Four Stars

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.

You’ve Got Mail Review

November 4, 2016 by JD Hansel

I’d like to take a moment to focus on a film called The Shop Around the Corner. This is a classic Ernst Lubitsch comedy that I highly recommend. It’s very funny and clever, and it established certain stylistic elements of the romantic comedy that have continued to this day. In short, two employees of a furniture store don’t get along well, but then one of them discovers that the other has been his pen pal, with whom he’s anonymously been exchanging love letters. It features a great cast of actors, many of whom I recognized from other films of the era (including the great and powerful Frank Morgan), and the plot is captivating from start to finish. It becomes particularly interesting when the protagonist, played by James Stewart, starts to use the knowledge he has of his correspondent’s identity to mess with and manipulate her, before ultimately making her fall in love with him.

This leads me to the film that follows in its footsteps, You’ve Got Mail. This film is very smart in that it takes full advantage of the new technology of the time – the personal email – to tell a new kind of story, while at the same time recycling elements of a classic story. The characters are very likable, and the story is captivating enough, but the moment that absolutely blew me away is when the film suddenly turns into a line-for-line remake of a scene from The Shop Around the Corner. It’s one of the greatest homages in history simply because it’s a movie doing an impression of its father, which is hardly ever seen. That being said, the movie’s main problem seems to be how it is too much like its predecessor: it follows the old story of a man who’s mission is to manipulate the woman until he gets what he wants from her – a story of masculine domination. Since the film is coming from a female director, I would hope for some sort of a creative break from this old formula, rather than a film that follows along with Hollywood’s boring old habit of making the formation of the couple synonymous with the psychological battle of a man conquering a woman’s mind. It’s actually very strange to see just how forgiving Meg Ryan’s character is of Hanks’ after he’s completely destroyed her family business, when he could have saved it just by stopping the development of the Fox store’s children’s section and establishing a partnership between the store and the shop, essentially making her store the Fox children’s section.

Now, I’ve spoken many a time before about the ‘80s charm – the special power that ‘80s movies have over me even when I know they’re stupid (or perhaps especially when I know they’re stupid). I am, however, a child of the ‘90s, so I also get nostalgic about this period as well. When something strikes me as extremely ‘90s, it can have about the same effect on me as something extremely ‘80s has – it’s emblematic of just how cute we humans are when we think our trends, fashions, technology, music, and life-choices isn’t really as absurd as it will seem in the future. I think sometime around Vietnam we see American culture hit its mid-life crisis as a result of the country’s depression, so Americans wore their hair long and made over-the-top music and acted more sophisticated than they really were and did everything in their power to embrace a new American value: individuality. We dragged the rest of western culture into the pits of idiosyncrasy with us, and borrowed from what Europe had that already fit this philosophy: the avant-garde, David Bowie, Python humor, Expressionism, and so on and so forth. We are still in this crisis today, but while we’re waiting for our kids to dye their hair purple for “2010s Day” at high school, we can just enjoy how charming the sights and sounds of ‘90s cinema can be. You’ve Got Mail is one of the greatest examples of the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with a trip back to the ‘90s, and everything from its leading lady’s hairdo to its title to its soundtrack (especially that song by the Cranberries) makes the film into a perfect time capsule.

With all this in mind, I can still say that I appreciate the film greatly, even if I find it rather hackneyed, trite, and overly submissive to tired patriarchal tradition. I can also say that I’m tired of the old stereotype of the male romantic lead always being an obnoxious jerk at the beginning, but this I am also willing to forgive. Ultimately, the film wins me over because it’s story is fascinating (even if we know how it’s going to play out), it made me care about the characters, and it has a special kind of charm about it. I tip my hat to Nora Ephron for creating such an impressive and enjoyable contemporary film classic.

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.

Sherlock Jr. Review

October 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

Well, I suppose I couldn’t avoid it forever. I always knew that I would eventually have to start reviewing silent films. Sure, I did review Metropolis, but that was the Giorgio Moroder version, so I was largely reviewing an audio storyteller’s work with re-interpreting older visual material, making it more similar to an ordinary sound film. The reason why that is the only silent film I have reviewed thus far is because it was a way of cheating – I just don’t know how to review a pure silent film. At the end of the day, sound cinema isn’t just a different kind of storytelling or a different stage of the history of the same medium – it’s a fundamentally different medium. Ever since Sergei Eisenstein penned his essay on “vertical montage,” cinema as we know it has been an art of both sight and sound, and I would even go so far as to say that the sound film is more like the television show than it is to the silent film. Because of the radical difference, I have been far too scared of reviewing a true silent film in my writings thus far, largely due to the fact that my attention is always, always, always drawn first to the contemporary soundtracks that have been added to the silent films I’ve seen, and the sound determines a huge percentage of my experience. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to focus this review on what it is I see that I find fascinating.

For his day, I think what Buster Keaton created here was a very good mix of spectacle (or “attraction”) and story. The story is interesting and clever, although it is structured strangely, and it does leave much of the most interesting actions in the story up to secondary characters, all while Buster is asleep. Keaton’s character in the film is exceptionally likable – the kind of daydreamer that the ideal “Walter Mitty” ought to be – and the way this character concludes the film is one of the greatest combinations of clever comedy and romantic charm I have ever seen. His playfulness with the medium is equally clever, resulting in some exceptional special effects that have truly stumped be. The silent slapstick may not be my cup of tea, but I think that the film works fairly well with audiences today on the whole, at least as far as its comedy goes, and I do consider it a very impressive achievement of the silent age.

Double Indemnity Review

October 23, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Before watching this film, I was informed by a reliable source that this is the “perfect film noir,” and its screenplay by Raymond Chandler and cinema god Billy Wilder is commonly regarded as holy. Perhaps it was because of the hype that I did not find the film absolutely perfect, but I have been having a hard time thinking of anything that’s wrong with the film, and it’s been growing on me both in hindsight and as I’ve re-watched certain scenes. I do consider it brilliant, and I hail it as a great cinematic achievement, but maybe its simply not quite my style of film. Much of the visual style is more or less in the cinematographic territory that I most like, and there are good tracks on the soundtrack, and the story is interesting, and the performances are very good, and the pacing keeps me engaged, but I think I still have a hard time loving a story that doesn’t have the kinds of characters that really interest me in it. Duck Soup has one type of character that I like in Firefly, while Labyrinth has a protagonist that reminds me of my youth, and Little Shop of Horrors has a great villain, and Phantom of the Paradise has an even better villain, while Gremlins is a delightful, childlike collective of loony villainy – but Double Indemnity doesn’t have any of the usual character types that tickle my fancy. Still, that’s never stopped me from enjoying films like Mockingjay or Casablanca, and Edward G. Robinson’s character, Keyes, is probably one of my favorite characters in all of cinema at this point, so what’s the problem?

I think that the reason why I haven’t fallen head-over-heels in love with the film is that I’m not wrapped up in the goals of the characters – their motives don’t grab me. Phyllis gives the impression that she’s willing to attempt to kill off her husband simply because she’s grown bored with him, and Walter Neff is willing to attempt murder just for the fun of it – an attitude that comes out of nowhere from this otherwise charming, polite, likable every-man. The results of Walter’s efforts don’t seem to matter to him much, and neither does his life, so it’s very difficult for the audience to care too much about what happens to him. That being said, I still have both an intellectual appreciate and a special soft spot for this film noir classic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good drama.

Sullivan’s Travels Review

October 21, 2016 by JD Hansel

While I’m not sure I would say that this is one of the funniest comedy films of all time, I do see why it is considered one of the greatest. After all, a quick Google of the film will list it in the genre(s) of “Drama/Romance,” so clearly there aren’t many particularly memorable belly laughs throughout the movie. In all fairness, I do get a good laugh out of some parts, and it features one of the best chase sequences I’ve ever seen (and I usually don’t go for chase sequences much). The character actors who were placed around Sullivan made for a very pleasant experience because of how much I enjoyed hanging around the fun cast, and Veronica Lake‘s character is much more charming than she might have been if the film had been made by (or cast with) the wrong people. I think the drama is very impressive and moving, but as much as it stirred up passion in me, I fear that it may have detracted from the overall feeling of joy from the comedy. What’s problematic about the drama is that the film can be viewed as an argument for why comedy is more important than drama – in which case the film’s reliance on drama to make its point seems to work against it – but film critics and historians have since argued that the protagonist’s conclusion regarding comedy’s significance is more a matter of plot than message. While I would hope that someday I’ll find a film that does attempt (and succeed) to make a great case for the superiority of comedy, I think that Sturges’ goal here is much simpler – to tell a good, fun, engaging story – and this goal is accomplished with finesse.