• Pro­fess love for Marnie Stern’s In Advance of the Bro­ken Arm [see above] despite miss­ing her house show in West Philly tonight. See also, minus con­cert-going: Ortho­dox’s Gran Poder, Deer­hoof’s Friend Oppor­tu­ni­ty.
• Come to appre­ci­ate Pazz & Jop com­ment joke about U.S. out­sourc­ing pop to Cana­da, Swe­den. [Link?]
• Vis­it friends in New York City tomor­row, take pic­tures, enjoy “warm” weath­er, Bur­ri­toville, Brook­lyn lager.
• Final­ly fin­ish Flaubert’s Par­rot. Bet­ter under­stand dimin­ish­ing returns of pro­long­ing enjoy­ment of books, movies, albums through pro­cras­ti­na­tion and ignorance.
• Fin­ish review­ing Shin­ing’s “Win­ter­reise.” Explain “death jazz” con­cept to friends, fam­i­ly. Bask in Jor­gen Munke­by’s bril­liance. [Thanks for the love­ly interview!]
• Real­ize that it’s Fri­day again.

Wan­der­ing into Pan’s Labyrinth is not the same as try­ing to find Franken­stein’s mon­ster, but it’s close. I’m not real­ly sure why del Toro’s crit­ics would com­pare his work to a Span­ish film with super­fi­cial sim­i­lar­i­ties; I’m guess­ing that many of them, like myself, were only recent­ly made aware of Erice’s mas­ter­piece thanks to the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, mean­ing that they joined any­one with a Net­flix account in their abil­i­ty to make this asser­tion. So while both are based on a lit­tle girl’s [or girls’] escapist fan­tasies under Fran­co’s reign, del Toro’s treat­ment avails itself of the fright­en­ing bru­tal­i­ty of Grim­m’s fairy tales, while Erice’s lin­ger­ing ele­gy to youth has the feel of Anto­nion­i’s exis­ten­tial meditations.

If a com­plaint should be lodged against Pan’s Labryinth, it’s that del Toro short­changes its audi­ence with too lit­tle fan­tas­ti­cal alle­go­ry and too much of the cook­ie cut­ter strong­man we’ve all seen before. As is point­ed out in the com­ments on Cin­e­marati’s fifth best movie of the year, del Toro fails to con­nect the the two halves of the film in a way that mean­ing­ful­ly con­tributes to the action of the sto­ry. Too lit­er­al by half, del Toro applies the pulpy Hol­ly­wood mod­el to a film that should rely on some dark majesty and falls short of mak­ing the cryp­to-polit­i­cal mas­ter­piece with which he’s being credited.