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Date: 1/11/2018
What I’ve been watching: a lovely, if not odd, new film in theaters now and a classic murder mystery just released on Blu-ray.
In theaters: The Shape of Water
It has been known that writer, producer and director Guillermo del Toro is an unabashed horror and fantasy film fan boy. He has been responsible for innovative films such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” as well as fan favorites such as the two “Hellboy” movies and “Pacific Rim.”
With his newest film, “The Shape of Water,” he just doesn’t exhibit his love for the classic film “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” but also his ability to take a fantasy film theme and deepen it to provide a narrative that goes into unexpected places.
A monster loving the heroine is nothing new in cinema. The Phantom of the Opera loved Christine. Kong loved Ann Darrow. And the Gillman in the original “Creature from the Black Lagoon” had an interspecies crush as well.
None of these loves were ever reciprocated, but in this new film del Toro explores what if one such relationship ever was mutual.
Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who lives above a movie theater in 1960s Baltimore. She works as a janitor at a government research facility with one of her two best friends, another janitor, an African-American woman played by Octavia Spencer.
Elisa’s other best friend is Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay commercial artist who lives across the hall, who is seeking to remain sober, while trying to get his career and love life back on track.
Elisa is an orphan and she has built a world for herself along the edges of mainstream society. That world is changed when an amphibian creature from the Amazon is brought in for study. She is drawn to the creature and soon discovers he is intelligent and responds to both communication and music.
The scientists are charged with trying to understand how he breathes as part of the research to put men in space, a goal which quickly turns threatening to the creature.
As unlikely it would seem, Elisa falls in love with the creature and he with her. Now I realize that on paper this seems to be a wildly unlikely premise, but in del Toro’s hands, it works and works very well.
The reason is that it’s not just an odd romance. The film is about the “others” in society – the racial minorities, the disabled and the gays – people who must conform to society’s norms with never being considered part of the mainstream at that time. It’s a heartfelt observation and not one might expect to see in a fantasy movie.
And it is a message that is very much part of American society today.
The American mainstream is represented by the villain of the film played with intensity by Michael Shannon. His Richard Strickland is someone who has everything – a wife, two kids, a suburban ranch home and a Cadillac – is trapped by his own ambitions and terrified of what it would mean to fail. I love the fact the guy is sitting at his desk reading a Dale Carnegie-type book. He is convinced that such self-help tomes are a key to advancing in society.
There is only one moment at which del Toro’s story turns forced, but it is mercifully short. Otherwise, this is a very satisfying fantasy that goes beyond one might expect. I recommend you see it before it leaves theaters.
On Blu-ray: Cat O’ Nine Tails
I’ve only seen very little of the output of Italian director Dario Argento – not through design, I’ve just been a little busy with other films – and I welcomed the opportunity to see the Blu-ray restoration of one of his earliest triumphs, “Cat O’ Nine Tails.”
A murder mystery and thriller, rather than a horror film, Argento’s take on a killer trying to hide something by murdering people who might have discovered his secret is to this day innovative and riveting.
Released in 1971, like many European films at the time the leads are American actors (Karl Malden and James Franciscus), a move to help insure marketability in the United States. Franciscus plays a reporter investigating a puzzling break-in at a genetics lab during which nothing was apparently taken. Malden is a blind former reporter who teams up with Franciscus when people associated with the lab begin to be murdered.
Argento and his editor used a technique that pushed the story along artistically without obscuring the mystery. As with Italian films of that time, the version we are presented is dubbed with Malden and Franciscus apparently looping in their voices after the film was completed, something I have always found a little off-putting.
I got used to it, as Argento knows how to build suspense and to present shocks – the film is pretty explicit in several sequences.
The Blu-ray has several great extras including a recent interview with Argento himself and other key production members on the production of the film.
A fascinating film, it now propels me to seek out more of Argento’s early work.