alyssa @alyssa@cat.family

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.

also also the trouble with reading critics is that it's too easy to just interpret them as saying things i already agree with when they are maybe saying something subtly different.

also the trouble with reading critics is that Derrida says a lot of complicated things I don't fully follow

perhaps this is arguably the case with pretty much all writing and its sources and influences, but it's a lot more apparent in the criticism case

the trouble with reading critics is that they spend their time writing criticism of particular texts and then i read that and then i feel like to get the most out of the criticism i need to go read the thing they're criticizing.

nonetheless, a good horror film.

The film deploys the cliché of sexual deviance as the sin of the aristocracy. Indeed, it presents all the horror as deriving from that original sin. There's a brief moment that acknowledges that deviance itself as having an origin, but it's brushed past. I think a Crimson Peak that developed that question further would have been more interesting to me, although I'd still have had mixed feelings.

i have mixed feelings about certain elements, but this was the better done film compared to Mimic (this is perhaps his second horror film per se).

to be clear, this is not a conflict of values between me and the film but the explicit textual problem the protagonist is dealing with rn

oh no, the tragic circumstance in which there's an aristocrat but he's charming.