Fuck you, Del Toro

No, seriously. Fuck you, Guillermo Del Toro.

All the talk and hype around "Pan's Labyrinth" made me very enthusiastic to see it. Take my favorites from the Henson shop, "Labyrinth" and "Mirrormask", and add a fine earthy edge and a Spanish Civil War period-piece to it, and it seemed that this dark fantasy of a young girl and her experience with the twisted world of her favorite fairae stories would be a winner.

And, yeah, it kind of is. It's transporting, it's detailed, it's emotional. The fables are a little bit abbreviated, but as a whole, there's a lot of very well executed attention to detail here.

And it's hard to go on much more without revealing an ultimate spoiler. Suffice to say, it's a tragedy.

In reality, I really do kind of yearn for more tragedies in this sort of thing. But when it seems to be so sensless, so empty, so much the antitheses of what leads up to it, well...

Fuck you, Del Toro.

Okay, really, I think I "get it". It's very dark, despite the hope you want to put into it, and it really doesn't fake you out so much that you wouldn't expect it. There's a tacked-on attempt at making it not-so-tragic, though, and I'm not sure what to feel about that. Now it's bittersweet. Or so you're telling me.

Fuck you.

It is a really good movie, though. It takes a number of cinematic ingredients that have been missing in the typical fare and brings you into a different world and sets you up to empathize with the characters and the situation. All the more reason why the sudden, senseless tragedy seems so wrong, so hurtful.

Fuck.