JD Hansel

Burn After Reading Review

November 6, 2016 by JD Hansel

It’s always a little bit embarrassing for me to say that I don’t “get” a certain kind of humor. In general, the inability to understand a joke that others find humorous is often a sign of a lack of understanding of the world as a whole – a sign of immaturity. It usually shows that the person who does not laugh is “out of the loop” and does not have the perspective (or intelligence) to understand either the mechanics of the joke or the nature of the joke’s subjects. This is why I have always hated to reveal that I “just don’t get it” when I watch a film by the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, much like the small fraction of the rest of their work that I’ve seen, simply doesn’t do it for me, and I have a hard time explaining why.

Some might think that I am making too big a deal out of a simple matter of differing tastes, but I don’t think that comedy is quite as subjective as the public believes. I think that appreciation or depreciation of certain jokes or certain kinds of comedy can be indicative of a level of thoughtfulness or intelligence, and the comedy of the Coen brothers is generally thought of as a more sophisticated kind of comedy. I think that this sense of sophistication comes from the fact that they do comedy that is not explicitly comedic – the actors don’t go too far over the top, don’t wink at the camera, don’t crack jokes, don’t engage in funny physical comedy, don’t release a steady stream of witty one-liners the way Woody Allen does, and don’t have the sense of “putting on a show” that is nearly always a part of the comedic aesthetic. The comedy is in how uninteresting and pathetic these people are, but even the traditional comedy style of England, which is known for focusing on the uninteresting and pathetic people more than the fun, wisecracking comic type that America has celebrated, tends to “play up” the comedy much more than the Coen brothers do. I think the subdued nature of the comedy creates the sense that the comedy is a bit harder to find, perhaps to the point that someone could walk into the film mid-way and believe it was a drama for a few minutes. This in turn creates the sense that the comedy must only be visible to those who are smart enough to see it, but I think this is illusory – I know that it’s supposed to be funny that Clooney’s character has so little control over the way he’s wired to behave that he can’t help but find a new woman to have a secret affair with the moment that his current secret lover looks like she’ll become his wife, but it’s only funny to the point of making me roll my eyes. I’m not interested in laughing at people who are just pathetic, annoying suckers – I’m just annoyed with them because I’m surrounded by the same kind of annoying people every day, and their loss is more of a cause for a sigh of relief than for a laugh.

This film is an example of how the Coen brothers simply fail to understand how to properly walk the tiny tightrope that is the comedy narrative. The comedy film is such a difficult thing to do well because of its inherent contradiction: cinema is, as Roger Ebert rightly noted, an empathy-generating machine, while comedy and empathy are forever at odds. The audience can’t care too much about the characters or else it won’t be funny when something bad happens to them – it will be dramatic – but they also can’t be too apathetic about the characters or else they will have no interest in the plot. It is finding the type of character that is amusing, interesting, and somewhat likable, without seeming so real or relatable as to be taken seriously, that makes comedic entertainment possible. From what I’ve seen, the trick seems to be to make the characters relatable through childlike naivete, while still keeping them irrational and foolish. Consider Cookie Monster – he is forever obsessed with cookies, and we laugh at both his inability to obtain them and his inability to see how absurd his obsession is, but we still feel happy for him when he does get a cookie. We laugh at early Hermione Granger when she is saddened by the news that exams have been cancelled, but when she is saddened by being a disliked outcast, this is played as drama, showing the way the two kinds of misery function. Very often, this need for a character to “straighten out her priorities” is enough to make for the “adorable loser” type of character that we enjoy in the work of Henson, Chaplin, and other comedic greats, but the work of the Coen brothers doesn’t fit into either category of misery, and doesn’t work for me.

What does work for me, however, is the ending. The cuts to the men at the C.I.A. who are trying to figure out what on earth is wrong with all these crazy people are delightful. While I’ve never been a huge fan of either version of The Office, I do very much agree with Rainn Wilson’s observation that the show’s awkward moments are not as funny as the reactions of the other cast members in response to those moments. The look to the camera is funny because it relies on the other way that comedy functions in narrative – instead of enjoying the silly misery of the adorable loser, we enjoy the fun that one of the characters is having observing people being fools or losers. Burn After Reading could have worked if it had some sane characters appearing throughout who recognized the absurdity of the other characters, but the characters are just not funny enough on their own. They are annoying and stupid and boring and they made for a tedious film. It took me a very long time to watch it because I couldn’t stomach it all in fewer than three sittings, and frankly I feel like it was time poorly spent.

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.

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.

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.

Raw Deal Review

October 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

Unlike many of my fellow millennials, I have no reservations or concerns about watching films from Classical Hollywood, because I do not share in their fears that old movies are “too boring.” My issue with classic cinema is that it can be uncomfortable recommending or showing older films to friends of mine without explaining to them beforehand that I don’t condone the sexism or racism that sometimes appears in these classic films. When I heard that Raw Deal brings a female perspective to film noir by having a woman narrate, I was hoping that it would be a film noir I could show to friends with no such concerns. Better yet, the professor of the class that was screening Raw Deal said it was his favorite film noir, which sounded like a good sign (as he was also a big fan of Double Indemnity, which I find excellent). Regrettably, I not only greatly disliked the film, but was very disappointed to find no trace of feminism or anything of the sort. While I do think the recurring theme throughout the film is the theme of the choice(s) of its women, I do not think that the film presents the women’s freedom to choose in a positive light.

Most scenes in Raw Deal are part of a set up for the main female choices in the film: Pat’s choice to lie to Joe about Rick’s goon’s phone call concerning Ann, and then her choice tell him the truth. Pat is the character who is most clearly being silenced throughout the film, never getting the chance to take part in the decision-making in her and Joe’s relationship during the first two acts. She’s actually being told what to do by men even before Joe starts – at the prison, she’s told she’ll have to wait to see Joe, which is just the first of many moments in the film that focus on how she’s forced to wait, and then she and Joe are commanded by the security guard to keep their voices up. When Joe starts, if Pat’s narration is to be trusted, the commanding gets alarmingly strict. She hardly gets to finish one sentence once he gets in the car before he tells her to focus on the wheel, and then when she tells him he doesn’t like his plan to use her and Ann to get through the dragnet, he dismisses her concerns immediately and tells her to get dressed. She is similarly told what to do and/or silenced when speaking her mind – either on screen or according to her voiceover – in their car ride to the border, just after they pass the dragnet, at the campfire, when they make their way to Walt’s bar by the beach, and repeatedly throughout their whole discussion when he decides to leave her behind and go to Rick’s. Pat’s narration makes it seem almost as though it’s the story of a woman who’s trapped in a film that’s about her lover’s love story, not hers.

From the perspective of screenwriting theory, it seems like this would be the obvious set-up for a story about a woman who finally learns to make her own choice. While Joe may be the protagonist and dominate the film’s climax, Pat has her own semi-climactic moment when she decides to lie about the phone call. However, the liberation that seems to be displayed in this scene is undercut by her more climactic scene, when she realizes her one big decision in the film was a mistake. If she learns any moral lesson – although that’s debatable – it’s that she should have done as Joe told her in the first place and told him what the man said on the phone call.

Rick goes further in his mistreatment of women, as I suppose one would expect of the villain, and he shows this by keeping his cool after he’s lost his poker game and found out that Joe successfully escaped, but losing it when his lady friend accidentally spills a little bit of her drink on him. (That’s rather small in comparison, even if it is supposed to be the last straw.) Still, it’s ultimately Pat’s narrative that reveals time and time again that she lives in a world in which women’s views aren’t as important as men’s, and I don’t see how her decision to withhold information from Joe changes that. Ann’s choice to shoot a man, which is also set up earlier in the film (with her mentioning in her apartment that she’d be able to stop Joe if she had a gun), but this choice leads to her overwhelming guilt, and ultimately Joe ends up dying hours later anyway. Add this to the number of times they use the word dame and the way the whistle blows when Ann walks out of the prison and it’s clear that the film does not play as well as one would hope to younger audiences who find anti-feminism in film morally unsatisfactory. While I’ve heard some make the case today that the way women are presented and/or treated in film today seems worse that it was back in the days of Classical Hollywood, this is clearly the kind of movie that people are afraid to find when they watch classic films because it perpetuates the view that it is the woman’s place to shut up and obey. At the end of the day, as much as I really appreciate the film’s charmingly “Noir-Expressionist” visual style, I have found nothing else about the film which is particularly noteworthy or memorable, which presents me in the Song of the South conundrum – if all that’s really memorable about the film are the few parts that seem particularly politically inappropriate, should those alone be the memorable part of its reception and ratings?

In this case, I vote yes.