The Shape Of Water

Everybody is raving about Guillermo del Toro at the moment but I'm not that familiar with him. His films range generally from Spanish language horror films such as the acclaimed 'Pan’s Labyrinth' to weird action affairs such as 'Hellboy'. So the 'Shape Of Water' is already being acclaimed as a masterpiece.

Del Toro calls it a fairy tale and everyone says its based on ‘Beauty And The Beast’, which I suppose, tenuously, it could be but personally as I watched it I was thinking 'Splash' only without Daryl Hannah or maybe the 'Creature From the Black Lagoon'. 

This is probably why it's up for so many Oscars, the Academy does like a bit of cross pollination with old films and this, like ‘La La Land’,  name checks many, features a cinema and also a man obsessed with old movies.

Then again the Academy aren't going to like the plagiarism allegations surrounding the play ‘Let Me Hear You Whisper’ which is a love story between a cleaner and dolphin that is held in a laboratory.

The cleaner in this story is Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) who is a mute and has been since she was found by a river one day with odd scars on her neck. She lives above the Orpheum cinema which somehow survives on its minuscule audiences and next door to Giles (Richard Jenkins), an out of work artist who watches old TV movies all day long while having the hots for the waiter at the nearby pie emporium.

Elisa’s cleaning job is at a ‘top secret research facility’ where she works alongside Zelda (Octavia Spencer). The research facility has a new project, having come across an amphibious creature somewhere in the Amazon. Despite the top secret-ness of the facility the two cleaners stumble across it while doing the hoovering.

Elisa is immediately mitten but then she is a strange one. She hard boils eggs every morning while masturbating in the bath to her water fuelled fantasies. I'm not sure these scenes were strictly necessary but I suppose when you've got a film based on bestiality I guess you think 'what the hell'. 

Elisa then shares her eggs with the creature, plays him music and dances for him. He seems smitten too and she devises a plan to save the creature from the clutches of the film’s bad guy Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) and his boss General Hoyt (Nick Searcy).

She talks Giles into helping her and they are assisted by the sympathetic scientist Dr Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who wants to study the creature which he says was once revered by the Amazon tribes as a god. Neither of these men nor her colleague Zelda appear to think her romance with the creature is at all strange. 

Back at her apartment, she keeps the creature alive in her bath which she fills with salt water but things don’t take a good turn when he dines savagely on the cat and then Hoffstetler turns out to be a Russian spy. This is the cold war by the way and Russian Agents have already infiltrated the facility with the soul purpose of killing the creature. 

The creature does she to get on with Giles because as well as being able to heal bodily wounds, he can also restore hair to a bald man. Elisa is happy as well because she now gets to consummate her relationship with the creature in her bathroom, Which we find out will hold ten feet of water simply by closing the door and putting a towel under it. Well, apart from a few leaks into the cinema below.

So all that is left is to complete the plan. The plan being that once the river is at full tide, the creature can be set loose to find the ocean. What can possibly go wrong...

Well... it is indeed a good film but bloody weird too. Best Film? Probably not.

Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures follows three black women who worked in NASA's computing section in 1961 where they performed the calculations for the space program by hand. They were basically the computers of the day as real computers were only just being rolled out to such places as NASA. Being coloured they had their own separate toilets and dining facilities.

Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) had been managing her section for some time but is repeatedly denied a supervisory position and is instead overseen by her own supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst).

Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) meanwhile is an aspiring engineer but she cannot progress further because she doesn’t have the right qualifications, which she is barred from getting because of her colour. She goes to court to try to get this changed.

Then there is Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), who is the main focus of the film. Johnson is the most talented mathematician at NASA and once they realise this she is called upon to work in the Space Task Group under Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) and his boss Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Their aim is to put a man in space before the Soviet Union.

It’s not easy for her working in her new environment and not only because she had to climb a high ladder every day to write on a huge blackboard. She has to drink coffee from a pot labelled ‘Coloured’ and has to run half a mile back to her old building where the nearest toilet for coloured females is. While at home, she has three young daughters to raise.

Despite all this, through her excellent work, she earns the respect of everybody on the project including astronaut John Glenn (Glen Powell). Glenn trusts her calculations above those of anyone else’s including those produced by their new IBM computer.

The aim of the film is clearly to raise the struggles that the coloured minority had to be recognised at that time. However, personally I found learning about the space race with the Soviet Union, the difficulties of getting a man into space, keeping him there and then getting him back again in one piece the most fascinating part. 

As it is ‘based on true events’, you of course rush home and immediately ‘google’ the plot. If only to check whether Katherine really need to run half a mile just to use the toilet? And... no, of course she didn't. That, and a whole lot of other things, were manufactured or overstated for dramatic effect. Sadly, that ruined the film for me.

Katherine Johnson herself states that she didn’t experience any segregation and that everyone worked brilliantly together as a team. In fact, the film seems to totally undersell what Johnson achieved. As for NASA, who are practically painted as racists, they didn’t even exist until after the types of issues raised in the film were resolved.

The real story is fascinating enough, so it’s really annoying that the filmmakers were not impressed by the quiet and efficient way these women actually conducted themselves and achieved so much.

Therefore, it’s really just an enjoyable piece of (part) fiction that is also quite informative about the space race, which I don’t think they tampered with too much.