Pan

I have some irritating cinema habits, I know I do. I try to stop myself because it annoys Kevin and because he's right, it is ungracious of me. But why, WHY the world over (and of course by that I mean in Canada and Britain) do I need someone to read the big numbers on my ticket to me? Yesterday I couldn't help myself. I only have a very narrow range of smart things to say,
'Is it screen 12 by any chance?' it's not fair I know, they're only kids.

After the film I have to stay until the end of the credits. It balances my rudeness going in. It seems like very bad manners to leave before you have seen the names of everyone who helped in the making of the film. And I like looking at names, jobs, places they filmed, music they used.

Feminism - and this isn't so much of an aside - doesn't oblige me to do blokey things and it doesn't turn me into a bloke. It gives me the right to do them if I wish and it allows my equivalent girlie things to be equally valued. So when I go into a bar, I'm not obliged to drink beer and beer shouldn't be seen as the same as lemonade. Beer isn't a universal drink, it's a bloke's drink that women have started to imbibe because - well who knows why, but let them drink it if they wish and not if they don't.
But a society that values the drinking of beer is, well, essentially a society based on what men value.
I went into the diner we were going to eat in before the movie and since there was a queue, beer was being given out. Thank you for that, how useful.

And another thing. I'm still a woman and as such have been brought up to expect not to have a man walk through a door before me. Having a man let me through the door first doesn't mean I have fewer rights than him, I can't even see the logic in that, it means that society as a whole honours the gender who can if they wish, produce the next generation.
The opposite of this isn't all barging at the door at the same time, it's not being allowed onto the street without the 'permission' of a male member of the family and such like.
Just to sort out a couple of little confusions there.

We're nearly at the film. I like a film that makes me think, that sends me back to look up some history.

We saw a film by director and writer Guillermo del Torro, 'Pan's Labyrinth'. It intertwined fantasy and the grim reality of life in Spain under the fascists after the Spanish Civil War and during the time frame of the Second World War. This was probably covered in history lessons at school by a paragraph in a text book.
It involved Britain in that some British people were so horrified by the spread of fascism in Europe that they went to fight it, joining volunteers from other countries in the 'International Brigade'.
The Spanish Civil war ended in 1939, the same year that war was declared in the rest of Europe, so the 21 people still alive who fought in that war are now in their nineties.
I found two quotes from veterans of this war. Trade unionist Jack Jones said,

"You have got to have conviction in life, to do what is the right thing to do. Many men I know did that and died. I could have been in their place, but I was glad to fight with them."

Another, Sam Russell, said,

"I went to fight Fascism. We may have lost on the field of battle but we never lost the fight, the struggle against Fascism."

I also know that Sleepy's grandad fought in this 'forgotten war'.

I found it interesting that the fantasy part of the film was centred on the realm of the Faunus, or Pan. Pan was a god of the pastoral, of nature, but also of human nature.
He was also the only god in Greek mythology to die. But we shouldn't panic about that, nature can't die can it?
And why is it that the representation of the god of the natural world was demonised into the often use picture of Satan?

I wonder.