JD Hansel

Paths of Glory Review

October 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

I don’t like war movies.

I have no interest in wars. It is an embarrassment to the species that we still have them. I generally have no interest in stories that attempt to glorify wars, even if they do balance it out to a degree by showing much bloodshed to display how horrible war can be. At the end of the day, war movies (and arguably anti-war movies) make their money by appealing to the disgusting, aggressive, barbaric element of the human soul that just wants to watch people beat the crap out of other people – an element of the soul that our culture has particularly nurtured and groomed in men.

I also don’t like Stanley Kubrick.

2001: A Space Odyssey was the first (and I think only) movie to literally bore me to tears. Kubrick’s obnoxious art style is frankly too “up in your face” for his work to feel mature enough for my tastes. His intense focus on what I consider “mindless mindfulness” for hours on end with his hypnotic visuals is about as pseudo-intellectual as it gets. I have given him a hard time before for being too boring, and even though I liked Dr. Strangelove, it too felt rather slow and boring at times (as did Killer’s Kiss). I think this is because Kubrick has a particular gift – and I do mean this sincerely – for making human characters as distant and inhuman as possible, which is honestly a challenge. Personally, however, I get bored too easily when a film doesn’t have any real “human” characters in it, and when I’m not being drawn in to a specific emotional experience because of the characters.

Enter Paths of Glory.

Here is a film that is extremely intense and intensely extreme, pulling the viewer into the deepest trenches of emotion and outrage. The hero (whom Kirk Douglas plays beautifully) is largely likable because he is the character who stands for that which is moral, but I would argue that the protagonist is not what makes the film so engaging. The emotional pull comes not from how much we like the protagonist, but how much we hate the people above him. He is surrounded by devils, and any notion the viewer may have had beforehand of the first World War being about “good guys vs. bad guys” is shattered – there are bad guys and worse guys. War is revealed to be a matter of politics, killing people to make a point and artificially form a narrative, making for an absolutely excellent anti-war movie.

Interestingly, I happened to follow my viewing of this film with the 1918 Charlie Chaplin comedy Shoulder Arms, which also takes place during World War I. It’s amazing to see how both a film that reduces the war to petty political games and a film that completely makes light of the war (both taking place in the French trenches specifically) could be very thoughtful, insightful, and entertaining films. It almost feels like practicing two separate religions, or supporting two opposing political candidates. What’s odd, however, is this: with how much of a comedy buff I am, I feel as though I ought to like the Chaplin comedy more – it is very, very clever, after all – but I am more drawn to Kubrick’s film.

What Kubrick captures here is not so much humanity as it is a different kind of inhumanity than I’m used to seeing from him: he offers us the chance to see the twisted monsters that lie in our souls, thus exposing how much of our humanity is actually made up of inhumanity. While Paths may have started off a little bit on the tedious side as I’d expected, I soon found myself on the edge of my seat as the cynic in me felt overwhelmed with orgasmic outrage and rapturous rage. I was far more invested in the political drama of this film than I get invested in most films in general, let alone dramas about war. I was sort of let down by the ending, but I eventually found that the ending was purposely underwhelming, giving the audience one final sting with the realization that no progress has been made, and everything will go on the same corrupt way until the war is over. It may not be a perfect film, but finally I see in Kubrick the cinematic master I’ve always heard he should be.

Detour (1945) Review

October 6, 2016 by JD Hansel

This film is an absolute mess. It looks as cheap as it is, constantly making it painfully obvious that the director’s been given less than $100,000 and less than a week to make a movie. The script is all over the place, with a story that the biggest of fans of this film concede makes little or no sense. The characters are clearly not meant to be likable, but I found them utterly detestable without reason. The whole experience is painful, and I think most film critics/historians recognize that, but they still review it well and consider it a classic because they justify its badness. I’m not going to do that, because this film doesn’t deserve my help.

I’ve heard a number of reasons why the story and characters are as bad as they are and explanations of what it’s supposed to mean. I’ve come up with a few similar explanations myself, which the professor of my film noir class found rather thoughtful. Some argue that the story is addressed directly to us, while I argue he’s mentally preparing his story for anyone – primarily the cops – who may question him, and some would say it’s all essentially a dream (which would explain why it seems to function in an over-dramatized fairy tale world of “dream logic” rather than in reality). The running theme throughout interpretations and justifications of the story is the unreliable narrator, but in the end, these are all mere excuses. I think the real reason why people make such excuses is that the film is so intellectually fascinating to critics, and these critics want to make their fascination with the film – which often transforms into love for the film – seem justified. In my view, however, this is not a matter of a film being so bad that it’s good, although I’ve reviewed such films positively in the past. This is a case of a very creative and fascinating (yet illogical) film that feels like it ought to have a logic to it, so it remains a memorable enigma, and for that it is a classic . . . it’s just not a good classic.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life Review

October 3, 2016 by JD Hansel

This is it – the last film in the Monty Python “Holy Trinity” – and it’s certainly the weirdest.

Its “prologue” is the worst part, and it is very clearly directed by Terry Gilliam. I have mixed feelings about Gilliam, and I think this short is a good example of what bugs me about his work. Somewhere between the films of Terry Gilliam and the books of Roald Dahl is the land of “Semi-Horrific, Mildly Comedic, Awkward Whimsy,” or “SHMCAW” for short. Shmcaw is my least favorite thing in cinema, or at least it’s up there. This is that nauseating feeling I have when a film presents uncomfortable dehumanizing in a whimsical way, causing my face to scrunch up. It happens in Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry’s aunt inflates, and all throughout The Witches, and it happens in The Crimson Permanent Assurance when we’re supposed to laugh at random businessmen being forced to jump out of a building to their deaths by delighted elderly folks. The whole thing just feels wrong, but I will not detract any points from my rating, because this is the short feature that plays before the main feature, and Wikipedia gives it a separate article as its own short film, but I felt the need to mention it because it is (in some respects) inseparable from the film.

There is very little for me to say for the film itself. I think that it offers much of the kind of comedy I expected, but its main focus seems to be doing whatever any other directing, production company, writers, or group of performers would never, ever, ever be allowed to do in a film distributed by Hollywood. It breaks rules of cinema that no one ever invented – there was no concept of a rule against showing a man in an elephant suit for no reason, or devoting half the movie to unimportant fish for no reason, or giving an impossibly fat man who vomits profusely and eats until he explodes his own scene for no reason. Monty Python made up rules to break, all in the spirit of giddy, childlike (or perhaps childish) fun. There is, however, the question of purpose – Life of Brian has good reasoning behind its scenes, with an important message, but why does this film need to exist? Is it merely here to weird out the audience as much as possible?

Personally, I’d prefer to see more sense to the senselessness, more logic to the lunacy, and more method to the madness, but that is not what the film is for. Many have said before that it is essentially an extended episode of Flying Circus, and that’s what it feels like to me. It is not their best film, but it is pretty good, with several, several moments that continue to pop up in my head many weeks every watching the film, and they continue to give me a chuckle. The music is some of Python’s best, making for a very enjoyable soundtrack. This movie offers a fair mix of some of the best and the worst that Python has to offer, but by the 1980s, the Pythoners had learned how to ensure that their worst was still rather fun.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) Review

September 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

Many consider this to be one of the greatest comedy films of all time, and I am happy to say that I have joined the many in that opinion. I’m afraid I have very little to add here that hasn’t been said, so I will keep my comments brief and simply urge all readers to watch this film. While it may not be my favorite comedy, it is one that I greatly appreciate, and one that I intend to emulate. It perfectly established so many great tricks to make a film extra-funny, and these are techniques that can still be employed today without losing much strength. Much of its brilliance and beauty come from the fact that it’s a comedy about World War II that was made and released during World War II, and yet the really great thing about it is how well it plays with an audience of young people today (as I had the good fortune of witnessing myself). Because I saw the Brooks film some years before seeing the Lubitsch original, there were some parts of the movie that annoyed me simply because I was hoping this film would offer more of the great moments I was used to seeing in the way I was used to seeing them. That being said, this film takes everything a different direction – its own unique direction – that I think is worth a little analysis.

After reading an analysis of the film from a few decades ago by cultural theorist Mladen Dolar, and reading Ebert’s review of the Brooks/Johnson remake, I am fascinated by two elements of this film’s humor. The first is the way it manages to be over-the-top without being over-the-top. While watching this film, I was a little let down during the soliloquy sequences, because the remake made me expect Jack Benny to totally lose his cool on stage and follow the man in the audience to the edge of the stage. This film doesn’t do that, instead focusing on understatement of big problems. This is tied to my second note, which is how petty everyone is. I think films are can be found on a rectangular spectrum-like chart with a particular type of fictional world in each corner:

Type A: The audience and the protagonist are sane, normal, and relatively smart people, but some people are inhuman, evil monsters.
Type B: All humans are inhuman, evil monsters.
Type C: The audience and the protagonist are sane, normal, and relatively smart people, but some people are short-sighted, ignorant, silly fools.
Type D: All humans are short-sighted, ignorant, silly fools.

I sorted them in order of popularity, and maybe I’ll make up a graphic representation later, but for now we can call our imaginary chart “The Fictional Cynicism Diagram.” This film is noteworthy for being an early example (if not one of the only really good examples) of a film that belongs right in the last corner, Type D. Most stories are somewhere in the middle, but this sets a tone that wouldn’t become more common until mockumentary shows and Tina Fey productions became popular. For a film made during the second world war to have this approach to even the Nazis, refusing to let them be anything but flawed, foolish humans, just like our heroes, is amazing. That’s what makes this a landmark film, and why its one of my favorites.

Stranger on the Third Floor Review

September 29, 2016 by JD Hansel

This surely must be one of the most fascinating and strange films I have ever seen.

Stranger on the Third Floor is generally considered to be the first movie in the film noir genre, and yet it is very different from the standard conceptions that come to mind when most people think of noir (based on films like Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, or the Bogart films). The lead in this story is no stone-faced, stoic Bogart type – he’s an emotional basket-case – and the relative normalcy of the characters makes the film feel very different from how I’d come to think of noir based on what I saw in Out of the Past. It starts off like a simple enough old-timey Classical Hollywood story about two young lovebirds, but the second act takes a turn when it becomes an experiment in expressionism, before finally returning to reality for a third act that breaks Hollywood in the strangest way.

The second act features an elaborate and creative nightmare sequence, composed almost entirely of elements that were shown (or at least discussed) earlier in the film, now warped into something entirely unreal. This sequence is expressionism gone wild, blatantly stealing from German, French, and Russian artistic styles, but clearly forming a new style of its own at the same time that would be very influential in future film noirs (not to mention Tim Burton films – even if indirectly – and other dark dramas). Simply put, it all looks gorgeous, and its exaggerated theatrical style makes the whole nightmare scene explode with all the wild emotion that burns in the protagonist’s shredded heart. I’m not sure I can think of any other film that manages to be so vibrant without having color, so over-the-top without getting silly, or so animated without being . . . well, literally animated. Then comes the ending.

The final act is incredibly bizarre seeing as how the protagonist vanishes from the movie, leaving his girlfriend to take over the role of being a hero (of sorts). This is not so much a feminist move as a clumsy one, because this was not done to make any sort of statement about gender equality, from what I saw/heard in my repeated viewings and careful reading, but I’m not sure what exactly it really is supposed to be. This move seems to serve little purpose and just make the narrative awkward. Even more awkward is the conversation the leading lady has with the insane antagonist, which had so little logic to it that there were multiple moments of laughter in the screening room when I saw it. Then, at the end, the antagonist is randomly hit by a car and presumed dead, only for the police to look at him and start talking to him as his body lies in the street, revealing he is alive. This is finished off with one of the most forced “tag endings” in movie history, making for an overly cheery, cheesy conclusion that just doesn’t feel human.

On the whole, however, the film is very strong. The expressionist visuals are used not just for show, but to saturate the conflict, making the emotions of the protagonist that much stronger and the drama of the story that much more powerful. Its commentary on how flawed the American justice system may very well be is truly chilling. The performances by some of the actors, particularly the great Peter Lorre, served the film very well, making for a very special mood to the work overall. I recommend this film not only because it was inspirational for filmmakers historically, but because it is inspirational to me. It’s weaknesses may be absurd, but its strengths win me over, and I cannot help but have a massive crush on this gorgeous, gorgeous film.

Contact Review

September 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

Please, please read this review.

I don’t think the star rating is an accurate picture of what I think of this movie. It is an absolutely brilliant drama, clearly showing off the storytelling skills of Carl Sagan, Robert Zemeckis, and Alan Silvestri at their finest. At the same time, I don’t think this review is adequate either. I sort of have a hatred for this film. It’s one of those movies that I want to either give a very high rating or a very low rating, but I can’t decide which. What makes the movie so difficult for me to process is this: Carl Sagan – one of the greatest champions of scientific, skeptical thinking – gave the world a story that makes a case for faith, and seems to make the case against skepticism itself.

This feels like an abominable treachery from one of the last men I would ever expect to be a turncoat in the movement for scientific reasoning. While the very, very end of the movie seems to suggest that skepticism isn’t a bad thing, the conclusion of the movie essentially does. The viewer is put in the position of assuming that the protagonist’s experience, for which she has no evidence, is entirely real, and not at all of her own imagination. The skeptics, however, decide that her experience must be considered invalid. We see the believers with their signs outside the courthouse claiming that she really did “contact” alien life, but these people (whom we are led to believe are correct) have no good evidence for their stance. They are right by happenstance – because their unwarranted belief just so happened to be true – and that is not a healthy way to think. The messages that this film promotes and the way in which it promotes them may be detrimental to the intellectual safety of anyone who takes this film seriously, which is a prospect that I frankly find horrifying and enraging.

The worst part of all this is that the film is perfect up until the ending. It is one of the most thoughtful, provocative, intellectual, creative, realistic, imaginative, clever, emotional, smart, gripping, fun, and serious films I have ever seen. It looks at the idea of alien contact in a way that makes it seem very, very real – both intellectually and emotionally. I was completely sucked in, on the edge of my seat with my jaw on the floor for most of the film, and I was overwhelmingly impressed with perfect marriage of the screenplay Sagan and his wife had fashioned and the cinematic craftsmanship of Zemeckis. When one considers that this is a drama, which I see as a genre that is generally intellectually inferior to comedy, it is amazing that its first two acts won me over to the extent that they did. All it needed to do to be one of my top 25 favorite films of all time was show that the beauty of scientific discovery is directly linked to the beauty of skepticism, but instead its ending turned the film into the same drivel that most sappy dramedies end with: “no matter what anyone says, all that matters is that you believe in yourself.” No, that’s not an actual quote from the film, but frankly it would have been fitting for the closing credits to feature this exact address from one of the Care Bears.

I will need to consider the film further and read more about Sagan’s view of skepticism, but from what I’ve read in interviews and articles thus far, he lacks a basic understanding of what skepticism is, what atheism is, and how to think with rationality about matters of faith in general. I must concede, however, that the film is deserving of much praise for being incredibly well-made, and I would have to rate it fairly well. At least it can be seen as inspirational to young women and girls who may leave this film with an eagerness to go into the scientific field, and whom I sincerely hope will learn for themselves just how beautiful true skepticism really is.