eat light:

glaucon and i watched prozac nation this evening. wow. the film itself was OK--not great, not terrible--but the main character, based on elizabeth wurtzel, an actual person, was difficult to watch. afterward, we looked up some stuff on wurtzel, and i think i would find her even more annoying in person than as a character portrayed by christina ricci. wow. i kept thinking, through the whole film, that she had been diagnosed with the wrong thing, that she actually had borderline personality disorder--her mother (played by jessica lange), too, but especially her: solipsistic, narcissistic, self-important, nobody understands her or feels things as deeply and truly as she does, everything's a crisis and her friends have to drop everything to help her, no matter what...

piece of work, that one. through the whole film--and even more, now that i've read some stuff about her--i kept getting this feeling like...if this stuff actually happened to her in just this way, she wrote about it and sold the film rights as a way of saying to the friends who eventually deserted her, one by one: "see? i was really screwed up. and you treated me badly. don't you feel guilty? but now that you know how screwed up i was, you can't be mad at me anymore, right? doesn't this show you? don't you want to apologize and be my friend again now?"

watching this film made my skin crawl...which doesn't mean i think it's a bad film (though, as i said, i don't think it was a great film, either). i'm not sure the director intended to portray wurtzel in a fully sympathetic light. that would compute, actually--she apparently hated it, so perhaps ricci's portrayal hit a little too close to the mark.

well...pan's labyrinth (which should have been called the faun's labyrinth, since the featured faun is not pan) is one film that deserves pretty much any award it got. it makes sense that it won oscars for cinematography, makeup, and art direction. i'm happy to see that the national society of film critics gave it best picture.

simplemente magnifico.
simply gorgeous.

i got the feeling that the subtitle translations weren't always the best. one thing i caught: in one scene, this evil captain guy pulls stuff out of a bag. in reference to one item, he says "chorizo," but the subtitle says "dried meat." yeah...same thing, right?