Best Thing(s) I Read Today

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For some reason, I haven't read many reviews of my #1 movie pick of the year, Pan's Labyrinth. I just today got around to reading a couple, and while I'm not usually a big fan of A.O. Scott at The New York Times, he kinda made me misty at the end of his Pan's review (beware of a semi-spoiler!):

"Fairy tales (and scary movies) are designed to console as well as terrify. What distinguishes Pan’s Labyrinth, what makes it art, is that it balances its own magical thinking with the knowledge that not everyone lives happily ever after.

The story has two endings, two final images that linger in haunting, unresolved tension. Here is a princess, smilingly restored to her throne, bathed in golden subterranean light. And here is a grown woman weeping inconsolably in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy."

I also loved this bit of info from J. Hoberman's review at the Village Voice:

"There in the darkness [Ofelia] encounters the horned and walleyed faun. This mossy, capricious creature is an altogether different type than the gentle little Narnian creature who befriends the young heroine in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — a movie that del Toro turned down, apparently for religious reasons. (He told Sight and Sound that he "wasn't interested in the lion resurrecting.")"

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