J.D. Hansel

Comedy Classics

Rocky Horror Picture Show Review

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This movie is often compared to Phantom of the Paradise, with fans of each film arguing about which is better.  While I would certainly put myself on “Team Phantom” in this debate, I’m not sure that this is a fair comparison seeing as how they are so incredibly different.  Phantom is careful and thoughtful, setting up a story that manages to be simple, yet detailed, derivative, yet surprising.  Rocky Horror just happens.  While it can be said that each film is something wild that happens to the viewer, Rocky Horror isn’t as focused on a story, a causal chain, a logic, a message, or an argument – it’s just things happening.

The kinds of things that happen are a mix.  Some of the music is great and memorable, but a lot of it is completely forgettable.  The soundtrack is largely just average ’70s pop, without much to make it stand out, so after a while it all runs together, and it becomes a little bit annoying when one song ends only for another to begin.  In a way, however, this is part of the beauty of the film.  It doesn’t really care what it is, so long as it keeps on being whatever the heck it’s supposed to be.  This ‘devil may care’ attitude empowers the film to be charmingly weird, with excellent visuals, bizarre humor, unconventional editing, random turns in the plot, inexplicable changes of character, and very memorable performances.

The structure is essentially a series of “Big-Lipped Alligator Moments.”  Generally, a movie is supposed to have two kinds of transitions: “therefore” and “but then.”  This film, on the other hand, has only one transition: “and now this is happening, and now this is happening, and now this is happening.”  While the musical upon which this film is based is clearly the result of at least one “trip,” the movie feels like a dream – it feels mostly random and spontaneous, but there are important recurring themes and logical connections between different parts of the film (such as the appearance of Tim Curry in the wedding photos).  The film offers no explanation for itself and no apologies – it just drags the viewer along for a wild ride with no questions asked, and for that I greatly appreciate it.

The Apartment Review

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It’s amazing to me just how different someone’s conception of a film can be from what it actually turns out to be, especially because of marketing.  Consider the above image.  Fortunately, I don’t think I saw this front cover image before seeing the film, but if I had, I certainly would’ve gotten the wrong idea entirely.  This gives one the impression that it’s a simple, brainless, lighthearted comedy about two men (seemingly equal in status) rivaling for the heart of the same woman.  As a matter of fact, the movie is not brainless – I don’t think any Billy Wilder films are – and it’s not very light – it’s actually so adult as to challenge everything I thought I understood about the Production Code (which is also usual for Wilder films).  Without giving too much plot away, here’s the premise: a man works his way up through his company by offering his apartment to his bosses as a secret place for them to have extra-marital affairs.  Obviously, it’s also a romantic comedy.

I first became interested in this movie simply because it was a high-ranking Wilder comedy, but then I became more interested when I saw in on Rob Walker’s list of “alternative” Christmas movies to watch during the 2016 holiday season.  I’m not sure if a movie counts as a “Christmas movie” simply by taking place around Christmas and New Year’s, but if so, this isn’t a bad film to watch during the holidays.  That being said, I don’t think it’s particularly heartwarming, and I’m not even sure of what moral lesson I’ve learned from it.  I know that I got caught up in the drama more than the comedy, although I couldn’t understand why Jack Lemmon’s character handled the situations he found himself in so unwisely when he could have done a better job of explaining himself and keeping his good name.  Still, I like Lemmon’s performance, Fred MacMurray’s character is perfect, and I care for Shirley MacLaine’s character in all the ways I’m supposed to.  It may be a very slow and tedious film at times, but it’s clever and it works, making for a very cynical, yet beautiful romance.

The Seven Year Itch Review

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This film is absolutely mad – or at the very least its protagonist is.  It had been a long time since it had last seen a Billy Wilder comedy, but after seeing Double Indemnity this past Autumn, I was naturally interested in seeing if his comedies could be as intelligent as his dramas.  I was not disappointed, but I was surprised by just how far this story dives into madness, creating a crazy comedy about romance instead of a romantic comedy.  I think this is where the film’s intelligence is found: it recognizes with brilliant observation just how absurd the human imagination is when fueled by fear, lust, and images from fictions, almost making it a criticism of its own medium.  Admittedly, the screenplay is clever, but not quite as funny as it could be, and Marilyn is sexy, but not quite at her best as a performer, so I watched it in parts over time to prevent boredom.  In spite of this, it’s definitely the must-see comedy movie of its era because it taps into the anxieties of the adult, straight, American male on a level few films have apart from The Graduate (and because I cannot believe it was approved by the code).  This makes it a perfect introduction to the inner-workings of the male mind, and it has the benefits of stylistic charms and hearty laughs to make it a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

When Harry Met Sally Review

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For those of us who didn’t grow up in the 1980s, it can be very difficult to imagine a time when Billy Crystal was young, handsome, and a viable romantic lead.  He seems like such a comic figure that it would be impossible for him to play a character with a lot of heart, and yet he’s perfectly cast in this film.  He fits into the character type of the street-wise all-American wise-cracker who never knows when to quit and who lives for the tickle of the feathers he ruffles.  Meg Ryan, by contrast, is the Bert to his Ernie – the straight man who lives a very orderly and particular life and must see to it that everything is precisely as it ought to be.  The idea of taking this kind of duo and watching it develop into a romance may not be entirely original to When Harry Met Sally, but this film does it especially well.

Perhaps the better pairing in the film, however, is not a couple of characters, but a duo behind the camera – Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner.  By this point in his career, Reiner had demonstrated that he could do comedies that were fairly brutal (This Is Spinal Tap) and love stories that had just the right amount of heart in just the right places (The Princess Bride).  Ephron, on the other hand, seemed to be best at making films in this particular genre with this particular sentiment, saturating her scripts in nostalgia and seeking out a way to keep the magic of Classical Hollywood believable in an age of cynicism.  Consequently, the two forces put together inevitably resulted in a film that has lots of laughs and lots of heart, never going too far with either.  Roger Ebert rightly noted that it has a resemblance to Woody Allen films, which largely has to do with the excellent choices of old jazz standards.  The structure of the film is rather unconventional and artistic in a way, which I attribute to the clever craftsmanship of these two creative forces.

I’ll concede that it took me a long time to finish the movie – I frequently took breaks from it for days and I rarely felt the compulsion to find out what happened next (which I blame on the story’s predictability) – but it was worth it to finish it.  It’s simply a pretty package of pure charm.

Network Review

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The first part of this film I ever saw was the famous scene with everyone shouting from their windows.  It was in a film history course I took a few years ago, and ever since I saw the clip, I’d been really wanting to see the whole film.  That scene really moved me when I first saw it – it spoke to me in a way that the most touching and emotional of scenes from other classic movies don’t – but I had to wait to watch it until I was in the right mood.  Since that course was back in early 2014, it seemed like late 2016 was a good time, ensuring that the scene wouldn’t be so fresh in my memory that it would be spoiled.  For this most recent viewing, once I could tell the scene was coming, I turned off the lights, sat up close to the screen, and let it overpower me.  Because the scene is so greatly enhanced by its context in the plot, I found myself quivering as tears fell down my face, and all I could do was remark at the beauty of what I was experiencing.  I’ve found myself tearing up while writing this review just at the thought of it, and this is a very unusual sort of experience for me.  This is exactly what cinema should be doing, and in a time when artsy drivel like 2001 is seen as the kind of thing the elite film critics want from Hollywood, it’s nice to know that a film with true meaning and power is still regarded as a great cinematic achievement.

As for the rest of the film, it’s not bad.  It can be a little boring at times, but most of it is pretty satisfying in its comedy, its irony, or at the very least its brutal honesty.  The film shows us exactly what we would like to think the evil overlords behind our television programming would be saying and doing behind closed doors.  The balance between comedy and drama is pretty good, particularly with the way the lines between the two are blurred.  I will say that I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of names and faces, but the story kept me interested.  The writing is smart, the characters are what they ought to be, and the ending is just perfect (and it merits comparison to the ending of another of my favorite ’70s movies, Phantom of the Paradise, to gain an appreciation of the cinema of the Vietnam-era and the years that followed).  What’s most impressive about the story is that it manages to be very dramatic, very absurd, and very believable all at the same time, such that the ridiculous solution proposed at the end of the film leaves the viewer gaping and thinking, “By gosh, at this point that actually seems plausible!”

Essentially, the movie is an interesting analysis of the normalization of madness, and it raises the question of just how sane a species we truly are.

Scrooged Review

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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got into a big argument on their TV show back in the 1980s because of the film Back to the Future: Part II.  Ebert thought it was a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy, but Siskel found it lacking in a certain quality that the first film in the series had.  “The first film had a heart to it, and I don’t think there’s any reason why a screwball comedy couldn’t take time out to have heart.  . . . I really found it kind of unpleasant to watch in a way.”  Ebert conceded that the first film moved the audience emotionally, and the second film didn’t do that, but I don’t understand what either of them were talking about here.  There’s nothing heartwarming about the story of a boy who doesn’t like his parents, and then inadvertently changes them into likable people and ends up richer.  I think people are desperate to see heart in a movie any chance they get, even if it doesn’t belong there, and when they can’t see it, they feel like the movie is missing something fundamental.  Frankly, this is nonsense.

Heart is a very delicate thing – it can easily turn to sap if the filmmaker isn’t careful, but it amazes me how many people will take heart even when it is sappy crap.  I’ll never understand how anyone can watch the climax of the movie Elf without vomiting rainbows and pooping out snowflakes – it’s just disgusting – but this is the only way most people want to feel when they watch a Christmas movie.  This is the only way I can make sense of Ebert’s very harsh review of 1988’s Scrooged, which he thought was so horribly lacking in the heart of the original story that it seemed to him like the filmmakers must not have read it, especially because of Murray’s particularly harsh performance in the film.  I, in turn, wonder if Ebert has ever read the story, because this film captures exactly what the story needs to be in order to be applicable to the modern era.

The original story by Dickens is not exactly a light, fun, and heartwarming story – at least not until the end.  Scrooge is a thoroughly horrible person, and it is very important to the story that he starts off without a shred of human decency.  He doesn’t care if the poor and hungry die, arguing it would “decrease the surplus population.”  While it may be tempting for some to feel that Murray should have been more like his funny characters in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, this would completely undercut the story’s message.  We want to be those characters in those films, but it is crucial that Murray’s character in this film is not very likable in this film – even a Tony Stark type would be too charming for the story to function.  Also, a writer that wants to be purely heartfelt and whimsical would use Faeries of Christmas Past, not ghosts, but this story is designed to be so eerie and dark that the light of Christmas morning is like a breath of fresh air for the reader.  Much like with Our Town, the story makes its case well because it forecasts death and doom, and it uses its darkness in order to keep the positive message from being so cheery as to seem unrealistic and so sweet as to seem disgusting, while also motivating the audience to live better lives.

It’s also important that the film take the heartless approach that it does to most of the film because it’s not a straight adaptation of the story: it’s a modern-day comedy, and that has different requirements than a traditional adaptation or a drama would.  Comedy, unlike what many people suppose, is not a particularly cheery genre by nature – it’s actually, in its purest form, quite brutal.  Comedy assaults the ego, making a mockery of humankind and all of its accomplishments, revealing absurdity in the things we hold most sacred, including Christmas.  This movie understands that, so it makes Murray a total jerk, the man he fires a drunken psycho, and the Ghost of Christmas Present a cartoony, merciless sadist, creating the sense that the film must have been directed by Yakko Warner or Daffy Duck.  It also modernizes the story with a  Nora Ephron approach before the films of Ephron’s era of romantic comedy even came out: it addresses the old story it’s retelling pretty directly, displays skepticism towards its relevance or believably in the post-Vietnam era, dismisses it as pure fiction, and then ultimately decides to go along with it anyway.  The films of the late ’80s and 1990s that revisited old stories and genres had a different audience that was not as willing to believe in stories with pure and concentrated heart, so the smart ones knew to tell the audiences that they knew the story was a silly fairy tale, and this allowed the audience to humor it anyway.  This film uses its dark humor wisely to give the audience the licence to believe in an otherwise unbelievable story, which is exactly what it needed to do.

It’s interesting to compare Scrooged to other modern Christmas classics, such as Elf, which have a lot more heart to them.  With Elf, not everything is sweet: his father is a jerk at the start, and the people of New York are initially reticent about embracing Christmas cheer, but these scenes with real-world problems and minor profanity are used to make the unrealistically jolly world where people say “cotton-headed ninny-muggins” seem entirely absurd.  The film then makes an awkward turn-around towards the end and insists that the world of jolliness must entirely trump the world of the normal people, as though the jolliness is inexplicably no longer absurd, but an important part of the human experience.  This is easily accepted by the people of New York without believable justification, and everything feels excruciatingly forced.  In Scrooged, on the other hand, nobody ever has to believe in the ghosts Murray encountered, and the characters only go along with Murray’s musical number because he’s crazy enough to fire them if they don’t and the TV crew is being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.  One film makes the case that faithful belief, even in something everyone in real life knows is obviously a lie, is intrinsically good, the other makes the case that we sometimes have to embrace a little bit of craziness because we’re a desperate, crazy species in a depraved, crazy world, which is clearly more honest and ethical.

In short, even though I have my issues with it, this is already one of my favorite Christmas movies.  It’s over-the-top, delightfully dark, and incredibly clever, even if it could use a few more laughs than it has.  It’s another one of those movies that feels like an ’80s movie should: it’s too dark for it to be made as a kid’s film today, but too childlike to be a movie for adults today, so it’s right in the sweet spot.  Its costumes, sets, and special effects are just right, and it even has a little bit of a Tim Burton feel to it, which is probably largely due to Danny Elfman’s perfectly fitting score.  I will say that I thought some of it could have been a little bit more original.  (For example, I got the impression that the Ghosts of Christmas Past wouldn’t be literal ghosts, but real people whom Murray’s character interprets to be the ghosts, but they went the boring literal way, which I guess worked out fine because of their unique casting choices for the first two ghosts.)  If you’re looking for Rankin-Bass levels of good holiday cheer, you and Roger Ebert can go look elsewhere, but this is the film I’m looking forward to watching at Christmastime for years to come.