Media Man

The Shape of Water  is a movie that is almost impossible to review objectively because the entire reason for its existence is based on a deeply held set of socio-political ideologies designed to appeal to those who share these beliefs and alienate everybody else. Thus, no matter how I review this I'm going to end up pissing off half of you because I do actually need to give my opinion. If you haven't heard about this one or just didn't watch the Oscars (which at this point is understandable) The Shape of Water  is about a mute janitor named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) working at a laboratory in 1960s America where the scientists and military have just captured a fish monster that they believe will help them in the Cold War. However, Elisa begins to form an attachment to the character to the point where she falls in deep, and explicitly consummated, love with it. Let's get the good out of the way first: it's a Guillermo Del Toro film so it's not only aesthetically

Looking back on it now Carrie can pretty much be seen as a template for Stephen King's entire career onward: psychotic bullies, traumatized kid characters, mistaking cultic behavior with what he supposes to be fundamentalism and so on. However, Carrie wasn't just the blueprint for every book King would write for the rest of his life; it was also a pop-cultural touch stone that had a lasting effect on the rest of the horror genre, inspiring everything from Nightmare on Elm Street  to Chronicle . When a film has that kind of legacy the question becomes not whether  Carrie  is a good movie in its own right, but whether it holds up after everything in the entertainment industry has picked its bones clean over the last 30+ years. The answer, thankfully, is absolutely. The setup is that Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a timid girl who has been turned into a forceful shut-in by her cultic mother (Piper Laurie) and the constant torment of her sadistic classmates, barely kept sane by