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I haven’t discussed Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water since it opened three and a half weeks ago. I posted my review exactly four months ago during the Telluride Film Festival. A day later I posted a back-and-forth discussion with a film critic friend, called “Shape of Water Pushback.”

Now that everyone’s seen it, I’m re-posting my initial response and asking for comments:

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8), but I certainly approve as far as it goes.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

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I began explaining my lack of interest in the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival two years ago. I respectfully blew it off again this year, and will most likely do the same again next year. Who cares? It’s just a big glossy event that mainly attracts red-carpet media types. No culture, no intrigue, too many limos, not for me.

“I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years,” I wrote on 1.3.16, “and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself ‘was that really worth it?’ I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos.

“You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

A 2015 HE headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

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I’m not saying the home-invader murderers in Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s remake of Death Wish (MGM/Annapurna, 3.2) should be from this or that tribe, but the U.S. is a multicultural society, after all, and it does seem a tiny bit chickenshit that the bad guys are generic white scumbags, or cut from the same cloth as the three invaders (Jeff Goldblum played one of them) in Michael Winner’s 1974 original. Plus: Paul Kersey was an architect in the original — why is he now a surgeon? Why isn’t he a concert promoter, a car salesman or an owner of a fleet of dump trucks?

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You need to look on the bright side of Bright (Netflix, 12.22). That 28% rating it received on Rotten Tomatoes means that a little more than one out of four critics liked it. More importantly, Bright is “the highest viewed Netflix film ever on the service in its first week of release and one of the biggest originals (including sequels/additional seasons) Netflix has ever launched,” according to a release. It’s also “the #1 movie on Netflix in every country (190 or so) since its release with more people viewing the film internationally than domestically.” Which is why Netflix announced today that they’ll be making a Bright sequel. David Ayer will write and direct; Will Smith and Joel Edgerton will also return.

For decades my sleep pattern was to get about six hours, midnight or 1 am to 6 or 7 am. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken a one-hour nap around 2 or 3 pm on the couch. But every now and then (i.e., usually when I’m really stressed about something) I’ll become a fitful sleeper, and that means a 3 or 3:30 or 4 am wake-up, which always results in (a) moving to the living room couch for a 90-to-120-minute Twitter session. (b) finally returning to sleep around 6 or 6:30 am, and (c) waking again at 9 or even 9:30 am.

Tatyana and Arianna Huffington say it’s better to get at least seven if not eight hours straight. While I recognize the soundness of that advice, I have this nonsensical, deep-down notion that overnight slumber is a little slice of death, and that if I sleep too much I’ll miss stuff, and that too much sleep is for losers — the horizontal equivalent of taking extra-long showers.

Last night was particularly bad. I fell asleep on the couch during the second hour of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, and then stumbled into the bedroom and tossed and turned for 90 minutes. And then, Tatyana tells me, I began snoring, which in my book is 100% unforgivable. (I told her this morning that “if this happens again, wake me up and kick me out of the bedroom…seriously.”) And then I woke up at 4 am and did the standard fitful — Twitter, back to sleep at 6:30 or 7 am, wake up at 9 or 9:30 am.

I go through periods, in other words, in which I am almost Al Pacino in Insomnia. But not quite.

From “Dave Chappelle Stumbles Into The #MeToo Movement,” a 1.2.18 N.Y. Times review by Jason Zinoman:

“In ‘The Bird Revelation,’ Chappelle…leans on the gravitas of Martin Luther King to pivot from the pain caused by sexual misconduct. He criticizes the ‘brittle spirit’ of the female comic who said Louis C.K. masturbating in front of her hurt her career, before imagining what would happen if Louis C.K. masturbated in front of the civil rights leader, prompting him to give up his movement.

“When suggesting a handsome man wouldn’t be accused of assault and rape, he says that if Brad Pitt did what Harvey Weinstein did, the response would be different. (‘Girl would have been like: I got the part.’) But Mr. Chappelle is just rehashing a Chris Rock bit on sexual harassment from the 1990s (‘If Clarence Thomas looked like Denzel Washington…’). It’s a joke that has not aged well, and this new version does not do Mr. Chappelle any favors.”

“Going to the movies has become like a theme park. Studios making bad content in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking — you get the best return right now but you wreck the earth. It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world.” — Jodie Foster speaking two or three days ago to Radio Times magazine, as reported by the Daily Mail‘s Ross McDonagh.

Foster isn’t wrong, of course, but I’ve been using the term “theme-park cinema” since at least the late ’90s and possibly a bit earlier. I actually stopped using it a few years ago. I moved on to other disparaging terms.

Here’s to Gun Crazy star Peggy Cummins, who passed in London on 12.29 at age 92. Odd as this may sound, I never even saw Joseph H. Lewis and Dalton Trumbo‘s groundbreaking film until three years ago. Here’s a confessional that I wrote in this space:

“I was flipping through films on my new Roku player and came upon a high-def version on Warner Classics. I’d been told for decades that Gun Crazy was an essential noir that everyone loves, but I wasn’t expecting to be blown away.

“I was half-asleep when I started watching at 11:30 pm but I woke right up. It’s genius-level — a major groundbreaker, pulp art. Those long takes shot from the rear of John Dall and Peggy Cummins‘ moving car (particularly that legendary three-minute-long bank robbery sequence), the urgent sense of immediacy, that semi-improvised-sounding dialogue, those urgent close-ups, conflicted emotions, the sexuality, the fog-shrouded ending in the swamp…all of it.

“I hereby apologize to Lewis, Trumbo, Dall, Cummins and the whole team for missing this classic for so long.

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