J.D. Hansel

Film Criticism

Anchorman 2 Review

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I oddly don’t know what to say about this film.  Parts of it were funny, and nearly all of it was strangely fun, although I’m generally not a fan of the brand of humor Ferrell and Carrell tend to do.  In the first Anchorman movie, there was just something about the film’s “devil may care” attitude with doing whatever felt fun, no matter how little sense it made, that gave it a bizarre charm; there is still some of that present in this one.  The simple problem is that the movie has a classic case of “sequelitis”: it can’t emulate its predecessor without rehashing old material, and it can’t do anything new without diverging from whatever worked well for the first film.  This “sequelitis” really makes this a much weaker movie – although the first wasn’t exactly the greatest comedy of all time – but I still basically enjoyed watching it.  I knew going in that I wasn’t about to see anything brilliant, so when something legitimately clever and entertaining happened, I experienced the benefits of living by Great Grandpa Hansel’s old mantra: “Expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.”  In some ways Anchorman 2 may be underwhelming, and sometimes it feels like the whole thing is forced, but the characters and story are generally fascinating enough to keep me invested, so I’m satisfied.

73 Anchorman 2

Hotel Transylvania Review

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This is the first of a few films I’m going to review this month that are at the very least passable on the grounds that, in spite of their clichés and shortcomings, they unfailingly hold a grip on my enjoyment simply by being so strangely interesting.  Hotel Transylvania is, by all means, a stereotypical CG animated film, with shameless repetition of embarrassing tropes, as I can easily explain by summing up the film.  An overprotective widowed father (see Finding Nemo) whose “innocently villainous” demeanor makes him a bizarre parental figure (see Despicable Me) lives in a world populated with monsters (see Monsters Inc.) and runs a hotel to provide solitude the legendary figures (the film’s primary, if not only, defining feature) in order to protect his daughter from the dangers of the outside world (see Tangled).  The stupid teenage protagonist gets a crush on the girl who’s voiced by a pop star (see The Lorax) and finds that she wants her freedom (see Brave), and now the protagonist has to avoid being caught for deceiving everyone (see A Bug’s Life) while the couple hopes they can fulfill her dreams of going to paradise (see Up).  This isn’t even mentioning the fact that it ends in a random musical number set to a pop song, making it even more reminiscent of Despicable Me, or the running gag concerning an awkward old lady doing something inappropriate while uttering a catchphrase with an odd accent, which in this case is the monster who eats things and says, “I dint do that,” but it’s basically “bad kitty” from Madagascar.

While the whole film feels too familiar, these are merely the ugly little details that fill the gaps between the beautiful experiences of seeing such great, strong characters trying to figure out how to handle the protagonist’s incredibly difficult situation whilst navigating through this frighteningly inventive world.  The way that the characters – and other magical/mythical elements – are consistently used in ways I never would have considered.  The movie is silly, smart, and surprising, which makes it a good family movie to share with anyone.  I can almost forgive the horrendous cliché of the part when the loud party music comes to a halt just as someone is yelling something personal to someone else, creating a very “CG family film” scene that’s both awkward and sad.  That being said, the only reason why that scene alone hasn’t earned this film a terrible rating from me is this: I already miss the film’s delightful characters, and I’m eager to join them again when the sequel arrives.

72 Hotel Transylvania

The National Treasure series: Upon Further Consideration…

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(MINOR SPOILERS)

I’d always thought of the National Treasure series as a franchise that was decent for what it was, but wasn’t anything all that special. For this reason, I was surprised to find out that the screenwriters behind it were Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, whose website I’ve relied on greatly to learn about screenwriting. So, when my mother wanted to watch the series during a long car ride, I was interested in giving them another chance to see if they were any better than I remembered. I was not disappointed.

The first film is very cleverly written, and much like The Road to El Dorado (from the same screenwriters) it is very much a “correct” screenplay. It handles everything exactly the way it’s supposed to be handled, constantly upping the stakes and setting up solutions that the audience won’t see coming. I was very impressed not just by the knowledge of history and conspiracy theories National Treasure displays, but in how they were interwoven with a smart, original, interesting story. The movie actually makes good use of Nicolas Cage, so his performance almost seems believably human. All in all, the movie just works well, and while it may be a tiny bit cliché here and there, it’s still a good one for any screenwriter to study.

The second film was sadly weaker, which is to be expected since Rossio and Elliot were not quite as involved. It felt a little forced and redundant, in spite of the fact that it had much of the cleverness and humor of the first. Part of the problem is that the villain isn’t as strong or believable, which is a necessity in a movie like this, if it needed a villain at all (although I’m not sure it did). Still, it’s certainly not a bad film, and it contains some of the most interesting and memorable moments in the franchise – particularly when they all have to balance each other’s weight to avoid falling off the trap inside Mount Rushmore. In the end, I’m glad this sequel was made, and I’m happy to say that I’m a bigger fan of the franchise than I thought.

The Ten Commandments (1956) Review

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It’s hard to keep a long movie interesting.  After all, some movies that are only 90 minutes long struggle to hold my attention, so when a movie goes over two and a half hours, that’s risky.  (It is, however, understandable in many cases, because the length must be determined by what the story requires.)  While I’ve never been able to make it all the way through any of the Lord of the Rings movies, I did enjoy the 1996 Hamlet, which has a running time of 242 minutes – about four hours.   Little did I know when I picked up The Ten Commandments that it was almost as long, or that the experience I had yet to face would take days to complete.

Was it worth sitting through the whole thing?  Yes.  Unlike some movies I know, this film actually filled its long running time with many interesting characters expressing very intriguing drama, so it’s easy to get through a lot of the film in one sitting.  Based on what I knew of DeMille’s work before I watched the film, I was already expecting the gorgeous visuals to keep my eyes glued to the screen, but I had no idea that my ears would be enticed as well by the absolutely excellent dialogue throughout.  This is the kind of writing that inspires me.  (I should mention that my ears were also listening for the epic score by Elmer Bernstein.)

So, in the end, while I’m not sure the story itself is my kind of story, and the film may suffer a little from a lack of focus, it is an excellent masterpiece that I cannot help but respect.  While I think of Egypt and the dessert to be visually bland settings for a movie (since I like colorful, theatrical visuals, rather than tan, brown, or sandy visuals) this movie has some of the best and most cinematic shots I have ever seen.  It finds a way to make a nearly-four-hour biography into a dramatic experience that I could never forget.

70 The Ten Commandments (1956)

Zoolander Review

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It’s a happy coincidence that I happened to come across Zoolander right around the time that the news of the sequel started spreading, and I’m hopeful that the coincidence could hand me an extra slice of attention for this review.  What’s important for that to work, however, is that I have something new and interesting to say about this film.  The problem is that I oddly have very little to say about it.  It’s simple, passable, and done correctly.

If I may be honest, I generally don’t go for the brand(s) of humor developed by Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, and Owen Wilson, which generally involve(s) idiots shouting, or just over-the-top awkwardness.  This film, however, seems to play its cards right, and it knows how to make a “correct” film.  Its jokes are based on the interactions of its strong characters, with very appropriate cameos, and its moron protagonists are innocent enough to be likable.  The biggest laugh for me is the nod to 2001, which is strangely perfect.  The overall plot is clever, the visuals are appealing, and the soundtrack is a delight.  While I may have my little gripes about a couple of things I’d have done differently, I can’t dis a film that makes the smart choices and strives to be “technically correct,” even if it has a deliberately incorrect comedy style.

I must wonder, however, if it could have been better had it worked out a clever way to be successfully incorrect.  Perhaps this is what’s required for a good movie to be more than just a good movie.

69 Zoolander

Paper Towns Review

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Alright, I think it’s time for us to have “the talk.”

As a proud cinema snob, this is tough for me to talk about openly, but we need to discuss the true implications of “the C word” – cliché.  We critics have always assumed that it’s a Cinema Sin for a story to be cliché and/or stereotypical.  Obviously, a film would ideally be entirely original, and would set itself apart from even its best imitators.  On the other hand, while it might be disheartening to think that one of our favorite critiques to use against the mediocre could be a moot point, we may have to admit that rejecting the unoriginal can cheat a film that would be absolutely brilliant… had it only come out a few years earlier.  Let’s really think about this: can an otherwise good movie be condemned solely for its inappropriate chronological placement?

Sometimes we do appreciate a film that reuses old ideas in better ways, and I think Doug and Rob Walker have extinguished Inside Out criticisms definitively on multiple occasions.  The problem arises when a story is pleasant enough to be enjoyable, but it uses a stereotypical formula for its genre – without adding enough originality or twists to give it significance.  For the “based on a book all the teenage girls and their mothers have read” genre, there is a trick to dodge this, namely built-in fill-in-the-blanks for unique character details, but is that enough to keep the audience from feeling like they’re watching the genre rather than a movie?  In the case of Paper Towns, that is exactly the problem, and to drive the point home, I counted the number of clichés responsible for this effect that appear throughout the film.

It’s thirty five.  That is scary.

To clarify the kind of clichés I’m talking about, I will further explain the concept of built-in fill-in-the-blanks.  Please refer to the now infamous Tumblr post entitled “John Green’s writing process” by clicking here.  This writing style, which seems rather common today, uses a Mad Lib formula to add bizarre little details and fun idiosyncrasies to each character, usually consisting of a curious mismatched adjective/noun pairing.  This adds flavor to the story, but it can quickly grow stale, because one can only see so many combinations in the vein of Patrick’s cancerous balls in TFioS or Margo’s random capitalization in Paper Towns before it’s all the same.  The most prominent combo of this nature in the film is the “black Santas,” which sounds so, so, so much like it comes from a Mad Lib that I’m starting to think John Green really does employ a dartboard in his writing process.

That being said, I’m limited in the extent to which I can criticize the film due to the other tricky dilemma that makes critics uncomfortable – adaptations have to stick to their source material, for better or for worse.  Any problems I have with the film from a writing standpoint can really only take up about half of my review, and my problem with clichés should take up only a small portion of that, because I really don’t like shaming a film purely for its similarity to others in its genre (especially since the book came out a few years before all these clichés became so established).  So, I guess the real question to ask about this movie is: did I have a good time experiencing it?  I’d say I did.  It’s a pleasant film that never fails to entertain with its lovable cast (particularly Jaz Sinclair, whose charm will take her far, I suspect) and its interesting plot, which was paced and stylized appropriately.  The dynamic of the characters, particularly during the Pokémon scene, is enough to make the film quite pleasant to watch, and it leaves me wanting more… unless maybe I wanted more because the ending was anticlimactic, but let’s not think about that.

68 Paper Towns