strange_complex: (La Dolce Vita Trevi)
I went to see this with [livejournal.com profile] big_daz on Wednesday night at the Everyman, Leeds. It's the second new release I've seen in the cinema this year, which is already more than I manage some years in total. If there were more films like this to go and see, that would be very different.

It is framed in multiple ways as a fairy tale. One is the two bookended voice-over sequences which begin by describing the main character, Elisa, as a princess and end by talking about her happy ending. They turn out to be voiced by her neighbour, who has spent his life painting advertising posters but is quickly being made obsolete by the camera, who keeps his television permanently tuned to old black-and-white musicals and comedies, and who ponders whether he was born too early or too late. That is, we are being told a story by a man disconnected from reality whose job is to sell fantasies. Elisa herself we first meet fast asleep on her couch, sunk deep into a watery dream-world, while throughout the film sound and light from the cinema over which she lives leak up into her apartment, and at one point she herself breaks out into a black-and-white song-and-dance routine to voice the love for the creature which she cannot speak. Perhaps some time in the decade before 1962 (the film's dramatic date) she has sat downstairs watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, absorbed its soundtrack in her sleep, and been living it in her dreams ever since? Later on, she returns the favour, sending the watery by-products of her own fantasy romance dripping onto customers nodding off in the auditorium below when she floods her bathroom to turn it into an aquatic playground. In fact, between her voicelessness and the fact that she was both found by water as a baby and ultimately finds her happiness there, she may as well be the Little Mermaid, on land only ever temporarily while she finds her prince.

All these markers of fairy-tale status are of course crucial cues in allowing us to accept the extraordinary story of a romance between an ordinary woman and a humanoid amphibian with magical powers. But they also allow us to enjoy another kind of fantasy alongside it: that of a bunch of underprivileged outsiders successfully sticking it to The Man. Elisa is mute. Giles, her ageing advertising-designer neighbour, is gay. Zelda, her best friend at the facility where they work, is black. And infiltrated into the facility's team of scientists is 'Bob', aka Dimitri, a Russian spy who has come to feel as strongly about science as he does about the motherland. Meanwhile, The Man himself manifests as Colonel Strickland, the facility's authoritarian, racist, misogynistic boss, who tortures the creature as much for fun as to learn anything from it and who takes the decision to vivisect it rather than trying to study it alive without it even occurring to him that this might be something to pause over, let alone actually doing so. In all this, he's the successor of Dr Mark Williams from the original film (LJ / DW), but much more starkly militaristic and exaggeratedly nasty. And boy, is it satisfying to see him out-foxed by our plucky band of misfits, pulling off the creature's liberation from the facility while he can't begin to imagine that they could even be capable of any such thing.

This might all sound rather heavy-handed, except that each character is drawn with such humanity it's impossible not to believe in them. In fact the entire story is approached with the same utter seriousness which makes Hammer's dark fairy-tales just as compelling. No-one here has their tongue in their cheek, or behaves like an avatar standing in for a particular social group. Instead, each has their own inner turmoil and believable home-life (Zelda's lazy husband, Dimitri's careful ironing), including Strickland, whose career trajectory still doesn't quite satisfy his perfect all-American wife. On both sides of the balance, it's important that these characters aren't clichés and don't jump straight into their assigned roles. Elisa's friends need a lot of persuasion before they'll help her rescue the creature, while we see the system that creates Strickland in the even less sympathetic General Hoyt above him, and in how easy it is for a smarmy car salesman to talk him into buying an expensive Cadillac in a colour he doesn't like.

The film is also dripping with deeply symbolic detail, which likewise might have seemed over-done if it weren't for the fairy-tale framing and the believability of the characters. Most obvious is the colour-palette, all muted, swampy greens and blues in scaly patterns to suit the aquatic theme, but also to set off occasional departures the more starkly - like the red dress and shoes which Elisa is suddenly wearing the day after she and the creature have found out how to express their affection physically. Perhaps next most obviously, the oppressive machinery of capitalism. Vents and pipes above the creature's tank resemble not only the original Gill-Man but also (to me at least) the Machine-Mammon from Metropolis (1927). Elisa, Zelda and their co-workers are slaves to the facility's clocking-in system and CCTV cameras. And when the creature staggers into the cinema below Elisa's apartment, he finds it showing scenes of slaves working in the mines from The Story of Ruth (1960).

shape-e-23118.jpg Machine Mammon Metropolis.jpg

The cinema complex itself is called the Orpheum, perfectly underpinning Elisa's use of music (and boiled eggs) to win the confidence of the creature - though she plays it jazz on a portable record player rather than singing to the lyre. The facility is called the Occam institute, which drove me to Wikipedia - I know the basic principle and couldn't see how it might apply to this story, but found my answer in the biology section, where it turns out that it has featured quite heavily in debates around evolution and the matter of whether or not any animals share human-style psychology. There we are very much amongst the concerns of del Toro's story. Finally, in case it wasn't clear enough how rotten Strickland is, he spends most of the film with two of his fingers, severed by the creature after one too many electric shocks and reattached by surgeons, blackening and reeking as the attachment fails and they die on his hand. Towards the end, in one of several body-horror moments which had me squirming in my seat and putting my own fingers over my eyes, he acts out just how literally he has gone to pieces by pulling them off and throwing them at the terrified Zelda. I'm sure there is much more besides.

Nothing quite stops the niggling world-building questions bubbling up. Like, if the creature is 'from the Amazon', why does it seem to need saline water and return quite happily to the ocean at the end? And how exactly would its ability to switch between lung- and gill-based breathing systems be any particular help in the Space Race, as both the Americans and Russians seems to think? But ultimately none of these matter next to Elisa's coy, satisfied smile and the electric blue lights flickering across the creature's body. For that, everyone involved deserves my profoundest thanks, and I only hope the cinema industry as a whole is watching and learning.
strange_complex: (Eight DIY)
Oof! I am hideously behind with reviews of all kinds. Term has started, and a fatal combination of front-loaded teaching commitments this semester and getting behind on things due to being in Vienna has meant I've had all of about one hour of usable free time to myself each evening this week. That's just about enough time to browse through a few social media sites, answer emails from friends and family, and maybe watch an episode of Plebs before collapsing into bed. Not sit there doing yet more writing. So I'm now two weeks behind with Doctor Who write-ups, never mind anything else. Let's see how far I can get on clearing the backlog before another very similar week begins.

The Caretaker, then. Another good, solid episode, I thought. Basically all about characterisation, this time focused on the stand-off between the Doctor and Danny, and with the robot-of-the-week plot only really serving as a catalyst to their drama rather than a story in its own right. But that's absolutely fine by me, as long as the characterisation is done well. Which it was! All very emotionally plausible, and nicely structured too - as for example when Clara explained Danny to the Doctor, and I was sitting there thinking, "Ah, but this works two ways, doesn't it? What about the other side of that?" and just at that very moment the Doctor voiced exactly the same point: "You haven't explained him to me."

I liked the montage at the beginning, sketching out Clara's adventures with the Doctor and dates with Danny. Apart from anything else, it creates lots of lovely gaps for fan-fiction - and I thought it not uncoincidental that some spin-off novels were advertised in a little spot at the end of the programme. I couldn't quite tell from their titles, but I am guessing some of those will link in with the exact adventures referenced in the programme. More importantly, though, it created the right backdrop against which the characters could be moved quite far forward emotionally, without us needing to go through the details of lots of corridor-running adventures in order to get there. Just enough for us to have got to the point where the crisis and confrontation in this story could unfold and be resolved, without it seeming premature.

It was nice to finally see Clara doing some actual teaching. which I don't think has really happened before now. And to see her generally continuing to be sharp, self-assured and well able to handle the Doctor. I thought the scene in which she made him tell her what was going on by pointing out that the fact he hadn't so far must mean he knew she would disapprove, and thus that his plans must be endangering the school, was a particularly good example of that. But Danny's comments at the end about how people like the Doctor can push those who work with them to be better and stronger, and yet present a constant danger that they will try to push too far, are an important signpost for where all this could go. It seems a lot like the Doctor will ask too much of Clara in the final two-parter, and that she will finally decide to prioritise Danny, the man who tries his hardest to be good enough for her, over him.

Meanwhile, for the moment, Clara's situation reminds me a great deal of Gwen's in Torchwood, which went through a similar evolution from her hiding the true nature of her work from Rhys, him finding out and being angry about the lies, to him finally accepting it and becoming involved himself. Indeed, the scenes between Clara and Danny in his-or-her flat at the end of the story reminded me visually of the same sorts of scenes between Gwen and Rhys in Torchwood as well - both the talking-on-the-sofa scenes and the looking-out-over-a-night-time-city scenes. It's a good story-line, and one which gets to the heart of the disjunction between real life and fantasy-adventure life which is a very big part of what I love so much about all these stories.

Smaller things:
  • The invisibility watch - this had an in-story pay-off, when Danny used it to follow Clara at the end of the story and take the Skovox by surprise, so it may already have served out its purpose. But it also struck me as rather like the fob-watch from season 3 - an actually pretty game-changing piece of technology which turned out to have far greater implications than it first appeared. Certainly, it means the Doctor can be anywhere now, even when we think he's not, and we should be looking out for that in the season finale.
  • The Doctor was genuinely scared for his life when he realised that his plan to transport the Skovox to another time-zone had gone wrong, and he was face to face with a killing-machine. It's not something we often see, but it's important to have it sometimes if he is not to seem too much like a super-hero, and Capaldi did it well.
  • I liked the chess-set as a motif in a story all about the one-on-one confrontation between the Doctor and Danny, and indeed one concerned with the relationship between commanders (chess-players) and their troops (the pieces).
  • And it was lovely to see Courtney Woods being developed as a character (in preparation for her role in the next story, of course).
As per my previous reviews, I also kept a careful eye out this time for references to both water and breathing. Actually, there wasn't much happening on the breathing front this week (apart from all characters doing it in all scenes, obvs), but not to worry - there was plenty to make up for it in Kill The Moon. As for water, though, we had:
  • Clara arriving all wet and covered in sea-weed after her montage-adventure with the Doctor to see the fish-people.
  • The Doctor commenting that Clara looks good and asking whether it is because she's had a wash when he is trying to distract her from finding out that he is about to embark on trying to save the world from an alien danger in the Coal Hill area.
  • Clara grabbing a watering-can in the school garden so that she could get near enough to the Doctor, Danny and Adrian to hear their conversation. This was probably the most overt water-reference in the story, and rather like Clara with the wash-bowl in Deep Breath it draws a pretty clear link between her and pure, clean, life-giving water.
  • Courtney Woods finds out about the Doctor and the TARDIS because she has come to get paper towels to deal with a 'spillage' in the Geography class-room.
Enough to be going on with, then, I think.

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strange_complex: (La Dolce Vita Trevi)
After last week's big scares, deep exploration of the Doctor / companion dynamic, and epic rewriting of the Doctor's personal history, this episode was bound to seem rather work-a-day and ordinary by comparison. It did, and that's OK. You do actually need some of those each season to fill the gaps between the OMGWTF? episodes. But it was a very polished and nicely thought-out work-a-day episode, all the same. Just as they should be when Who is running properly.

This one gave us a nice mystery, some clever time-travel shenanigans, and indeed some further development of the season's big themes to boot )

Also ongoing is the importance of Clara and her relationship to the Doctor )

Meanwhile, it seems like the people responsible for both the casting and the wardrobe for this episode worked quite hard to make it inclusive and diverse )

A few smaller things )

Finally, I am now going to have to talk not only about water, but also about breathing )

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strange_complex: (Poirot truth)
So, yes - still a week behind on Who blogging, then. But I did really enjoy this episode, and not just in and of itself, but as yet another entry in what has so far been one of the thematically-strongest seasons of Doctor Who I've ever seen. Fear, heroism, companionship and prejudice are all being developed steadily and substantially from episode to episode - as the genre of each story permits, of course - and it is really looking impressive. I don't know what changed or what happened, but it really seems like Steven Moffat has his eye 100% on the ball at last. Perhaps things will suddenly go downhill again this evening, or perhaps the price we'll pay for this is a shoddy next season of Sherlock? But right now, I am liking it.

In this particular episode, there was a lot of very good stuff about fear and bravery and what makes a hero, but most of that has been discussed at length all over the internet, so I won't be adding much if I talk about that now. Let's just say I liked it a lot, and leave it at that. Perhaps more interesting, and less thoroughly raked over, was how much the story really explored the relationship between the Doctor and Clara )

Companionship issues aside, Listen was more straightforwardly a classic ghost story, and like all the best ghost stories, it kept the matter of whether or not there is actually an unseen other-worldly entity out there as ambiguous as possible )

Other things... I like the way the Doctor and Clara are positioned as complementary equals in this story )

I also think there was a nice little riff on Harry Potter )

Then, of course, there is the scene in the barn )

Finally - and I am sorry to keep going on about this - there really is quite a lot of watery business going on in this season ) All of this could still turn out to be nothing remarkable, but in case it isn't, I'm setting out the pattern as I see it so far here. Time will tell.

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strange_complex: (Metropolis False Maria)
Yes, the title of this post is correct. I was away all of last weekend, only saw this episode on Monday night, didn't have time to write it up in the week, and haven't even seen Listen yet either due to being out at a house-warming party last night. (The sacrifices I make for you, [livejournal.com profile] glitzfrau!) So here I am, slightly over a week behind on Who-blogging.

I expected little more than fun and fluff from this story, but actually it delivered fun, fluff and quite a bit of substance to boot. In particular, it continued to develop the questions of heroism and what constitutes a hero from the first two episodes very nicely )

This is great, but it also leave me with a slight niggling sense of dissatisfaction, because a naive belief in heroes can be dangerous as well as inspirational )

Maybe I'm over-reading what was basically just a meta-fictional romp through story-land, though )

Meanwhile, both Clara and the Doctor get some further nice character moments )

Finally, obviously this week's nod to the season's Big Plot Arc is a spoiler )

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