The Shape of Water
After watching the original Creature so many times it had become a sleep aid of mine in college, I delayed watching this for so long thinking that a Creature remake could never be done justice even when brought to life by a genius or after winning a meaningless award.
Boy howdy was I glad to be wrong. Sally Hawkins is perfect, the comedy all works, literally everything is visually and sonically impeccable, and Doug Jones and Michael Shannon manage to exude love and anger without a single word. Guillermo del Toro is no doubt a true blue Gill Man stan. (One of us! One of us!)
It takes a lot to have confidence in this life. BUT if you take your tongue out of your cheek and really try to engage with what movies like Bride of Frankenstein, Beauty and the Beast, and fuck it- Shrek are trying to say: (What is a man? Is a man a man without woman? Also in the remake, is a man a man without a man? Are you nobody until somebody loves you?) then you really start to peel back the layers of the fairy tale DNA in del Toro's beautiful brain.
Del Toro also gets the happenings surrounding the original film so well that it hurts how expertly he addresses them in Shape of Water. The magnificent Millicent Patrick didn't deserve her shabby treatment, Kay didn't deserve to be strongarmed into pairing with some shitty Wonderbread man in spite of the events of the original, Julia Adams didn't deserve to be slotted into place as a Hollywood gambit (she didn't mind though, bless her), and Elisa is all of these women and more. Part of the real tragedy of the original is the coequal injustice that never really is addressed, and in Shape of Water, del Toro sees you. He sees all of the misogyny, the negativity, the blind rage, and the injustice of the time period, and asks you to believe not in a perfect world where these all melt away but in a world where an audience of one is all it takes to matter and feel important and loved. That's why it's not enough to have just Shrek or just the Cocteau Beast. The Joseph Campbell people want to say it doesn't matter and the basic conceit of all of these stories is the same and they've got the right. If you got anything from those stories it's that the perfect match doesn't exist until we make them perfect in our perceptions. Shape of Water is here to tell us that again but with layers and newfound nuance that heals the pain of the original movie that most people never put into words. In structure how like an onion...
I think now you're ready to understand why I cried a little during this movie. (Okay, a lottle.) Hope you enjoyed reading this. This post was taken from my Letterboxd account, something I generally won't be doing but I thought it would be an exemplary post to give the new blog home a running start.
After watching the original Creature so many times it had become a sleep aid of mine in college, I delayed watching this for so long thinking that a Creature remake could never be done justice even when brought to life by a genius or after winning a meaningless award.
Boy howdy was I glad to be wrong. Sally Hawkins is perfect, the comedy all works, literally everything is visually and sonically impeccable, and Doug Jones and Michael Shannon manage to exude love and anger without a single word. Guillermo del Toro is no doubt a true blue Gill Man stan. (One of us! One of us!)
It takes a lot to have confidence in this life. BUT if you take your tongue out of your cheek and really try to engage with what movies like Bride of Frankenstein, Beauty and the Beast, and fuck it- Shrek are trying to say: (What is a man? Is a man a man without woman? Also in the remake, is a man a man without a man? Are you nobody until somebody loves you?) then you really start to peel back the layers of the fairy tale DNA in del Toro's beautiful brain.
Del Toro also gets the happenings surrounding the original film so well that it hurts how expertly he addresses them in Shape of Water. The magnificent Millicent Patrick didn't deserve her shabby treatment, Kay didn't deserve to be strongarmed into pairing with some shitty Wonderbread man in spite of the events of the original, Julia Adams didn't deserve to be slotted into place as a Hollywood gambit (she didn't mind though, bless her), and Elisa is all of these women and more. Part of the real tragedy of the original is the coequal injustice that never really is addressed, and in Shape of Water, del Toro sees you. He sees all of the misogyny, the negativity, the blind rage, and the injustice of the time period, and asks you to believe not in a perfect world where these all melt away but in a world where an audience of one is all it takes to matter and feel important and loved. That's why it's not enough to have just Shrek or just the Cocteau Beast. The Joseph Campbell people want to say it doesn't matter and the basic conceit of all of these stories is the same and they've got the right. If you got anything from those stories it's that the perfect match doesn't exist until we make them perfect in our perceptions. Shape of Water is here to tell us that again but with layers and newfound nuance that heals the pain of the original movie that most people never put into words. In structure how like an onion...
I think now you're ready to understand why I cried a little during this movie. (Okay, a lottle.) Hope you enjoyed reading this. This post was taken from my Letterboxd account, something I generally won't be doing but I thought it would be an exemplary post to give the new blog home a running start.
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