Some recently viewed movies

I've seen three pretty good movies in the last couple of weeks and I want to tell you about them

Last Sunday I saw Pan's Labyrinth. I have no idea why they gave the English version this title when "Labyrinth of the Faun" would have been better and a more accurate translation. The faun in the movie is definitely not the Greek god Pan. The movie is excellent and I can recommend it to anyone. However, it is definitely not a movie for young children. The movie is really about war and how a young girl copes by retreating into fantasy to avoid the brutality and uncertainty around her. The special effects are good, and the links between the real world and the fantasy world are logical without being too obvious. They also (SPOILER ALERT) have the courage to let the heroine die, which is the only way the movie could make sense.

I also saw Curse of the Golden Flower which was directed by one of my favorite's, Zhang Yimou. He directed Heroes and The House of Flying Daggers. I've always been a sucker for spectacle on film, and this movie, like his last two, certainly delivers on the eye candy. The sets and the costumes are incredible. If you like to see Chinese women's breasts jiggle as they run up and down elaborately gilded hallways, this is the movie for you. Unfortunately, the story is nearly incomprehensible. A friend of mine, who saw the movie with me, said "It's like a Mexican soap opera." Since he is from Mexico, I'll take his word for it. The story is about a Chinese emperor who has been steadily poisoning his empress with an herbal concoction, ostensibly for her anemia, for the past ten years. She must drink it every two hours whether she wants to or not. He has recently changed the recipe of his herbal mixture to include a black fungus from Persia which will eventually make her insane. The queen knows the mixture has changed and forms a plan to overthrow the emperor and replace him with one of her sons. Oh, and she is also having an affair with one of her step-sons. There are plenty of wonderfully staged fight scenes and a battle at the end to end all battles. But the ending is very abrupt. It's like the filmmaker ran out of ideas. I did think about this movie a great deal, and what I couldn't figure out is how the filmmakers could spend an enormous amount of money and time on this movie and leave it with a terrible ending. I've decided, and I haven't read this anywhere else so I may be wrong, that the movie is a parable for modern China.

The movie's tag line is "What I do not give, you must never take by force." This is a line uttered by the emperor to his most capable son (he has three). I think the emperor represents the modern Chinese government, which is slowly poisoning its people (the empress). The golden flowers, chrysanthemums embroidered by the empress for her supporters, represent money. The empress's supporters attack the palace dressed in gold, money again, and are crushed, literally, by the king's huge army, which I think is the communist party and the bureaucracy of the Chinese government. I think this is the filmmaker's comment on the rapidly developing capitalist economy developing in China. The Chinese are distracted by the capitalistic explosion occurring in their country and are content to continue to swallow the communist ideology offered by the government (poison). The queen is content to swallow this poison for years, until it threatens her very existence. The black fungus from Persia could represent the imported oil China is using to fuel its economic expansion while destroying their environment. At the end of the movie, the empress cries out and overturns the cup of poison. But of course, it is too late and all of her supporters are dead. Could this be Zhang Yimou's warning to China, but heavily coded in metaphor?

The last movie I saw was The Queen, which is about the week of Princess Diana's death, and how Queen Elizabeth misjudged the mood of her people and the extent of her people's feelings for Diana. There is a certain pleasure in watching talented people do something extremely well. I didn't think there was enough to this story to make a good movie, but I was certainly wrong. Helen Mirren was wonderful, and probably deserves the Oscar. Stephen Frears is also a wonderful director. Go see it!