the groundhog day project

Freddie (John Candy) is a pervert, even as a child. Allen (Tom Hanks) is more of a romantic, even as a child. As a kid, Freddie drops change on the floor to look up ladies' skirts. Allen jumps off a ferry to swim, briefly, with a mermaid girl. As adults, Allen runs Bauer Produce, Freddie... Well, Freddie is proud to have gotten a letter in Penthouse magazine. Broad strokes quickly painted, and we know these characters pretty well inside the first ten minutes of Splash . If you're unfamiliar, think The Shape of Water with the genders swapped, a less dangerous (and less stereotypical) antagonist, and... Dare I say it? More believable romance. Don't get me wrong; I liked The Shape of Water a lot. I had a problem with one particular aspect of its conclusion, but I didn't mind how it seemed to spend more time on heist details than fleshing out its central romance. Guillermo Del Toro's film has a couple clear advantages over Ron Howard's film. The obvious one is...

There's a moment at the end of The Shape of Water that almost undermines a really nice (but subtly done) theme that runs throughout the film. Oh, assume SPOILERS. (Just skip the next paragraph because the film is worth seeing.) From the start of the film, we know that Elisa (Sally Hawkins) has scars on her neck--one of my lesser complaints is that the film never quite focuses enough on them (though it could easily focus on them too much ) and I didn't even realize until just before the potentially undermining moment happens that she has scars on both side of her neck. Early in the film, when Strickland (Michael Shannon) sits Elisa and her friend and coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) down to talk to them, we learn that Elisa was found as a baby near a river, her neck scarred. There's no doubt that these scars (and her having been found by a river) will come into play later. But, I figured on the amphibian man (Doug Jones) either 1) having been responsible for her injuries...

Guillermo del Toro has a couple modes when it comes to horror films; there are those that prove he is enamored of old gothic horror and those that break the mold and do something a little more original. The former tends to be more predictable, the latter more interesting. Crimson Peak falls squarely into the former camp. Because it is del Toro, though, it is certainly well made, and looks far better than most horror films. It has a solid cast—Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam—and a sound design that is, at its best, an evocative score that brings to mind some of the greatest horror and, at its worst, seems trite and clichéd, bringing to mind the most stereotypical of horror. The plot hinges on common tropes from gothic romance and gothic horror, an isolated house on the English moors—one so old that it is quite literally falling apart—an enigmatic nobleman, an impressionable young woman, ghosts that—MINOR SPOILER—barely affect the plot at all but sugges...