with ever diminishing artistic and financial returns). On the other, indie rock is too often motivated by resentment and artistic overreaching; always in pursuit of the new at the expense of skill, craft, and experience. What gets left out or pushed aside in the mom-rock and dad-rock name-calling of today (as Gen-Xers hasten through their 30s and into their 40s), is this desire for subjects in rock music that have that "emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager." This is the idea that music can have a purpose and be about something deeper than the latest sense of moral outrage or cause-based charity hullabaloo. That it could actually allow you to express something true about life, and how it is lived, and how people grow and change over time. In the end, music is a refuge for our most emotional, irrational selves, and it is this ability to sing your life that connects those 19 million and why we need more music like Rumours.

Music They Missed

The All Songs Considered crew (Bob Boilen, Will Hermes, Tom Moon and Meredith Ochs) look at CDs they missed from 2007:

LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum" - Good track from a great record. It was probably hard to pick a favorite.

Roky Erkison, "You're Gonna Miss Me" - Good grief. Sounds like some kind of Animals/Yardbirds rip-off. Great if you like second tier 60s garage band records but, as a missed record of 2007? Seriously?

E.S.T., "The Goldhearted Miner" - Euro-jazz. Sounds cool, but this track is so mild, it's hard to tell.

Beirut, "Elephant Gun" - Wow, excellent song from a band I've never quite been sure about (always seemed like Bright Eyes-lite). But this is great. Must have.

Patty Griffin, "Stay on the Ride" - Um, what? This sound is played out. I'd rather hear Cat Power or Jenny Lewis.

Amy Winehouse, "Me and Mr. Jones" - Are they kidding? Nobody missed out on this record. This thing gets as much play as that Umbrella song. And "Me and Mr. Jones" is the most annoying track on there (I can't complain too much though since I do own it).

Dr. Dog, "The Girl" - This song went by in a non-descript blur. Sort of rocking, sort of dull.

Jose Conda y Ola Fresca, "Oshiri Pan Pan" - Peppy. Good for the genre but not my cuppa.

Common, "Misunderstood" - "A rapper with something to say ... a spiritual guy..." If I can't say something nice, I shouldn't say nothin' at all.

Justice, "Waters of Nazareth" - Hurray. Good way to close the show. I prefer D.A.N.C.E. but electronic-metal is pretty fun.

Mom Rock and Ethan Hawke

Pitchfork's Rob Mitchum reviews the soundtrack for the new Ethan Hawke film, The Hottest State:

..it's terrible. The Hottest State soundtrack features a roster of acts old and newish that would draw the envy of Cmdr. Braff: Bright Eyes, Feist, Cat Power, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, etc. But rather than culling the castaway B-sides from this posse, Hawke organizes a tribute session to none other than Jesse Harris-- that's right, the Jesse Harris. You may best know Harris as Norah Jones' guitar player, but he has a solo career in his own right, playing exceptionally harmless jazzy folk/folky jazz in the vein of James Taylor. So basically, Ethan Hawke (and all these other artists, apparently) have all the cutting-edge and adventurous preferences of, say, my Mom's bunko group.

Such a burn!

Of course, Rob is the same guy who wrote that Wilco's Sky Blue Sky "nakedly exposes the dad-rock gene Wilco has always carried but courageously attempted to disguise." So clearly, Rob is still dealing with a lot of angsty teenage type oedipal issues. "What's that racket, son?" "It's called music, dad! Jeez! Of course you'd never understand!" Slam. Slam. Stomp. Stomp.

I guess I'd rather rock with Rob's dad, and hang out with his Mom's bunko group. They seem to at least have it together.

Night at the Museum Is Better Than You Think

Night at the Museum is a much funnier and more entertaining movie than I expected it to be, and probably more than it deserves. First it has a great premise (and the premise is probably what sold me to begin with): the exhibits in New York Natural History museum come to life at night. Awesome. The kid in me is already thrilled. Add in the fact that the screenplay is written by alums of The State and Reno 911, and I'm thinking this could be interesting (it also has the same Director of Photography from Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, so it looks really good).

But on the other hand you have Ben Stiller who is pretty hit and miss with his movies, an overly sentimental storyline involving a father and son, a Rotten Tomatoes ranking of 44%, and I become a little more concerned about my DVD choice.

Luckily my 8 year old daughter and I laughed through the whole thing so it really doesn't matter. But I had to ask myself, why did it work for me, and not for the critics? Why did I enjoy this more than a lot of other more highly rated films? For those who think I just have bad taste, you can stop reading now.

What was Good

Like Rexxy the dinosaur, the basic story has good bones (in Dramatica terms). In a lot of reviews I read, the critics complained about the lack of plot or the incoherent story. This is just a dead give away that they have no idea what plot or story means, but that's a complaint for another time. In the case of Museum, we have a very solid base to work from:

• Overall story: Chaos in the Museum
• Main Character story: Larry, the Ordinary Guy
• Impact Character story: Teddy Roosevelt, the lovesick adventurer
  
• Relationship story: Becoming a hero

So regardless of the slapstick comedy and the Ben Stiller improvs, the movie has a backbone. This what also allows for some of the more imaginative sequences like the puppy-dog dinosaur, the lilliputian cowboys and Romans, the Easter Island head (gum-gum, dum-dum), or Attila the Hun in need of a hug.

You can also tell that there was probably more to the story then they had room to tell: about the Egyptian tablet, the Security Guard's masterplan, financial troubles at the museum, and the stolen property subplot that would have gotten Larry in trouble. But again, because the four throughlines are so well defined, none of those details need to be explored. Each storyline finds its own satisfying resolution and the overall story ends on the right note when the future is secured for all concerned.

So What Bugs People?

So why the 44%? I have two reasons and they're both related to the Dramatica notion of story reception. The first issue is that the story limit is poorly defined (I'm sure StoryFanatic would be the first to point this out.) Is there an Option limit or a Time limit? On the one hand, the story takes place over three nights, so Larry has three chances to get things right. On the other hand, we're constantly being reminded of the time limit set by the fact that everything needs to go back to normal by dawn. Because, of the three nights, the story feel repetitive: the character's dilemma (chaos in the museum) should be solved regardless of time, or the clock should not be reset over and over.

The second issue is that Larry is a holistic thinker. He doesn't think in linear terms (like the other Security Guards) and he isn't able to follow the instruction manual's 1, 2, 3, 4. Even when he tries to learn about the museum exhibits, he treats each character individually in pursuit of overall balance. Like Stiller the actor, Larry is intuitive and improvisational. This makes for a funny character, but ultimately one who is more sympathetic than empathetic to a largely male audience. If we combine this with the timelock problem, we tend to see the characters as flat and one-dimensional. Not because they are, but because the nature of the situation and the problem solving style keeps the audience on the outside of the situation (this all comes from Dramatica).

I think this is probably true of most comedic characters. From Chaplin's Tramp to Mr. Bean, most characters are intuitive do-ers and the comedy arises from their lack of skill in or their unconventional approaches to everyday situations. More often than not we laugh at not with and that perhaps is the best way to distinguish between sympathy and empathy.

And Yet It Is Fun

Luckily kids don't seem to care about story reception. Funny is funny, and when it comes to plot, my kid was yelling at the TV the whole time about what she thought should or shouldn't happen. When it comes down to the happy ending (Success/Good in Dramatica terms), well how else should a movie end? It's a family movie after all, with some subversive comedy courtesy of Stiller and Owen Wilson that makes it fun for grown ups too.

Lost in the Labyrinth of the Faun

Guillermo del Toro has an incredible talent for making almost great movies. Which is to say movies that are almost great, movies that feel like they're going to be great, but somehow fall short (the Hellboy movie suffers from the same affliction). Indeed, for most of Pan's Labyrinth I felt like I was watching a new classic; a movie to put on the shelf and watch again and again.

Unfortunately as beautifully designed as the sets and costumes were, as amazing as the performances are, and as incredibly realized and brought to life as the movie is by the effects team, it doesn't add up to anything more than a mish-mash of ideas. There's the systematic brutality of war vs. the uncontrolled violence of fairy tales; fascist obedience vs. the rebellion of the imagination; childhood idealism vs. adult cynicism; life and death; the arbitrariness of reality vs. the rules-making of stories; etc. etc. etc.

del Toro know his stuff and he talks a good game (in the DVD extras), and the images he has created for the film, including the giant frog, the pale man, and the faun itself are visually arresting, as are the horrific scenes of violence, and the monstrous face of the Captain after a particularly gruesome scene. He knows enough to talk about rules of three, and to site Bruno Bettelheim as an influence. It was also clever to design the faun as a green man or druidic oak king figure and therefore tie him to the more primordial and dark aspects of the Pan archetype.

In the story of Fascist Spain, I was interested by the design of the Captain's house with it's low, sweeping roof-line, surrounded by endless forest, and whose doors are guarded by enormous iron locks. In this fairy tale setting, the Captain becomes an analog for every evil king. He has captured the Queen and hopes to usurp her throne by replacing the true heir (Ofelia) with his own son (the baby brother who must be saved). In the end, he is transformed into a monster by the horrific wound on his face and he is destroyed, without a son to follow him or even the solace of a story to remember him.

Except that the fascist storyline never really parallels the fantasy world. There is is no allegory. The Captain and the world he represents are too insular, too self-regarding: representatives of the banality of evil and the everyday institutional violence of fearful governments besieged by rebellion and terror. When the captain kills the farmer and his son, he blames his lieutenants for their lack of bureaucratic thoroughness.

Meanwhile the frog king and the pale man seem to have no analogs in the main story either. They belong completely to the fantasy world of childhood fears and anxieties. More importantly, the Faun does not turn out to be evil as I suspected he might, but he is merely a servant doing his duty to the rules of the fairy world. He tests Ofelia not to push her along the path of maturity or to help her face the reality of her situation (which del Toro knows ought to be the "use" of this particular "enchantment"), but to draw her deeper into her delusional world of fantasy and escapism, and ultimately the death wish of transcendence.

And that's the real problem with the movie. Ofelia's quest and struggle does not make her stronger, it only allows her and the audience to accept the senselessness of her murder. She's in a better place, and the faun was there not only to lead her to her death, but to teach her the pointlessness of living. After all she's not a mortal, she's a princess of the underworld; a goth suicide girl.

This also highlights the limited perspective we get when our main character is a child. She is someone who can't see beyond her own self, her own situation, her own fears and desires. She is incapable of heroism because she is incapable, unlike Mercedes the servant, of actively engaging in the world and understanding its true dangers.

And it is Mercedes, in the end, who is the protagonist of the story (which gives the movie an interesting symmetry with the structure of To Kill a Mockingbird where Scout is the main character, her father is the protagonist, and Boo like the Faun is the spooky impact character). She is the one who has the bravery and the inner resolve to pursue her goals, face up to reality, fight for what she wants (literally with a pairing knife!), and provides the rebels with their final victory.

I think we are intended to see Mercedes and Ofelia as two sides of the same person, and here we have a missed opportunity. If Mercedes had been Ofelia's impact character, the you and I are alike person, the movie would have tied together the two storylines into a unified whole. What's missing is a scene or two to show that Mercedes knows about the magic kingdom, that she understands what Ofelia is going through and can help her complete her quest and grow up. If the two were linked, we would have seen more clearly the meaning of innocence and sacrifice in the ending: that Ofelia in her world was able to achieve her personal goal by refusing to sacrifice innocent blood (her baby brother's), while Mercedes in her goal to assist the rebels in the woods does sacrifice innocent blood. Yes, the captain and his men are destroyed, but in order to do so Ofelia was unprotected and ultimately sacrificed. This gives resonance not only to the fairy story but to the real world situation the very grown up ability to regret the unthinkable costs of war and revolution.

But in the end, Mercedes and Ofelia occupy separate worlds, and Ofelia's welcome into the underworld seems like a cheap cop-out next to the reality of war. What we get is a movie that is more violent than Reservoir Dogs, that features scenes of brutality and torture, and that in the end gives us a senseless scene of child murder justified by pseudo-history and cgi theatrics. It's a story for children that no child can watch, and a story for adults with no deeper meaning or greater understanding of the human cost of war. The story, as told, has no justification, and the movie is ultimately a very beautiful and thought-provoking failure.