The Shape of Water - science fiction never felt so wondeous

It feels like it is harder and harder to do these days, but I do try to make a point of watching the films that succeed at the Oscars in the year of the Oscar ceremony when they win.  Only took me 6 months - but last weekend finally watched The Shape of Water.

Guillermo del Toro is a wonderful film-maker who's work has always been rooted in the science fiction / fantasy genre.  Pan's Labyrinth is a work of heart-felt art.  Pacific Rim is absolutely everything you would want from a classic East Asian monster movie - with Idris Elba.  He knows how science fiction works.  He knows you can tell stories about the human condition, childhood crises and love equally as well as you can create an insane world populated with container-ship wielding Godzilla rip-offs.  It's all good.  What a joy that this man was awarded the Oscar for best director this year.

If there is a story that science fiction excels at, it is the story of The Outsider.  It's The man who fell to Earth, Silent Running, Wall-E, Spock and Data in Star Trek, every character in Buffy - you name some good science fiction, I guarantee you there's an outsider.  All the characters we sympathise with in The Shape of Water are outsiders in 1950's America.  Be they a monster, black, gay, mute or a foreigner, they are all rejected by the characters representative of white, middle class, middle aged, middle of the road, male America.  All look to each other for comfort and companionship.  It is here that we see the developing love story between the mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and the monster from the deep being experimented upon by government researcher in the secret facility where she cleans.  Lost in a world that either doesn't see them or doesn't want them, they find each other, before rescuing each other from a world shunning them.
 
The colour and lighting in the film are astonishing, so much so that I am even more upset to have not seen it in the cinema.  Blues, greens and greys are used throughout, but the lighting pierces through the potentially drab underwater palate and infuses everything with a magical hue.  When we finally do get reds they stand out and reflect the emotional point the film has reached.  The final sequence had us both in tears.  It isn't just the stellar performance from Sally Hawkins that did that - it was everything.  Script, lighting, set design, art design, colour, editing - every element of film-making worked perfectly in unison to create a wonderful touching story with layers upon layers of emotion and depth.

It's a film that is 100% inflected by science fiction.  The tone is part steam punk, part magical realism and part McCarthyite allegory.  There are elements of body horror, government conspiracy and obviously creatures from the deep.  Science fiction wins the best film Oscar - at last.  This wasn't no sympathy award because the Academy wanted to prove it was able to give its highest honour to a genre that's different but ever popular.  This was absolutely deserved.  A true achievement in film.

The Ghoul - not quite David Lynch

With my girlfriend away this evening I made the most of the chance to watch a film she would be unlikely to give the time of day simply because of its title.  The Ghoul is a dark and twisted psycho-criminal drama that wants very much to be a part of David Lynch's canon.  From the recurring highway motifs to the constant shifting of motivations and perspectives, the film strives for a twisted Lynchian tone that disorientates the viewer.  This shit is hard to pull off successfully, and here is it seldom effective.

Tom Meeten plays Chris, a cop who is in London for a few days from the North to help his old forces friends solve a strange crime, a crime in which it appears victims of a shooting have carried on coming at their shooter after they should have died.  But the mystery quickly veers away from how these victims came to be, shifting jarringly on to Chris himself as he attends a psychotherapist ostensibly to inveigle into the world of the victims.  We quickly question Chris' mental health, his motivations, and even if he is a police officer at all.  Fantasy and reality bleed into one as the reality of Chris' life and the life of the persona he has taken on come together.  Eventually they are indistinguishable and we are lead on a circular path in which pretty much anything could be true.

I don't know precisely what it is that David Lynch and Shane Carruth do to make films like this that don't suck.  It is something to do with the tone, and to do with establishing a world in which the rules of that world might not be the same as the rules in our world, but they are self-consistent none-the-less.  I think that writer / director Gareth Tunley is trying to have it both ways here.  He wants a film that's completely set in the real world, but with jarring shifts of character and motivation that just sit awkwardly.  It's also very dark in places, which make it even harder to get under the skin of the main character and feel like you care what's happening to him.  Compare that to the way that Lynch lights Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.  It's a fine effort and interesting enough to watch, but in addition to needing something to help me care more, I wanted a tiny bit more resolution at the end.  There's circular story telling, and then there's circular story telling.  This is the latter, and it's fairly unsatisfying.

Was great to see Alice Lowe in something else, shame that she's not apparently writing anything at the moment (according to IMDB).  I remain eagerly awaiting a follow-up to Prevenge.