THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

Rated:  R

STARS: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg
DIRECTOR: Guillermo del Toro
GENRE: Drama/Sci-fi/Fantasy


The Shape of Water wants to be an endearing movie. It tries really hard. It wants to be E.T.  It wants to be La La Land. It wants to be Creature From The Black Lagoon.  It wants to be Beauty And The Beast. That's too many films for me to keep track of in my head.  It wants to be poetic...and yet there's an overabundance of gore. It's like having Freddy Krueger reciting Emily Dickinson at the end. What the hell was that? Bottom line, it doesn't know what it wants to be.

Elisa Espisoto (Sally Hawkins) is a cleaning lady who hears just fine but doesn't speak. She works at a secret government lab that is housing an "Amphibian Man" who looks a lot like the Gill Man from Creature From The Black Lagoon. The merman was captured in the Amazon by government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon), who gets his kicks by abusing the poor thing with a cattle prod. (Fish Guy gets a measure of revenge by biting off a couple of Strickland's fingers.) The evil fed wants to kill the amphibian (played by Doug Jones) and study him like a dead frog in a biology lab. Strickland is opposed by scientist Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who wants to keep the scaly being alive. It's 1962--in the thick of the cold war--and a subplot has the Russians trying to get their mitts on Amphibian Man for their own nefarious purposes.

Elisa, being an outcast herself, repeatedly sneaks into the chamber (security seems to be really lax for an "asset" of this magnitude) where the creature sits in a tank tethered by a chain around its neck. She and Amphibian Man hit it off right away. Cut to the chase: An escape plan must be hatched, as the creature's days are numbered. With the help of Elisa's unemployed artist neighbor (Richard Jenkins), and her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), she springs the fishy dude from his confines (like I said, security is really lax) and takes him to her abode. That's where the real fun begins, as Elisa ends up naked in the shower with him and discovers he's a lot more like a regular guy than meets the eye!

Okay...The Shape of Water is a fantasy, so anything goes. But to buy into it hook, line and sinker, the willing suspension of disbelief must kick in. That was hard for me because Amphibian Man looks sorta like Frankie Valli in a wet suit with barnacles hanging off him. At no point are you going to think it looks like anything but an actor dressed up in a cheesy rubber costume--a la those laughable creature features from the fifties. The only reason I can imagine why  director Guillermo del Toro--in this era of CGI wizardry--chose to go this low tech would be as a way of paying homage to that era of cinema, which he seems to love.

But The Shape of Water does have its visual delights, and one of them is Sally Hawkins. They've got her made up to look really plain--as befitting a lowly toilet cleaner--but they couldn't hide her light under a bushel for the whole movie, and that becomes abundantly clear when she strips down for the steamy shower scene.

There are aural delights as well, with a big band flavored soundtrack from Alexandre Desplat. There's Andy Williams, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and a silky rendition of "You'll Never Know" from opera singer Renee Fleming.

Nice touches...but not enough to make me gush about this movie.

Grade:  C +

JILL'S TAKE

Finally. Tim and I disagree! I found The Shape Of Water to be absolutely brilliant, even Oscar-worthy. (Hell, it's already nominated for seven Golden Globes.) For starters, the opening underwater sequence deserves a special award for its dank and delightful originality. I was not prepared to like this film since sci-fi and/or fantasy is not one of my favorite genres. But I'm so glad I allowed myself to see it!

The girl I went with, a visitor from Oregon, liked it too. But afterwards, she mentioned how similar this creature was to the creature in Hellboy. I later looked up that movie and was blown away by the physical similarities. And the fact that both films were directed by Guillermo del Toro!

I do agree with Tim about the lax security. But by then, I was hooked on saving the poor creature from any more cattle-prodding. And since Tim gave away the finger chomping bit, another friend pointed out how the smell of rotting flesh would have been apparent to both Agent Strickland and anyone else long before those blackened digits departed. Sure, there were a lot of implausible scenes in the The Shape of Water but romances between humans and non-humans have worked for a long, long time. (Beauty and the Beast, Phantom of the Opera, King Kong, etc.)

The Russian plot was, for me, unnecessary. But I did find it interesting that the roles played by the two Michaels (Shannon and Stuhlbarg) were reversals of the roles they played in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire." In that one, Stuhlbarg played mafia boss Arnold Rothstein and Shannon was a bumbling FBI agent. And Richard Jenkins, who never turns in a bad performance, was superb. (I wept for him at the end.)

Grade: A

THE MARTIAN (2015)

Rated: PG-13

STARS: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Chiwetel Ejiofor
DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott
GENRE: Sci-fi/Fantasy/Drama


Imagine you are part of a manned mission to Mars, and you're just hanging out on the red planet, enjoying the landscape and doing your job picking up rocks and stuff...doo n doo...when along comes a monster storm that sends you reeling in a big we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore way--and your fellow crew members figure you must be dead, so they make a hasty decision to abort the mission, get outta Dodge, and head back to the friendly confines of mother earth. But you're not dead, because you are Matt Damon (as astronaut/botanist Mark Watney), and now you have to figure out how to survive up there all by your lonesome for as long as you can. And then determine how in the world (in an other worldly sort of way) you're going to get back home.

That becomes the one and only story question of The Martian--a highly imaginative film from a highly imaginative book (which I haven't read) by Andy Weir, but I know it must be so because there's a lot of techie sci-fi jargon just in the movie itself, which is always a watered down version of the book. Which would be easier to follow if you were a techie type, which I'm not, but not essential for enjoyment of the film on an empathy level, as we can all identify with a guy who is stranded high and dry many millions of miles from home but can still maintain his sense of humor.

The first thing Watney sets about doing is planting and growing some food in the controlled environment of the Mars mission base. He grows potatoes, because there are lots of spuds in the rations on hand. This made me enjoy the movie more, because I like potatoes. I eat a lot of potatoes. And so does he. Someone once told me about a girl who ate nothing but potatoes---that was the only thing she liked--and she seemed just fine.

Watney eventually figures out how to communicate with NASA back on earth. Now it's up to Jeff Daniels, as the NASA administrator, to consult with our best and brightest minds so he can be the man with the plan. But Watney's fellow crew members, who originally thought they were heading back to earth,  have their own ideas--and it's a bit more complicated than simply making a U-turn in space and going back to pick up our spaced out hitch-hiker. In fact, it's one of those deals where seemingly hundreds of things have to go right, and if any one thing goes haywire, everybody can kiss their rear ends goodbye. Of course, the odds of pulling off something like that in reality are...well...ASTRONOMICAL!  But never let that get in the way of a good story. (Perhaps the most far-fetched aspect of the tale is the idea that China and the United States would cooperate closely in developing and carrying out the rescue mission!) 

As word spreads, there's a lot of feelgood rooting and cheering for Watney around the globe--a la Slumdog Millionaire--suggesting that we are all better off when there is something that captures the imagination of this bickering, worn out old planet to bring us all together, if only for a while.  

 Jessica Chastain stands out as the crew commander who made the call to abandon the mission when the storm hit, and must live with the guilt of that decision. But comic actress Kristen Wiig's talents are wasted here in an unchallenging and unremarkable role--and it makes you wonder why she, of all people, is in this movie.

The real star of The Martian--as is often the case with sci-fi films--is the CG wizardry that created the whole outer space milieu and the eerily fascinating martian landscape. Give Ridley Scott credit for not just throwing up those highly recycled images of Monument Valley, like nearly every other film ever made that required a desolate looking landscape as the backdrop. 

Grade:  B

JILL'S TAKE

Let me begin by saying I enjoyed Tim's write-up a lot more than the two hours and twenty-two minutes of The Martian. Aside from endless techie jargon (of which I understood zilch), the "will-he-ever-get-back-to-earth" plot got lost in space. I'm not a sci-fi fan so I went in with a huge chunk of orbital debris on my shoulder. And it only got bigger as the film progressed.

To me, this flick is the Red Planet's version of Castaway. Only Matt Damon didn't feel the need to create a companion like Wilson. Therein likes the problem: astronauts have to keep a tight lid on their emotions. So it becomes a matter of solving problem after insurmountable problem with as little emotional turmoil as possible. Bor-ing! Unless, of course, you are seriously into cosmology.... 

I'm not. 

But to give kudos where kudos are due, the folks in charge of production design and/or art direction will definitely get a nod at Oscar time.

Grade: C -