I said this about Lady Bird too but I really mean it here: I didn’t expect to like this movie this much. I think that every story has already been told so every new story is like a trick being pulled on the audience and if the teller is skilled enough, the story will work. This was fantastical romance that could have been farcical but it pulled me in.

I really appreciated how the film made 1960’s Baltimore feel like Paris. (I think it was all filmed on location in Toronto.)

Richard Jenkins gets put on the national treasure list (along with Alison Janney and Laurie Metcalf).

There’s a scene where Elisa (Sally Hawkins) signs to Giles (Richard Jenkins) telling him to see her and say what she’s signing out loud. I haven’t seen Frances McDormand yet in Three Billboards but I would have given Hawkins the Academy Award right there.

Michael Stuhlbarg is like the secret ingredient for an Oscar nominated movie.

The Russians, man. They’ve been trying to get us for a while now, ever since the space race.

Michael Shannon will haunt my dreams. Good Lord, what is he like in real life?

There’s a dance sequence in this movie. It’s black and white between Elisa and the amphibian man. I watched it thinking, my God, how is this working? In any other movie I would be laughing at how stupid this is but it was really beautiful.

I was so impressed with myself for spotting the use of the color green throughout the movie but they actually talk about it several times, so, I guess spotting it wasn’t that impressive. The only time Elisa wears red is after she and the amphibian man have sex(?). And when Strickland drags Dimitri by a hole in his mouth, it’s like a hook in the mouth of a fish. See? I get film.

When I was working at Comedy Central, Octavia Spencer was starring in this improvised show called Halfway Home about some people living in a halfway house. She was really funny but do you remember that show? Exactly. Now she’s putting in Academy Award caliber performances in movies. I don’t really have a point here other than she’s awesome and good for her.

There’s something about watching period pieces with overt racism in them. It’s as if the movie is saying look at how racist things used to be, which is fine, but I’m not really okay with the implied sentiment of that which is, we know better now. It’s a way for the audience to pat themselves on the back for being enlightened but I don’t really think we deserve it.

There was some commentary on the American Dream in this movie with its darkness lurking beneath the surface of Richard Strickland’s (Michael Shannon) seemingly perfect home life with his two children, perfect wife, and brand new teal Cadillac. This was the only part of the movie that felt a little trite to me. We must be the only country that does that. We both wholeheartedly believe in our own mythology of the American Dream while simultaneously believing that it’s a myth.

“Life is just the shipwreck of our plans.”