Pans labyiinth

Roger Ebert

Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is one of the cinema's great fantasies, rich with darkness and wonder. It's a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children. If you recall the chills that ran down your spine and the surreal humor that tickled your brain in the presence of "Alice in Wonderland," "Little Red Riding Hood" or "The Wizard of Oz" when you were a child (or, later, in the nightmarish dream-films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, F.W. Murnau or David Cronenberg), you'll discover those sensations once again, buried deep in the heart of "Pan's Labyrinth."
As gruesome and brutal as it is enchanting and spellbinding, "Pan's Labyrinth" is a movie intended for adults, not children, as its "R" rating indicates. Some kids under 17 will find it fascinating (especially if they know Spanish or don't mind reading subtitles), but it's a harsh and uncompromising film -- although less gory and violent than many video games.
"Pan's Labyrinth" is itself a narrative maze, with multiple stories that branch and eddy, flowing apart and back together again like the a stream tumbling down a rocky hillside or, more aptly, blood spilling over a craggy boulder. Opening titles set the story in Spain, 1944, as resistance fighters lurking in the mountains continue to fight Franco's fascist regime. And then, immediately, before we can grasp any visual bearings in that world, the subterranean voice of Pan (a faun, whose name "only the wind and the trees can pronounce") whisks us into a fable about a dead princess whose kingly father waits for his daughter's soul to return in another form, and to reclaim her place at his side.
In the first vertigo-inducing minute or so of the film we're plunged into the turbulent imagination of Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a bookish 11-year-old girl who is traveling with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to an old mill in the forest, where Ofelia's evil-stepfather-to-be, Capitan Vidal (Sergi Lopez), commands a fascist outpost. Next door is an ancient stone labyrinth, a place that's easy to get lost in.
The night of their arrival, Ofelia clings to her mother in bed as the creaky old house moans and Ofelia's unborn brother restlessly kicks. Carmen asks her daughter to tell the baby a story, to calm his nerves (as well as Ofelia's). The girl rests her head on her mother's belly and the camera, positioned at the foot of the bed, descends into Carmen's womb, where we see the fetus suspended in warmly glowing amniotic fluid.
Ofelia tells of a rare and beautiful night-blooming blue rose that once grew on a mountaintop (a reference not only to the lore of the blue Meconopsis poppy, but perhaps to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" mythology), surrounded by poisonous thorns that made its mysterious beauty -- and properties of immortality -- inaccessible. The camera moves to the right and there's the rose and the mountain. Then it descends into the prickly brambles where a mantislike insect (previously encountered by Ofelia in the woods) alights in the foreground. The bug takes wing and the camera soars to keep up with it, past the moon and onto the stone sill of the room where Ofelia and her mother lie in bed.
This astounding and fluid composite shot serves as a microcosm of the whole movie: a graceful, complex but seamless, seemingly inexorable movement that weaves in and out of fantasy and reality so that each becomes an extension of the other. Whole worlds open before our eyes and then fold back upon themselves; dimensions of time and space are creased into shape as if the movie was an elaborate origami creation.
Meanwhile, bugs and monsters (lethal and benign) buzz, squirm and shuffle through the forest of Ofelia's imagination. Pan, a creature with the head of a goat and the body of a contorted mammalian tree trunk, believes that Ofelia herself is (surprise!) the reincarnation of the dead princess, and gives her a series of tasks to prove she is indeed the lost royal.
Ofelia's challenges do not arise like arbitrary plot obstacles; they are organic to her (and the movie's) development. The girl learns not only to follow instructions, and that there are heavy prices to pay for failing to abide by them, but also to trust her own instincts about right and wrong. In order to find her true self, she must also find the strength to break the rules imposed by authority.
An individual conscience: What could be a more powerful anti-fascist weapon than that?



Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro returns to the phantasmagorical cinema that defined such early fare as Cronos and The Devil's Backbone with this haunting fantasy-drama set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and detailing the strange journeys of an imaginative young girl who may be the mythical princess of an underground kingdom. Her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), recently remarried to sadistic army captain Vidal (Sergi Lpez) and soon to bear the cruel military man's child, shy young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is forced to entertain herself as her recently-formed family settles into their new home nestled deep in the Spanish countryside. As Ofelia's bed-ridden mother lies immobilized in anticipation of her forthcoming child and her high-ranking stepfather remains determined to fulfill the orders of General Francisco Franco to crush a nearby guerilla uprising, the young girl soon ventures into an elaborate stone labyrinth presided over by the mythical faun Pan (Doug Jones). Convinced by Pan that she is the lost princess of legend and that in order to return to her underground home she must complete a trio of life-threatening tasks, Ofelia sets out to reclaim her kingdom and return to her grieving father as Vidal's housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verd) and doctor (Alex Angulo) plot secretly on the surface to keep the revolution alive. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

 

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300 :Rise of an empire

PutLocker
Synopsis: After its victory over Leonidas' 300, the Persian Army under the command of Xerxes marches towards the major Greek city-states. The Democratic city of Athens, first on the path of Xerxes' army, bases its strength on its fleet, led by admiral Themistocles. Themistocles is forced to an unwilling alliance with the traditional rival of Athens, oligarchic Sparta whose might lies with its superior infantry troops. But Xerxes still reigns supreme in numbers over sea and land. 



RogerEbert

I didn't bone up on my ancient Greek history before seeing 2006's "300," nor did I do so before seeing its new followup, "300: Rise of an Empire." Not because I feel that such research is above my pay grade, but because no matter how much research the filmmakers might say went into their subsequent visions, I know that realism and/or actual accuracy was scarcely Job One for them. That being the case, though, I was ill-prepared for the fact that "Rise of an Empire," which is not so much a sequel to "300" as a companion piece (given that it depicts events that happen simultaneously to those depicted in "300." For example, the titular number of feisty, cut Spartans getting [spoiler alert!] slaughtered by a bunch of fey Persians of larger numbers), opens with an action montage accompanied by maybe twenty minutes of expository voice-over. Or so it seems. And for all that, I didn't get much of a sense of historical narrative from the movie.
There's one Greek fellow, an Athenian, who believes in the "experiment" called "democracy," and he wants the Spartans to back him up as the fey Persians, spurred by possibly homosexual golden (literally!) boy Xerxes, come to lay waste to his model city. They're coming by ship, and the navy is commanded by the golden boy's sister, Artemisia, played by the sexually intimidating Eva Green, who's going Full Diamanda Galas here, only without the singing. And this naval commander, an unusual one by anybody's standards, is both intrigued and vexed by the Athenian, who goes by the name Themistocles, and is played by a stalwart Sullivan Stapleton.
While the first "300," based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, was relentlessly male-driven in a way that was both relentlessly homoerotic and blithely homophobic, the introduction (no doubt historically inaccurate) of Green's character to the combat changes the sexual dynamic in a way that's pretty ridiculous and also kind of jaw-dropping. I hated the Zack-Snyder-directed "300" with a passion: aside from its in-your-face hateful war-mongering sentiments and the aforementioned homophobia, the thing looked as if it had been shot through lenses that had been smeared with dog feces prior to each take. "Rise of an Empire," directed by Noam Munro (who also made "Smart People," which clearly established his 3D action movie bonafides…no wait…) is entirely more engaging by dint of being absolutely impossible to take even a little bit seriously. The ruthlessness of Green's character is taken to extremes that meld Medea to the cheesiest serial you can name, and is hence delicious.
The rest of the film's over-the-topness is pretty purposeful as well. Every time a sword swipes a battling warrior, the screen fills up with a lake's worth of spurting blood, to the extent that you really start hoping that one of the film's character's suffers a paper cut, just to see what happens. Also, the color palette here is more expansive than in Snyder's original: in addition to dun, there's also a lot of blue, a dark gray, and lots and lots of crimson. Is there intelligent dialogue, or anything actually emotionally stirring? By my lights, no. But in terms of sheer bloody spectacle, "300: Rise of an Empire" gets a lot of mileage out of sheer venal spectacle. Just don't try to derive a history lesson from the movie.
 

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Hellraiser 3 Hell On Earth

Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

A sleazy nightclub owner purchases a strange, disturbing sculpture, which he soon discovers contains a mysterious, ornate puzzle box. This box is a legendary object that promises the secrets of ultimate pain and pleasure, but is in fact a gateway to hell. Soon the box's new owner has unleashed the evil Pinhead, a member of a race of supernatural beings known as Cenobites. Pinhead proceeds to murder numerous clubgoers in an attempt to gain power and fully free himself into the earthly realm. He faces unexpected opposition, however, from a television reporter investigating the mysterious club murders. When she discovers the truth behind the enigmatic puzzle box, she realizes that only she can stop the carnage. However, she must not only defeat Pinhead, but his fellow Cenobites, including the barbed-wire-wrapped Barbie and the horrific CD-Head. (Yes, CD-Head does indeed kill people by shooting CDs from his head.) Though this third entry in the Hellraiser series pays lip service to the intricate mythology of the first two films, especially through a series of flashbacks to Pinhead's human past, the film soon reverts to a fairly standard slasher formula. ~ Judd Blaise, Rovi

Wikipedia 

Plot[edit]

The revelation of his own former humanity in Hellraiser II has resulted in the Cenobite named Pinhead being split into two distinct entities: His former self, World War I British Army Captain Eliot Spencer, and a manifestation of Spencer's id, which takes on the form of Pinhead. While Spencer ends up in limbo, Pinhead is trapped, along with the puzzle box, amongst the writhing figures and distorted faces etched into the surface of an intricately carved pillar — the Pillar of Souls.

The pillar is bought by the rich and spoiled J.P. Monroe, owner of a popular nightclub called The Boiler Room. During her investigation, an ambitious young television reporter, Joey Summerskill, slowly begins to learn about Pinhead and the mysterious puzzle box. Joey is introduced to the pain the box can bring when she views a teenage clubgoer being ripped apart by the box's chains in a hospital emergency room. Joey tracks the box and a young woman named Terri to The Boiler Room nightclub. Terri had previously stolen the box from the nightclub.

Video tape interviews are recovered from the Channard Institute of one of Pinhead's former victims Kirsty Cotton. Joey and Terri learn through the videos about the demonic Cenobites and the power of the Lament Configuration puzzle box and that it is the only means of sending Pinhead back to Hell. Pinhead remains dormant until one night several hooked chains shoot out of the pillar and rip into one of the club goers, Sandy, whom Monroe had just recently slept with. After killing Sandy, Pinhead consumes her flesh and her distorted face appears on the pillar. Pinhead convinces Monroe to bring him more club members so he can feed on them and be freed from the pillar.

Meanwhile, Joey is contacted by the spirit of Eliot Spencer, who tells her that this "Pinhead" is a separate entity than the one encountered by Kirsty previously. Without Spencer's humanity to act as a balancing influence, this Pinhead is completely evil and has no sense of order. Rather than abide by the laws of the Cenobite realm, he will indiscriminately wreak havoc on Earth for his own pleasure unless he is stopped. In order to defeat him, Joey must reunite Spencer's spirit with Pinhead, fusing them back into a single entity.

At the climax of the film, Pinhead and Joey confront each other in a boiler room. The "Pinhead" demon tells Joey to give him the box, she then breaks away and begins to flee. Pinhead resurrects the corpses of his victims into Cenobites, but they are then quickly sent to hell. Joey finds herself in a heaven like realm and comes face to face with an apparition who appears to be her dead father. The apparition tells Joey to give him the Lament Configuration, aka the puzzle box, and is revealed to be Pinhead in disguise. Pinhead catches her in machinery and prepares to turn her into a cenobite, but is confronted by Spencer's spirit who forcibly fuses himself into Pinhead. Joey breaks free and stabs Pinhead, sending him back to hell. With Pinhead's humanity restored, Joey buries the Puzzle Box in cement.

The final scene of the film shows a new building built where Joey buried the box, with the interior design of the building being the same as the Lament Configuration (foreshadowing the events of the following film, Hellraiser: Bloodline).

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