J.D. Hansel

Art Film

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Review

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People who have an obsessive passion for and enjoyment of Terry Gilliam films – or at least his more intense and bizarre creations like Time Bandits and Brazil – scare me.   Guillermo del Toro, for example, was overjoyed to see his young daughter giggle with delight at the end of Time Bandits when (spoiler alert) the young protagonist’s parents explode.  He’s happy that she found it funny that the boy’s parents died.  It’s disgusting, but it’s all part of Gilliam – he has a sense of humor that goes for extreme intensity even if it crosses ethical lines, and some film enthusiasts really go for that.  These films are, by and large, not too violent, but it’s often the merciless infliction of wild images and editing onto the audience mixed with the heartless infliction of “comedy without relief” onto the poor characters that makes these films so difficult for some to watch.  Interestingly, upon watching Brazil again many years later for an audio commentary track, Gilliam found he wasn’t sure he liked the film very much because of how brutal its comedy and story were, but it is precisely the fact that the film is too much to handle in one sitting that draws some filmmakers to it.

Edgar Wright is one of the filmmakers who absolutely adores Brazil, and I think it really shows in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the most relentless movie ever made.  It never stops.  It just keeps blasting the viewer with more unconventional and experimental insanity that is incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around, all while retaining a formulaic story that’s perfectly easy to follow.  The only way I was able to survive the movie was by taking breaks – I had to get up and walk to another room, or talk about what I’d just experienced with the friend of mine who so kindly subjected me to this film.  I think I also could have used a snack break, and maybe a few naps.  Technically, the film shouldn’t even be that hard to swallow: it’s not gory, it’s not scary, it’s not intensely dramatic (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy), it’s not addressing sensitive topics, it’s not making me feel “naked” the way The Graduate does, and it’s not flashing wild lights and vivid colors at me like that one irritating Canadian film.  It’s simply difficult to process.

What makes it difficult is the unhinged creativity.  There are no clear rules in this movie.  When a man shows up with sexy demon hipsters singing a musical number as he flies around, you have to accept it, even though there is no setup for it.  Honestly, the movie is so strange that, when one character’s ability to read minds is explained by the fact that he’s a vegan, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.”  Relatively, that does make sense.  It’s the best explanation you’ll get for anything in the movie.  The Hollywood-trained mind isn’t ready for this.

What the film shares with Terry Gilliam is an unsettling contentment with the awkwardly terrifying conditions of its reality.  There’s something very disturbing about seeing nobody react appropriately to the death of a boy’s parents – even if they are really bad parents – and watching old men in an office giddily force their bosses to walk off a blank from a skyscraper to fall to their whimsical deaths.  When something that should alarm people is met with the wrong response, it creates an effect that just feels wrong on a moral level, and that’s all over this film.  Right from the first fight scene, the way that other characters react to the brutality of what they’re witnessing feels off – it feels inhuman – and this makes the film tough to take on its first viewing (although I think it improves over time).  However, what makes it possible for the viewer to adjust as the film progresses is the fact that the movie is largely operating on video game logic, where the impossible is often normalized in ways that would be unsettling if we thought about it, and Edgar Wright has forced us to think about it.  He’s shown us a lot of our blind-spots in regards to video games simply by adapting the aspects of video games that no one has ever thought to adapt before.

I think that’s what I respect about the film.  It tells its story in the way that it believes is the most fun, the most exciting, and the most respectful to the source, regardless of whether or not it’s what people are used to.  There’s a sense that no one on set ever said, “Hey, this is going a bit too far, let’s dial it down.”  Instead, they just followed every urge to do something fresh and exciting, and this philosophy actually paid off with a lot of really funny scenes.  In fact, by putting the viewer in such a scared and vulnerable state, a lot of the comedy is made funnier, and the story’s messages are made more powerful.  So, sure, I may have lost a significant percentage of my sanity from watching this film, but it was absolutely worth it to receive all of the joy the story brings and all of the power a filmmakers can have when he dares to be relentless.

(Still, that demon musical number is just plain stupid.  Obviously.)

Moonrise Kingdom Review

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You know what’s an ugly color?  Yellow.  Yellow is a really sucky color.  It can make a movie look pretty terrible, or at least it’ll make the color scheme seem smelly.  In fact, one of the main reasons I’ve waited so long to watch a Wes Anderson film is that I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach all of the colors (or at least hues) he tends to use that make me sick.  The second reason is my distaste for films that are overly quirky for the sake of being quirky.  Much to my surprise, I found that I can appreciate the film’s colors and quirks because Anderson can appreciate the beauty in the fakeness of things.

The important thing to remember about the film is that it takes place in a strange version of the 1960s, and the film is very conscious of that.  Anderson doesn’t stylistically approach the decade the way that most filmmakers would though.  Perhaps because he’s playing with themes of childhood and nostalgia in the film, he uses color, grain, and visual effects to make the film look like an old photograph from the ‘60s or ‘70s, which is exactly what any of us today would have to use to get a glimpse what the time period was like for kids.  No one could ever have a jacket as vividly red as the narrator’s in real life – real life doesn’t look like that – but in old photos it would seem normal, and photos of our childhood inform our memories of what the world used to look like.  It’s a very strange effect, but it makes for a look and feeling that’s oddly warm and charming.

But there’s much more to the visual style than that.  Anderson has a knack for playing with size and perspective, somehow making many of the props and set pieces look like little toys.  I think part of this is done with camera tricks, and some is done by using small models of props and set pieces instead of the real thing.  This gives the sense that everything on his set is one of his little toys to play with, as though making a statement in favor of Auteur Theory the characters are just as much his puppets as the characters in his stop-motion film are.  Now, most people don’t notice this as much as they notice his unique cinematography – his habit of framing his subjects symmetrically, moving the camera steadily in elaborate tracking shots, and filling the frame with things dropping and sliding and jumping and spinning so nothing is ever too boring.  Since I’d seen a clip or two from this movie a few years ago, I figured I would find it irritating, but in context, I don’t mind it.  I think I’m okay with it because, on the one hand, Anderson is clearly having too much giddy, childlike fun doing it, and on the other, he keeps it limited to what will help the scene/story more than distract from it.

And this story is good.

The story itself is rather quirky, but it builds up to its least plausible parts very carefully, so it still feels like it’s been written carefully – not like everything has been thrown at the wall, as I would have expected.  And I think it has been written carefully.  The story is both innocently childlike and unsettlingly adult, somehow blending emotions one would only expect to feel in an old Tim Burton film with an empathetic love for these characters.  It’s incredible that characters with so little visible emotion grab the heartstrings the way these characters do – I don’t understand how it’s possible – but they keep the viewer completely sucked into the story.  In fact, I believe this movie tells one of the most intriguing and captivating stories ever told, and it tells it beautifully.  So, yes, some aspects of the film stray far from what I usually like, but Anderson keeps me engaged on a level that few others can, and he seems to have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.  I’m not sure if I liked this movie for itself or just because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but I can say that I look forward to watching it again.

Fantasia Review

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As a film student who’s grown tired of hearing that “film is a visual medium,” there’s something quite refreshing about seeing a film that is famous for its visual achievements, yet serves as a great example of how sound can drive storytelling.  The way that Disney and his team turned ballets and symphonies that could have been interpreted in any of a thousand ways into memorable audio-visual experiences is extraordinary.  The method of letting music guide a film’s story (or, in this case, stories) can have widely varying results, yet this presents one of the best, employing a special reworking of “Vertical Montage” theory that creates exactly the sense of audio-visual harmony Sergei Eisenstein would have loved.  I have been fascinated for the past couple months with the idea of creating video productions that experiment with creating shapes and streaks of color that depict what musical sounds might look like, but I see that Disney has at the very least laid the groundwork in this area if not beaten me to the punch.

While it’s true that the film gets tedious and tiring rather quickly, it’s delightful when broken up into bite-sized parts and spread out over a few days, and I suspect that it might work well as the kind of film one could play in the background at a party without worrying that everyone would get distracted.  Not every piece is animated in the style I would have chosen, but the visual style is, overall, gorgeous, with beautiful shades of blue in the cartoons and even more beautiful lights and colors in the brief live-action portions.  I’m not inclined to give a film a good review for its visuals alone, but I don’t think I’m doing that here.  Fantasia strikes me as an artistic achievement that advances cinematic storytelling and paves the way to new kinds of experimental film, all while showcasing Disney’s unassailable power as a creative force.

La La Land Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I should not be writing this review.  I am not capable of doing the film justice having only seen it once.  There are many movies that have left my friends, family, and peers thinking they ought to watch them multiple times to make sure that they’ve taken everything in, and usually these are either mind-bending thrillers (think The Matrix or Spy Game) or pseudo-intellectual Oscar-bait like Mulholland Drive.  Most of the time, I feel no need to see these movies again – I tend to pick up on everything I want to upon my first viewing – but for La La Land, I think I’d need many more viewings before I can fully comprehend the scope of its intellectual assessment of its own situation.  As I’ve written about before, we are in a time in film history when cinema is growing more reflective than ever before, submerging itself further into the worlds it has already created to find the nooks and crannies of the Wizard World or the Death Star that it may have missed at first.  This applies to genres as well.  When the romantic comedy was revamped with When Harry Met Sally, the “rom coms” that followed in the 1990s clearly confronted the movies of Classical Hollywood and addressed “the compatibilism question” – how do we bring together the people of today with the genres of yesterday in a way that feels believable?  The musicals of today, such as Into the Woods, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Jungle Book, haven’t really addressed this question head-on, resulting in an embarrassingly awkward transition in Jungle Book from a dark, ominous shot of a giant, scary ape to a bouncy little ukulele song.  La La Land has the intelligence to recognize that we actually need to sit down and talk about the compatibilism question, but I don’t think it’s very sure of what the answer is.

It’s interesting to me that Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as having “thrillingly assured direction,” because the nature of the director’s assurance is fairly complex.  To me he seems unsure as to what the movie ought to be exactly, yet he refuses to allow it to be anything other than what it is.  The film is very technically impressive and is shot with great care, but just because he understands the film’s essence on a technical level does not mean he has a grip on what it is as a story (or as an argument).  The film is fairly insecure, sometimes suggesting that it will do a certain musical number a certain way, then backing out of it as though it would be too corny for 2016, before finally overcoming its skepticism (and embarrassment) and diving into theatricality.  Still, there is always a sense that Classical Hollywood is watching over the characters in this film, waiting to see what they’ll do with a genre that doesn’t belong to them, showing that the director knows exactly where his film stands: it is being scrutinized closely by both the past and the future, wondering if it is truly capable of pleasing both masters.

The compatibilism question takes three forms in the movie, first asking how an old-fashioned musical film can succeed today, then asking how jazz can continue to thrive, and finally asking if two different dreamers of two different dreams can have a lasting partnership.  As for question one, its answer seems to be that the contemporary drama and the classical musical are, inevitably, an awkward pairing, but it’s decided that this awkwardness is okay.  There are times when a jazzy musical number ends with a ringtone, or an old cartoonish iris-opening transition presents a profane term that would never have been used in the days of Singin’ in the Rain.  It’s an odd clash, but a cute and coquettish clash, not unlike a couple in a romantic comedy.  The film also has elements of the mid-19th century musical that don’t work very well today, and these can stir up debate and arguments among viewers pertaining to the issue of how this genre should be handled in the new century.  For example, consider how the film might be asking questions about race in much the same way that musicals like Singin’ in the Rain feature white men borrowing from black dance, and La La Land features a white man explaining black music.  The film goes so far as to include musical numbers that contribute nothing to the plot at all – an often forgotten element of the mid-century musical – and this is part of what makes the film so divisive: it has flaws built in that I suspect were carefully designed to make some viewers hate it (and make most viewers debate it).

Regarding the jazz question, the film shows its hand a bit more, presenting an explicit answer to the question through John Legend’s dialogue, and thus revealing the film’s intellectual pursuit to viewers who haven’t yet caught on.  Here too, however, the film is somewhat ambiguous, presenting the contemporary jazz music as unsatisfactory, impure, and greatly problematic for our characters.  Even the song it uses to represent the future of jazz (“Start a Fire”) is mostly comprised of pieces of older genres, mixing jazz, Motown, soul, funk, disco, and ‘80s pop, revealing a reticence to accept the modern even from the characters that claim to embrace it.  On the other hand, this choice may have just been made so that the director, who seems to prefer older music himself, can tolerate it.

The third question – the question of the couple – is the area where I am most critical of and disappointed with the film’s argumentation.  This is the reason why I almost deducted half a star (or even four of the stars) from my rating.  The problem here has to do with the logic of cinema, which generally ought to resemble a symbolic logical sentence (A ⋀ B → C → D, for example).  This is the basis for one of the holy and unbreakable rules of screenwriting: the ending may be unexpected, yet it must be set up and inevitable.  Obviously, La La Land does not follow this rule, because the decision for Mia to end up with another man comes out of the blue and seems entirely arbitrary.  There is no rational reason for her to choose to be with someone other than her true love, nor is there anything in the film’s plot that suggests she would forgo the rational/emotional/intuitive choice to serve some other purpose.  This ending is ultimately a non-sequitur, so the film’s conclusion that Mia and Sebastian’s romance cannot work is seemingly a random one with little or no basis in the logic of the story.

What makes this so frustrating is that the film seems to make the case that their romance could have worked had they made better choices.  This is, of course, suggested by the fantasy sequence in the film’s final act, during which Mia imagines the better way the story could have gone had things been just slightly different . . . or so it seems.  What seems hard for some viewers to notice is that this fantasy is actually a completely impossible one – their story could not have gone this way.  Sebastian could not have known that Mia wanted him to kiss her after she first heard him play their song; he could not have attended Mia’s play and remained dedicated to the source of his income that was required in order for him to open his jazz club; he could not have veered off the main road at the end and coincidentally stumble upon his own jazz club (which somehow managed to exist without him).  This is only Mia’s fantasy of what life could have been like if she had magically gotten every little thing she wanted regardless of how much it cost Sebastian and regardless of whether or not it was even humanly possible.

The reason why this ending is so important is that it relates to questions about the musical romance as a genre.  Traditionally, the Classical Hollywood romance story exists almost solely for the formation of the heterosexual couple – to convince its audience for the thousandth time that the formation of a happy and healthy romance between a man and a woman is possible.  If the film has not made this case in such a way that the viewer believes it, the narrative and/or genre does not function.  The fact that Mia and Sebastian were not able to form a lasting romantic couple means that the genre has failed – it tells us that Classical Hollywood’s way of forming a couple does not work for people in the modern world.  In other words, the fact that the genre could not serve its function today answers the first compatibilism question with a definite negative.  Whether he meant to or not, the director told us that his attempt at making a mid-20th century musical in the 20th century was a failure, regardless of how well the film has been received.  The problem with his answer, of course, is that he did not show his work, instead selecting an arbitrary ending that gives his argument a random conclusion rather than a logical and satisfactory one.

As much as I detest this laziness of writing, I still must give this movie the highest of praises because I believe it is very, very good for the future of cinema.  Even if its logical argument is very poor, at least this film is different from most of the films that the “cinematic elite” embrace in that, rather than prompting the viewer to ask meaningless questions the way that Mulholland Drive does, this film uses the argumentative power of cinema to get the audience thinking about real and important questions (in this case pertaining to the future of media).  This could lead to other films that can ask the viewer questions about ethics, laws, cultures, progress, the environment, and any intellectual topic imaginable, all without sounding preachy.  In this sense, La La Land has the potential to shape this century’s cinema into something great – something that is highly intelligent and that is beneficial to humankind.  (It’s worth noting that the film’s ending is an attempt to do the kind of “open to interpretation” endings that Lynch and other “art film” directors love, so this film’s director clearly has a fondness for the kind of pseudo-intellectual ambiguity that the “cinema elite” adores, but this element of the film hopefully won’t hinder the potential positive effects that I have outlined in this paragraph.)

Perhaps more importantly, I think this film just might be a greater movie experience than nearly any other film made within the past ten years because this movie is alive!  In a time when nearly every movie released from Hollywood is hideously drab, gray, and monochromatic, this film has color!  In a time when nearly every filmmaker tries to capture an almost depressing realism with the camera, this film has theatricality!  In a time when nearly every Hollywood soundtrack sounds like a collection of durges, this film has boogie!  Director Damien Chazelle has found that the perfect combination of visual beauty and musical beauty can sometimes be enough to form emotional beauty, using pure spectacle and unfiltered passion to overpower and enthrall me, filling me with bubbly excitement and childlike wonder from the very first scene.  Never before have I found myself tearing up within the first few minutes of a movie, and never have I given myself over to a musical number the way I did with “Fools Who Dream.”  It’s true that not every moment in the film is captivating, and I may have checked my watch over a dozen times while watching it, but its best scenes were so riveting, enchanting, and divine that its flaws are forgivable, and I may never have had so many tears fill my eyes from just one film in my entire lifetime.

Therefore, I must give this film the highest of praises – long live La La Land, the greatest work of art of this century!

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover Review

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I’ve been meaning to see this film for a long time – unlike most people my age, it’s been on my radar for years, and I have often joked about its incredibly long title.  Upon seeing it, I’ve found that it’s approximately what I thought it would be, only better.

It’s very much an artsy movie that seems to focus on visuals, themes, and cinematic experiments than entertaining, but it actually gets rather captivating and exciting in the second half.  The characters are, to my surprise, very interesting, with many characters I root for and one character who reminds me (and reminded the professor who was showing the film when I saw it) of a certain bushy-haired billionaire who’s been in the news lately.  The fear of “The Thief” intensifies as the film progresses, making for an intense and chilling third act.  All of this, of course, gets elevated and enhanced by the excellent soundtrack, and of course by some of the greatest visuals in cinema history.  Director Peter Greenaway seems to care very little for making a film that feels like real life, instead preferring a theatrical atmosphere, an unbelievable ending, and at least one subtle moment that is physically impossible (specifically the moment when a the wife’s dress changes colors instantly to match her surroundings).  While I must confess that some of it feels somewhat slow and boring, and there is definitely an aura of pseudo-intellectualism coupled with needless violence throughout, the film basically works because of its ironic conclusion, which is just as dramatic and chilling as it is ridiculously absurd.

It’s a bit awkward and grim for my tastes, but at least it’s fresh and well-done.

Mulholland Drive Review

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what effect the “Books Are Always Better” movement has had on cinema.  Just to be clear, I am referring to the notion that the novel is a superior medium, both intellectually and in terms of affect, to the medium of film.  While I intend to write more on the subject in the future, for now I’ll just say that cinema has spent the past several decades – perhaps its entire lifetime – trying to prove itself as a medium that can both have a certain kind of intelligence, elegance, and subtlety about it, addressing the first insult to its ego, and have a powerful, intimate, and subjective emotional effect like books do, addressing the second.  These are the two main marks of quality and refinement in cinema, and film critics have been striving for years to emphasize the films that display these qualities so that film, and in turn film critics, can have some dignity.  On a related note, in a class on literature I had at my previous college, the professor (and many of the students) had a fondness for a quality of interpretive ambiguity – the literature that was considered to be truly excellent and meaningful was the literature that gestured towards a variety of possible meanings, but ultimately left its meaning up to the subjective feelings of the reader.  This is seen as an intersection of intellectualism and a personally emotional effect because it seems to require thinking on the part of the audience and it relies on subjectivity, which is why so many filmmakers have foolishly bought into the idea that this ought to be the goal of all literature, including film.  Mulholland Drive is one of the films that has impressed people because of how well it manages to be entertaining and interesting as a film while staying at this intersection that is so highly regarded in literature.

I think it boils down to how people think about photogénie.  This is a term used in reference to the aspect of cinema that is essentially, distinctly, and uniquely cinematic, and it is usually associated with Jean Epstein’s theory that film is not meant to focus on characters and plot so much as its elements and powers that no other media have (e.g. its tendency to break the rules of time with editing techniques, or its ability to show large, complex movement).  The dominant view right now, from what I can tell, is that cinema is at its best when it focuses on its sheer power to emotionally overwhelm the spectator, not on the logic of its plot.  While I will write further on this later, I argue that the pure essence of cinema has more to do with simulating a logical sequence of events following from an understood set of premises for the spectator to analyze intellectually and/or emotionally.  Naturally, I find it hard to get behind a film that has complete disregard for everything I believe cinema ought to be, and I find it exceptionally lazy to set up a great story that has no conclusion or meaning.  It’s a huge disappointment, but at least it is somehow strangely captivating.

In the end though , I still think it’s just finely polished garbage.

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