J.D. Hansel

Disney

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.

The Straight Story Review

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Coincidences come up an awful lot in my experiences viewing movies, and one such experience happened not too long ago when I was watching a YouTube video by Doug Walker, “Can an Ending Ruin a Film?”  I started watching the video sometime before my class on “art film” on Wednesday, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to finishing it until Thursday.  Within the last five minutes or so before that class began, he decided to show The Straight Story, which is David Lynch’s Disney movie.  The professor then explained for those of us who missed it, as I think I had, that the film had been subtly telling us everything about the character’s past and motivation, setting up the ending, without ever making it clear that any of the events of the first hour and a half of the film had a point.  The ending is when the audience is supposed to put everything together.  Interestingly, when I resumed Doug Walker’s video, I found I had apparently paused it just one second before he brought up The Straight Story, making the argument that the ending to this film turns it from a painfully boring film into a brilliant film.  Some might take this as a sign of some sort, but I am not a superstitious man – I just see this as a great opportunity to explain why this film actually sucks, even with the ending.

This film is horribly, horribly boring.  None of its characters are particularly interesting or likable – most of them are really quite forgettable – and the performances from the cast were not able to redeem the script in this area.  There are a few interesting moments that seem a little bit clever, cheeky, or quirky, all in the way one would expect from David Lynch, but they are severely overpowered by the surprising amount of banality in the film.  The plot is purposely slow and uninteresting, but as deliberate as this may have been, I have yet to understand what positive effect this was meant to have on the film as a whole.  The list of moral lessons and sappy moments throughout the film is unbearably long, and the number of times that I’m supposed to tear up but don’t feel anything by annoyance is nauseatingly high.  This is probably how most viewers feel about the film until the ending, but the ending doesn’t change anything for me.

The ending doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t part of a generic, cliché family separation story, so it isn’t exactly a big shock or an exceptionally moving moment.  When the brothers are reunited, I’m waiting to see what happens – to get more specific information about what exactly makes their conflict unique – but the film ends with little time spent on the brother.  The goal of the ending is to use the audience’s knowledge of Harry Dean Stanton (the brother, Lyle) and his previous film roles to fill in the gaps about what kind of guy his character in this story is supposed to be, ideally filling in the gaps about the conflict between the Straights.  This is rather silly, because I haven’t seen any other film of his, and even if I had, that tells me nothing about who this character is supposed to be.  It’s a gimmick that I doubt would work with the likes of John Wayne or Ben Stein, and it certainly doesn’t work here.  I think the main problem is that Richard Farnsworth (Alvin Straight) just isn’t likable enough for me to care about the conclusion to his story, so the story entirely falls flat, and the film leaves much to be desired.

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Bedknobs and Broomsticks Review

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Mary Poppins is just plain crazy.  It’s based on a book filled with various adventures that don’t always connect, and consequently the film often lacks coherency.  Some scenes in the movie have absolutely no place in the story, and are merely a pretty spectacle – certainly “Step in Time” seems this way, and no such song would be written for any musical produced after Disney’s The Little Mermaid.  One of the characters (the mother) was given a mission that goes nowhere as far as the story is concerned, just because the writers wanted to give her something to do; in the book she just wasn’t around much, with no explanation.  Some of the actors could not sing properly, while others were completely inept at presenting believable British accents.  Yet, somehow, Mary Poppins is one of the far greatest films of all time.  It is not only a classic, but a top-tier classic, and it could never be replicated.

Interestingly, they tried to replicate it.  The story of Bedknobs and Broomsticks revolves around a magical woman who ends up caring for a few bored British kids (who are clearly designed to give the film the same tone as Poppins) and David Tomlinson (Poppins’ Mr. Banks) takes a main role.  The film features big, Broadway-like musical numbers that add little or nothing to the plot, and the characters randomly spend part of their time in a cartoon world.  The film is very much aware of the historical context of its story and has fun with it, and it also has fun with the special effects that were possible at the time, with some scenes that remind me very much of Spoonful of Sugar.  In short, this is a very careful forgery of the kind of feeling that Mary Poppins had, and while it’s not perfect, it’s still a decent forgery – to the point that it has become a classic in its own right.

I use the word charm quite a bit in my reviews, but I can find no better word for the special quality of Mary Poppins that this film recaptures other than charm (or perhaps Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious).  It’s the little things that make it work so well – the way it’s easy to see how the effects are done, or the way the children frequently interrupt Angela Lansbury’s singing with their little remarks.  Some of the visuals are fantastic (literally), and I especially love the way it looks when they travel with the bed.  The one thing Bedknobs improves upon in comparison to Poppins is its use of David Tomlinson as a showman, because now I feel like his talent was almost wasted for most of Poppins, but apart from that, this film does feel like it’s lacking something.  I think perhaps I would have liked it better if I had watched it growing up, and having only seen it as a young adult, it doesn’t quite “wow” me as much as I would hope – in fact I found much of the plot rather tedious due its lack of . . . well, plot.  It does indeed have a story, but the story is loose (and randomly involves fighting Nazis at the end) because the film is more interested in the emotional effect of its individual scenes than it is the intrigue of its story.  That being said, I can’t imagine The Gnome-Mobile is any better, so I’ll take what I can get.

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Star Wars – The Force Awakens Review

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I love home video.  I absolutely adore it.  I get nostalgic about VHS tapes, I collect DVDs, I obsess over digital copies, and I drool at the majesty of a beautiful Blu-Ray on an HD screen.  I must emphasize this because I’m about to say something a wee bit unfavorable about home video: it may have ruined cinema.  Not completely, of course, but I think that we’ve lost something special about the movie theater experience.

Because home video has been so prominent since before I was born, I don’t know personally what going to the movies was like at the time, but I’ve heard the stories.  I’ve heard how the crowd cheered in joyous support at the premiere of Muppet Christmas Carol when the dedication to Jim Henson and Richard Hunt appeared on screen.  I’ve heard how the boys let out a snide “oooOOOooh…” in unison in the bedroom scene in 1968’s Romeo and Juliet.  I’ve heard how the test audience for Ghostbusters went wild when they saw “scene missing” as a placeholder for a shot that had yet to be composed.  I’ve heard how they edited silent pauses after the Marx Brothers’ jokes because the audience would laugh so long and loudly.  I’ve heard how much more of a community experience it used to be back before we got used to watching movies in private – before we trained ourselves to take no involvement in a collective movie experience.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens made the movie theater into the big, loud, excited, delighted, happy family it was meant to be.  There was applause for the Star Wars logo, applause for the Lucasfilm logo, and even for a spaceship.  Everybody could feel the immense joy in the room when a familiar face came on screen.  The jokes hit home with everyone.  The twists had us all on the edge of our seats.  Seeing this film was one of the best experiences of my life because, for the first time in a long while, I was truly experiencing a film rather than just looking at a film.  Not to mention, the movie itself floored me.

I felt like a child again, even though I didn’t watch Star Wars films much growing up.  This movie actually made me into a bigger Star Wars fan than I have ever been in my life.  I was simply reverted to a time when watching a movie was joyous and exciting, getting more delightful by the minute, and I couldn’t have been more excited.  When I remembered to use my grown up brain to analyze the film, I was impressed by the effects, the acting, the visuals, the score, the dialogue, the story structure – everything about it.  This is the kind of experience that the movies are all about, and I feel privileged to live in such a historic moment when the event of a lifetime is on big screens everywhere.

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Babes in Toyland Review

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I recall the time when I took some tests to be assessed for my IQ, intelligence, and/or learning disabilities a few years back.  The expert who assessed me found the results quite curious, and noted the following: “a Full Scale IQ Score is not an accurate assessment of his ability.  He is a student whose scores on these measures of ability range from the 5th to the 99.9th percentile.  A Full Scale IQ Score represents an average of these numbers and as such, will underestimate his strengths and overestimate his weaknesses.”  The same can be said of many people and many things, as nothing is black and white.  This is why I argue that the classic Walt Disney embarrassment Babes in Toyland, based on the fatally frown-inducing operetta of the same name, cannot be given an accurate star rating.

Babes in Toyland is such a remarkable piece of work, which I suppose is best understood in context.  As I understand it, Disney planned to make a Wizard of Oz movie ever since the days when he was working on Snow White, but ironically, the success of Snow White prompted MGM to buy the rights to The Wizard of Oz in an attempt to make a better family film than Disney’s.  (Spoiler alert – they succeeded.)  Years later, Disney decided to try again to get the rights to make an Oz film, but he wanted to do a test-drive first to see if his creative team – and his usual cast – could pull off such a feat.  His test was Babes in Toyland, which was an old operetta made by the people who’d created a successful Wizard of Oz operetta, and Babes was just a cash-in on that.  So, Disney’s Babes in Toyland is a Wizard of Oz test drive based on a Wizard of Oz rip off, which happens to star Ray Bolger of Wizard of Oz fame.  Some of my facts might be a little off, so feel free to correct me since I’m no historian, but this is about the gist of it.

Because I love MGM’s Wizard of Oz, I naturally really like many elements of this film.  The overall spirit, mood, and atmosphere are just delightful.  It’s just as wondrous and theatrical as I would want any live-action family fantasy film to be.  Many, many, many of the visuals are fantastic because the lighting is so perfect, and the costumes so colorful.  The cast is clearly talented too, and they use every exaggerated prop or over-the-top costume piece to its fullest potential to create an atmosphere of complete other-worldliness.  Because of this, just watching clips from the movie would make it seem like perfection, at least for someone with my tastes in film.

Here comes the however.  However . . . the problems with this beast seem unending.  The puppets are often hideous and/or poorly performed, the plot doesn’t make any sense, the characters are all idiots, the focus of the story keeps changing, the songs are mediocre, and nearly every scene goes on far too long.  That sums up a lot of it, but a closer look will reveal other issues.  It seems to be rather sexist, mildly racist, and possibly advocating child slavery.  It’s not that Disney can be blamed for all of these problems – I can say from experience that the stage show is just as painful if it’s not performed with astonishing excellence from all cast members – but what people forgive on a stage they’d decry on a screen.

Unfortunately, while it’s a film worth studying as visual art, and although it may make for a good laugh if you riff it with an MST3K-loving friend, this cinematic disaster is far from being the kind of holiday classic one would hope Mr. Disney would have produced.

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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.