Mexican Madness!, a Korean fairytale and cyber-organic-convertiplanes

I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth, the last of the girls-in-wonderland trifecta. I felt Mirror Mask and Tideland were self-indulgent. In Mirror Mask we go inside Dave McKean's head only to find that nothing's there. In Tideland we have a series of beautiful images strung together with the ramblings of a girl talking to herself (people always talk to themselves in Gilliam films). Artists always make art for themselves but with those two films it felt like ONLY themselves. Pan's Labyrinth reminded me of Alejandro Amenábar's The Others in the sense that when you watch them, both films are unremarkable but they seem richer and more resonant after the movie is over.

Western fairytales often seem to be about having good intentions and second chances. For me, Asian fairytales often have a legalistic quality to them. You screw up once and that's it. I remember a fairytale I thought up when Maria was in the hospital. In the story, a dying Korean woman asks her husband to get her some special oranges from the top of a certain hill. He searches and searches but he is unable to find them. Fortunately, he is able to find some other fruit. Pleased with himself he returns, but his wife is disappointed and she ends up dying and haunting him. I guess in this story, there was no way to win.

I liked the blood and guts of Pan's Labyrinth. Coincidentally just last night I posted that bloody clip from Santa Sangre. I also coincidentally posted Guy Maddin's Sombra Dolorosa. I must be part Mexican. The gore reminded me that I've always been curious about cyber-organic technologies. I remember I read about David Cronenberg's existenz thinking it would be about this idea. But he went in a different direction. In our hypothetical next film, we might have something like a bricolage-heart-convertiplane sitting in the background. The plane would be powered with human organs and have all sorts of tubes and wires coming out of it and three or four large engines. In fact, noisefilm has a device like this. You can't see it in most of the shots because the device is so small but it's a heart-lung-coin configuration that somehow helps the spinning device to work (see photo).

Buenas Dias!