#5 Guillermo del Toro
Welcome to Guillermo del Toro appreciation week! With Shape of Water winning a bunch of Oscars, GDT week seemed like a great idea. Obviously, here at Weird Movies, we could not care less about what the academy thinks. No, if we handed out awards, the categories would be Craziest Premise, Drunkest Director, and Most Random Objects in Set Design. Still, it seems wrong to just gloss over the weirdest movie to have won an Oscar in our lifetime. See, if Weird Movies were a family, Guillermo Del Toro would be the fun uncle we don't get to see that often because he's always off doing more big-league stuff. But that doesn't mean we don't throw him a party when he wins the Superbowl. As it turns out - Guillermo Del Toro research is way less fun than I thought. Not only does this his filmography lack anything weird enough for me to get excited about, but I also had to watch all his scary movies I hadn't seen before, and was once again reminded how much horror is not my genre. Somehow, horror movies leave me bored and terrified at the same time, and then give me nightmares as an extra treat. So yeah, John Carpenter appreciation week is definitely cancelled. Now let's get this over with. Since the man himself is weirder than his movies, I decided to do a Del Toro profile instead and pick out some weird recurring elements from his work. I also added some thoughts on Shape of Water. Enjoy, and rest assured that next week, we're going back to our regular format. Because to be perfectly candid, it wasn't just about the horror. Watching one movie director for an entire week got real claustrophobic real fast. If I felt comfortable spending that much consecutive time in another person's head, I'd be, you know, married.
Weird Director I: Guillermo del Toro
When he won the 2018 Golden Globe for best Director, Guillermo del Toro decided to make his tearful acceptance speech about monsters. He talked about how he's been obsessed with monsters since he was a kid, and how he continues to rely on them for inspiration. He was not kidding. Not only are his movies full of monsters, but so is his house. Apparently he has amassed enough Hollywood beasties and horror paraphernalia over the years to fill an entire museum. For all his talk of the monstrous, though, Del Toro's creations always come off to me as more charming than horrific. In essence, he is a teller of fairy tales. Like Disney, only a little darker, a little slimier, a little less PG. Basically what fairy tales used to be before The Mouse got his white little cleaning gloves on them. Del Toro loves monsters so much that he not only gives them the best visuals in his movies, but he also equips them with way better background stories than his human characters. Each of his creepy pets comes with an elaborate mythology, full of heart-breaking details about loneliness and loss that make you feel for them no matter how much goo is dripping off their tentacles. With all his predilection for amiable ghouls and artsy graphics, it's actually kind of a miracle this guy has been able to work on so many big studio movies. But I believe it's also been a curse. Del Toro makes films with flashes of originality and poetry that can leave you stunned, but taken as a whole, seem empty and conventional. I can't shake the feeling that his imagination is an exquisitely unique and expansive place, and we only get to see a fraction of it because he needs to keep the normies happy. My favourite Del Toro is Hellboy 2. I used to think it was the work where he does the least holding back, until I stumbled on Trollhunters, a Netflix cartoon series better than most, like 90s-good, that just got renewed for season 3. I had more fun with this show than with any of his other stuff, and reportedly, so did Del Toro. This is a great sign. Working in the whacky world of kid's animation could have broken the Hollywood curse a little. Now he's got both box office and Oscar success in the bag, I'm hoping this "visionary director" may finally be ready to shed the quotation marks, go nuts, and set loose his inner freak. Because no matter how big a collection of beautiful monsters he's already unleashed on the world, you just know there's more weird where that came from.
Weird Director II: Del Toro Quirks
There's quite a few of them. I made lists. You're very welcome.
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Like I said, Del Toro never met a monster he didn't like and never made a monster you couldn't love. My top 3 of his most sympathetic monsters:
#3: This vampire failson in Blade 2 was genetically modified by his own dad to feed off other vampires as part of some messed-up experiment. Most of us get shit advice and a life-long sense of inadequacy from our fathers, this poor dude got a chin slit, an octopus mouth and a guaranteed beef with Wesley Snipes. No wonder he's acting out.
#2: This majestic forest god in Hellboy 2 is the last of its kind. It grows out of a glowing green bean, and when it dies, it collapses into a thousand flowers.
#1: This handsome mofo from Pan's Labyrinth sits at a table full of food the whole day, but only devours those who dare touch any of it. I get it. His eyes are in his hands. He literally has to watch what he eats all the time. You'd develop an eating disorder, too.
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All Del Toro tech looks the same. He's the Steve Jobs of... what DO you call this kind of fancy Victorian sci-fi gadgetry? Swirly steampunk? Art Techo? Help me out here. Here's a top three of quirky thingamabobs:
#3: The alchemist's trinket from Cronos will make its wearer immortal, but it's also hella addictive and slowly turns you into a vampire. Put it on, and it's only a matter of time before you start licking stray blood off a public bathroom floor. Don't do cocaine, kids.
#2: The retro robot army from Hellboy 2 is 70 x 70 = 4900 soldiers strong, and it doesn't matter how many pieces you hack them into, they will re-assemble with the sole purpose of kicking your ass. It was forged by a goblin blacksmith at the dawn of the human age, which is probably why they don't build 'm like this anymore.
#1: The cyborg ninja nazi in Hellboy was a member of the proto-fascist Thule Society and an expert swordsman when he got blown to bits by an allied grenade in 1944. He survived, however, and is able to walk around anno 2004 through an unholy combination of classical mechanics and black magic. He has a clockwork heart and dust for blood. Add an ominous gas mask and some custom-made arm blades, and you just cooked up the most evil robot in history.
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Del Toro has a knack for creating luscious locations that are as pretty as they are deadly. Top 3 places not to visit:
#3: Crimson Peak's beautiful, bleeding gothic mansion has a hole in the roof, so white snow falls from the ceiling. And it's built atop a clay pit, so red liquid keeps seeping through the walls. Only normal things can happen here.
#2: At the center of Pan's Labyrinth there's either a bunch of rocks or a magnificent palace for secret princesses. You have to die to get there first, but frankly it looks like it might be worth it.
#1: The vintage underground military lab in Shape of Water is a site of routine torture as well as gorgeous mid-century interiors. Literally everything here would sell for a tiny fortune on ebay. Dibs on the fishtank prison that's a statement shower cabin waiting to happen.
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Del Toro ❤ Ron Perlman. He's cast him in literally half of his movies, and never fails to make him look gooood. 3 coolest Ron Perlmans:
#3: cool leather-clad boss of the anti-Blade brigade in Blade 2
#2: cool devil dude in Hellboy
#1: cool... monster parts... pawnshop owner...in Pacific Rim?
Review: Reflections on Shape of Water, no pun intended
1) Do you guys remember Amélie? By a French dude called Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also made the sexy Alien 4 movie from one of my Valentine's posts? Anyway, before seeing SoW, I wondered whether this was going to be Del Toro's Amélie. The two directors have a lot in common. They're both monster-loving weirdos who like to combine the beautiful and sweet with the creepy and grotesque, they both made critically acclaimed movies about a lonely unconventional lady finding love, both dig sea-foam green, and neither seems to be able to stop casting Ron Perlman. They're actually beefing right now because Jeunet thinks Del Toro stole his sitting-down-dancing scene of all things, and Del Toro's defense is that they both stole everything from Terry Gilliam. Anyway, Amélie is not a bad movie, but it became an international sensation and an Oscar nominee despite being the least interesting thing Jeunet had made at the time. But that was the point. It toned down his weird to a digestible minimum, and so respectable members of the academy could suddenly fuck with the guy. SoW is and isn't like Amélie in that respect. While Amélie told a pretty run-of-the-mill girl-boy story in a cute, off-the-wall kind of way, Del Toro portrayed the kinky tale of someone falling in love with a fish as straight-forward as humanly possible. I think that's why he won and Jeunet didn't, even if Amélie is probably the better movie. Which brings me to my second point:
2) I wasn't into it. It felt like Del Torro took a simple Disney fairy tale about inter-species dating and padded it with minority issues, R-rated content and classic Hollywood movie references, precision-engineering it for award glory. But the disparate elements never quite come together. It's like he just wanted to make his fish-loving movie, but had to include wokeness for funding reasons or something. It's frankly insulting. The main character Eliza is mute, her co-worker is a woman of colour, her neighbour is a gay man and her lover is a man-fish. And that pretty much is what informs all of their emotional arcs, each person's difference and resulting isolation serving as a stand-in for their entire character. Ironically, there is much more interesting stuff in the story lines of the two (presumably) straight white guys, the sadistic American army man who serves as the villain and the Russian spy scientist. Both are empowered by their governments to do terrible things, but left without any power of their own. We watch in horror as these guys' orders chip away at their agency and humanity, and propel them into all manner of paranoia and violence. I liked this part of the movie because instead of making some generic point like "they call us freaks, but they're the real monsters", it was about how our institutionalized inability to deal with Otherness creates monsters in the first place. It's just a better and timelier message than that 90s throwback "difference good" thing.
3) On the other hand, my sister loved SoW. She thought it was adorable and moving and that the actors did an incredible job. She watches as many movies as I do, but unlike me, she is an actual human being and not some disaffected media consumption machine made out of Pynchon paperbacks and old SCART-cables. So maybe just listen to her instead.