The Shape of Water

A fable is a story that uses animals or other creatures to teach a moral lesson, so clearly "the Shape of Water" fits that definition. There is an animal at the center of the story, an ethereal "princess" that moves the action forward, and there are morality tales everywhere in the events that take place. Keeping track of the main theme might be the most complicated issue related to this movie, because everything else is a little too spoon fed to us. The shifting of the story to another time period, but one that feels familiar, and in fact has been referred top by many as "Camelot", makes it all seem even more like a fairy tale.

Guillermo del Toro has a mixed record of success as far as I can tell. "Pan Labyrinth" is a well respected and widely loved success. "Pacific Rim" was successful but not as widely admired, and the two "Hellboy" movies worked for fans but they don't seem to have connected with many outside of the comic book world.  This is a film that would probably bring him a wider audience with one significant issue that is going to hold it back, the explicit sexuality. This is a beauty and the beast match which adds more to the story than our imaginations might need. For adult audiences with mature tastes, it is well presented and beautiful. An adolescent audience might find it gross or something to titter over. Younger audiences will probably find it creepy and that is what I mean about it being a bit too direct.

Ultimately the morality lesson that should be the central focus of the story is about the danger of loneliness and isolation. Elisa, the mute woman at the center of the story, has a solidary life with an older man as a friend and a co-worker that she can talk to, but she has no romantic life. The sadness of that is demonstrated almost immediately in the film by letting us in on her morning bathroom routine. Sally Hawkins is an average beauty but one that clearly has a spark of life that needs to be fed. Her mostly mute performance is designed to deliberately emphasize her separation from almost everyone else in the world. Del Toro shows her intimately but it is her face that gives us the greatest cues as to her feelings. Like Elisa, her neighbor Giles, played with fussy perfection by scene stealer Richard Jenkins, is isolted as well. He is an artist living in the post atomic age, he is a homosexual without the ability to create a connection that he so desperately crave. Octavia Spencer is Elisa's work friend Zelda, a black woman working in a white mans world with a husband who largely ignores her. Michael Stuhlbarg as Dr. Hoffstetler is also mostly on his own but for very different reasons. The character that ultimately connects them all is the amphibian man who is the most lonesome of all. He has been dragged away from his domain, locked in a vault, chained and for the most part mistreated.
Elisa's efforts to reach out to this unusual creature starts to unlock the loneliness surrounding her and the creature. As in most fables, before we can learn the lesson there have to be failures. This is the role that Giles fulfills. Unable to make a romance with a man he is attracted to, and clearly empathetic to the black residents of Baltimore who are also isolated in spite of their population, he capitulates to the needs of his one true friend and makes a gallant and dangerous stand against the oppressive feeling of being an outsider.

So far I have not mentioned the other major character of the film. He clearly qualifies as the villain of the piece, but his connection to the theme is interesting. Head of security at the facility to which he has brought his prize, Strickland has difficulty relating to others as well. He is verbally respectful at first of the two women who work as custodians at the facility, but that is all undermined by his non-verbal indifference to them. In one of the dangling strings of the story, he also has a sexual attraction to verbal silence. Elisa becomes an object of fascination and revulsion to him. The writer/director I think gives too much time to his personal peculiarities without connecting them very well to the morality lessons. Michael Shannon is a fine actor and he easily gets us to dislike him, we really don't need to see his sexual hangups or the awkward family life. Except for how it fetishizes the culture of the early sixties, his whole sub-plot about buying a Cadillac is a trip to no where.

Doug Jones has done these creature characters in a number of other movies and his body language is the main skill he is called upon to use. He manages to convey some emotions quite clearly with his posture. His arm movements are the tender element that allows us to accept Elisa's attraction to him. The make up and special effects prosthetics help his performance but he shows he is an actor with range, even if he does not have the name recognition of Andy Serkis.

As I mentioned, except for the explicitness of the relationship, this movie follows the patterns of a hundred other variations of the Beauty and the Beast motif. It is incredibly lovely to look at but it has a lot of side trips that lead to dead ends. You can get the impression that there is a social critique here but it is truncated at best and certainly heavy handed as it is being delivered . The love story works against every expectation, but you have to be a fairly sober viewer to appreciate it.

Lambcast Acting School 101: Faye Dunaway

KAMAD  Rejoins the Lambcast for Acting School 101 with Movie Rob and Faye Dunaway. 

KAMAD Top Ten Films of 2017

The video will give you a list but if you want to read a little about each film or click on a link to the original post, then all you have to do is continue to the next page.

I, Tonya (Updated)

The problem with doing your top ten for the year before Midnight on December 31st is that you could see something that would force you to adjust your list. That's exactly what's happened with this film, and now I have to revise the video and post that I had planned for tomorrow.  Since it is late on New Years Eve, and my tail end is dragging from a outdoor project I worked on today, I will ask your indulgence and tell you that you have to wait for the full review until later. However, my comments here should make it perfectly clear how I feel about this film.

Till tomorrow then my friends.

UPDATE

So it took a little longer to get back to this than I'd hoped but it is still worth it. This is a film that deserves to be talked about. To start with, I remember the events that this film covers in vague outline form. Many people watched it closely but our lives were taking dramatic new directions 24 years ago so it was not a daily download for me as it was for so many others in that period of time. As a soap opera in real life it was compelling, but my recall of all of it was that a bunch of stupid people were involved in doing something stupid, which happened to be taking place on the world stage.

The movie claims to be based on interviews with various participants in the whole affair, and when they all agree on the events, that's how they are depicted on screen. There are however wild divergences in how the story plays out, and what screenwriter Steven Rogers does in those instances is contrast the two versions with slightly different emphasis and typically a great deal of humor. It seems apparent to me that in the long run he does come down on the side of Tonya Harding herself. When it comes to credibility, although she does not seem very reliable, in contrast to everyone else telling their version of the story, she is the voice of reason. Her husband/ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, is as unreliable a person as you are likely to ever see in a film much less meet in real life. As portrayed by Sebastian Stan, he seems ineffectual and pathetically needy. He is also an abusive spouse who strikes out in a way that most of us would see is a problem from the beginning, but that based on Harding's life, might simply be a minor character flaw which can be forgiven. Since there was a record of what was said between him and his dim witted friend, the "bodyguard" Shawn, it seems that the only intelligent thing he did in the whole process was cut himself off from Shawn at the set up arranged by the FBI.

Harding's status as an athlete in the world of competitive Ice Skating is vividly realized with true discomfort as we see the elitism and snobbery that she faces despite being the most physically talented woman on the ice. At the end of the film there are clips of the interviews used to put the story together with many of the actual people involved[not Tonya herself]. When you see the clip with LaVona Golden, Tonya's Mother, you will see the true genius of Allison Janney's performance. That woman was a nut job and the number she did on her kid had to have been something. Again, this is Tonya's version of events that drives that part of the story but it explains the chip on her shoulder and the willingness to put up with abuse for far too long. Janney is always a welcome performer in any film I see. She is dead eyed and without redemption as LaVona. The same "damn the consequences to hell with you" self centeredness displayed by Francis McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is present here. Janney is willing to play the most unlikable character in a manner that is based in the reality that the character doesn't give a f##k what anybody else thinks. That has got to be a freeing experience for an actor and she makes the most of it.

The performance that stands out the most of course is the title character played by Margot Robbie. Costuming and hair-styling accomplish a lot, but the range of the performance goes well beyond that. The two girls who were the younger versions of Tonya were both excellent and they set up this character as much more sympathetic than you would ever have believed. When Robbie steps into the fifteen year old Tonya's skates, she has to be proficient at skating, angry at perceived injustice,  and resentful of the way that the world demands a hero and a villain in this sort of competition. Her desperation at the sentencing after all the events take place feels like the most authentic human moment that Harding had in the film. In all that precede this moment, Robbie was chillingly direct. This one counter-point shows how broad her emotional vocabulary is and it makes the other moments in the film feel more important as a consequence. Of course she did not learn to do the triple axle, but Director Craig Gillespie, manages with technical prowess to make you think she did. 

This is a serious biopic about a much derided pop culture figure that also happens to be hysterically funny. You probably would not imagine yourself feeling much empathy for the central figure at the start of all this, but by the end, you hope her version, as sad as it is, is the most accurate. You also hope her life has gotten better, because despite being the greatest woman ice skater in the world at one point, her life pretty much sucked up to the "incident" and after that, it did not get much better. The two women's performances are awards bait, but the film deserves to be seen as worthy also. This was a real surprise and a pleasant one despite the tawdry topic. 

Call Me By Your Name

This film is getting a lot of praise for the performances of the two leads, Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. It is a love story between an older man and a 17 year old boy, but Kevin Spacey is nowhere to be found. The pace of this film is leisurely to say the least. The story is set in Northern Italy during the summertime so there is plenty of lovely scenery to surround the two attractive leads as they engage in a protracted dance of "love that dare not speak it's name".  The nature of the romance is about the only reason I can think that the movie is set in 1983, except for the ubiquitous presence of the Psychedelic Furs.

The story meanders through a whole lot of plot points that end up going no where. Elio, the boy, gets nosebleeds. Don't worry, there is no terminal illness coming, it is simply an incident that has no bearing on the characters and their relationships, but it does allow the movie to add two minutes to it's running time. There is also a seemingly competing romantic interest for each of the young men. One is more developed than the other, but again, neither has much to do with the central relationship.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar are Elio's parents. They are erudite, sensitive and well educated. They are the kind of family that sits together in the afternoon, and has Mom read out loud 16th Century literature, which she is translating from German for them, and which also happens to pose the exact philosophical question facing Elio at this moment. Should the Knight reveal his affection for a forbidden love?  This screenplay is too precious for it's own good. Near the end of the film, Professor Perlman has a long talk with his son, which reflects his deep understanding of romance, human experience and poetry. The words sound like they were composed with great care but they are delivered as if they are random thoughts that a warm hearted parent can trickle off the tongue at a moments notice.

In addition to the slow pace of the movie, and the erotic theme, there are two or three other clues to show you that this is the indie darling of the moment. There are at least seven company credits at the start of the movie, which are of course referenced then in the title. Three sections have the obligatory cruise through the countryside accompanied by an indie alternative pop tune that is slow and meditative. If you thought that Rooney Mara eating pie in "A Ghost Story" was the weirdest food moment you would get in films this year, well be prepared to be surprised by Chalamet and his peach.

The actors are fine. Armie Hammer is appropriately casually arrogant in the way a young American must be. He flexes and poses in all the right ways to get the girls in the story hot, and of course it has the same effect on the lead. Elio is an artist, musician and intellectual with a brooding demeanor that suddenly warms up in a much too unclear manner. Staring out the window and  saying nothing is visual but it does not reveal the inner needs of the young man. Some of the events that take place are more useful at doing so, but they are often randomly distributed and the movie never seems to develop and dramatic urgency until the last ten minutes. It was a interesting story, that was told in a loose manner. A few good performances can't overcome the issues with the screenplay however.

Darkest Hour

Viscount Halifax: "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

With all due deference to screenwriter Anthony McCarten, who has crafted a solid narrative around the early days of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister, much of the success of this film must go to another writer. That author is the central character of this film and perhaps the most important historical figure of the last century. The high points of this film all center around addresses that he made to Parliament,  the Nation, or to an inner circle of confidants and political rivals. As a Speech instructor, it is understandable then how I can be moved and consequently passionate about this movie.  

There is something in the air this last year because this period of time has been the subject of several films over the last twelve months. "Dunkirk", "Their Finest", and "Churchill" have all been released in 2017. While I have not seen the later, the other two are strongly related to the events depicted in this film. One of my colleague on-line, a British citizen, schooled me in the attitudes toward patriotism in Great Britain. He suggests that it is acceptable to be proud of the history and heritage but not to draw attention to it as we Americans are wont to do. I can appreciate the cultural norm of humility, but being an American I do not feel bound by it. Great Britain stood up to one of the greatest evils in the history of the world, and for a time stood alone. The wherewithal to do so was inspired substantially by their wartime leader, a man that every free person should be willing to acknowledge. Churchill was far from perfect, he had a history of failures and his views on some subjects would be viewed very dimly by most people today. He was however, the right man at the right time and place.

Speaking of the right man, actor Gary Oldman, who has been a favorite of mine since the days of "Sid and Nancy", rightly deserves the talk he is getting about winning an Academy Award. This is a intricate portrayal of a complex character, who was fiercely convinced of his correctness but was also cognizant of the circumstances he found himself in. Certainly the make-up artists that transformed his visage into Churchill will deserve a share of the credit, but the lion's share goes to Oldman. He is able to summon doubt and conviction almost simultaneously in some scenes.If you have ever listened to Churchill's wartime speeches, you will hear the grumbling and muttering and dry delivery. Oldman manages to duplicate the manner of those speeches but imbue them with enough theatricality to make them compelling to watch in a feature film. He stays true to Churchill's demeanor but adds a spark of charisma to the settings.

Director Joe Wright has made very good films in the past (Atonement/Pride and Prejudice), but he has also stumbled at times (The Soloist/Pan). He makes several choices here that I think work well for the focus of the film. Although the subject is war, the depiction of the war is cinematically visualized without dwelling on the combat. A series of overhead shots, usually accompanied by an airplane swipe across the screen, gives us a bird's eye view of the events that are taking place on the ground without turning the movie into a combat film.   In a similar fashion, Churchill is shown at times as an isolated figure in a sea of hostility by lighting and again the use of an overhead shot.

The contributions of the screen writer probably include the frequently uncomfortable conversations that Churchill had with the King. Certainly, the inspiring ride on the underground is an imagined event that helps the Character know the mind of the British people more forcefully. My memories of my British Public Address graduate seminar, helped give me a little context to the Parliamentary process, but I think anyone would be able to fathom what is going on and what it all means by simply following the cues that McCarten has laid out for us. It may be an old school concept to give us a running slide of calendar days but it works well in building some urgency, even though there is little action in the story. The film makers have managed to put together a very watchable narrative that is not driven by great events but rather by great oratorical moments. I may sometimes be blinded by my own sense of righteousness concerning the events of World War II. I like history and I admire the figures who made a difference in the world, regardless of revisionist social norms. Let's hope that enough young people get exposed to this story before they start reading about this in school. I don't think movies should be our main source of knowledge about history, but like Spielberg's "Lincoln", "Darkest Hour" manages to make an historical figure the giant that he truly deserves to be. 

The Greatest Showman

I'm of the opinion that Hugh Jackman should do a musical on an annual basis and that it ought to be released at Christmas time. Those pieces just fit together. Everyone has their own Christmas traditions, one of ours has been a visit to a movie theater on Christmas Day.  If you are interested, here is a link to my Letterboxd List of Christmas Movies.As it turns out, there is a Hugh Jackman musical and a Zac Efron musical on the list as well. Even for a subject as grim as Les Misérables, the fact that it is a musical makes it feel more holiday appropriate.

This film is an original musical, supposedly based on the life of P.T. Barnum. Barnum did have a Museum of Oddities, and was married to a woman named charity, and did tour the singer Jenny Lind as an attraction after discovering her in Europe. Everything else is made up out of whole cloth. For dramatic purposes, the screen writers and director have gone the old school Hollywood fashion and tacked pieces of Barnum's history onto a story that they want to tell which has little to do with the biographical subject. That's OK, but Barnum had a very interesting life and was a significant public figure of the American scene in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, a hip hop musical probably needs some romantic stories to hang onto and a little social justice subtext seems to fit with the personality of the film.

First time director Michael Gracey, shows his roots as a visual effects guy, as he shoots segments of the background in slow motion and has the main figures operating at live speed. There are so many beautiful moments that it sometimes feels like a visit to the eye candy store and maybe we over indulge a little. Still, the modern dance numbers and elaborate aerial ballet look fantastic and when combined with the show stopping mood of each segment, it does feel like a series of crescendos. The dances are staged in clever ways when the ensemble is performing, you can see the contemporary influences easily. When the story focuses on a single performer at a time, the mood is a little more traditional although the songs never are.

Jackman and Efron are joined by several performers who stand out. Zendaya is an actress/dancer who was recently seen in "Spider Man Homecoming". She actually performs the acrobatics in the film and as the love interest and face of victimization from racism in the last century, she makes a solid impression. Keala Settle is a singer with some stage experience, but her voice and demeanor as the bearded lady in Barnum's show, belie any masculinity and show the toughness that a woman and a so-called freak would need to have. Michelle Williams is always solid and her part here was enhanced with some singing and dancing that seems to extend her range even more. Rebecca Ferguson plays the song bird Jenny Linn, and although her singing voice is dubbed, her performance on stage will make you a believer as it did the audiences in the film.

So the movie looks amazing, the music is inspiring, the story is mostly nonsense but the heart of the film is what matters. Hugh Jackman for years has wanted to do a film featuring P.T. Barnum as a character. He seems to have put his heart into this movie and it shows. Modern Audiences would certainly flock to this if it were a stage show and was performed on Broadway. Movie audiences on the other hand are more fickle and less likely to embrace this until it has an established reputation. Expect this to be a widely loved cult film among cinema fans in about five years. As for me, although it is apocryphal that P.T. Barnum said "there is a sucker born every minute", I'm with the newspaper man from "The Man who Shot Liberty Vallance", "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." I'm a sucker for musicals and show business stories, so I can say I loved this piece of catnip and I hope you will go out and see it.