Adam Nayman owns Guillermo Del Toro

http://cinema-scope.com/features/the-uses-of-disenchantment-guillermo-del-toros-the-shape-of-water/

“Part of what’s at stake in this particular filmmaker’s ascendancy is the attractive, reassuringly auteurist idea of a culturally specific but globally saleable vision. More than Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, or his buddy Nicolas Winding Refn (and distinct from an English-language contemporary like Peter Jackson, whose own lo-fi breakthrough didn’t enter the marketplace saddled with subtitles), del Toro has spearheaded the gentrification of genre cinema.”

“Pan’s Labyrinth was duly sold in the US as an exotic import demonstrating to Hollywood hacks how neo-Spielbergian wonderment should be done. In this at once lofty and modest context, the film’s nightmarish monster known as the “Pale Man”—an elongated cipher with eyeballs crammed into his palms—appeared as the ideal avatar for del Toro himself: a detail-oriented filmmaker dealing in “handmade” aesthetics.”

I really like Nayman when he isn’t writing for the Ringer because he takes the gloves off and speaks his mind. Has anyone seen the Shape of Water yet?

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The Shape of Water is Hideo Kojima’s 4th favorite movie of the year.

I can’t tell if that article quote is an all out insult or some sort of half compliment.

He’s right that Cronos is still v good

Not yet, but I am waiting for its theatrical release on the 15th of February over here. I like what GdT puts out, so i’ll probably will like this one as well? We’ll see…

regarding this bit

I am not sure what he’s on about here. The few movies that GdT made in the latter few years didn’t have suchanimpact that you could talk of gentrification of genre cinema, or I have somehow missed all those genre flicks plopping up inbetween transformers, Minions and Marvel movies.

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i mean yeah, owned i guess, but i don’t see this guy creating any films that “does it right.”

i’m getting tired of smarter people taking down everything that’s successful because it’s not “authentic” or whatever

it’s like a dumb game of gotcha or something

anyway i’m a crude, uncultured simpleton

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Yeah, I’m really confused by this whole gentrification angle.

Is he critizing del Toro for being too Hollywood of a “foreign” director? Is that somehow damaging to the prospects of traditional art house “foreign” directors?

I think he just wanted to fit a particularly charged buzzword in.

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This dude makes a lot of fair points about the movie, and he’s clearly well-read, but boy does he seem like a massive asshole.

The curatorial risks of juxtaposing authentically Gothic ephemera with prop department tchotchkes are real, and an ungenerous attendee might say that At Home with Monsters is just so much strategically mounted kitsch—a Planet Hollywood outpost crossed with a Hot Topic. (I’ve rarely seen so many high-school kids at an AGO show, most of whom took their sweet time exiting through the gift shop.) However dubious it might seem to so brazenly mainstream a gallery space (and thereby implicitly argue for the enduring aesthetic worth of storyboards from Hellboy [2002]), del Toro, it should be said, earns the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, how low of the Art Gallery of Ontario to put on an exhibit that appeals to high schoolers, how base. God forbid anyone in the art world put out anything accessible to get young people interested in the arts. This dude’s such a self-aggrandizing elitist.

Zelda, meanwhile, acts mostly as Elisa’s personal hype-woman, existing only to help her out and psych her up. (It will take a braver critic than myself to suggest that the character’s stock sassiness is some sort of self-reflexive commentary.)

Like, fair point, but you just did suggest it, dickhead, have the courage of your convictions.

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Del Toro is totally a middlebrow filmmaker, and Nayman is trying to hold him to standards I don’t think Del Toro ever even aspired to.

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yeah, i’m not smart or well-read, but a lot of this comes off to me as “i’m going to show you all how smart and right i am, use big words that you wish you knew, and you should feel bad about liking this thing.”

for a period in my life i kind of aspired to be a person like this, i liked knowing more than everyone else and putting my finger up with a great, big “ACTUALLY” — but then I realized it didn’t really mean anything. there was no great contest of Taste to win. people are gonna like what they like and the reasons they like it aren’t usually putting up intentional finger to all the stuff that piece of media may happen to be doing a disservice to. People, for better or worse, are just simple and don’t think a lot.

Of course, sometimes I get mad that certain things become popular over other things that were more original and did it better. It’s all arbitrary and rises and falls on the whims of so many things.

Anyway, in 2018 I’m just gonna like what I like and try to support the people creating it as best I can, and not get too miffed if I don’t like stuff that seems to be ultra-popular for the wrong reasons.

But yeah, I don’t think this film is so deserving of such ire. I think it’s just doing well and it’s in-vouge to always have somebody going “ACTUALLY!” from the sidelines and reminding you that Thing You Like isn’t really worthy of your like. why don’t you feel bad yet?

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like i dunno, instead of trashing stuff, go put that energy into making stuff that you like?

i feel like that’s all del toro is doing, and someone gave him a platform to do it, so cool! i think he’s just making stuff he likes and is happy with that.

i was actually really conflicted about making art for a long time. i like making creating “dumb” fantasy shit when I thought I should be making cool hipster graphic art stuff, or focus on life drawing and realism and art-school stuff. i tried really hard to avoid making the stuff i liked because I wanted to achieve some higher-standard, like to make art worthy of making or some shit.

now i just sculpt dryads and mermaids and monster girls cause that’s what i like to do. it’s not high art, but it brings me a lot more happiness (though understanding anatomy and having good fundamentals is still important to my work). it seems like a silly thing to be conflicted about, but it took me years of my life to make peace with this shit.

sorry this is more meta and kind of me being frustrated at our current culture of cinema sins/bad-nautured riffing/let me make a youtube video about why x is bad and get tons of #engagement

also i didn’t mean to turn this into a personal story. didn’t mean to derail!

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i’m not a huge fan of his movies, and i’m sure the critique of the shape of water itself is valid, but the larger argument kind of makes no sense to me, like i don’t even know where to begin, but in particular it seems weird to pick on del toro for this and not, say, colin treverrow. i mean the thing of ‘indie’ directors using their early features essentially as a way to get into the hollywood blockbuster game is certainly not limited to del toro, and he took a lot more time getting there than most. it’s not surprising at all that the features they would use to do this are not exactly avant-garde, despite their low budget origins.

talking about ‘the gentrification of genre cinema’ in the 21st century is hilarious to me. what the hell does that even mean?

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But, not to be totally negative, just went back and read his review of Inside Llewyn Davis and it’s really good. Makes me want to watch that movie again

I think pinning the “gentrification of genre cinema” on del Toro, a man who made a movie about giant robots fighting monsters because he likes Mazinger Z, and not, say, the fall of mid-major and minor studios after the 80s, the rise and profitability of home video and the wave of filmmakers that came from that, the establishment of a more organized fandom, Marvel Studios the apparent need for studios to turn everything into a cinematic universe because of Marvel Studios and the need to appeal to foreign audiences, where dumb genre stuff rules, is kind of… off the mark?

the idea of genre and B-films as a special cult ghetto and not part of the mainstream seemed like it died when we got post-MST3K and The Room has a movie made about how much of a disaster it is because there’s actually an audience to support it and Hollywood saw there was money in Random Property X (did you know the live-action TMNT (the first one) was the highest grossing independent movie for a while?).

like, there’s something to be said for your Peter Jacksons, guys who came up doing crazy genre shit then settled for whatever the hell The Lovely Bones was, but, again, del Toro is producing a second movie about giant anime robots, so, more power to him

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I really don’t understand the specific phrase “gentrification of genre cinema” but in general I feel like this critique is spot on and don’t feel the critic is doing too many look-at-me elitist acrobatics. His general gripe with del Toro is that he’s middlebrow and thematically dull, but he isn’t hateable specifically because of the enthusiasm that rye notes. Del Toro is at his best when he commits to his true genre tastes rather than trying to import them into Oscar-grab territory. I mean this Water movie sounds like someone making A Beautiful Mind with the aesthetic of Creature From The Black Lagoon, which, yeah, that sounds pretty bad.

But it’s not a “takedown” article, it’s about 50/50 praise and criticism. Or maybe like 40/60.

i mean isn’t “authentically Gothic” kind of a contradiction in terms in that what’s gothic is intrinsically kind of kitschy and excessive and theatrical. do the complaints about seriousness in the same piece mean that his films are inauthentically gothic in that they’re too authentic to be gothic?? is authenticity bad or not?

i guess i’m not against critiquing the weird mix of bland sincerity and “underdog” genre trappings (haven’t seen the movie, just thinking of a bunch of midbudget indiegames with this same mix) but it feels useless to critique that within the movie review format as if it’s a case of one isolated dude and his directorial choices as opposed to the world in which those choices are made, recieve funding and support, resonate with particular people for whatever reason etc. like music writing that acts as if the landscape of modern pop music is a consequence of the personal decisions of a handful of name stars, with the rest of the industry just vaguely tagging along. i think writing in this format can’t help but become a kind of dopey moralism in which whatever shmucks happen to be the “name” at the forefront of some particular tendency are blurred into being the personal avatars of it, setting the course the rest of us follow, and critiqued on that basis rather than looking at the actual dynamics between individual works and global tendencies and the way that comes about. like regardless of the crack at reassuring auteurism it’s hard not to get the idea from this piece that del toro is himself, personally, the one pushing a kind of sanitised genre vision into being a movement of the worldwide film market. “in a world already being run on dangerous fantasies, the last thing we need is another critical writer who acts as though the cultural ramifications of this stuff is purely a result of moral indiscretions on the part of Great Men”

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he doesn’t even diss on the creature just looking like Abe Sapien what the fuck

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i guess i’m not against critiquing the weird mix of bland sincerity and “underdog” genre trappings (haven’t seen the movie, just thinking of a bunch of midbudget indiegames with this same mix)

this is a digression but im curious what youre thinking of here

mm i mean i feel there’s a specific place in the vgames landscape by now for like, auteur-driven progressions upon some older title (like the original metroid or zelda, say) which at the same time combine a very obvious sense of tribute to the atmospheric qualities of those works with some element of broader meaning which might not in itself be very much but which is seen as redeeming the less-reflexive entertainment sensibilities of the originals. like axiom verge, hyper light drifter etc. not dissing those games in particular and i’ve made them myself but i think this is common enough and frequently popular enough a mixture that there could be more critical focus on what these are as things other than individual “labours of love”.

like, whatever the merits of it whenever a new metroidvania comes out which promises even more atmosphere and density and emotion than the original i think back to all those comicbook relaunches which try to retell the spiderman origin story while imparting it with the gravitas of a global myth, instead of just a oneshot anthology comic about a guy who dressed like a bug or something. desire to expunge the founding arbitrariness of pulp as it’s absorbed into mainstream culture.

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this is a very good post to have read today, thank you.

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“gentrification of genre cinema” is very dumb but it gave me a chuckle, i wish i’d come up with it

i don’t know, i think there’s some merit in dunking on del toro!

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