thread to discuss Guillermo del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER

I adored Sally Hawkins, esp the "You'll never knowwwwwww" sequence

― fuck you, your hat is horrible (Neanderthal), Sunday, 24 December 2017 13:42 (three minutes ago) Permalink

I agree, despite my criticisms of the movie she is very good in it.

The creature itself is the weak link for me. I just can’t buy anyone warming up to that thing. The movie tries to have it both ways, excusing its murder of a cat with “it’s a wild creature” while telling us it’s this wonderful misunderstood scaly stud muffin.

I think the obvious attraction are their similarities. both of them take degrees of abuse for how they're 'different' from society (and she witnesses how poorly monster-boy is treated from the onset of his arrival). both of them are largely socially isolated as a result of it.

I don't view it as purely sexual at the beginning - she seems to look on him like an owner looks at an adorable dog that they just purchased at first. The "fuck eyes" seem to come more when she realizes it can communicate back and likes music etc....

xpost

I do wish Michael Shannon wasn't playing his 100th iteration of "morally corrupt baddie". his making unwanted sexual advances to Elisa kind of comes out of nowhere and seems to exist only to say "see, this guy is a shitbeak"

Yeah, the movie spends an awful lot of time with him. Did we need to see his home life? It’s an odd choice because those scenes don’t really illuminate anything about him.

the romance was cute and occasionally delightful and i was so glad they went there with the sex (and made it an ongoing thing) because that part was like, cool, i haven't seen this before in a movie! was way less interested in the michael shannon stuff cause that's pretty familiar territory. woulda been more interesting if he was mildly sympathetic to what the scientists had to say but ultimately more driven by pleasing the higher-ups. i like that the russian spy subplot was fused together with the scientist-thinks-we-should-study-it-not-kill-it plot. sucks that scientist guy gives them up for no reason at all, and that octavia spencer's never-before-seen husband also cracks and sells them out... felt like forced plot mechanics to get us to a final confrontation. i dunno it was sweet and kinda interesting with some occasionally good use of the period and its politics to draw out some of the themes - better than your average B movie?

Not great.

i was so glad they went there with the sex (and made it an ongoing thing) because that part was like, cool, i haven't seen this before in a movie!
same. my mom asked me why it was rated R and i was like "probably nudity and masturbation?" none of the sexuality between elisa and the sea beast was crass at all; she didn't hesitate when the sea beast showed interest in her, but we don't really know that much about her or what goes on in her head. the idea that she would be portrayed as an overtly sexual being at all is interesting to me.

my main complaint about this movie was how her name was elisa but everyone said eliza?! that seemed weird to me. either call her eliza or say it elisa. i don't understand that choice.

it is a petty complaint
also i love sally hawkins

Sally Hawkins was new to me and great in this. I also have an endless appetite for Michael Shannon playing an unmitigated prick.

Also p much everyone of my generation definitely wants to fuck monsters if twitter is to be believed, monster-fucking is in

http://images.sequart.org/images/Neonomicon-The-Deep-One-and-Merril-Brears.jpg

the only thing that bugged me is the over-reliance on destroying the myth of the innocence of the 60s.

Just completing the work Mad Men did. But if they hammered on it once....

Also, the idea of monsters going after human females is the subtext to a lot of the classic horror movies (possibly even text, depending on how you read Frankenstein or Dracula's Daughter). A human female reciprocating, or even initiating such attractions, is a logical extension.

Sure, it’s also the subtext of Creature From the Black Lagoon, which is one of the obvious inspirations for this movie.

Reversing that trope is a good premise that could work, I just don’t think it’s convincingly executed well here. YMMV.

idk it's one of those where there's so MUCH business that at first appears to be outside the main thrust of the movie (fish man romance) that i sort of have to say, maybe i'm misreading what the main thrust of the movie is. more broadly of course it's about difference/othering and the narrow intolerant values of the time When America Was Great Before (seen in treatment of the creature, of nonwhite americans, of shannon's wife, of the gay neighbor), and the fish man saga lets us encounter all of these with the romance just being the most central of those (and the one that leads to a happy ending for one and letting the others feel they scored a victory for minorities and alternative lifestyles).

this falls apart just a little with the red scare, which is one critical thing that might make it into feel-good pop histories of the period ("mccarthyism was bad"); here it's not really framed as an attack on difference or on the Old Left - an actual 100% guilty russian spy is detected and defeated. he's a good guy for our purposes but this bit feels not quite as well worked out; it's mostly an excuse for a more cartoonish "bloviating military guy, obsessed with communists, misses the actual rescuers of the creature right under his nose." i'm okay with that sometimes (see The Iron Giant) but here it felt a bit more off-theme, there just to keep the plot going.

pretty sure Creature from the Black Lagoon was a well-documented explicit inspiration for this

also I was going to post a picture of monster-human female sex from Possession but they were all too lurid -- that's what I think separates this movie from other movies featuring this sort of...odd relationship. there was really nothing too lurid about their relationship. i'd venture it was sweeter than your average relationship between 2 humans.

They spent 3 YEARS making sure he had a sexy ass. This is real art 😩💦💦 pic.twitter.com/q4I0QkF7Vp

— 💙Waiting4My🐟Fishman💙 (@rawrburd) December 25, 2017

V important bc apparently Doug Jones doesn’t have a natural ass to speak of so there’s always the question of whether his character should have an ass

http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/how-doug-jones-became-guillermo-del-toros-favorite-monster.html

Nice profile of Jones

this movie blew me away. it was so well paced & entertaining. loved basically every minute. i completely bought the monster romance. it was really emotional & moved me much more than i was expecting. it was movie magic. its cold as fuck right now here in the northeast bomb cyclone and the medium-filled theater on a friday afternoon loved it and clapped at the end. beautiful

so she was also a water creature, orphaned at birth?

as soon as we saw the scars on her neck and heard her backstory ("orphan found by a river") it seemed clear to me that she was actually an orphaned seamonster, they also made the explicit point about "they can switch between the two modes of breathing" for this purpose IMO

so none of the sudden romance came as a surprise to me, this was two outcasts finding commonality where they least expected it.

sorry "scars"

also the reason why neither of them can talk - they are the same species

damn ok wait
how/why was she in a human suit

what

idk about that part but the rest seemed clear or at the least heavily implied?

This disappointed me.

haha yeah i mean that's a huge leap to make but you have some convincing points

xp to Alfred

why? legit position imo, this was kinda like an X-files movie but I liked the performances and a lot of the shots.

What I wrote last week.

thanks, good points there esp. about the overkill of Shannon's character

and I still liked it enough!

pretty sure Creature from the Black Lagoon was a well-documented explicit inspiration for this

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Sunday, December 24, 2017 10:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know I've read that del Toro wanted to remake CFtBL with an explicit erotic angle, but was shot down.

sleeve makes some good points about the conservation of elements/breathing -- it hadn't occurred to me that they were the same species but in spite of the human suit issue, it does make sense. also her name was Elisa -- everyone pronounced it Eliza and I wasn't ever sure what that was all about but if it was a My Fair Lady thing, that would make sense (I don't particularly like that parallel between the two stories but that's irrelevant)

This doesn't screen in UK until second week of febuary.

in spite of the human suit issue

this is a pretty big issue tho

Was anybody else weirded out by the nudity in the first five minutes? Just seemed kind of arbitrary as opposed to the mermaid sexin later.

I also recoiled when Michael Shannon said "pussy finger"

this is a pretty big issue tho
true, and it's why i don't buy this theory entirely -- it also changes the nature of their relationship dramatically and i prefer an interpretation of her as an ordinary woman than than a rescued orphaned special secretly magical mer-person.

as for this Was anybody else weirded out by the nudity in the first five minutes? Just seemed kind of arbitrary
no way, i like nudity that's natural and isn't intended to titillate -- incidental/natural nudity is nudity as it happens regularly in life. when nudity is confined to sexual scenes only, it makes nudity more sexual than it really is. it's actually kind of ordinary.

i think all the things about Strickland that made people recoil (the above comment, the disgusting scene with his wife) were intended to disgust. mission accomplished i guess.

otm re: the nudity- felt very naturalistic, not salacious at all. masturbating in the tub was as much a part of her daily routine as brushing her teeth or pulling a page off of her paper calendar. i really appreciated that detail.

I tend to agree with Alfred though. Shannon felt like a composite of every character he's ever played

I agree, I loved it, but can absolutely understand loathing it and his performance taking you out of the move if he's one of your problem actors, ymmv

Like personally idaf if he plays that same guy in 5 movies a year for the rest of his career, I love it, I love him doing it. Check out The Night Before to see him as a benevolent hobo drug ghost

Like personally idaf if he plays that same guy in 5 movies a year for the rest of his career, I love it, I love him doing it.

cosine

I like Michael Shannon a lot and have seen most of his movies, even 99 Homes. wasn't really his performance that bothered me, but I felt like his character was a warmed-over version of older Shannon roles.

I kept thinking, "Here we go again" every time he came onscreen.

the signing "fuck you" scene was great though. I love Sally Hawkins

Saw this last night somewhat by chance. A friend invited me to go, the theater is a short walk from home, I was around and at loose ends.

I didn't know much about the movie! All I'd really heard was "creature from the black lagoon" and "quirky romance between loner and monster." I enjoyed it well enough but I also agree to an extent with both Dr. Casino and latebloomer upthread -- There was a lack of focus that I thought was detrimental to the love story between the creature and Eliza. We weren't given many scenes between the two that made their romance believable. We get some eggs and then some Glenn Miller, and then it's all sexy. I think if we'd been given more Eliza/Monster scenes it would have made more sense. As it was, their love story seemed like a whole lot of projection on her part and a probable lack of understanding on his? Kind of a weird dynamic imo but.. whatever, I guess.

Just saw this on a whim. I also didn't know much about it going in and live close to the theater! All the themes of toxic masculinity got a little heavy-handed, but this director likes to be heavy-handed and make the monster take the form of a hypermasculine family dude so I wasn't too mad at that. The love story didn't bother me either, actually I quite liked it, but after reading this thread I agree it could've improved with more exposition. This movie was a gorgeous thing visually, though, and fun to see the super-team of the mute person, the scientist, the homosexual guy and the black woman come together against all odds. GdT does some pretty great stuff when he swings for the fences.

yeah, definitely teal but for once it was on purpose and related to the story (mostly aquatic).
I loved the design. It actually reminded me of an old video game : Bioshock !

Yeah, I kind of think Paddington would be a better mate than the fish.

Just wait for Paddington 3.

https://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/review/primary_image/reviews/ted-2012/hero_EB20120627REVIEWS120629973AR.jpg

very interesting (and wow "the wave" on the wall in her flat !)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7gJ5C1muo

That review linked above is pretty good.

Yeah, Nayman's Cinemascope review is excellent: informed, well-written and worth thinking about. I disagree in that I quite like the film and think it generally succeeds in its ambitions, but most of Nayman's criticisms hit their mark.

Mike d'Angelo otm:

Del Toro is the kind of auteur who conceives a cartoon sadist (every damn time, come to think of it) and decides to hire Michael freakin' Shannon for the role. Everything's a hat on a hat. It's like having someone yell "Surrender to the magic!" in your face for two hours. Maybe I could if you'd stop yelling.

Shannon has really got to stop playing the cartoon villains, or risk being Walkenized.

Or risk being someone who always gets paid?

at some point you've got enough

just get paid every other role

my red hook friends and acquaintances speak well of him as a neighbor and bar regular iirc

I'm sure he's a great person. But boy, he even looks more than a little like Walken, doesn't he?

Shannon works so much, didn't Walken's career really drop off in the 80s? I mean was he in everything after The Deer Hunter like Shannon has been in everything for the last... 4-5 years?

I hate the name of this movie, it just screams oscar bait you will forget about in 10 years.

Walken starred in The Dead Zone and A View To A Kill in '83 and '85, and some other pictures like Brainstorm that people probably expected to be slightly bigger than they were. It's only after that that his profile kinda dropped for a while. If you compare it to Shannon's side by side I feel like there's about the same ratio of "big" movies and stuff most people haven't heard of or kind of forgot about already.

It's not godawful... I'm impressed that a film can win Best Picture while resurrecting Alice Faye's biggest hit AND featuring severed fingers, ripped-open throat, etc. And still come off like Amelie Does the Gill Man.

In a Details profile published in late '93, Walken said, "An agent can't say 'Get a Chris Walken type!' I am the type. I own it. Which means I will work for a very long time."

rote-type

That quote at the top - hat on top of a hat - is perfect. This whole film screams "I Love Monsters! And Whimsy! And! And!". Gimme "Pan's Labyrinth" any ol' day instead.