Tonight! Tonight!

i swear that coffee was awful! that coffee didnt taste like coffee at all. maybe i ordered peppermint milk. gee! please listen to what i say next time when im ordering. i might have missed saying please put coffee there. or maybe i should ask them if decaffeneited means water? hmmm... now im wondering.

so after the Coffee Experience, we saw Pan's Labyrinth. By the first lines of the subtitle (stating that the setting takes place in Spain in 1944 when the Civil War was takiing place), my first reaction was, George Orwell is hunting me. I must go back to finishing my book. Anyway, the story is nice. how they shifted the sick real life that she has, to her unbelievably clever other life was really nice. some scenes were pretty disgusting for sissy's (like me!), but i made it through and realized, its part of the cinematic experience of watching it. i would not discuss the story coz there are other sites that has the synopsis or summary, so why do i have to bother writing my own summary. i'd be talking about here the issues that arose while watching the movie.

faux or real? what was real and what was not? everything was real. everything existed (except maybe how the faun or the fairy or the toad or the other creatures there looked like). though right after watching the movie, what i was thinking was everything was real, and the "other" life was her imagination, signified by the empty pages of the book (just like the empty pages in the Harry Potter diary). she used this story, out of her fascination for fairy tales, to divert her worries from what she is experiencing. Though the fairy tale life is not all perfect too, the obstacles were pretty challenging, she had to somehow get thru it to achieve what she wanted, and that is to live the life of a princess, with her family by her side, living in a grandiose castle with everything else nice. this became her outlet because she was not living the life that all the good classic fairy tales had. her life was with a brute step-father, she was living in the middle of that time when there was too much political unrest, and she was experiencing personal pains with her mother's pregnancy. all these, she had to mesh up, making her every time the hero (with bits of failures), but in the end, because she gave up her life for the sake of her baby brother, she passed all the obstacles and was able to win her throne back. but that's the point, the fairy tale ending ended with her life, making her story a success.

The other side is making everything turn out real. Yes, the princess is still out there, in every one of us or amongst others, and maybe we are not looking. But if we go back to the story, there are interesting things to it. If it was a writer who was like George Orwell, who lived his life in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, this is how I would write. I would write something critical or subversive about my surroundings in a form that will take a lot of understanding to surpass the surface that I am trying to say right now. In Orwell language, he wrote the Animal Farm to criticize Fascists, Russians, and other political enemies of his time. He wrote 1984 to criticize the continuing Russian backward- forward of authority (backward- suppressed civil liberties, forward- for world domination). If I wrote Pan’s Labyrinth at that time, I would show an all-fairy tale side. Ofelia is the hope of the country, and with the help of a few, we can destroy the political evils that come our way, so that we will be able to go against the fascists and live the “free” life we ought to have. Since it is written at present-times, it had a different approach to it. It showed what the reality was at that time. The faun represents the guerillas!!! (gosh! It just dawned to me!) Both were hopeful that a change would happen that would help them live normally. Ofelia represents Mercedes and all the women and men who are ready to risk it all for their cause (even if they had to be spies). The Captain of course represented the criticized government, stern and brutal. Ofelia’s mother represented the helpless, the in middle ordinary people who do not want to take sides because all they care about was to live their lives as ordinarily and normal as possible (and I don’t blame anyone).

So there you go. I’m still trying to get these all figured out more properly. But as far as I am concerned, I have shared all the main thoughts that I should be sharing about the movie. What was pretty hard to do was read the subtitles, watch the scenes at the same time, listen to key Spanish words that you know, process what you were reading to the brain, and let your mind flow with ideas from the inputs. So it was kindda messing up my thinking self as how I should be able to understand everything clearly.

I also lack sleep I guess.

PS: Resolutions
1) finish the George Orwell book.
2) Also read the self-help book on reading faster
3) Be sure to have complete tetanus shots before stitching yourself.
4) Don’t drink decaf latte with peppermint at night time (drink your favorite grande caffeinated latte with extra shot –or two- with mint or peppermint syrup, at morning time, so you’ll still be able to sleep)