the groundhog day project

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...

In her review of Sing Street , Sheila O'Malley points out, "There are pitfalls everywhere in a coming-of-age period piece like this one." She argues that director John "Carney avoids them easily, keeping the film on its proper track" And, she explains how this works: "It's extremely confident: It knows what it wants to be, what story it wants to tell." And--coming back to the advice of the the other day--that's what a person needs to be, too. Gotta be confident. Gotta know what you want to be. Gotta know what story you want to tell, the story being you and how you present that self to the world. Easy to fake on the Internet. (I wrote a whole master's thesis about it.) Harder to fake in the real world. And, I mean real confidence, not the pathetic arrogance and ego-centrism that pretends to confidence online or, lately, in politics. Party lines draw people into corners where they're quicker to defend their positions out of the illusio...