Hacker Cinema
The Shape of Water
2017 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
An other-worldly story, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962, where a mute janitor working at a lab falls in love with an amphibious man being held captive there and devises a plan to help him escape.
5 positive2 negative6 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
I think there’s a value in realism, ARC Raiders is one of my favorite games right now and it reminds of of movies like Stalker or The Shape of Water, movies that show old run down buildings and industrial complexes in their full glory, paint flaking, water in the wrong place, it’s just fantastic. It really sells me on being in a once busy space that’s been abandoned and fallen from its former glory.
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
[3] https://crisismagazine.com/vault/americas-greatest-living-composer-an-interview-with-composer-david-diamond
[4] https://fugueforthought.de/2016/07/13/boulez-piano-sonata-no-1/
Disney now owns Searchlight Pictures (formerly Fox Searchlight). They have an incredible legacy of unique high quality creative films. Go watch Shape Of Water or The Favorite. They just came out with The Menu, which I’d recommend (saw it in the theater just today). Seeing adult oriented original screenplays is just heavenly. You literally couldn’t pay me to sit through a Marvel movie.
Something like in "The Shape of Water" movie [1] ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Water
Recently:
- Everything Everywhere All at Once - The Black Phone - The Northman - House of Gucci - Knives Out - Little Women - A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - The Shape of Water
The blockbusters are such a huge part of the cultural landscape so that it’s easy to miss all the other film out there. But there’s really a lot of it!
I do find the thesis in the ending quite weak:
> For a longer time before the gritty period, we all dedicated ourselves to the idea that anything we’d acknowledge as very good had to be both serious and artsy. People really liked Good Will Hunting (see: very serious); it was also a good movie, so it won an Oscar. Zillions of people love movies like The Princess Bride and Happy Gilmore; it’s incredibly likely both dwarf Good Will Hunting in terms of total views, but you can’t even imagine a world where either could have possibly won an Oscar.
[...]
> This is a short article by my standards, but it does have me thinking: What kind of world could we actually live in, if we were willing to treat works of art made with the goal of making us happy as if they were important? What if we were willing to make them? We’ve seen what happens in a world where all the Oscars go to movies that make you cry, or that we pretend make us think even though they generally don't
There are plenty of widely acclaimed movies that can not be considered "very serious", picking some recent Oscar winners as examples with categorizations from wikipedia:
* Parasite ("black comedy thriller")
* Green Book ("comedy-drama")
* The Shape of Water ("romantic fantasy")
* Birdman ("black comedy drama")
* CODA ("comedy-drama")
* La La Land ("comedy-drama")
* Life Of Pie ("adventure-drama")
Are all those completely feel-good movies intended to make you happy? Maybe not, but still its not like happy/humorous/feel-good is completely disregarded category even among grumpy art critics.
> "For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and political correctness checkboxes)."
no, the green book is awful, a particularly bad example of the feel-good movie, never once inviting the viewer to get lost in a believable world, instead inviting the viewer to question every directorial decision made. it was fake and pretentious at the same time, and completely safe around race relations.
the shape of water was not perfect, but better. not the best example of interracial relations (metaphorically), but gentle, revealing, quirky, ambient, and unpretentious.
I completely agree with this. Whenever critics' and users' assessments of a movie or a TV show diverge, it is almost universally the critics who end up being wrong (in my subjective view).
They sometimes over-rate things people in their position cannot be seen disliking because it's about Societal Importance or some such thing that has little to do with actual quality. And conversely, they sometimes ignore or under-rate things because they cannot be seen to overly praise a work that's criticised for things having little or nothing to do with actual quality.
Thing is, I don't need to be culturally influenced, have my outdated views updated to match what's currently considered mainstream, my privilege checked, etc. I just want to watch a good fucking movie and decide for myself whether it contains a message that changes my mind on a topic.
For example, critics and users disagree on The Shape of Water[0] (users are right, it's very mediocre). They also disagree on Green Book[1] (users are right again, it's a great film even if it doesn't tick all the wokeness and political correctness checkboxes).
[0] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-shape-of-water
[1] https://www.metacritic.com/movie/green-book
I'm of the same mind here. But I also want to express that diversity is heavily important in movies, and movies that merely put diversity as a demographic ignore that the demographic comes with experiences. Many of the most successful movies today involve the diversity of experiences, but too much budget continues to go into rehashes.
I don't really watch movies myself, but I could tell you that Black Panther was a massive cultural success. As was Get Out. And The Shape Of Water (which I did see and enjoyed thoroughly, especially for its seamless integration with the battling of traditional and nontraditional masculinity). But I couldn't tell you anything about, I don't know, Antman or Daredevil other than that they existed at some point. And I think this reflects in commecial successes, also.
What has been forgotten is that masses do want some novelty, even if it isn't by very much. Incremental novelies, perhaps.
Definitely gave me vibes of The Shape of Water: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580390/
If they continue like this cinemas will just die out.
My local cinema however is offering a "Sneak Preview" on Mondays. For 5€ you get to see some (unknown on ticket purchase) new movie that people have actually put some effort into (non "block busters", a.k.a. transformers part 500). There I have seen Shape of Water, Hotel Artemis and Searching. I will see another one this evening.
With adaptions like these maybe they'll survive a bit longer. I certainly enjoy the offering.
I hate watching movies on the plane. They are edited to remove all violence and nudity. The Shape of Water was missing huge chunks when I peered at my wife’s scree.
I prefer to watch Netflix offline. Although Altered Carbon had me cradling my iPad mini so my fellow passenger couldn’t see all of the erotic scenes.
I’m wondering what the legality of the situation above is.
I dunno, I think parts of their coverage would seem to demonstrate otherwise.
For instance, consider their Oscars article:
https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/how-did-the-oscars-coverage-rate-hint-it-was-biased/
Scroll all the way to the bottom to find their attempt at an "unbiased" article ("the raw data"). Now, maybe Oscars reporting is a special case and you can't do this for other kinds of articles, but isn't it worth a try?
Full article follows:
> The 90th Oscars awards ceremony airs to an estimated 26.5M viewers
> Jimmy Kimmel hosted the 90th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. The “Oscars,” or Academy Awards of Merit, are given annually to “honor outstanding artistic and scientific achievements in theatrically released feature-length motion pictures,” according to the awards’ website.
> This year’s show was aired live from 8 to 11 p.m. eastern on ABC, to an estimated audience of 26.5 million viewers. It is the lowest number since the 1990s when the viewership data began being collected. The 2017 awards had 32.9 million viewers.
> Besides speaking about the nominated films and filmmaking, some presenters and award recipients spoke about other topics. While hosting, Kimmel made jokes about Fox News, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
> Best actress award winner Frances McDormand spoke about “inclusion riders,” a stipulation that actors can put in their contracts to ensure gender and ethnic diversity among cast and crew members of film projects that they work on. Presenters Kumail Nanjiani and Lupita Nyong’o spoke in support of “Dreamers,” referring to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Award winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez spoke about diversity and gender representation in the songwriter category.
> Award winners include:
> Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” won for both Best Picture and Best Director. > Frances McDormand earned Best Actress for her role in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” > Gary Oldman won for Best Actor for his role in “Darkest Hour.” > Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez received the Best Original Song award for the track “Remember Me” in “Coco.” > Alexandre Desplat won Best Original Score for “The Shape of Water.”
> Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, The New York Times, The Oscars
One thing in there that has a tiny whiff of bias is mentioning the huge drop in viewership. IF there is some more favorable way of estimating the event's impact or importance, then including that bit would count in their framework as "slant". Did I miss anything else?