JD Hansel

Now You See Me 2 Review

July 15, 2016 by JD Hansel

Oh, shut up.

Why is it that everyone (encompassing the world’s audiences, the world’s critics, and the world’s John Olivers) is acting as though this movie is worthless? Well, I think there’s a certain psychological effect – I’ll call it “Sequel Blindness” – at work here. I remember being stunned by the reviews that Muppets Most Wanted received, because the movie was getting hammered for problems that were worse in its universally acclaimed predecessor: the overuse of fourth-wall jokes, the cliché plot, and the “kiddie” vibes. Somehow, the critics were willing to overlook these flaws in the first film because that was the Muppets’ comeback to cinema after a twelve-year hiatus, but once they were used to Muppets being in movies again, they could suddenly see all of the problems that they missed before, but they only saw them when they came to the franchise for a second time. This is the effect of Sequel Blindness: when a sequel makes critics rethink the franchise by bringing them back to it after time to reflect on the predecessor, allowing flaws in the franchise to become more noticeable, prompting them to erroneously attribute the flaws to the sequel. While the original Now You See Me got very mixed reviews, I still think this is what happened with Now You See Me 2.

Don’t get me wrong – the movie has its flaws and its fair share of scenes that make no sense, so I wouldn’t call it an excellent film. It is, however, a good film, that feels like it’s allowed to make no sense since the first one didn’t make sense. In the original Now You See Me, the “girl Horseman” walks into a bubble and starts floating around in it, which is followed by flashlights changing the numbers on pieces of paper in perfect synchronicity with the magicians’ act. This impossibility is presented because the filmmakers wanted to do a movie that showcased the tricks that might become possible to pull off at some point in the future, but when the sequel contains equally implausible feats, critics complain that there’s no point in asking how the tricks were done (even though that was never the point of the franchise).

I do wish the reviews would focus more on the ways in which this movie improves on its predecessor. It has more emotion and heart, and in a way that I actually think was done acceptably. It has better comedy – particularly in one of Daniel Radcliffe’s scenes that made me laugh hysterically. It has a better “girl Horseman” by far, and I’d happily watch Lizzy Caplan’s character in her own spin-off. So stop complaining about the movie. It’s stupid in many ways, I must admit, but it’s a fun kind of stupid, so just enjoy it.

The Birds Review

July 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

With High Anxiety being my favorite Mel Brooks film, one would expect that I would be well-versed in the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Quite contrarily, after watching Strangers on a Train for a film history class I took a few years ago, I was turned off by Hitchcock. I felt like whenever he was trying to have me waiting in suspense, I found myself just waiting. I put off watching his films for another day, simply because I didn’t feel like being bored, but I eventually felt like I may have been missing out on some important films. I decided to give him another go, trying out one of the films he’s best known for, if not the film he’s best known for, The Birds.

While I had a little bit of a hard time getting into it at first (since its pace is almost annoyingly slow at times), I was quickly impressed more than I thought I would be by the characters and dialogue. The conversations that the characters had when they weren’t dealing with a bird attack were actually very interesting for the most part, and it’s always good when character interactions are enough to keep me interested. Then, during the now-cliché panicked bar scene – that scene in all the disaster movies with the flustered witness of the attack, the bartender who tries to keep things under control, the skeptic who happens to be an expert on the subject, and the lunatic who believes it’s the end of the world – I was delighted by how Hitchcock had perfected this kind of set-up. The addition of the panicky mother made the scenes in the bar that much better.

Oh, and I suppose the scary elements are sort of an important part of this film, being its mark on the history of cinema and all, so I’ll briefly say that I liked them. The scary scenes weren’t exceptionally terrifying in the sense I’m used to, but maybe that’s a good thing. I despise jump scares, so it’s nice that Hitchcock did a good job at keeping me on the edge of my seat and fearing for the well-being of the characters I’d come to really like, all without relying on too many cheap gimmicks. While the ending somehow manages to be both gripping and underwhelming at the same time, making for a movie experience that feels a little awkward, I think that this picture is nicely crafted work of cinema that’s creative, fascinating, and supplies just the kind of experience it needs to to make it into the film history books.

Captain America: Civil War Review

June 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Well, okay, here’s one thing that no one else has said: I didn’t go into this movie taking a side. I did declare myself as Team Cap or Team Iron Man at any time, because I tend to be on Team Shut Up and Talk Like Civilized People, but I suppose that wouldn’t make for as interesting of a movie. It’s challenging for a movie like this to make the audience very understanding of both sides, and then turn around and make us want to see everyone we love in this franchise beating the snot out of each other. Remarkably, the movie not only accomplishes this daring feat, but also puts the characters on the wrong sides (without making the audience bat an eye at it). Allow me to briefly explain what I mean.

Please, consider the following: Captain America is the one who would ordinarily want to work with the government, especially since his roots are with the U. S. military, and Stark is the type of person who would never want to give control over himself to anyone else, since it would hurt his ego to be the U. N.’s puppet; and let’s not forget that Romanoff has weirdly decided to fight against Cap’s team, at least for the most part. In the end though, I think the most impressive thing about this is that, in the midst of all this drama, the movie is a heck of a lot of fun. It may be rather awkward at some points and tedious at others, but between the creative action sequences, the perfect cast, the smart dialogue, the surprising twists, the bizarre inclusion of Ant Man, and the spectacular Spider-Man, Civil War hits all the right spots. It’s one of Marvel’s finest films – quite possibly its best to date.

This Is the End Review

June 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

I watched this film on my last night as a teenager because it seemed like a fun way to mark the end of an era, but it ended up reminding me of the end of a different era. Once upon a time, people made outrageous comedy films that broke new grounds of absurd, all without relying on needless expletives and gratuitous violence to keep the viewers’ attention. Duck Soup, Airplane, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Young Frankenstein, Gremlins 2, Sleeper, Seven Day Week, The Naked Gun, Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Silent Movie, Beetlejuice, CLUE, and of course The Muppet Movie are among the classic comedies that have impressed me by relying on unfathomable absurdity, stupidity, and impossibility to keep the audience entertained, rather than jokes about coke and rape and Michael Cera’s CGI butt-cheeks. Sure, plenty of the movies I listed above have jokes that get rather dirty, and some of them have a bit of language from which I prefer to refrain, but these are secondary to the inherent toony lunacy of the worlds they present. The fact that this movie starts off very realistically, creating the sense that what we’re seeing is meant to be taken as our world, puts the filmmakers in a corner from the onset by forcing them to make light of a situation they made serious.

Think about this: the world ending isn’t a silly concept. The world ending at the hands of a singing plant is a silly concept, and the world ending from an attack by a giant boob is a silly concept, and even the world ending because the U.S. accidentally lets a bomb get dropped on Russia is a silly concept. What’s the difference? It starts with the fact that these are the kinds of ideas that leave people dying to know how in blazes the filmmakers handled them. They’re weird ideas, and they’re hard to wrap one’s mind around. However, I do think that the concept of the world ending because … it’s just the end of the world, in a biblical style, could lend itself to lots of great comedy. The primary problem standing in the way of this is what I mentioned above – the weed of realism is choking the fun out of cinema, and it breaks my heart. All that being said, even though this film is very much in the genre of “just scream profanities” comedy, it has its fair share of clever moments. At the very least I’m impressed with the filmmakers’ ability to get a feminist icon to take part in a scene that essentially boils down to a rape joke (the audio commentary says their goal was to “make it rapey; make that the joke”) which I find ethically unsettling, but still artistically impressive in a mildly evil sense. Given the nature of the beast, it is a surprise that the movie is as clever, creative, and respectable as it is, so I’d give it a passing grade.

The Outrage Review

June 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

In my last review, I was bothered by how the 2016 Jungle Book film had little to add to the original Disney classic, and how it did not hold up as well in comparison. Fortunately, not every remake is a bad one, and I’d like to briefly use a film I saw recently called The Outrage as and example of that. It wasn’t too long ago that I posted my review of Rashomon on this website, and shortly after that, I wrote a paper that compared that film to other movies using similar techniques. When I found out that there was an American remake of Rashomon that had notable actors in it (including a young William Shatner) I knew I had to see it. This remake of Rashomon is, of course, The Outrage, and it’s a very impressive film.

The Outrage must have been difficult to make because it had the difficult task of remaking a great film in such a way that new elements are added to interest the American market, but the elements that made the original film remain in tact. In my opinion, this movie really succeeded at that. I’ve never been one for Westerns, as I’ve explained before in previous reviews, but next to Blazing Saddles, I think this is the most I’ve liked a Western in my whole life. The change of genre didn’t hurt the story in the slightest, and even with scenes that seemed like they couldn’t be adapted to the Western genre successfully (such as the channeling of the dead husband through a medium), The Outrage manages to convert it to a Western equivalent smoothly. While the original film had some cool stylistic elements that the remake unfortunately did not keep in tact, like the way we never see or hear the judge in Kurosawa’s court scenes, the visual style of Outrage overall is just as good if not better, and some minor changes to the characters and story actually improved the film overall – particularly with the way the colonel dies. All in all, The Outrage is a great example of how to adapt without subtracting, and without letting the audience get bored with material they’ve seen before, which is why I would recommend watching both of these movies to anyone who enjoys comparing films even a fraction of as much as I do.

The Jungle Book (2016) Review

June 20, 2016 by JD Hansel

This is it – I’m stumped. I can understand how ambiguity and open ends are used in films to trick critics into thinking they’re deep. I can understand how commentary on important social issues like racism or sexism are used in films to trick critics into thinking their message justifies their storytelling. I can understand how many “oppositional” techniques designed purely to do what Hollywood normally wouldn’t do are used in films to trick critics into thinking they’re immensely creative, groundbreaking, and historic. What I cannot fathom is how a few needless remakes that do not offer the creative spins and twists on their stories required to justify their existence are making the critics out to be as gullible as a four-year-old.

The beauty of retelling an already established story lies within the creative approach one brings to the story that no one else would have seen in it. Ever After tells the story of “Cinderella” without using a conventional fairy godmother, instead relying on a brilliant historic figure to supply science as a substitute for magic. Muppet Christmas Carol integrates the prose of the book that most other film adaptations up to that point (if not all of them) omitted, which is already enough to set it apart from its predecessors, and that’s without mentioning that Bob Cratchit is played by a puppet frog. While the 1970s Carrie film by Brian de Palma seems to emphasize the fantasy in the story (from what I can gather from its surrealistic trailers), the remake (or arguably “additional adaptation of the novel”) is clearly very grounded in reality. The examples can go on endlessly.

Then we have Cinderella. I hope I never see Cinderella. From every clip I’ve seen from it thus far, and everything I’ve heard about its story, I can tell that it’s as needless as can be. This is followed by Jungle Book, and I could tell from the trailer that it had little to offer, and that I would never appreciate this movie as much as the original animated film. Furthermore, I also knew that this was Disney’s fifth movie based on this story, including the original animated film and its sequel, which makes it seem especially redundant. This is a level of stupidity I can’t handle. However, since I was advised by friends I trusted that the movie was worth seeing, I went to see it.

Having seen the original animated film, I had no good reason to see this rehash, and to those friends of mine who encouraged me to pay money to see it, I must respond with Fozzie’s great immortal line: “Shaaaaaame on you!” This movie isn’t terrible, but its best elements are mostly just the things Disney had already gotten right back in the 1960s. The visuals that I heard were so stunning offered me nothing, and they make me hesitate to call it a “live-action remake” instead of “the CGI version.” The fact that there are only two musical numbers in the film, the first of which doesn’t begin until about 50 minutes in, creates a jarring effect because they don’t feel like they fit in with the rest of the movie. To make matters worse, the best number on the soundtrack is Scarlett Johansson’s recording of “Trust in Me,” and I was beside myself with disappointment when I found it had been cut from the film. Again, this movie isn’t terrible, and I might have even said it was good had I not known its best elements were borrowed, not organic. Knowing what I know, however, it strikes me as a film that’s extremely and distinctly “fine, I guess” – it’s so-so soup. I am left shrugging and squinting, trying to figure out how in the world everyone has been tricked into thinking Disney is justified in charging admission for this.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a better remake than 2016’s Jungle Book, not because it’s a great movie, but because it looked at the tens upon dozens upon scores of adaptations of the story that had been done, and it left them behind to find an entirely new way of looking at the source material.

Now bring me some psychologists, some marketing strategists, and the Amazing Randi, because it shouldn’t be possible for critics and audiences to be duped on this scale.