"The Shape Of Water" + Lake Balboa

Tonight I did watch a movie; I finally saw "The Shape Of Water", which you no doubt saw in the theater when it was first released. I may have mentioned that it always takes me a while to catch up on all the big movies of the previous year, the Academy Award winners and such, and that's because I don't go to the theater as much as I once did. "Shape Of Water" must have looked amazing on the big screen, and I really enjoyed it even on my old school non-flatscreen 27 inch TV set, but....

I'm not sure it was Best Picture material.

Now don't worry, because I'm not gonna go all curmudgeon on you. I thought it was a very good movie, and I loved the other Del Toro films that I've seen : "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Orphanage".

"Shape" has his trademark retro art direction, which I love. His attention to detail with the look of his films really puts you into a cultural time machine and takes you back to the period in which his movies take place, in this case 1963, a forward looking time in America. With Del Toro, you know you're gonna get a great looking film, and that it will be stylized to put you into his own fantasy world, which he has said comes from his own obsessions with the styles and pop culture objects of the past.

Assuming you have seen "The Shape Of Water", I will omit my usual plot description and just make a few observations. I think, basically, that it was a paean to "Creature From The Black Lagoon". I know that's an "obvious" observation, one which I think a few critics have made as well, and I agree. Del Toro loves old things, he loves retro culture, he loves monsters and comic books, all that stuff. In "Black Lagoon", the Creature is after Julie Adams, and of course it is the King Kong story, the Beauty and The Beast story. The Creature is "in love" with Adams. In "Creature From The Black Lagoon", though, the feeling is not mutual. That movie is a straight 1950s sci-fi horror film, with an undercurrent of social message. But for the most part, it is straightforward.

I think basically that Del Toro just took the main theme of "Black Lagoon" and tweaked it - made it entirely about outcast or marginalised people. Sally Hawkins is mute, Octavia Spencer is black, Richard Jenkins is gay. On the opposite side, Michael Shannon is tall, white, military and imposing...and evil.

So you have a sort of comic book story of discarded heroes who in 1963 would have all been marginalised and kept in their place, and so the Creature - made handsome in this movie - becomes their idol, and for Hawkins, her soulmate.

The story took a while to develop but really got going in the second hour. Probably 15 minutes could have been carefully extracted from the film, which would have made it move faster and lost nothing in the telling of the tale.

Sally Hawkins was very good in the lead, and I would've voted for her over Frances McDormand who won the Oscar for that horrible movie she was in. Michael Shannon is always good, though I'd like to see him play a sympathetic role one day.

Overall, a very good movie, total Guillermo Del Toro, but because his films are so stylised, in this case I did not get involved emotionally with the characters. The Creature did not resonate in that way, and so his relationship with Hawkins seemed flat. There was no "get out your hankies" moment, and I am a guy who will get out my hankie if I need to, so you can trust me in this regard.

So, to sum up, "The Shape Of Water" was a very good movie in that it looked great, put you in it's world, and was very entertaining. More or less it was a "good guys" vs. "bad guys" movie with an added ingredient of social outcasts from 1963, which created a sympathy for those characters, but not enough to overcome the stylistic layer and cause you to feel those characters as real people.

Two thumbs up because it was entertaining. Best Picture material? Maybe in a year when "Three Billboards" was also a contender. ///

This aft, I took Pearl to Lake Balboa. It was our first time there since last July 4th, and our first time without The Doberman Pinscher. I felt him walking right beside us anyhow, and I pushed Pearl around the lake, past the multitude of dog walkers, skaters and bike riders.

Elizabeth, I saw on your FB that your photos from the fashion shoot at the concrete Brutalism building have been published in HUF Magazine. Congratulations for that, and I hope everything else is going well. Hopefully, the FB thing will become unstuck one of these days......:):)

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)