David Butler
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The Shape of Water (2017)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced by The Little Colonel (1935)
Visuals
There is one such astonishing moment: a glitzy 1930s-style black-and-white musical reverie featuring Elisa and the merman dancing arm-in-arm that, like the classic movies Giles watches on TV—including a The Little Colonel clip featuring another mismatched but harmonious pair, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Shirley Temple—expresses The Shape of Water ’s old-Hollywood amour.
But with The Shape Of Water , he transmits obsession with his chosen medium both implicitly and explicitly, concocting a self-consciously old-fashioned curiosity that also pauses occasionally to marvel at a snippet of real Golden Age movie magic, like Bill Robinson dancing down the stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel .
The first five minutes is a spot the reference game for any cinephile, from Cleopatra , to The Little Colonel , to Beauty and the Beast , to The Red Shoes .
We catch glimpses of various movies and TV shows, including The Little Colonel , Coney Island , and Mister Ed —the last one particularly fitting, given the talking animal at its center.
On TV, we see Shirley Temple dancing in The Little Colonel (1935) and Betty Grable sashaying with a costumed pantomime horse in Coney Island (1943).
You might think that advances in technology might have improved on the conversing camels from 1942's Road to Morocco and those were deliberately cartoonish but you'll find no evidence of progress here.
It centers on a year in the doomed romance between a wannabe actress named Mia (Emma Stone), demoted to waiting tables in the Warner Brothers coffee shop (a gimmick stolen from Doris Day in It’s a Great Feeling) and an aspiring jazz pianist named Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), miserably relegated to playing Christmas carols in a Hollywood watering hole run by a mean-spirited boss who is no music lover (J.
It’s the good old American yarn (Road to Morocco, Sabrina, The Philadelphia Story) of a beautiful girl in the predicament of two beautiful boys…