Essential Classics

It Happened One Night Review

November 8, 2016 by JD Hansel

It’s an interesting sign of how times have changed to see that this was the “Best Picture” winner at the Oscars back in the mid-1930s. This film would probably be dismissed today as a fairly average romantic comedy, but it actually was sort of novel at the time. The notion of the “re-marriage comedy” as a sub-genre didn’t really exist before this film appeared, and director Frank Capra ended up solidifying elements of the romantic comedy (and arguably the screwball comedy) that would stick around to this day. The story and characters are simple, and much of the film is predictable, but between the clever writing and the great performance given by Clark Gable, it still manages to be highly entertaining. It’s easy to get tired of the old stereotype of the obnoxious, arrogant, manipulative man forcing himself into the woman’s life until she falls in love with him, but Gable makes the character likable, and even made the character so clever and funny that he became an influence on the comedy of Bugs Bunny. The pacing is nice and speedy, and the witty dialogue exchanges are often so fast that they make today’s films and TV shows seem sluggish in comparison (and at the very least they rival the clever dialogue exchanges in the Smith/Coleman years of Doctor Who). It’s not my favorite film, but it’s a smart, masterful, influential, and exemplary film.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks Review

November 5, 2016 by JD Hansel

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.

Animal House Review

October 31, 2016 by JD Hansel

When I was a wee lad in the humble state of Delaware, I was a big fan of a certain kind of film – a kind that usually took the form of made-for-TV film. Because I spent my whole childhood overwhelmed by the fact that I was forced to remain a child for years to come, and therefore would have no say in any decision-making and would never be able to get anyone to listen to me, I loved the films about kids who banded together to solve the problems adults couldn’t or wouldn’t, always in creative ways. I think the best example of this is Max Keeble’s Big Move, but others include Recess: School’s Out and Gunther and the Paper Brigade. It’s a cute genre that generally does not age well (in the sense that adults don’t like them as much as kids do), but it stays near and dear to my heart. College comedies that try to offer the same experience to adults rarely interest me as much because they generally lack the same spirit or charm. The one exception to this, of course, is Animal House, which both fills my heart with nostalgic warmth and fills my head with adult filth.

While the story is rather loose and the screenplay gives one the feeling that the film can be summed up as “stuff happening,” this is a solid piece of entertainment. It manages to present very pathetic, stupid, un-relatable characters and still make them likable. The performance from Belushi obviously steals the show, but Karen Allen brings the charm to the film, and Donald Sutherland blew my mind with how perfectly he was able to embody the epitome of nebbishness even though I’m used to thinking of him as an intimidating figure. This movie kept impressing me with the depths to which it was willing to go just to be stupid, as was clearly demonstrated when it first established its cliché “weirdly extreme villain with the weak, dorky sidekick” dynamic. The music is good too, as are most of the stylistic elements, and Landis proved himself once again to be a great cinematic craftsman. The very end of the film felt a little weak, as there was really no resolution, but it did seem appropriate. It may not be as pure as Some Like It Hot, but it still deserves its status as one of cinema’s finest comedies to date.

Singin’ in the Rain Review: Upon Further Consideration…

October 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

Anyone familiar with my “Upon Further Consideration…” series knows from the categorization of this article that I have already seen Singin’ in the Rain in the past. I think this most recent viewing was my third or fourth one, and I enjoyed each and every previous viewing. I’ve considered the film to be not only a must-see classic, but also one of my favorite films for many years, although in recent years I started to wonder how much of that might me my memory’s exaggeration based on my fondness for the classic musicals I watched with my family as a child. I remembered that some parts of the movie felt slow or irrelevant, like the scene that presents all of the models in bizarre dresses – which has nothing to do with the story and does not get a laugh. During this viewing, however, I was not only pleasantly surprised to see that my memories had not done the film justice, but also that this film is actually an outstanding work of absolute genius, with stunning talent and unbelievable near-perfection that frequently left me literally gaping.

Technically, this is not a perfect movie, but like most of the greats, its strength is in making the audience not care about its imperfections. The film is loaded with musical numbers that contribute little or nothing to the plot and could have been replaced by just about any other song. Fortunately, these musical numbers are, overall, so impressive and fun and entertaining as spectacles that no one could possibly complain that they interrupt the plot. I don’t even mind the needless number about the fashion too much. Even still, the plot doesn’t hold together perfectly. Towards the end, Lena essentially takes over the studio simply by lying to the press, making the studio head too concerned that their movie will bomb if one of its stars is found to be a phony. At the film’s closing, however, the studio head randomly decides that it’ll be perfectly okay to reveal Lena to be an untalented sham, which he obviously could have done sooner in a more professional manner. The trick that the film pulls here is simply a bit of misdirection – they pull the viewer’s attention to the romantic sub-plot, which has by and large taken over the movie and become the A-plot at this point, so that we do not care what the motives are for giving us the happy ending. I heard from a professor of mine that Terry Gilliam once said filmmakers could cut anything they wanted to from the last fifteen minutes of a film and not even the biggest fans of the movie would care so long as they got their happy ending, and while I’m not sure if the attribution is accurate, the principle is exemplified in Singin’ in the Rain.

There’s also a lot more cleverness to this film than I remembered. Heck, the opening shot of the film is a way of doing the credits that I haven’t seen done in any other film, and it’s one of the best beginnings a movie’s ever had. They also take great care in the film’s first act to save the reveal of Lena’s voice for just the right moment, which is all handled very “stealthily” in a way, in that they make sure the audience doesn’t suspect the whopper of a gag that the movie has planned with her. Cosmo’s dialogue is superb, and clearly set the tone for all the “comedic sidekick” characters to come. There are a few elements of the film that seem to borrow from, or perhaps pay homage to, Babes in Arms – particularly the scene showing the industry’s sudden transition from silent films to sound films. Parts of the movie are significantly more over-the-top and theatrical than I remembered, but the theatricality is at its peak during the “Broadway Melody” number, which just might be the most gorgeous scene in all of cinema – it’s sort of like expressionism on steroids. It all comes together to make for a delightful experience that no one should miss.

Terminator Review

October 29, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Oh, how I love the ’80s. The ’80s developed the styles of particular cult ’70s musicals into a New Expressionism – one that emphasized deep, vivid colors and bright lights flashing through dark, gray cities. This mix of warm grays, cold blues, and hot reds spread across theatrical sets was complimented by over-the-top acting of Lloyd, Fox, Moranis, Curry, and others, bringing a theatrical quality to cinema that had not been seen since the days of German Expressionism. The use of electronic music made everyone feel like the future was just around the corner, but whether that future was exciting or dystopian depended on the movie. There is, of course, a spectrum to ’80s cinema, and much of it was very light and clean and harmless, but the darker end of the spectrum was home to the dark, dystopian action films: Blade Runner, RoboCop, Aliens, Batman, and perhaps the most emblematic of them all, Terminator.

Regrettably, I didn’t love Terminator quite as much as I’d hoped. I liked it just fine, but since I’m not usually a big fan of an action movie for action’s sake, I found it somewhat lacking. Its characters could have been a little bit more interesting, although Schwarzenegger was about as fun to watch as I had expected, and the story could have been a little bit more dramatic or devious. The ending left me a bit unsatisfied because it means that very little was actually accomplished apart from that which was necessitated by the rules of time – all of the events of the film (that take place in the ’80s) are already predestined, and couldn’t have possibly gone any other way. The ending would have been more satisfying if their actions in the ’80s somehow prevented all the horrible robot wars of the future or had caused all of the horrible robot wars, but as it was it felt weak. I don’t really consider this film to be a disappointment, however, because it was exactly what it needed to be – an excursion into fun science fiction with that beautiful ’80s charm.

Barry Lyndon Review

October 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

In my recent review of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, I explained that I finally understood just how impressive a director Kubrick was, and had come to respect him much more than I had after seeing 2001. While 2001 was agony, I have found that I enjoy some of his other films, such as Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, and Killer’s Kiss isn’t all that bad either. Better yet, if I found 2001 to be so devastatingly lacking in both emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction, Paths of Glory has made up for the emotional lack in spades, and A Clockwork Orange has done the same for the intellectual lack, with both of these films being brilliant, powerful masterpieces that redeemed him in my eyes. Unfortunately, just as the Israelites of the Old Testament made right with God just before they wandered back into their sinful ways, I was bound to find another Kubrick film that brought his score back down into the negative. This film is Barry Lyndon.

Conceptually, this film is essentially a remake of 2001, only this time it’s set in the world of old paintings instead of the future. Visually, it is absolutely stunning, and his technical innovating that allowed him to create such a fascinating visual experience is evidence of the man’s genius. Once again, however, Kubrick shows his taste for making human characters less and less human in a way that does not serve his film well. His characters are, as one would expect after 2001, mechanical and uninteresting, which I think it is safe to say was his goal. Also like 2001, the run-time is far too long for a story so incoherent and pointless, and there is really only one scene in the film that is particularly good (and emotionally captivating) as far as the characters are concerned. Naturally, these reasons I give for hating the film are, as I expected, exactly the same reasons that others love it.

Clearly, making me dislike the characters is the point, and in a way, making it boring is part of the point as well, which many professional critics have conceded. “[F]or all its dry wit and visual splendor,” wrote Time Out in a recent review, “this 1975 adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel might be the great director’s least satisfying, most disconcerting film – and that’s what makes it extraordinary.” The film is considered fascinating because Kubrick uses the fact that the character has nothing that any sensible person would recognize as a “personality” (for most of the film) as his social criticism on how pathetic humans are. “Barry Lyndon isn’t a great success, and it’s not a great entertainment,” Roger Ebert adds in one of his two reviews of the film, “but it’s a great example of directorial vision: Kubrick saying he’s going to make this material function as an illustration of the way he sees the world.” I can understand and appreciate this effort, and I think I even strongly agree with Kubrick’s thesis – people really are pathetic machines with an utter lack of any devotion to living a good, reasonable life, and are hopelessly seeking a nonexistent state of total happiness; but even if I agree with his thesis, and even if I am impressed with what he’s done to achieve his goal for the film, I do not think that his goal for the film (making the audience annoyed, uncomfortable, and bored for three hours) is either a good goal for a movie or an effective goal for the purpose of supporting his thesis.

The fact of the matter is that critics do not really want what they say they want. Their desire for a blunt critique of how pathetic humans are and how meaningless their lives are, there is a well-known technique for doing that effectively while keeping the audience entertained. It’s called comedy. Comedy, when done properly, shows all intentions to be selfish, all ideas to be myopic, all peoples to be primitive, all societal conventions to be fragile, all masculinity to be non-existent, all propriety to be a joke, all nations to be powerless, all genius to be craziness, all traditions to be childish, all pride to be arrogant, wars to be inconsequential, all actions to be futile, and all humans to be stupid as swine. Yet somehow this is of no interest to critics, who are uncomfortable awarding films of this nature when they could instead award the dramas, which always pretend the feelings of one good individual can make all the difference in the world and which relentlessly hammer in the message that some people are simply bad people because they do bad things because they are bad people because they do bad things. (For more on this subject, I recommend Mladen Dolar’s essay “To Be or Not to Be? No, Thank You,” which explains this concept far better than I.) Dramas are allowed to be fatalistic or libertarian in philosophy, but the realm of determinism has always belonged to the comedy. This is why the most popular kind of film right now in critical, academic, and pseudo-intellectual circles seems to be, from what I’ve seen recently, the dramedy.

The modern dramedy attempts to make a drama film while borrowing the element of “pathetic determinism” from comedy. This offers the intellectual criticism of comedy with the sense of emotional weight and significance brought to a subject by drama. This, I argue, presents the sort of film that Barry Lyndon is – it is a predecessor to the contemporary dramedy in that it presents hopelessly pathetic, semi-mechanical humans (like characters out of a Coen brothers film) in the guise of drama, giving critics everything they say they want. I argue, however, that what they want may in fact be simply comedy: after all, it seems as though it has been much easier for a comedy to get a high score on Rotten Tomatoes recently than it has been for the dramas. I think that drama is not what they want, and it is not even necessarily what they say they want – it’s what they say they say they want. The numbers show that what they want is comedy, but have been trained by tradition to think they must want drama if they’re smart.

What critics (and perhaps most other people) truly want, or so it seems to me, is the chance to seem thoughtful while experiencing the thoughtless. This is what many dramedies do, but it is also what I think many practices in the world of “mindfulness” do. In short, people like to reach a “zen” state of hypnosis or “zoning out” in which they feel like they’re having an experience that is somehow elevated to a higher level of human consciousness. This is why critics have described it as “hypnotic” – it has a mesmerizing quality, and that is something that does not particularly appeal to me, but it appeals to a great many individuals who want to seem intelligent, wise, and/or spiritual. A hypnotic experience is not the same as experiencing genius, insight, or elevation. The problem is that people associate the significance and meaningfulness of something with emotion, and so we feel like something but be especially meaningful if it gives us a special, “higher” kind of emotional experience. For this reason, an emotionally distant comedy that’s very intellectual is often not as desirable to critics or audiences as a drama on the same subject would be or as a hypnotic film would be, simply because it is an emotional experience that makes us feel as though we are watching something important.

While I recognize that this review probably comes across to many readers as an arrogant, ignorant, and even sanctimonious display of hubris, I see no other way to write this review. Think about it: if I am to maintain my view that one’s assessment of a film is not merely a subjective feeling, as anyone who appreciates the function of the film critics ought to understand, but I am also to argue that I do not support the enormous (and almost unanimous) critical acclaim that this film has come to receive, I am logically required to explain some sort of reasoning for how it’s possible that I am right and all the professional critics are wrong. I regrettably have no other choice – without this explanation of my views, anyone could compare the number of stars I have given this film to the number that one finds in a Google search and immediately deem me a thoughtless fool. All of my above writing on the “critics’ delusion” is not to be taken as dogmatic facts from a know-it-all, but as a working thesis I have for what the many worshipers of the films I hate might be missing. At the same time, I obviously don’t mind if other people like films that I don’t, so long as I am not considered thoughtless for hating a film that the “cinema elect” has decided is perfect. I do believe that a large amount of diversity in tastes is healthy for a culture, but this notion that the dramatic and the hypnotic are (by default) artwork of a higher caliber than fun, entertaining artwork is one that I must militantly oppose.