J.D. Hansel

JD Hansel

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 LEGO Batman Movie Review

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SPOILER WARNING

This film’s strengths and weaknesses both pertain to the issue of “heart” in film.

If not for the fact that this is a spin-off of The LEGO Movie, the writers would have been free to simply fill the entire film with fun Batman jokes and absurd mix-ups and lunacy that only make sense in an animated comedy.  The LEGO Movie, however, has a lot of heart to it that tied the film together nicely and offered a solid foundation for its comedy.  I argue that LEGO Movie is probably one of the better examples of heart done well because, by that point in the movie, it feels needed and welcomed, as opposed to being forced down our throats at the very beginning like in other family films.  I often think back on an argument between Siskel and Ebert (which I explained in my Scrooged review) in which Gene Siskel said Back to the Future II should have stopped to take the time to add more heart.  I think this is a fairly stupid position to hold seeing as how a movie should really bring in heart at times when it is necessitated by (and it necessitates) the story, but unfortunately, The LEGO Batman Movie makes its heart-warming scenes feel almost out of place, even though they inform much of the story and supply the main character motivation.  Somewhere in the crazy, convoluted mess that was the writing process for this film – consisting of a grand total of five people getting screenwriting credits – the story kept getting reworked until the final result felt like certain scenes were in the script simply to satisfy a “kids movie checklist” of some sort, and most of the bullets on the list pertained to grabbing the heartstrings.  Since I watched this film in a theater filled with children, it was very easy to tell that these scenes simply did not succeed at grabbing the audience.

The rest of the movie, however, is filled with the best kind of heart: passion.  LEGO Batman is one of those films with the rare quality of feeling like a great fan project was given a Hollywood budget and free range.  The film may be loaded with fan-service and a little too dependent on the laughability of previous incarnations of Batman, but it just loves its world and its characters so much that the passion is infectious.  The beauty of the thing, of course, comes from the fact that this is a LEGO-based film, so it can do things with Batman that couldn’t work with the real Batman, and that couldn’t work with a parody, but work perfectly in the space in between.  After all, who doesn’t want to see the Dynamic Duo fight off the gremlins, the Joker recruit Godzilla, or freaking Voldemort casting spells in the Bat Cave?  In a Batman movie that audiences took somewhat seriously, this would enrage people, and in a YouTube parody, it wouldn’t have much power or meaning, but in this movie, it is both official and non-canon at once.  Consequently, the writers were able to put Batman against all of his greatest enemies at once at the start of the movie, making the audience wonder where on earth they could possibly go from there, and then live up to that question by raising the stakes to a level that we never knew could be part of the game.  The movie somehow managed to bring back so much classic Batman material dating back to the 1940s (including an obscure villain played by Vincent Price on the 1960s series) and bring in great new material (Batman vs. King Kong, a touching Batman/Joker bromance, etc.) without feeling overcrowded.

My one regret is that the theater didn’t have more excited, happy Batman fans in it to laugh with me.  Please see it with friends and have a good time.

Animal Crackers Review

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UPDATE 2017-03-01: I wrote that this was the first Marx Brothers film, but it was not.  Excluding Humor Risk – a silent film that was previewed but never released and is now lost – their first film was The Cocoanuts.

The films of the Marx Brothers are generally divided into about three different eras, and this film, being their first, obviously belongs to the first era.  This was the time when they were essentially just taking their stage plays that had done well on Broadway and putting a camera in front of them.  Consequently, most of Animal Crackers really doesn’t feel like much more than a standard comedy play about an unlikely mix-up – one that could be performed at any high school – and now it has been badly filmed with poor editing and the sound quality one would expect from a studio that had just made its very first sound film a few months prior.  The one thing that keeps this film from feeling too much like the above description is the fact that a few of the characters are played by the Marx Brothers, which changes everything.  While it is apparent that the brothers haven’t quite hit their stride yet, their characters are already reasonably well-defined here, or at last as defined as they would ever be (I’m looking at you, Zeppo).  When the boys are allowed to simply be funny, they generally succeed in this film, but much of the movie drags on and focuses too much on plotlines that Marx Bros. fans don’t really care about.  Not all of the jokes are funny, as Groucho admirably admits to the audience, and the random musical numbers are awkward, slow, and forgettable, but over all, it’s still a pretty fun movie that I would gladly watch again.

Girls in Uniform (1931) Review

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Mädchen in Uniform is a 1931 sound film about a girl in a boarding school who finds herself falling in love with one of the women who teaches there (see image below).  This film is highly dramatic, and puts the audience in her shoes as she suffers greatly at the boarding school and (minor spoiler warning) considers committing suicide.  It has an all-female cast and a female director, and it’s based on a play by Christa Winsloe.  Needless to say, this is not a Hollywood movie – it comes from Germany – but it was highly successful internationally.  In part because of the time period in which it debuted, it is considered to be an anti-Nazi film, even though Nazis are (to my memory) never seen nor mentioned.  Welcome to European cinema.

What we have here is a film that is doing a lot of things at once.  On the one hand, it shows what girls are like at their most normal and ordinary through its exceptional realism, while at the same time presenting us with girls who are quite strongly attracted to other females and thus represent a distinct minority of the population.  It relies on elements of German Expressionism in some scenes, particularly in its lighting, but most of it has the style of the New Objectivity movement, which was oppositional to the aforementioned movement.  It is a very personal story about the problems that come with a strict, unfeeling manner of bringing up children that lacks compassion and understanding, yet it can also work as an allegory for the issue of overly strict authoritarian governments.  To me, it is the personal story of living in a strict school that gives the film so much power over me, if only because I’m still rather resentful about the arguably overbearing schooling I received, and the perfect blend of realism and theatricality sells it brilliantly.  I do think that most of the first half of the movie is rather boring, but by the climax, it gets my blood boiling in just the right way – a way so few stories since Carrie have been able to do – and for that I appreciate it greatly.

Top Hat Review

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This film was not what I expected it to be, and yet it was only what I expected it to be.  There are some dance numbers in here that are very nice and impressive, and that feel like what I would expect from this duo, but only one or two, and I had already seen one of them.  For some reason I thought there would be a bit more of the two of them dancing and a bit more fun, with less of the two antagonizing each other.  Most of the film, however, is dominated by their bizarre conflict/romance and a cliché story of mistaken identity.  I’m not sure if it seemed as cliché at the time, of course, but it felt very much like it was just repeating the kind of things one finds in the usual comedic plays of someone like Oscar Wilde, or even Shakespeare.  In a way, this makes it a very standard romantic comedy, although it’s still a very smart one, so it serves as a great example of what a serviceable Classical Hollywood romantic comedy feels like (just with more cool dancing).

Of course, don’t think for a second that I don’t really like this movie.  Certain aspects of some of these dance numbers are brilliant, and a lot of the writing of the dialogue is clever too, which was only improved by the strong characterizations these actors brought to their characters, so I can see why this film is so popular.  Perhaps I’ve been a bit too hard on this movie – it did, after all, give us the song “Cheek to Cheek,” which is one of the greatest love songs of all time – but for whatever reason, I just felt like something was missing.  I’m not sure what.  I feel like the movie was somehow not fun enough, even though I enjoyed myself watching it, and Fred Astaire’s character seemed to be having a great deal of fun the whole time.  Still, since this was my first time actually watching an Astaire-Rogers musical in its entirety, I was hoping for something a little more bright and dazzling, but maybe I’ll find that in another one of their films.

What About Bob? Review

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I generally try to be a really tough critic.  I never give five stars, and I only give four and a half stars to the movies that grab me in the most intense and personal ways possible or impress me such that I would not object to considering them the greatest films of all time.  Naturally, I try to keep the list of films that get this most esteemed rating as small as possible, with only a few such reviews every year so they only make up about 10% of my reviews.  As I watched What About Bob?, I could tell that this film was in the 4 to 4.5 zone, but I wasn’t sure where, and I regrettably remained unsure even after the film had ended.  Over time, however, I found myself leaning towards 4.5 not only because its particular story and comedy style grab me personally, but because I kept laughing at its comedy after weeks had passed since I watched the film.

I do believe that this film is truly (and perhaps objectively) good, but the reasons why I love it are more subjective.  I have a personal connection to What About Bob? because I love Frank Oz, who directed the film, and I’ve grown fond of his style as a filmmaker and humorist.  He also cast fellow Muppet performer Fran Brill as a fairly significant character in the film, which I greatly appreciate – it’s not every film that pairs Bill Murray with Prairie Dawn.  I also just like comedic stories about craziness, mental illness, anxiety, psychology, and the brain, which is why films like High Anxiety, Silver Linings Playbook, Crazy People, and Inside Out are among my favorites.  I also like comedy that focuses on the dynamic between characters that each have distinct and understandable personalities, a la the early Harry Potter films and certain Muppet movies.

To be more objective, however, the story is cleverly written, and the performances are absolutely excellent. Richard Dreyfuss in particular clearly had a difficult task in that his character must become progressively and consistently less sane, while staying somewhat relatable during most of the film, and I think he handled it very well, delivering most of the film’s best comedy.  I will say that the extent to which I empathize with Dreyfuss’ character does at times get in the way of the comedy, and it is perhaps a consequence of this that the film’s ending feels a little weak, but overall, What About Bob? offers the high level of cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve come to expect from Frank Oz.  I don’t think this movie gets a lot of credit as one of the greats – although it did make Bravo’s list of the “100 Funniest Movies” and a quote from the film is in my movie quotes daily calendar – but regardless of what anyone else might think of it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.