Pan’s Labyrinth is an extraordinary film boasting a touching performance from Ivana Baquero, playing Ofelia, an innocent young girl introduced against her will to the evils of the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, a few years after the Spanish royalists lost the Civil War to Franco’s fascists, a widow marries a Spanish army captain (Sergi Lopez). He commands a remote northern Spanish garrison where he’s assigned to root out remnants of royalist resistance. The marriage is clearly one of convenience for her, as the love of her life was her first husband, a tailor, who was killed during the fighting. She brings with her a teenage daughter just beginning to enter the realms of sexual, intellectual and moral discovery that come with adolescence.
Idgie experiences a terrible heartbreak during her young developmental stage. She, along with Ruth witness Buddy’s tragic death. This will forever change Idgie, as she becomes even more rebellious and revolutionary. A example of her mischievous ways was when she can road past the church during a sermon and compared the preacher to a snake. The next stage that greatly influences Idgie’s life is when Ruth is asked to come and stay at Idgie’s home by her mother.
Through the movie her father starts dating and gets engaged to a woman whom tries to help Vada with her emotional feelings. The story line takes a turn when Vada best friend dies from bee stings while trying to retrieve her mood ring she lost in the woods. Vada is in her middle childhood and that is a rough time for most girls at this age. Vada spends time worrying about herself and how she is changing physically. Vada is also a becoming a hypochondriac and misconceptions of death and how that evolves in her world.
These settings’ dark, grayish tones contribute to an overall mood of mystery and suspense, and focus the audience’s attention on the protagonist, Ofelia, whose white nightgown sets a huge contrast against the dully-coloured surroundings. Settings can also serve as metaphorical representations which support the main narrative action. Ofelia’s departure from her bedroom to the labyrinth and rotunda, taken on a subtler level, can be understood as her desire to escape reality and the harsh cruelties that exist in a post-civil war Spain (bedroom), to a fantasy world (labyrinth and rotunda) of mystical creatures that promise her liberation and freedom from the binds of
MY SISTER’S KEEPER (Movie Review) Conceived by means of in vitro fertilization, Anna Fitzgerald (Abigail Breslin) was brought into the world to be a genetic match for her older sister, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), who suffers from acute promyelocytic leukemia. Because of her sister's dependency on her, Anna is unable to live the life she wants; in and out of the hospital constantly, she cannot take part in extracurricular activities such as cheerleading or soccer. When Kate turns 13 she goes into renal failure. Knowing that she will have to donate one of her kidneys to her sister, Anna sues her parents for medical emancipation and the rights to her own body. Attorney Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) agrees to work for Anna pro bono.
As the novel opens, Allison’s narrator, Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, recounts her illegitimate birth to her fifteen-year-old mother, Anney Boatwright, and her mother’s annual humiliating attempts to get her child a birth certificate without “Illegitimate” stamped across the bottom (4). In Bone’s narration of Anney’s quest for a new birth certificate without the dehumanizing stamp, Allison indicates that the category “white trash” is an ideological construct--one of the enabling myths of a bourgeois society that relies upon the exploited labor of the class it stigmatizes in order to secure its own wealth: “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground” (3-4). Allison reverses the qualities associated with the privileged class--hard-working, honest, civil--and those associated with the underclass--lazy, shiftless, uncivilized. In Allison’s analysis, Anney’s employers appear inhumane, unjust, and uncivil as they objectify her body stooped in labor for their benefit; she appears hard-working and purposeful while they appear lazy and self-indulgent in their exploitation of her work. Thus the qualities ascribed to the underclass and the elite cannot embody metaphysical essences constituting the nature of each class since the allegedly defining qualities of each are interchangeable.
The final step is the return back to the interpreted realm, bringing back the transformation of consciousness. In the novel The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, An-mei’s mother suffers of rape, immediately causing herself to depart into a cruel world without her daughter, social acceptance, and a place to live. Forced to eventually care for An-mei as a fourth wife, An-mei’s mother realizes the poor conditions An-mei is set to grow up in, and kills herself to rid herself of her own weak spirit to make An-mei’s stronger. This action shocks Wu Tsing, into raising An-mei as if she were from his first wife, thus making An-mei a bold and confident child. Through challenges and trials that An-mei’s mother overcome for her daughter, she is granted with the qualities of a full-fledged hero from Campbell’s perspective.
Both women find love, commit to love, lose love and suffer from heartache. Each character’s reaction to these scenarios are far from alike. Medea, Princes of Colchis and practicing sorceress, falls in love with Jason of Lolcus. On the hopes that Jason will whisk her away from Colchis, marry her and start a family, Medea uses her powers to acquire the Golden Fleece for Jason and clear their path for escape. She is so intent on fulfilling her desires that Medea kills her own brother and manipulates the death of a king during their flight from Colchis.
Essay: Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda deals with a country where sons are favored over daughters, a woman named Kavita conceives her first child, a baby girl, and is brutally forbidden to keep that child, who is then sentenced to death. In the meantime, while many women struggle to conceive, across the ocean, a woman named Somer attempts to conceive a child and was unsuccessful in doing so. Later on, Kavita is blessed by God and delivered a second child, who is again a girl, but this time she is faced with the heartbreaking choice of having to give up her baby for adoption in order to save the baby’s life. Somer later adopts Kavita’s daughter, Asha, giving herself the opportunity to be a mother and giving Asha the opportunity to have a family. Kavita, Somer, and Asha, all struggle psychologically with the reality of the brutality they face as women.
He married Isabella to place himself an heir of Thrushcross Grange. This made Catherine being seriously ill with jealousy and died giving birth to Cathy junior. In part one of The Reader, Michael Berg was a hepatitis-struck teen and Hanna came into the story as a woman assisting him home. Months later when he came back to thank her, he became attracted to her and they began an erotic affair, despite their age difference. Hanna asked Michael to read aloud to him.