alyssa @alyssa@cat.family

i feel like this book's author doesn't really care for postmodernism. big emphasis on "but if the real isn't a thing anymore then how can we say whether anything is good or bad?". including specifically giving Baudrillard on the Gulf War as an example of that, which my impression was that Baudrillard was in those essays very much criticizing (in the "disapproving of" sense) the Gulf War? i haven't actually read them, but that was the impression i had gotten from like wikipedia and such... i think i will probably actually read them now

@aescling does that US history textbook you've been looking at talk about the invasion of Grenada at all?

idk if i've remarked here that del Toro is very good at putting seemingly incidental details to further use, reincorporating them later in the film in various fashions, but this film included a very clear multi-part example i liked.

1. at the start of the film there's a moment where Elisa masturbates in her bathtub as part of her daily pre-work routine.
2. a while later, she's eating cornflakes and her neighbor makes a joking reference to their having been invented to discourage masturbation (my impression is that this is not in fact true and that unlike Graham's, Kellogg's ideas about diet were separate from his campaign against masturbation), which he remarks didn't work.
3. much later, when she breaks her beloved out, she keeps him in her bathtub, which due to the reemphasis of masturbation by the corn flakes joke, now reminds us of that initial masturbation in the tub.
4. soon thereafter they fuck in the bathtub.

strong contender for my favorite of his movies

kinda fitting that i ended up rewatching this one and pan’s labyrinth close to each other as there’s certain parallels i might have forgotten about otherwise.

yeah this movie was really fun.

i forgot that they overtly, textually fucked

she and the fish person fucked :)

lol they accidentally clipped Strickland's new Cadillac

oh no i forgot about some stuff in this movie

love her

i liked the romance montage.

she is not very flappable

now i just gotta rewatch The Shape of Water and i can issue my official ranking of every feature film he's directed by how much I liked them (and possibly also a separate ranking for how good they were)

i think this was probably my least favorite of his Spanish language movies (not a negative remark! Cronos and The Devil's Backbone were both very good)

there is something to be said about Guillermo del Toro heroines (Ofelia and Mercedes here, Conchita and Carmen in The Devil's Backbone, maybe even Princess Nuala in Hellboy II, Aurora in Cronos, perhaps the human lead in The Shape of Water) but idk what that is

good movie. fucking fascists.