cliftonofun

Nothing like getting ready for Thanksgiving with a film about the blurred lines between families, performance, and manipulation. Stellan, could you share that booze, actually?

The house at the center of this film probably should have crumbled beneath all its trauma and metaphors, but it manages to be as resilient as the family and the film. The themes are common; the execution is anything but. If you can manage to watch without getting emotional, kudos.

This movie is what happens if Chekhov's gun goes off in the first act instead and then everybody spends the rest of the play saying, "Remember when that gun went off?"

Seriously, though, those first 40 minutes? Remember when that gun went off?

I really wish things wouldn't have gone off the rails when we zoomed in on the Oval Office, but I suppose that isn't all that surprising these days.

Watching this film reminded me of watching Peter Jackson's King Kong: A filmmaker climbs to the absolute pinnacle of their craft, and then decides the time has finally arrived to adapt the story that inspired them in the first place. And in both cases I walked away going, "I'm happy for you?" Neither is bad, but neither feels all that necessary either. Del Toro invests so many gorgeous scenes and shots (along with some bad CGI) in service of dialogue that feels familiar at best and stale at worst. Still, I couldn't look away. With the masters (and GDT absolutely qualifies), you rarely can.