Quick takes

Since returning from our cross-country trip, I've been busy with a church video project and a number of other things. But I haven't been neglecting movies, just putting off writing about them. Before I forget all about the recent ones, here are some quick impressions:

Pan's Labyrinth: Much more than a typical fairy tale. The fantasy characters are deliciously flawed and complicated, and the movie doesn't just hint at the grim realities our dreamer needs to escape, it shows them in gruesome detail. The parallels between dream and real life are brilliant.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Maybe some earlier film I don't know about had a big influence on George Roy Hill, but this 1969 megahit looks like the very blueprint of early Seventies style. Backlighting and halo effects, anyone? Ankle-length Victorian dresses? Robert Redford's wavy locks? I could almost taste the gorp. But the movie's aged about as well as peanuts, raisins, corn nuts, and M&M's in a Kelty backpack on a hot day. The idea of Western outlaws as charming free-love nonconformists on a lark is the epitome of Baby Boomer narcissism. Butch and Sundance's sudden moment of remorse over killing a bunch of innocent Bolivians is such an obvious Vietnam reference that it just makes this macrame trifle unravel that much faster. Gimme shelter.

Ocean's 12: Now here's a movie that knows it's meringue. It's the glitzy European heist flick as all glitz and no heist. The popcorn pandering reaches delirious heights at the movie's self-referential climax. But director Steven Soderbergh's visuals are anything but dumb, with endlessly inventive angles including a twist on the jumbo-jet-landing shot that's so bizarre I can't even reconstruct it in my mind.