Lover From the Black Lagoon

Movies: The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is clearly inspired by 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon. del Toro, a director known for making films that walk the line between the real and the fantastic, also appears to borrow from the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet's films--in particular The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen--are both whimsical and a little scary and bizarre. They're like the original Grimm's fairytales, filled with evil men and strange creatures, violence and playfulness.

Despite pulling from the work of other directors, classic horror and science-fiction, and millennia of fables and fairytales, The Shape of Water is anything but derivative. del Toro has done something remarkable with this film: he's taken half a dozen different genres--suspense, romance, drama, fantasy, history, and horror (with a sprinkling of comedy)--and stitched them together in such a way where no one genre dominates another. And at the heart of this tale is a desire common to all humans (and, apparently, non-humans as well): the longing for connection and the desire to be seen and accepted as we are.

del Toro also accomplishes a difficult feat: he makes us believe that a woman might actually want to fuck an amphibious half-man, half-creature. And fuck they do. Hoo boy.

Taking place in 1960, The Shape of Water follows Elisa Esposito (in a career-best performance by Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman who works the graveyard shift at a government research facility in Baltimore. Elisa's only friends are her closeted gay neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and fellow cleaning lady Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa seems to lead a quiet, orderly, and lonely life.

Then one day, the research facility becomes home to an "asset"--a sea creature that was captured and brought to Baltimore by Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, malevolent and somewhat sexy as he always is). Strickland and his superior, General Hoyt, see this creature as a potential weapon in the Cold War and want to vivisect it to see how it works. Scientist Bob Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlberg) sees the creature as "beautiful" and wants to treat it with gentleness and certainly not kill it. Meanwhile, Elisa sneaks into the lab where the creature is kept chained up and feeds it hardboiled eggs and teaches it sign language. She discovers that the creature can communicate and feel emotions. When she overhears the plans to vivisect her new friend, she decides to bust the creature out of the facility and set it free.

There's also a Russian double-agent subplot as well as a subplot involving Giles in his attempts to express his desire for other men. del Toro manages to make these plot lines vital to the story and its themes of what it means to be an outsider and to be misunderstood. In fact, every character in The Shape of Water is misunderstood in some way, and forced into submission by other people, by society, or by circumstances. Of course, Elisa is misunderstood in a literal sense by being mute. Giles is a gay man in the 1960s, Zelda is a black woman, and the creature is, well, not human. But even Richard Strickland--the "bad guy" of the film--is misunderstood and bullied by his superiors. He reacts by acting aggressively towards those weaker than himself, but his pain is understandable even if his actions are deplorable. Like most great films, The Shape of Water has no one-dimensional characters and no simple answers.

Director of Photography Dan Lauston films The Shape of Water with a wonderful palette of shades of green, from the bright green candy that Strickland compulsively consumes to the grayish-blue green of the water where the creature lives. Green is a symbol of renewal and nature. Likewise, eggs show up in the movie a lot: Elisa hard boils them everyday before she heads to work, and her first connection with the creature is when she offers it an egg to eat. Like the color green, eggs are also symbols of rebirth and fertility, and The Shape of Water--especially the ending--is the story of Elisa's rebirth in the face of finding a connection and love where she leasts expects it.

If you think that a movie about a human woman falling in love with a non-human creature is silly or stupid, of course I only have to point to King Kong, or Beauty and the Beast, or every vampire and werewolf story ever told. Stories like these are about being loved for who we are, no matter our outside packaging. Stories about monsters are also about being hated or feared by society and a demand for conformity.

The Shape of Water takes place during a precarious time in United States history. The early 1960s was a time of manners and hierarchies, but it was also right before the world blew wide open with JFK's assassination, the Civil Rights Act, and Woodstock. The Shape of Water reveals that during this time in the United States, beautiful strangeness--or maybe a more accurate term would be "queerness"--existed right there under everyone's nose. That queerness, like the creature in the movie, lurked below the surface, just waiting for its moment to emerge from the depths and demand to be seen in all its glory.

Grade: B+

A Portrait of Grief 14 Feet High

Movies: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

It's difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Like his 2008 film In Bruges, it's a mix of intense drama and pitch-black comedy sprinkled with a light dusting of absurdity. The concoction, not unlike when I first had a salted caramel flavored beer, is both strange and addictive: I'm not sure what I feel about this, but I....I kinda like it!

Three Billboards is the story of a mother's grief. Frances McDormand, who is excellent in every movie she's been in, including this one, plays Mildred Hayes, a middle-aged woman whose daughter was raped, killed, and burned into unrecognizable ash just outside the town limits of Ebbing. After 7 months, it seems like the local police force is too busy sitting on their thumbs to make any arrests. So Mildred rents out three dilapidated billboards along the road where her daughter was murdered to send a message to the police and specifically the chief. The messages read:

RAPED WHILE DYING

AND STILL NO ARRESTS?

HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? 


(To give you a sense of the kind of humor this movie trades in, when Mildred and her 17 year old son, Robbie [played by the wonderful Lucas Hedges], drive down this road, Robbie remarks "Oh, great, the 'Raped while dying' route")

Chief Willoughby is played--also wonderfully (every single actor in this film brings their A-game)--by Woody Harrelson. Willoughby is a good man and beloved by the people of Ebbing, so Mildred gets tons of shit by putting up these billboards. Even the town priest pays her a visit to implore her to take them down. But Mildred rightly points out that she's gotten more phone calls, house calls, and attention in the days following the erection of the billboards than in the 7 months following her daughter's brutal murder.

Willoughby treats Mildred with respect compared to other members of the community, including her ex-husband Charlie (played--you guessed it--wonderfully by John Hawkes) and the hotheaded, slow-witted police officer Dixon, played MORE THAN WONDERFULLY by Sam Rockwell in one of the best performances of his career--which has been filled with amazing performances.

Officer Dixon is probably the most complicated character in the film. He's angry and abusive, but he longs for approval. He's the epitome of a blatantly racist small-town cop. He's everything wrong with police today distilled into one character: not that smart, thinks he's all that, lazy as hell--except when beating the shit out of innocent people. He's irredeemable. Or so you think....Three Billboards is full of surprises, both good and bad.

I won't get into the details of the plot since that would spoil the movie, but I'll distill my overall impressions into a couple sentences and you can decide if this is a movie you want to see:

1) As I said, the acting in Three Billboards is, to a performance, excellent, A+, perfecto. You will not be disappointed by a single performance in this film. Somehow, McDonagh gathered Hollywood's best and brightest and wrung out every drop of acting they had to give.

2) If you like movies where justice is served and peace and order restored in a way we rarely see in real life, then this is not the movie for you. The plot arc is really more of a rollercoaster and there's no neat little bow tying things up and the end.

3) There is, however, redemption. Three Billboards might be the most "Christian" movie that's not explicitly about religion I've seen this year. In particular, the character arcs that Mildred and Dixon travel throughout the film are like something out of the Bible (or a Greek tragedy, as my mother, who saw the movie with me, said). Three Billboards is about a lot of things, but it's surprisingly not about justice. It's about something deeper than justice--it's about forgiveness, redemption, hope, and love. And if all that sounds cheesy, I can assure you that the path this film takes towards these fuzzy feelings is the opposite of cheesy. It's goddamn brutal. It's a trial by fire, literally. To steal the title of a Rebecca Solnit book, it's about "Hope in the dark".

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will enrage you. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. You might hate it or you might love it. But I can promise you one thing: It won't bore you.

Grade: A-

Oh Hai Movie

Movies: The Disaster Artist

"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

The above is a quote from the wonderful Tim Burton film Ed Wood in which famed terrible director Ed Wood (Johnny Depp, before he was the caricature he is today) meets with Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio). Wood is about to give up his directing dreams when Welles tells him to believe in himself. The joke is, of course, that Wood is essentially the polar opposite of Welles in terms of talent. But the quote has always stuck with me as a pure-hearted bon mot in a cynical world. Even if you're a no-talent hack, you still have a right to your dreams.

In order to appreciate James Franco's film The Disaster Artist, you first need to know what The Room is. Here is the Wikipedia entry for it and here are some options for where to watch The Room, or at least clips of it.

But to give you the elevator pitch, The Room is a 2003 film written, directed, produced, and starring a man name Tommy Wiseau. The Room has achieved cult status for how absolutely awful it is on every count: the actors are wooden, the script is terrible, and the plot is thin. But the cult behind the room would be nothing without the mystery of Wiseau--a man with a seemingly bottomless bank account, a bizarre accent, and dreams that stretch far beyond his talent.

Unlike Ed Wood, who was an all-American man (who, incidentally, enjoyed wearing women's clothing) with optimism and goofy charm, Wiseau is pretty much an asshole by all accounts. He bullied nearly everyone on the set of The Room, refusing to buy water for the cast and crew even at the peak of summer and calling the moles on his lead actress's body "disgusting". These revelations came to light in a memoir co-written by Greg Sestero, Wiseau's friend and second lead actor in The Room. That memoir is titled The Disaster Artist and it is the basis for this film, directed and starring James Franco. A rather strange actor/director/writer/producer in his own right, Franco is pretty much the perfect auteur to take on this project.

Franco plays Wiseau to near perfection, nailing the vaguely Eastern European accent and strange mannerisms impeccably. Franco's younger brother, Dave, plays Greg Sestero, which is arguably a more difficult role since it's far more subtle than mimicking Wiseau.

The Disaster Artist opens in 1998 San Francisco where Wiseau and Sestero meet in an acting class. Where Sestero is conventionally good-looking but timid onstage, Wiseau looks, acts, and dresses bizarrely but is absolutely fearless in the class. Well, that or crazy. But we all know that there is a thin line between madness and genius.

Sestero and Wiseau become friends and eventually Wiseau convinces Sestero to move with him to Los Angeles and make a real effort to pursue acting. Sestero agrees and they move to an apartment Wiseau already owns. The fact that this man owns apartments in both San Francisco and LA is mind-boggling to Sestero--how does he have all this money? To make matters more mysterious, Wiseau claims to be from Louisiana although he clearly has an Eastern European accent. And he refuses to tell Sestero how old he is. When pushed, he claims to be Sestero's age: early 20s. The man is OBVIOUSLY at least two decades older, but won't cop to it. What's up with this guy?

After multiple rejections, Wiseau decides to make his own movie and give himself the starring role and Sestero the second lead. The movie, titled The Room, is about Johnny, an "all-American hero" in Wiseau's words, who is betrayed by his girlfriend who sleeps with his best friend, Mark (played by Sestero). Through sheer force of will and with a little help from the apparently millions of dollars Wiseau inexplicably has in his bank account, he gets the film made and released.

Franco cast dozens of actors and comedians for The Disaster Artist. No role is too small. Ari Graynor plays Juliette Danielle, who plays "Lisa" in The Room, the unfortunate young woman who had to endure a sex scene with Tommy Wiseau. Seth Rogen plays Sandy Schklair, the script supervisor. Additionally, for you Room-heads:

Josh Hutcherson plays Philip Haldiman, aka "Denny"
Nathan Fielder plays Kyle Vogt, aka "Peter"
Jackie Weaver plays Carolyn Minnott, aka "Claudette" (the one who "definitely has breast cancer")
Zac Efron plays Dan Janjigian, aka "Chris-R"

Oh, and all three hosts of the podcast How Did This Get Made?--Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are in the movie.

Oh, and why not throw Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Hannibal Buress, Allison Brie, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally, Charlene Yi, and fuckin' Bob Odenkirk in there as well? Seriously, all of Hollywood got a paycheck from this movie. Hell, I visited LA for a couple days this year, so I expect my royalties check to come in the mail any day now.

Seeing huge stars in tiny roles playing terrible actors working with a terrible script is part of the fun of The Disaster Artist. The film is less of a compelling and accurate tribute to Wiseau (they definitely downplayed his weirdness and on-set abuse, most likely to have his permission to the rights to his story) and more of a meta-comedy about fame and movie-making. Some folks have suggested that The Disaster Artist is "Oscar worthy" and I personally do not agree. It's a funny, good movie that speaks almost exclusively to fans of The Room (I can't imagine what people who have not seen The Room and walk into this movie blind will make of it) but it's not a masterpiece. In my opinion.

Even though it falls back on buddy-comedy tropes (Sestero and Wiseau have a massive falling out, but make up in the end), The Disaster Artist is great fun and pretty darn hilarious. I definitely recommend it to fans of The Room. For people who haven't seen The Room, I actually *do not* recommend seeing The Disaster Artist...yet.

First: Watch The Room "dry" just to familiarize yourself with the movie and how uniquely awful it is.

Then: See The Room during a midnight screening that includes audience participation. This is The Room in its truest and ideal habitat.

Bonus:  Read The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell to understand the full story and insider's perspective behind the making of The Room

And then you're allowed to watch The Disaster Artist. If you see The Disaster Artist without fully appreciating the story behind it, you might find yourself saying

Grade: B+

No-Tell Motel

Movies: The Florida Project, Voyeur

Two movies that revolve around cheap motels, one very good and one....problematic, to say the least.

The Florida Project

Directed by Sean Baker, whose 2015 film Tangerine made waves on the indie circuit, The Florida Project is a small movie with a big and complicated heart. The film focuses on 6-year-old Moonee, a sassy scamp of a girl who lives in a motel with her mother, Halley, and spends her days causing mischief with her friends Jancey and Scooty. While the film is ostensibly about the innocence of childhood, Baker almost immediately pulls back the curtain to reveal how fucked up and precarious Moonee's world actually is. Her mom is little more than a child herself--probably in her early 20s, no job, incredibly bad attitude toward those who only try to help her. In short, she's a terrible mother. While not abusive, per se, Halley's choices impact Moonee's life in ways neither Moonee nor Halley fully comprehend. If The Florida Project isn't excellent marketing for birth control and the morning-after pill, I don't know what is.

The motel where they live is owned by Bobby, who is played with deep wells of compassion by Willem Dafoe, the biggest star of the movie. Technically, Halley and the other women (all with small children) who live there are not legally allowed to take up permanent residence, but Bobby makes exceptions for them all despite the fact that Halley yells at him and causes him all sorts of trouble. Bobby acts as a de facto father figure to Moonee, Scooty, and Jancey who spend their days running around unsupervised (the film takes place over the summer, so they're not in school). I don't even have kids, yet I was cringing to see these little ones running along busy streets and exploring abandoned houses filled with debris.

But Baker didn't make this movie to shit on Halley and the other residents living hand-to-mouth. He shows a side of poverty most people (especially people who go see artsy movies like The Florida Project) never get to see. Social conservatives will shit themselves from scene one, in which children have a bit of fun spitting on parked cars and calling the adult woman who chastises them a "bitch". Is there something that's the opposite of a wet dream? Because this movie is whatever that is to conservatives who are anti-welfare, anti-sex work, and anti-single mothers. It hits on nearly every stereotype of the poor that conservatives believe: that they're entitled, lazy, and immoral. BUT, by showing this hard knock life through the eyes of children, Baker humanizes both the children and the adults and shows how difficult it is to break the cycle of poverty. He also shows how even a "bad mother" can have her moments of deep love and caring: when Halley takes Moonee and Jancey to see fireworks for Jancey's birthday and presents her with a Little Debbie's cupcake with a candle stuck into it to serve as a birthday cake. Ill-equipped moms have hearts too.

The Florida Project's saving grace is its humor and its honesty. The movie is actually hilarious, mostly due to Moonee and her friends' antics. And when I say it's an honest, I mean that Baker doesn't pull any punches: he does not romanticize poverty nor does he portray poverty as a living hell. He doesn't put the poor on a pedestal. There are no noble Bob Cratchits in this movie.

At the end of the day, The Florida Project is just a slice of life...a kind of life that many, many people live filled with struggles, hustling, and trying to take your pleasure where you can find it. Baker honors that and asks us not to close our eyes and shut our ears to the stories of people who live a harder life than we live.

Grade: A-

***

Voyeur

Released on Netflix, Voyeur is a documentary about a man, one Gerald Foos, who bought a Colorado motel with the sole purpose of spying on people who stayed there. He created little vents in the ceiling of each of the rooms so that he could spy, unseen and unheard by the residents as they watched TV, argued, and had sex. Foos did this for years without ever being caught until he sold the motel.

This documentary shows Foos' relationship with iconic journalist Gay Talese, who wrote a story about Foos titled "The Voyeur's Motel" for The New Yorker in 2016 and recently released a book about the story of the man who peeped on people for years.

Supposedly, the twist is that Foos claims to have witnessed a murder in the motel--a murder that he inadvertently played a role in. He spied a drug dealer hide his stash in a vent in one of the rooms and then he--Foos--went in and took the drugs. Later, he watched through the vent in the ceiling as the dealer discovered the drugs were missing, blamed his girlfriend, and then strangled her. Foos didn't stop him or call the police. By all accounts, we should be able to add "accessory to murder" on top of Foos' peeping Tom charges...

Only Foos has never been charged or faced any consequences for his actions. To me, this is the real twist of the story and the one that makes me wonder if the filmmakers were ethically wrong to make this film and Netflix ethically wrong to release it.

While Voyeur certainly doesn't celebrate Foos, it doesn't really do enough to make it clear that what he did was SUPER WRONG. I mean, the guy built a literal "observation platform" to watch people fucking in his own goddamned motel! He supposedly claims he saw a murder (the documentary suggests that Foos made this story up) and didn't do anything to help. He betrayed the implicit trust in the patrons of his motel.

Yet Voyeur is honestly more interested in Gay Talese than anything else. While the film is about Foos, it spends a lot of time explaining who Talese is and his relationship with Foos that dates back to the 80s, when Foos wrote a letter to Talese explaining to him that he had bought a motel for the express purpose of voyeurism and that he kept a log of everything he observed. Then, Talese came out to visit Foos at the motel and Foos took Talese up the observation platform and they spied on a couple having sex. Yes, not only did Talese know Foos was actively committing something that, if not illegal, was highly unethical, he participated!!

You guys, I'm no saint. If I lived in a high-rise apartment building in a big city you better believe I'd have a pair of binoculars by the window. Voyeurism is fascinating and I think all of us have curiosity about what people do and say behind closed doors. But buying a motel and remodeling it so that you can spy on your customers every night for decades is wrong. The people being spied on did not consent to it--and that's exactly what Foos liked about it--that they couldn't see him, but he could see them. And Voyeur is not a clever enough, ethical enough, or ambitious enough film to both tell Foos' story and make it crystal clear that the man is a fucking criminal.

If I sound a little hesitant to fully condemn it, I guess I am because I don't know all the details about the legality of peeping (I think the fact that the statue of limitations was up allowed Foos to not be charged for crimes he committed years before). But Voyeur left a bad taste in my mouth and I really think it should not have been filmed or released--it's giving a man who took advantage of others a chance to speak for himself when all those people whose privacy he invaded don't have the opportunity to tell *their* story or get justice. I can't recommend the movie at all, and therefore I'm not going to give it a grade.

Grade: n/a 

Lady Be Good

Movies: Lady Bird

Directed by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird takes inspiration from the best coming-of-age films, such as Rushmore, Election, Donnie Darko, and Ghost World and improves on them by defying cliches, being truthful to the female teenage experience, and--a rarity in the teen movie Canon--having a truly good heart.

Lady Bird is not only one of the best films of 2017, I'd call it one of the top coming-of-age films ever.

The story follows Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, played by Saoirse Ronan--who dazzled me in last year's excellent Brooklyn with her talent. Lady Bird is a unique teenager in a way we see in real life but rarely in film--she is a mess of contradictions. Her SAT scores are high, but her grades suck because she's smart but not really into school. She wants to go to college in New York City even though she's never been there. She loves the color pink and wants her "first time" to be special and memorable, but she also brutally sasses the speaker her Catholic high school brings in to talk about the evils of abortion. Lady Bird loves her family deeply and also takes them for granted, putting her own needs above the realities of her parents' financial struggles.

In short, she's a teenager. A beautiful, gloriously full of herself teenager.

The strength of the movie Lady Bird lies in its honesty. Not even "brutal honesty", which I find to usually be just as much of a lie as naiveté, but a simple, realistic look at the warring emotions and big dreams of 18-year-olds everywhere.

The film takes place in 2002 in Sacramento. A very specific time and place. The year resonated with me personally since I myself was 16-17 in 2002. Lady Bird and her best friend Julie swoon over the song "Crash Into Me" by Dave Matthews Band--a song that, in fact, was MY favorite song in 2002 and remains one of my favorites despite everyone loving to shit on DMB.

It's a really sensual, good song. It's about sex, ya know, with references to bondage ("Tied up and twisted/the way I like to be/for you, for me") and voyeurism ("Hike up your skirt a little more") that, uh, "spoke" to my hormone-addled 16-year-old brain.

ANYHOO. The point is, the movie really captures 2002 with a bullseye accuracy you don't often see in movies. The film it reminded me the most of was Wes Anderson's glorious Rushmore, only Lady Bird is firmly grounded in reality instead of Anderson's beautiful fantasy world of perfect symmetry and rich, velvety color.

Lady Bird's mother is played by Laurie Metcalfe, an amazing actress who does just a pitch-perfect job here as an extremely loving mom who can be both quite liberal (when Lady Bird asks "Mom...when is a normal time...to have sex?" She replies, "In college is good...and use protection like we talked about") and incredibly critical and overbearing. In one of the final scenes in the film, Metcalfe gives one of the best, most honest scenes of a mom's bittersweet sadness at realizing her baby is growing up that I have ever seen on film.

In addition to Metcalfe, the entire supporting cast, from Lois Smith playing Sister Sarah Joan, a nun at the school with a wonderful earnestness and sense of humor, to Lucas Hedges playing Danny, Lady Bird's kinda-sorta boyfriend, is great. The only teeny tiny flaw was the football coach-turned theatre director who came off as a one-joke gimmick (he treats directing Shakespeare like he's prepping a playbook for the big game! Hilarious! And totally unrealistic).

I feel like I could go through the movie scene by scene and tell you how great it is, but that would rob you of the chance to see for yourself. In fact, I've already said too much! Go see Lady Bird. It's one of the funniest, good-hearted but not sentimental portrayals of teen girlhood I've seen. And it's a bright spot in a year where we desperately need good feelings.

Grade: A+