The world has had an entire year to accept that The Shape Of Water, a movie about a woman who falls in love with a fishman, is an unquestioned part of modern pop culture. It won Best Picture at the Oscars, after all, and so we no longer really question the dramatic power of a story centered on the most successful land/sea romance since The Little Mermaid.
Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones, on the other hand, just watched The Shape Of Water for the first time last night. As summarized by a series of commentary tweets from her viewing, a pair of fresh eyes can reveal how gross different aspects of the film really are.
For instance, Jones has thoughts on the eye-watering stench of the room where the movie’s romance begins.
She’s also puzzled as to how dire the dating scene must be that Twitter responded to her thoughts on the movie by saying that the glassy-eyed, web-fingered fishman is “hot.”
As these things go, Jones eventually arrives at the culmination of the movie’s romance and must share her thoughts. If you’ve been following along so far, it won’t come as a big surprise that she’s not super into it.
She takes issue, too, with Octavia Spencer’s relatively nonchalant reaction to learning that her co-worker “fucked that fishman” the next day.
Most importantly, though, she points out that peeling boiled eggs is not as easy as Hollywood magic would have you believe.
Jones also has a lot of thoughts about Michael Shannon’s disgusting in-movie hands, which start off simply unwashed but end up rotting horribly. They’re part of an entire thread that serves as a good reminder that even though The Shape Of Water’s premise may be familiar enough not to shock us anymore, remembering the nasty particulars of its story can zap us back to an earlier time—a time before its release, when we were all maybe a bit more suspicious of the romantic possibilities of the movie’s grand, fish-based romance. Jones reminds us that when you cut through the metaphor and just take the movie at face value, it’s an awful lot to process.
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