{"id":3722,"date":"2018-03-11T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-11T08:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/?p=3722"},"modified":"2018-10-15T19:14:38","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T19:14:38","slug":"there-is-no-best-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/there-is-no-best-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"There is No Best Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guillermo del Toro won the Academy Award this year for Best Director for The Shape of Water<\/em>, which also won for Best Picture of the Year.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t love The Shape of Water<\/em>. It was not my favorite picture last year.<\/p>\n

I love Guillermo del Toro. He and his two friends, Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu and Alfonso Cuaron, are three of my favorite directors. All three are technical as well as aesthetic experimenters. Their films push the medium in completely different ways and they teach me through their ingenuity.<\/p>\n

I loved del Toro\u2019s Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em>. That 2006 film was a wonderful mix of brutal reality and startling fantasy. Del Toro displayed a rare and deft ability to use the latest special effects sparingly. Many of the film\u2019s fantasy elements are practical effects created solely with costume, makeup, or set design, but the scene where the villain sews a gash in the corner of his mouth back together is a powerful mix of the practical and the digital<\/a>. The computer work is invisible rather than showy.<\/p>\n

The Shape of Water<\/em> admittedly shows the same skill and creates the same potent mix of fairy tale and real violence.<\/p>\n

I love the cast of Water<\/em>. I love Richard Jenkins\u2019 reticence, Octavia Spencer\u2019s spark, and Michael Shannon\u2019s complexity. Michael Stuhlbarg\u2019s inner stillness deservedly seems to appear in everything on screen these days.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d wanted to see The Shape of Water<\/em> for all these reasons, but something else kept getting my ticket money in the final months and weeks of 2017. We finally picked the film in January because we\u2019d just seen and loved Sally Hawkins in Paddington 2<\/em>. We went to see Water<\/em> specifically to see her again.<\/p>\n

She leads a cast of genuine, unique, and moving souls.<\/p>\n

When I reflect on the film itself, I also find many things to like. Hawkins\u2019 role as a mute woman gives her the opportunity to act with her physicality alone. All of the roles have this attention to the physical and are carefully written outsiders\u2014originals\u2014that give these remarkable actors further opportunity to show what they can do.<\/p>\n

Del Toro is in full command and everything within the frame and just outside of it is meticulously considered and placed. The starring creature of the film is a culmination of performer Doug Jones\u2019 singular collaborations with del Toro<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet the creature didn\u2019t work for me. I didn\u2019t find him as compelling as Jones’ creatures in Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/em>. I didn\u2019t buy the egg scene. The moment Hawkins peeled that first hardboiled shell, I knew this was going to be a rehash of Kelly Reno, the sugar cubes, and The Black Stallion<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t feel the connection between Hawkins and the creature. I didn\u2019t lean toward Hawkins the way I did in either Paddington<\/em>. I felt Shannon and Spencer were cast too perfect; they\u2019d played these roles before.<\/p>\n

The whole film felt as cold to me as the sea.<\/p>\n

That’s why I’m writing this\u2014not to give yet another opinion and not to scold the creators because they certainly did their jobs and more. I want to point out that it takes two, just like in any relationship or conversation. When you go to the movies or to see any piece of art, it requires the right piece of art and the right you.<\/p>\n

Every film is different every time we watch, especially when we acknowledge the changes in ourselves over time. The dumbest film can leave us flabbergasted with revelation because clich\u00e9 often clobbers us when it suddenly applies to us. This is not to say all films can be good or bad depending on our mood, but it does reveal the subjectivity of taste and the power of the calendar.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sad that so many people online need consensus on what is best, what is awful, and what is dull. They must bare witness to the praise of what they love and utterly desecrate what they dislike. It\u2019s so limiting to think we should all agree.<\/p>\n

Filmmakers can\u2019t control the enormous, mercurial filmmaking process and neither can our appraisals. Our desire to make our truth into the indisputable truth is undone by art and that’s just one more reason to love its mysteries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guillermo del Toro won the Academy Award this year for Best Director for The Shape of Water, which also won for Best Picture of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,69,58,56],"tags":[111,177,149,179,188,187,178],"class_list":["post-3722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clipweek","category-course","category-ivision","category-ivoice","tag-audience","tag-clip","tag-critique","tag-filmreview","tag-like","tag-oscars","tag-script","post_format-post-format-image"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3722"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3864,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722\/revisions\/3864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dotkalm.com\/bumpspark\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}