Finally watched The Shape of Water. I didn't think it was mind-blowing or anything like some people made it out to be, but I liked it, for the most part. Del Toro gets a little excessively weird/artsy sometimes (in general, not just this), and stuff like Shannon plowing his wife and the fantasy song sequence felt superfluous, but it's basically an adult fairy tale infused with Del Toro writing a love letter to old-school movie monsters (Creature from the Black Lagoon, obviously) and film in general (the song and dance number, Elisa's apartment right above a theater, etc.), and uses the creature as the most extreme example of an overall sympathy for the marginalized and "other" (Elisa being mute, Zelda black, Giles gay, etc., while the clean-cut, "respectable" WASP military man Strickland is the real "monster"). The smuggling him out and then releasing him was when **** really got going, like a darker ET (if ET and Eliot were banging). Plus Michael Shannon hasn't been this Full Shannon since Premium Rush, and that's always a plus.