Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Guillermo Del Toro was born on October 9, 1964 and raised a devout Roman Catholic. Del Toro started making movies when he was eight years old. When he was 21, he created and produced his first short film by the name of Doña Lupe. Afterward, he dedicated his life to learning about and designing special effects and costuming for eight years. When he was done with this, Del Toro helped to co-found the Mexican Film Festival and he started his own production company, the Tequila Gang.

His movies draw on a wide variety of genres and topics, ranging from being something like the fantasy movies that he is well known for, such as El Labertino del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), to the movies that are based on comic books, such as Hellboy and Blade II.

Guillermo Del Toro is best known in recent years in the United States for his work on Pan’s Labyrinth, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 2006 Academy Awards (losing to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others). Pan’s Labyrinth received this kind of attention due to the amazing cinematography, costume designs, and imaginative story telling that Del Toro made as the movie’s director and producer. It’s hard to imagine viewers not thinking of the image of the faun, or of “the Pale Man” who holds his eyes in the palms of his hands, when they remember Pan’s Labyrinth. But every image in the film is a stunning visual treat, like a Tim Burton movie but with gravitas.

Del Toro’s love of costume design and special effects is also apparent in some of the earlier movies in his career, such as Hellboy (2004). While much of the imagery comes from Mike Mignola’s original comic book, Del Toro gave Hellboy a darker edge to its surrealistic fantasy, a trait shared by Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s clear that Del Toro is fascinated by fantasy, comfortable with disturbing but beautiful visions. What’s interesting is that he can find these common elements in both action-oriented super-hero stories and thought-provoking historical fantasies.

Perhaps because of his distinctive vision, since the creation and release of Pan’s Labyrinth Guillermo Del Toro has received many offers to work costuming or directing a variety of films but has turned many of them down. The ones that he turned down ranged from the serious, such as One Missed Call, to family movies like The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and even some in between, like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I am Legend. The reason that he turned all of these offers down was so that he could focus on writing and directing his newest release, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), a film that has been almost as financially successful as the original Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth combined. (He has agreed to direct the upcoming film version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit.) As disturbing as Del Toro’s visions may be, they definitely are finding their audience.

Jackson Smith
Film Club Co-President

Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995)

The Usual Suspects (1995) stands out as an incredible film for so many reasons, but these reasons all revolve around the many talented actors assembled – Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollack, Chazz Palminteri, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, and especially Kevin Spacey as “the Gimp,” Roger “Verbal” Kint. As is so often true with character-based films, quality acting creates lasting memories.

Spacey goes all out here. He aggressively prepared for his Kint role, filing his shoes down to create the kind of wear they would get if he actually had a limp and gluing his fingers together to simulate the effects of a disability. And this kind of attention to detail paid off. Even though he’d been acting in movies for almost a decade when he took the role in The Usual Suspects, his turn as Kint solidified our appreciation of his talent and opened more leading roles up to him in films like American Beauty, K-Pax, Shipping News, and Beyond the Sea.

The Usual Suspects also benefits from great writing. Christopher McQuarrie’s script, highlighted by Spacey’s voice-over narration and the witty dialogue between Palminteri’s Kujan and Spacey’s Kint, reflects and enhances the masterful balance and layering of the film.

Beyond the writing, Bryan Singer’s ability to create a masterpiece out of “the concept of a movie poster of five guys in a lineup” never ceases to amaze. This movie is one of those that gets better on repeat viewings, even if you know the film’s surprise ending. The movie accomplishes the feat of bringing together so many different stories, people and effects and flows them concisely together through entertaining twists and turns that so much detail, so many tiny clues and hints to the film’s subtext, evades the viewer’s eye that only multiple viewings can detect.

Singer’s genius lies in his ability to not only do the best job directing possible (and by the end of the film you’ll notice that he’s not only an expert at visual misdirection, but also a master at wrapping you up in the story), but to have the flexibility to allow actors to build complex, entertaining characters, like Benicio Del Toro’s quick, unintelligible Fenster. These things combined – the breathtaking tension of the film, the smooth, cool hilariousness of characters like Fenster, McManus and the assortment of ‘usual suspects’ – pushes the movie beyond a sharp mystery to a truly unique work of art.

And this is a mystery: The American Film Institute has listed The Usual Suspects as one of the top ten mysteries. What mystery does this film address, what questions does it ask? Here’s a challenge, what questions did the movie ask of you and what fears do the possible answers give you?

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President