One of the best thing about Guillermo del Toro’s movies is they’re so difficult to cram into any box. Is it a horror film? Science fiction? Romance? Historical parable? Fairy tale? Musical comedy?
All of the above, I’d say. After its impressive win at the Academy Awards last week, “The Shape of Water” will surely go down as one of the kookiest Best Picture winners ever.
Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning lady in a secret government laboratory circa the early 1960s. Her world is tightly bookended: the routine of her job, her friendship with Giles (Richard Jenkins), the gentle illustrator who lives next door, and another with Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who works with her in the dank underground facility.
One day, a strange aquatic man is brought into the lab, where he’s prodded and tortured like a curious science experiment. But Elisa befriends the creature, and even learns how to communicate with it using sign language. She discovers there is a gentleness behind his fearsome exterior, which is like a cross between the Creature from the Black Lagoon and a space alien.
Hawkins, Spencer and Jenkins all received acting nominations at the Oscars, and the movie could easily have gotten three more. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the chief scientist with conflicting impulses and loyalties; Michael Shannon is chilling as the military man running the operation, who sees the aquatic man as just another fish to be cut up; and Doug Jones, who elegantly plays the creature with the help of an elaborate costume and some CGI.
Perhaps the thing I liked best about “The Shape of Water” is that it manages to not only incorporate these six characters into the story, but it actually lets the audience follow each of them for a while, seeing how they became the people they are and how they will interact with each other, in commune or in conflict.
Bonus features are decent, but not great. They consist of five making-of documentary featurettes: “A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times,” “Anatomy of a Scene: Prologue,” “Anatomy of a Scene: The Dance,” “Shaping the Waves: A Conversation with James Jean” amd “Guillermo del Toro’s Master Class.”
The greatest compliment I can give to a filmmaker is they make movies that aren’t like anybody else’s.
I didn’t much care for director Guillermo del Toro’s first few American films, but then I discovered his early Mexican stuff and fell in love. Subsequent efforts like “Pacific Rim” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” are films I cherish deeply.
Even when he wandered into a hothouse of Gothic silliness with “Crimson Peak,” I appreciated that it represented a singular vision unlike no other.
Like all of del Toro’s films, “The Shape of Water” defies easy convention. It contains elements of fantasy, horror, science fiction, comedy and even, most surprisingly, romance. Like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” it has a timeless quality, as if the story could have taken place a long time ago or a few years from now.
It’s a deeply affecting film that makes us feel and also makes us think. And it boasts no less than a half-dozen terrific performances worthy of consideration during the awards season. Even characters at the edges of the story feel complete and fully drawn.
Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute youngish woman. In the opening minutes we observe her go through the quotidian routine of her day: waking, getting dressed, boiling eggs, shining shoes, a quick round of masturbation in the bathtub -- timed to coincide with the eggs, no less.
I liked that del Toro, who wrote the screenplay with Vanessa Taylor, included this last bit. It’s shocking, and it’s meant to be -- watching the main character get naked and rub one out moments after we’ve meant her. But it clues us in that Elisa is not some sexless fawn who deserves our pity because of her handicap, but a vibrant woman full of corners and contradictions.
After her amazing turn in “Maudie” earlier this year, it seems clear that Hawkins’ biggest competition for the Best Actress Oscar is… Sally Hawkins. She shows us Elisa’s yearning and doubt, but also her bravery and pride. What women.
Her entire life seems to be taken up with two things: her job, working as a cleaning lady at a secretive military laboratory, and her friendship with her next-door neighbor, Giles. Played by Richard Jenkins with humor and grace, he’s a fussy, aging commercial artist who frets about his baldness and loneliness. He repeatedly visits an awful pie franchise simply to chat up the sweet young boy working the counter. We get the sense, without it ever being stated, that Giles lost his day job because of his romantic impulses.
The lab where Elisa toils with her loyal friend, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), is a dank underground steampunk denizen of white coat-wearing scientists and gruff military types tromping to and fro. We half expect to glimpse through an open door and see James Bond strapped down with a laser pointed at his nethers.
One day a hard man named Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives with a secretive container holding a wild water creature that he has captured. Elisa is repulsed by the man but strangely drawn to the captive.
Strickland is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, the sort who wields his privilege as a weapon. He is the man who never fails, because he is always willing to take whatever steps are necessary to reach his goals. To him it’s a simple equation: do your duty, reap the rewards -- rank, prosperity, family, a glossy new 1962 Cadillac DeVille that is most definitely teal and not green.
Elisa starts spending her lunches in the lab with the creature, and soon finds he’s not the fearsome, mindless beast Strickland would have everyone believe. She starts to bring him eggs to eat, plays music to soothe and even discovers he can be taught to use her sign language.
Things go from there… though not in the way we expect.
Doug Jones, a master of costumed performance, plays the amphibious man, with the help of a little CGI. He slightly resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon, with some outer space alien added in.
The other notable character is Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), the chief scientist overseeing the creature. He objects to Strickland’s rough treatment, including the use of a cattle prod. He wants to learn from their captive rather than experiment upon him. At first coming across as a soulless technologist, Stuhlbarg’s wide, wet eyes clue us into a man whose heart is pulled in several directions.
The best thing about “The Shape of Water” is that we feel like the story could follow any one of these characters down their individual path and still feel satisfied with the journey. And to a large extent, the film actually does that.
It’s a story of two that is actually about many. We’re all connected -- sometimes in ways that are obvious, often more mysteriously.
This goofy, gothic horror/romance from Mexican auteur Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labrynth") is positively dripping in bloody mood, but forgot to pack the intrigue. It's a ghost tale in which the supernatural twist is spelled out for us from the very start. When the mystery is gone, so goes the thrill.
If that weren't bad enough, the evil twin siblings actually stand around and discuss their nefarious plans to the audience and, eventually, even the intended victim herself, who the brother has married for her money and then, tragically, actually fallen in love with.
We should kill her now, sister urges. Let's wait a while longer, he cautions, heart fluttering.
My God, people, do I really need to sit here and tell you that having characters blurt exactly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it tends to make a movie less, y'know, good? That when the heroine of the picture is the only one who's not clued in to what's happening, the audience will resent her for her stupidity rather than root for her resourcefulness?
Del Toro, who co-wrote the script with Matthew Robbins, is a feast-or-famine director whose stuff I've either loved ("Pacific Rim") or loathed ("Mimic"). He's a visionary filmmaker who sometimes fumbles with the ABC's of storytelling.
There was some consternation when the trailer for this highly anticipated movie seemed to reveal too much of the plot. That ire seems hilarious now; the film gives away so much of itself from the very outset that there's nothing left to tease. It's like a stripper who walks out onstage and drops all her clothes in a heap at once right after the song's started.
Mia Wasikowska plays Edith, an aspiring writer and proto-feminist in 1901 Buffalo. Dad (Jim Beaver) is a wealthy real estate guy who built himself up; mother is long dead of cholera, but occasionally turns up as a smoking, blackened corpse to warn her daughter to stay away from Crimson Peak.
(The creepy effects for the ghosts ae one of the few things about the movie that's special.)
In waltzes Baronet Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), the charming son of an old British house fallen low. He and his steely sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), who practically hisses at the local gentry, are in town to raise some grub to revive the family mining operation. In short order Edith is bedazzled and wedded, but not bedded.
The Sharpes bring her back to the family manse, Allerdale Hall, which is literally sinking into the earth. It seems there's a very rare ore that's blood red and oozes up from under the building foundation, staining the ground as Thomas labors on a machine to harvest it.
Don't be worried about the walls that bleed or the constant groaning sounds produced by the wind, Lucille reassures, and Edith, the ninny, goes along with it. Even when she starts to see more corpses crawling up out of the mansion's rotting floorboards, her devotion to a man she met like three weeks earlier manages to overcome her doubts.
Things go on from there, which I won't reveal because I don't want to rob you of the satisfaction of figuring it all out for yourself 15 minutes into the movie.
"Crimson Peak" is an overstuffed movie of poofy dresses and poofy hair hiding airheaded characters who tell you what they're about so you don't have to overtax your brain. What a bloody nightmare.
“Pacific Rim” tied the knot on a substandard summer of movies – it had something old, something new, plenty of stuff borrowed and something totally badass.
Some have dismissed co-writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s film as a mere mash-up of old Japanese science fiction, mecha and kaiju. And there is some truth to that: he basically took the big monsters of Godzilla and the mammoth robots of 1960s TV and said, “Hey, what would happen if they fought each other?”
The premise is that the Earth is under siege by skyscraper-tall alien creatures that emerge periodically from a portal at the bottom of the ocean. At first they laid waste to large swaths of the planet, but eventually humanity banded together to create the jaegers – hulking metal automatons controlled by two humans whose minds are linked through something called “the Drift.”
Things haven’t been going so well for humanity lately, with the jaeger program nearly shut down while the monsters are bigger and badder than ever. A washed-up pilot (Charlie Hunnam) gets recruited by his old boss (an imposing Idris Elba) to make one last stand.
The action scenes are tremendous, and del Toro gives a terrific sense of the awe-inspiring scale of the jaegers and their foes. The characters aren’t particularly deep, but they’re designed to be stand-ins for the audience to experience the roller coaster of thrills.
“Pacific Rim” is an exceedingly entertaining movie, easily the best this summer had to offer.
Special features are quite excellent, and you don’t have to pay more for the priciest edition in order to get the good stuff.
The DVD version includes a feature-length commentary track by del Toro, deleted/extended scenes, blooper reel and several featurettes focusing on different aspects of production, including the technology/psychic bond of the Drift.
Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack, and you add “The Director’s Notebook,” consisting of personal video by del Toro detailing the journey from conceptualization to post-production.
If you’ve checked out “Pacific Rim” in local theaters, you might already be familiar with director Guillermo del Toro. He got his start in his native Mexico, then came to Hollywood to make some commercially successful but not particularly good pictures (“Mimic,” “Hellboy”). In 2001, he returned to his native language to make a minor masterpiece, “The Devil’s Backbone.”
This moody, gorgeous horror/drama is now being issued as a Criterion Collection – the gold standard for video releases. It comes with a host of extra goodies, in addition to a sumptuous transfer of the film.
The story is set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War. A young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is sent to a remote orphanage where strange things are happening. An unexploded bomb sits buried in the courtyard like a religious totem, and there are rumors of gold hidden somewhere underground, perhaps being used to fund the Republicans.
Carlos is assigned the empty bed that used to belong to Santi, who disappeared mysteriously and whose spirit is still lingering around. Meanwhile Jacinto, a former resident turned groundskeeper, has various swindles and schemes going on.
Rife with symbolism and dark portents, it’s a beautiful and genuinely frightening film, part ghost story and part coming-of-age drama. If you want to see a true representation of del Toro’s prodigious talents, start with “The Devil’s Backbone.”
As is expected with any Criterion Collection, the video includes a raft of exhaustive bonus materials. These include an all-new digital transfer of the film, and a feature-length commentary track and introduction by del Toro.
There is also a making-of documentary, archival interviews, deleted scenes, perspective from a Spanish Civil War expert, storyboards/sketches a new English subtitle translation.
Robots versus monsters. At its heart, that's what "Pacific Rim" is
all about. And yet, this science fiction thriller is so much more.
Start with the obvious dimension: size. These creatures who rise from the sea, and the human-controlled metal automatons that confront them, make Godzilla seem like a yappy little dog. Director Guillermo del Toro brilliantly shoots these behemoths so they seem to envelop the screen; the eye can't track all of them at once. We're constantly reminded of their sheer immensity.
At a pivotal juncture, one of the robot guardians, called jaegers, picks up an ocean tanker ship and uses it like Casey Jones to wallop one of the toothsome beasties upside the head.
Like I said, big.
But what makes this picture really soar is that del Toro and co-screenwriter Travis Beacham take something old and turn it into something exciting and new and energizing. Essentially what they've done is take two Japanese film genres, kaiju (strange beasts) and mecha (robots), and melded them together.
It's wildly entertaining, a dizzying, dazzling flick. In a summer of sequels, rip-offs and remakes, "Pacific Rim" stands out not just for its elite quality but its original verve.
The setup is that beginning in 2013 (gulp!), these monstrous kaiju start emerging from a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, laying waste to whole cities and millions of people. All attempts to close the inter-dimensional pathway fail, but the world's nations pool their resources to build the jaeger robots to kill them.
"To fight the monsters, we created monsters of our own," we learn.
The robots are so massive, it takes the brains of two people to control one. They're connected in a psychic bond called the Drift, where all thoughts and memories are shared. So the best teams tend to be composed of family members or loved ones.
Cut to 2020, and the jaegers have the kaiju on the run. But then hotshot pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and his brother encounter a new type of creature that changes the game.
Jump forward again to 2025, and it looks to be end times for the human race. Global leaders have abandoned the jaeger program to focus on an ineffective seawall strategy, and there are only four of the mechanical giants left to mount a last-ditch effort. Marshal Stacker Pentecost (a commanding Idris Elba), head of the unit, recruits Raleigh to man one of the older jaegers, dubbed Gipsy Danger (which bears a more than passing resemblance to the robot in "The Iron Giant").
Like the jaegers, which were continually improved with each new generation, the kaiju appear to be adapting and evolving -- and emerging from the portal more and more frequently. It's an entire bestiary of critters, which are vaguely dinosaur-like but come with a variety of appendages and shapes. The jaeger command gives them appropriate code names, like "Knife Head."
The fight scenes are awesome and epic, taking place both in (and under) sea and on land. They smash through entire buildings like butter. Though there is a little of the "Transformers effect," in which it becomes hard to comprehend exactly what's going on when the titans grapple.
Also look for del Toro favorite Ron Perlman as a loathsome but charming black market dealer in kaiju biological trophies. Would you believe the things are so honkin' big, their skin lice are the size of bulldogs?
Ultimately, "Pacific Rim" doesn't add up to more than a fun time -- but what a time it is. I don't think there's any movie this year I've enjoyed more.
It turns out I loved Guillermo del Toro before I hated him. I just didn't know it yet. Of course, that was before I fell in love with him again.
Let me explain. Initially I knew del Toro, the Mexican-born filmmaker, only through his first American films, "Mimic," "Blade II" and "Hellboy." And I didn't particularly like them. While I didn't despise them, I wondered why my friends and colleagues were so taken with del Toro's visual style and storytelling abilities, when their appeal eluded me.
"Hellboy" in particular struck me as one of those movies that could've been much better than it was. It took a great concept and comic book character, and turned it into a film that seemed flat and overwhelmed by its special effects. (I didn't care for the 2008 sequel, either.)
But then came 2006 and "Pan's Labyrinth," and I was bowled over. It was by far my favorite film of the year, filled with tenderness and innocence, and yet heralded an imagination filled with gloom and human darkness.
When it was announced that del Toro would helm the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," I was overjoyed. His sensibility was the perfect combination of childlike wonder and nightmarish terror. I could only vibrate with anticipation at what the Smaug scenes would be like. (Alas, things fell through and del Toro withdrew from the project in favor of producer and "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson.)
After "Pan's Labyrinth," I also was able to go back and start watching some of del Toro's early work in his native country. 2001's "The Devil's Backbone" was a terrific picture, again delving into mind of a child who experiences horrible adult-made terrors. The only thing left was to see his very first feature, 1993's "Cronos."
Events conspired. No video version of "Cronos" was available in the U.S. that I could track down, and the movie languished on my Netflix wish list for two years. Then, out of the blue, it appeared in the mail. The Criterion Collection had issued their own version.
It's a low-budget horror/fantasy with some rough edges, but "Cronos" already reveals the dark genius of del Toro's fecund mind.
It stars Federico Luppi as Jesus Gris, an elderly antiques dealer who unearths a strange golden device created by a 16th-century alchemist. Resembling the shell of an insect, the Cronos attaches itself to Jesus' body, and slowly but inexorably begins to change him.
It's not a standard vampire movie, but there's obvious similarities to the vampire legends. Jesus finds himself filled with an insatiable lust for blood -- even following a man with a nosebleed into the restroom and licking the spilled drops of crimson off the bathroom floor. Sunlight also hurts him, and he learns the hard way that even the most horrifying injury will not kill him so long as his heart is not pierced.
The framing story involves De la Guardia (Claudio Brook), a mobster who is dying of various ailments and wants the Cronos to grant him immortaility. His right-hand-man is his thuggish nephew Angel, played by Ron Perlman, who dresses in pinstripes and speaks in a mix of Spanish and Americanized English.
Jesus is a kind and decent man, and reserves his greatest love for his granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). She serves as the film's silent Greek chorus, adoring her grandfather even when his skin begins to rot and drinks human blood in her presence.
The atmospherics of "Cronos" are black and rich, and we feel the impending doom hurtling down upon poor Jesus. The special effects are somewhat lackluster, though. Though the Cronos device itself is convincing enough, the slipshod makeup used to depict Jesus' decay is borderline humorous. Ditto for the supposed interior shots of the Cronos, where some evil bug is supposed to live.
Still, "Cronos" was good enough to justify the long wait, and serves to remind me that you shouldn't always judge a book by its cover, or a new director who has to make a few commercial flicks before turning to the kind of movie-making he really wants to do.
