Quote from: SM on Oct 02, 2018, 11:24:57 AM
After two good but not great Hellboys and the average Pacific Rim - I find Del Toro a bit overrated. Granted I haven't seen Shape of Water so perhaps that was an improvement.
There is two del Toro's. One that is serious, one that is silly and wants to eat candy on the beach. When he adapts or makes a movie about a silly genre,or property, yeah it's going to be candy on the beach del Toro. It can be obnoxious. At the same time when he is actually serious, he is an incredibly potent director.
Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water are two of those movies, Pan's Labryinth in particular is one of my favorite movies. It handles the Spanish Civil War, the escapism of a young girl in a fascist state, and ultimately her demise. Child death is nothing to take lightly. But it feels appropriate. It's one of the few films that shows the Spanish nationalists were a bunch of bastards, and the libertines, anarchists, and socialists, were actually not vile evil murderous monstrous communists like you would expect the Hollywood bottom line to represent them as.
I like one of del Toro's quotes, I could be wrong, and I believe it was from his twitter, it went something like "Movie monsters are not there to be thrown to the side and shot at, they're the stars of the movie. If you don't make sure that every little scale or hair or blemish is there, you're doing your audience a disservice, nobody wants to come to a movie that's just about shooting monsters." Now I butchered the quote because I can't find it, but it was something along those lines. You have to understand that he rarely gets work, it's the sillier projects that get greenlit more often because, well, studios think they'll line the seats more. But he is a very talented film maker, and that quote is really just right there in the problems of the Alien prequels. Especially Covenant.
I was just throwing it as a joke, but he respects horror too much for it to be one of his more studio friendly movies, he wouldn't do it otherwise. He would 100% nail a Carlos Huante drawing straight from the screen to the set without much CGI. Which is a weakness of Ridley Scott really, he relies far too much on realism. The Big Chap was hardly realistic looking, the end proved it. But it's the way it moved and the way it was cut sold it. We're a lot farther now than we were in 1978, and del Toro is right when he says that people come to monster movies to enjoy the monster.
I was really just joking about the idea, but given it's a movie he's passionate and serious about, I'm fairly sure it would be better than what we've got.
