J.D. Hansel

JD Hansel

Film Me Up Episode #1: Respectful Filmmaking

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Around Thanksgiving of 2014, we recorded this experiment, which we called “Film Me Up.”  The idea was to give us a platform for discussing our thoughts on film in a way others could see listen and respond, and the topic of this episode was whether or not it’s okay to disrespect the audience.  (Disrespecting, of course, means the same thing in film as it does in face-to-face communication: ignoring, excluding, stereotyping, deceiving, mocking, pandering, cheating, or harassing.)

Now, we’ve finally finished the video and are excited to share it with you!  Enjoy!

A Year of Tumblr Movie Reviews

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One year ago today, I finally decided to accept my own challenge.  After having finished film history course that required me to write movie reviews, I was looking for a good outlet for my thoughts on movies, and for a good place on social media to rate them.  I was bothered by the lack of freedom offered by Facebook in terms of movie ratings, and I have never been entirely satisfied with the Rotten Tomatoes website, but Tumblr seemed like a nice platform.  So, I challenged myself to review every movie I watched from then on, at least for a year, and now I don’t think I want to stop.

I think I’ve learned a good bit from doing this, and my writing is better for it.  Since my review of Play It Again, Sam, I’ve gotten a better sense for how to really put my finger on what exactly a movie did right or wrong, and why I responded the way I did.  I find it fascinating to look at how my writings grew to be more lengthy, particular, and expressive over time.  I discovered what my least-favorite movie was, and I could explain exactly why in depth.  I’ve been getting better and better at finding my style, and writing something worth reading.  I changed style during this adventure, trying different looks for the images I chose, and going through a long phase of strictly limiting which movies received the illustrious Star #4.5.  I reviewed over 60 films.

So, what phase comes next?  Well, from now on, I’m doing the reviews on JDHansel.com.  I think this keeps things more professional, and gives me all the freedoms of WordPress, plus a higher chance of getting shared around the web.  I also wish to separate my movie-reviewing from the promotion of my Muppet Hub content.  I want to treat Tumblr as a way to share my work, rather than a place to officially present it.  It makes more sense to me.  (Hopefully I’ll get the Tumblr reviews moved over to this website as posts soon.)

I also want to start a new series of reviews called “Upon Further Consideration,” or at least that’s the working title, which would essentially be my way of reviewing movies I’ve already seen before.  No, I would not review every movie I’ve ever seen.  Rather, when I feel like talking about a movie I watched before I started doing Tumblr movie reviews, or even re-evaluating a movie I’ve already reviewed, this would be the form my thoughts take.  It would be much like my regular movie reviews, but nothing about them would be mandatory – even a star rating.  This is the new direction I plan to take soon, and hopefully there will be more great movie reviews to come in the future.

Inside Out Review

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(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

PureFlix is – and I expect always shall be – my archenemy, but Pixar sure does come close.

Pixar seems to exist only to irk me specifically more than anyone else on the planet, and it has a few tricks for doing this that serve as “the Pixar old standbys.” To me, a movie that tries to tug on the heartstrings too soon is like a guy who gropes a woman’s bum in the first minute of a blind date.  It is blatantly violating, and yet Pixar gets away with it constantly.   Both Pixar and Disney have become notorious for killing off characters seemingly solely because they don’t know how else to hold our attention, or they think we’ll feel unsatisfied with our Disney experience if we don’t meet a certain tear quota.  I think it is largely because of Pixar that killing off a character in a children’s movie is no longer an act of courage, but ironically of cowardice, fearing that the audience cannot be emotionally moved enough by the characters without a death involved.  They also have one of the fundamental principles of storytelling backwards: anyone who’s taken a high-school-level class in journalism ought to know that empathy with a character is used to make the audience care about a situation, so to use a situation to try to make people empathize with a character is taking the horns by the bull.  Yet, somehow, projects under Lasseter’s thumb frequently use emotional, tragic circumstances in an attempt to make us care about a character – in lieu of simply writing a character that’s interesting from the get-go regardless of circumstances.

Above all, Pixar is notorious for an awe of “The Aw.”  “The Aw” can refer to either the sound a canned sitcom audience makes when a character is sad, or the sound that a stereotypical (or perhaps typical) preteen girl makes when brought joy by immense cuteness and sentimentality.  As a proud skeptical cynic, I find that watching Pixar with a crowd is comparable to being a punk rocker at a Carpenters concert – the urge to puke is overpowering.  Sometimes watching Pixar makes me feel more like being in a very strict religious school, except the intense dogma has been replaced with intense sappiness that is inflicted upon me.  Now, the studio that lives to make us cry – a prime directive I find mildly immoral and satanic – has the audacity to make a film about the importance of sadness.

So why in the name of Bing Bong do I love this movie?

Well, it was pleasant, impressive, and simply fun in every way from start to finish, and actually seemed to be aimed right at me for a change.  The film is the most imaginative commentary on the human mind I have ever seen, only closely followed by Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex.  As a big believer in the notion that the replacement of practical effects, puppetry, hand-drawn animation, and painted sets with CGI has largely been to the detriment of film, and I do think the film could have benefited from being a 2D or puppet film instead.  I must recognize, however, that this is probably the best all-CGI film I’ve seen in terms of visuals, so it’s certainly on par with The Lego Movie in at least one regard.  The way the human mind is imagined in this film is just so clever that one wants to spend forever wandering about this world, much like in The Wizard of Oz.

I also consider Inside Out to be Oz-like in terms of story structure, and unlike some films, this pulls off an Oz storyline without seeming weak or unoriginal for a second.  I think every screenwriter should study Inside Out as an example of how to write a nearly perfect screenplay.  It’s a very interesting premise to begin with, and the execution of the idea satisfies by exploring all of the areas of the mind that one would hope to see explored.  Pixar’s take on dreams was spot on, it’s take on memories was clever, and its joke about facts and opinions was absolutely brilliant.  Somehow this script is mostly a series of wonderfully clever jokes, but they never get in the way of the plot.  The characters were all delightful, and the casting was superb. I liked essentially every character in this movie – even Sadness.

This, of course, leads to my thoughts on both the portrayal of Sadness, and the use of sadness.  The role of Sadness essentially seems to be adding weight and significance to important people, places, and things in our lives by revealing how painful it would be to lose them.  This is just a modification of the age-old contrast excuse: bad must exist in order for good to have meaning.  Pardon me for getting philosophical, but I’m not a fan of this argument since knowledge of bad would actually be all that is required for good to have meaning, and no actual, existent bad is necessary in any form.  This means that sadness is still an unnecessary emotion if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge, understanding, perspective, and good reasoning. While Inside Out’s solution to the Sadness problem is not perfect, I do think it is acceptable, but I personally would have emphasized the important role sadness has in empathy.  This brings us to Bing Bong.

Somehow they found a way to incorporate death, and it’s in the most bizarre way, especially when one considers that people can recollect things that they’ve long forgotten, so a mere mention of Bing Bong from Riley’s mom could resurrect him.  Still, the decision to kill of Bing Bong is an odd one simply because it’s not really necessary, which just makes it feel like an excuse to get the audience crying. I suppose that he was, by the end of the movie, just dead weight, but he could have stuck around.  The cleverness of using his wagon to get back up over the Cliffs of Insanity made that scene powerful and impressive enough as it was, and the wagon had no need to stall.  This is, however, nitpicking.

Amazingly, nitpicking is all I can do to criticize it. This comes so amazingly close to the perfect screenplay that I am just as impressed as I’d hoped I would be.  I am so happy that Pixar finally made a hilarious, charming, and imaginative movie that’s right up my alley.  At last I can congratulate Lassiter, Docter, and the rest of the Pixar team for a job well done.

62 Inside Out

A Night at the Roxbury Review

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I thought it would be interesting to follow up my review of Blues Brothers with a review of another SNL spin-off, so I chose Roxbury since I enjoy the old “What Is Love” sketch. I went into the film expecting a weak, virtually plotless story about detestable characters, and perhaps it was my low expectations that allowed me to kind of enjoy the film.  I could tell I was watching no masterpiece, but it was surprisingly easier to watch than Blues Brothers.  Why?  It was simple.

I’m all for movies that get a bit complex in terms of story structure and details, such asCLUE in terms of a detailed screenplay or Pulp Fiction in terms of a unique story structure.  The problems occur when a movie is more wrapped up in details and complexity than it is in showing/telling the plot.  The Dark Crystal suffers from this, although I still respect it deeply, and I wonder if Blues Brothers is in a similar category.  Blues Brothers is hard to follow only because it seems to forget where it’s going, and there is something unsettling about following an unfocused movie. After all, a filmmaker is, to a large extent, the tour guide through an unknown world, and it’s a little disrespectful to the tour group to wander about aimlessly instead of focusing on what the tourists came to see.  (I am unwavering in my conviction that audiences don’t go to theaters to see films, but rather to experience stories, so I naturally propose that the story ought to be the focus of nearly every movie.)

While I do not mean for this to become another review of Blues Brothers, I think the comparison is important to me because of how much easier it was to watch Roxbury, if only because it was more focused.  I know on an intellectual level that Roxbury is a weaker film, but it felt easier to watch, and I think that’s where simplicity and focus come into play.  It’s pretty clear from near the beginning that the story is simply two idiots trying to get into a nightclub, and I suppose Blues Brothers has a story with about the same simplicity.  The difference is that Roxbury is only about 80 minutes long, whereas Blues Brothers, which could have been the same length, is over two hours long.  Roxbury was kind enough to get to its point … the problem is, it doesn’t have much of a point.

It’s severely lacking in humor, and some critics have gone as far as to say that the film only has one joke: the protagonists are idiots. I contest, as I think the butt-touching gag was fun, but it’s not good when the best joke in the film is butt-touching.  I didn’t hate the protagonists as much as I thought I would since there seems to be some kind of innocence about them.  They clearly just never grew out of middle school, and they very much reminded me of my younger self, so I was able to empathize with the characters.  I honestly was routing for them, wondering how the story and conflicts would all be resolved, which I suppose means it didn’t fail as a movie.  It just failed as a comedy, and certainly did not reach the heights of the comedy films I most enjoy.  I certainly don’t hate the film, since it is basically harmless; I just think it’s best for the viewer to be doing something else to keep his/her mind busy while it’s on, lest the mind be weakened by the stupid.

61 A Night at the Roxbury

The Blues Brothers Review

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I must confess that I’m a little disappointed in this one. Having heard such great things about it for so long, I was hoping for a very exciting comedy, but instead got a strangely-paced artsy musical.  I enjoy musicals a lot, so I had a good time during the musical sequences, but the rest of the film felt kind of pointless.  The story may not actually be as weak as it felt to me personally – it might just not be my kind of story – but something about the pace of the thing is certainly off, and there’s something else missing that kept the story from being interesting.  Unfortunately, I can’t put my finger on what that missing element is.

I know I like the actors’ performances, and the characters were fine.  The music was good, but the humor was lacking.  I’m okay with a movie that’s lacking in humor, so long as it has good drama, like in The Graduate.  I really love a great soundtrack, which is what makes it difficult for me to be as hard on this film as I think I ought.  What my problem boils down to is the fact that I don’t believe a film should be considered great purely on the grounds of its visuals or music if the story is weak.  (I even go so far as to argue with the saying that “film is a visual medium” – I say it’s a storytelling medium, and if the particular story being told requires the audio to lead and the visuals to follow, so be it.)  So, am I willing to own up to my claims and condemn the film of mediocrity in spite of its soundtrack?

Well, the music isn’t the only thing I like about it. There’s a really neat atmosphere that I think is unique to the film, and Landis adds a special vibe somehow that creates a very “bluesy” feeling.  Landis also shows off his Muppet fandom with a part played by Frank Oz, and a heck of a lot of Muppet merch in one scene, which I just adore.  There is ample cleverness throughout in both the circumstances that arise and the way they’re handled, but I still get too much of a Pee Wee’s Big Adventure feeling from the writing.  The fun cameos by great performers reminded me very much of my favorite movie, The Muppet Movie, which made this movie even more fascinating.  The film really impressed me with its visuals, as I think it’s a very, very well-shot film, so I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in cinematography.

Yes, there is a lot to like about it, but it somehow just didn’t quite grab me.  (This may have something to do with the fact that, from what I’ve read, Aykroyd had written an unconventional, dysfunctional script that had to be reworked by Landis.)  In the end, it was a movie I felt like I could just stop watching midway without missing much.  Finishing it felt like a chore.  That’s not a good sign.  So, in spite of all its strengths, I can’t give this the high rating other critics/historians do because it fails at simply holding my attention.

60 Blues Brothers

This Is Spinal Tap Review

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I don’t review documentaries.  I just wouldn’t know how.  Generally speaking, the world of film production can be split into two career paths: documentary and narrative.  The difference is actually pretty big since it is the role of the narrative filmmaker to tell a cohesive narrative story with a plot, whereas the documentary filmmaker has to find an interesting way to document history, which generally includes a story of sorts.  Because of this, a documentary can be done in many different ways, and most of them are valid, just as long as the information being conveyed is accurate and/or expressed effectively.  To me, that makes a documentary harder to judge.  Add this to the fact that the writers have limited control over the story since it’s based on reality, and the fact that a lot of documentaries are made for television (while I only do theatrical releases), and it should be pretty clear why I can’t bring myself to review the docs I watch.

Then there’s This Is Spinal Tap, which is a scripted story with fictional characters, making it more like a narrative, but it’s done in a documentary style.  Those in the know refer to this as a mockumentary, although this film calls itself a “rockumentary” because it concerns the lives of members of a hard rock group in the 1980s.  There’s actually very little story, and it seems more like a compilation of SNL-like sketches than a real movie, but that’s where the documentary style really helps.  When I watch a documentary – especially one that’s largely just following musicians around – I don’t expect plot.  I just expect to learn about interesting characters, which is what this film provides.

One of the rules I have for movies is that it should be difficult to watch broken up over a span of days.  Ideally, I should hate to pause the movie for a second (if I’m seeing it first viewing).  If I wouldn’t mind pausing it to go watch something else, coming back to the film to watch the rest the following week, that’s usually a sign that the story isn’t right.  This film, which I felt fine with pausing, can get away with it because it’s simply understood that the story isn’t the point – the only goal is to get laughs. Thankfully, the film meets that goal, although I did not laugh as much as I wanted to.  Instead of laughter of various degrees throughout the film, I actually had a few really big laughs during specific, spaced out parts of the film. Most of the times when I was not getting a good laugh felt like filler, but I may have just been missing the parody of other music documentaries at the time.  Either way, this mockumentary is a good time, and I highly recommend it to fans of documentaries, rock music history, or comedy in general.

59 This Is Spinal Tap