J.D. Hansel

JD Hansel

An American Werewolf in London Review

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My appreciation of great horror films is always a little bit limited by the fact that I don’t really care for being scared all that much.  There is still some horror out there that I like, but this film doesn’t have that much of it – most of this film’s horror portions are simply slow builds to jump-scares.  Sometimes fun builds, but the point is still the “startle,” which isn’t my kind of horror.  This film does, however, offer my kind of humor.

Most of the movie is really a sort of bizarre ’80s comedy about a college kid and his buddy having a strange experience abroad, and the character comedy is absolutely delightful.  John Landis knows how to make the minor characters funny as well; the casting of Frank Oz here is perfect, and sometimes finding the right character actor is all it takes for great comedy.  I think that’s what I like so much about this film: Landis brings together different elements that don’t usually get put together, but his careful combination creates a rare and beautiful emotional effect on the viewer – an effect of uneasy laughter.  It’s simply a work of really smart craftsmanship, and while not all of it is the kind of entertainment I’m used to, this film is already inching its way closer and closer to my heart.

Baby Driver Review

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This is the best film of 2017 I’ve seen so far.  Hands down.  Let’s talk about why.

I love it when I see a trailer for an upcoming movie and think, “Oh my gosh – what is this and how was it able to get made in today’s world?”  What puzzled me about the Baby Driver trailer, or at least the particular trailer I saw first, was that it looked like a generic action movie (by generic I mean it contains many of the most common standards of the genre, like impossible car chases and crime bosses who threaten to kill loved ones and 93 guns going off in every scene), but it actually looked good.  As the trailer explained more about the premise of the movie and what conflicts arise in it, I couldn’t help but think that this film must have come from a brilliant auteur – a Chazelle or Scorsese.  Then, with one name, it all made sense to me: Edgar Wright.

Knowing that Wright is a really smart director, and that I share a lot of his tastes, I went into the theater expecting the film to be pretty good … for a “gun flick.”  I couldn’t have known I would later leave the theater wanting it to win Best Picture.  So, herein lies the first reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it made a great movie out of a not-so-great genre.  Where other films in the genre would rely on CGI for their tricks, Wright amazingly depended on practical effects, giving every scene in a car all the more weight.  I think Wright approached this movie like he was making a movie – not like he was making an “action flick,” but like he was just making a good, compelling film – complete with interesting characters, gripping drama, highly inventive visual storytelling, and awesome music.  He took the film seriously as a work of art, and he made sure his story was as compelling as could be, borrowing from as many genres, styles, and influences as needed to accomplish this feat.

Now, I’ve recently written a lot about the Guardians of the Galaxy series, particularly in regards to its use of music.  There’s a trend that I think started around the late ‘80s – it had certainly become the norm by the early 2000s – of film soundtracks relying on a lot of known pop music (particularly older pop music) to add some fun, familiar elements to the film.  This is so normal for comedies, dramas, and comedy-dramas now that we usually don’t even notice it.  This music is generally non-diegetic, but often crosses into diegetic, and is selected very late in the filmmaking process to help establish the mood of a scene.  Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One” clearly has nothing to do with the story to the movie Bowfinger, at least not in its lyrical content, but it appears frequently in the film purely because its fun, bouncy sound reminds the viewer that the movie is fun.  With Guardians, the music is never an afterthought and is virtually always diegetic (or at least semi-diegetic), often taking the foreground in the scene and having an influence on the plot.  I believe this is a game-changer because it’s one of the only film series today to challenge the theory that film is a visual medium, suggesting that sometimes the music is what drives a movie.

Guardians, you’ve just made a friend.

And this is the second reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it uses music brilliantly.  First of all, its soundtrack is very good.  Secondly, and more importantly, the music is often used to create different kinds of scenes that I don’t think I’ve seen before – scenes in which the visuals are so in-sync with the music that lyrics from the song decorate the sets, or scenes with the music turned up and the dialogue turned down such that we’re only left with the general idea of the events taking place, and that’s all we need.  The scene with “Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up” creates a mood that is both weirdly funny and intensely dramatic at once, almost like The Graduate (but for very different reasons).  Heck, Wright even works a song from a live album into the opening scene, which is almost never done in film if the live recording isn’t remarkably well-known, and he keeps the part with the singer speaking to the audience in, all in a way that feels perfectly natural.  Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most impressive part of the movie, Wright uses music to make us feel close to a character with very little dialogue for a lead – we understand what he’s thinking and feeling through his music, and that’s enough to make us empathize with him completely.

The third reason why this film is the greatest of 2017 so far is that it racks up “points for style” like no film I’ve seen from the past 5 years apart from La La Land and the works of Wes Anderson.  I’ve already noted some of this, like the integration of music into the visuals, but some of it’s in the little things, like the way the clothes in the laundromat are all primary colors to create a sense of childlike joy and freedom in a scene with Baby and Debora having fun.  The beauty of the film is in the dramatic red light on the villain’s face in the climax, and the careful use of black and white in a few select scenes, and the way everyone in America is presumed to wear brightly-colored shirts on a sunny day (to contrast the attire in Wright’s films set in Britain).  Wright brings back his old trick of tying what’s playing on the television set into the plot, this time very comically, and he even showed his well-known love for my dearest Phantom of the Paradise by giving Paul Williams a great little part.  It takes a special kind of filmmaker to think to do these things, and I’m so glad we’ve been blessed with just the filmmaker we need in Edgar Wright.

The Land Before Time Review

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It’s amazing to me that a multimillion-dollar franchise containing fourteen films began with a movie containing so little.  In its  69-minute runtime, it quickly runs through the “greatest hits” of family films for little kids: the parents die, the protagonist is told to follow his heart and just believe and all that crap, a scary conflict keeps arising, the scary conflict goes away every time, a spiritual mentor reminds the protagonist to follow his heart some more, the main characters set aside their differences and strife to safe one of their own, and the protagonist completes his journey to live happily ever after with his newfound family.  It may sound like a lot when I list it like this, but in a movie, this all happens pretty fast.  In this movie, it all happens without enough necessity – it happens purely because the powers that be (Spielberg, Bluth, and Lucas) want it to, so the movie feels lacking in substance to me.  That being said, I think the franchise works because of its simplicity: it has common movie themes, goals, conflicts, and lessons, thus teaching kids the basics of the standard “Hero’s Journey,” and its cast of main characters are distinct from each other and each memorable and marketable in their own ways.

So, the story doesn’t do much for me, and I don’t like being beaten over the head with the “follow your heart” message, but the visuals are outstanding, and it’s a cute movie for the little ones.

The Nutty Professor Review

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Wait a minute – isn’t this movie supposed to be … ya know, funny?  It’s amazing how, with one look at the DVD case, anyone would think this film surely was one of the worst ever made, yet a look online would reveal how highly regarded it is as one of the great comedies.  While I can easily understand why critics want to recognize Lewis for his talents, I just have to ask … really?  This counts as a good comedy?

The characters are insufferable.  The story is insufferable.  The hokey visual gags are insufferable.  Most of the other jokes are insufferable.  The ending is just plain stupid, and undercuts everything else in the movie.  The only thing about this movie that’s impressive is, much to my surprise, the filmmaking.  The way that it’s shot and edited impressed me, but even more impressive is the production design – the costumes, the props, and the sets.  Largely due to its brilliant use of gorgeous colors, this is a movie I would gladly show to anyone who wanted to see my idea of a pretty-looking movie, as long as I didn’t have to watch it with them.

Pretty Woman Review

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Professors really like to tell their students stories about how things we mere millennials could never understand.  I remember an English professor at my first college (although I don’t remember which one) explaining that Pretty Woman was a very surprising and controversial movie upon its release – one might even say a “game-changer.”  The film was important because it presented two shifts in values: the first being acceptance of the fact that sex workers are people too, and the second being consideration of the opinion that a kiss on the mouth is more meaningful than sex.  Now that I think about it, I can see how this could have ruffled feathers at the time, but I can’t make myself feel what it must have felt like to watch this film at the time when it came out – I can’t emotionally understand the significance of the movie.  To me, it just looks like a movie that’s perfectly fine.

It does the job.  The director and cinematographer seem to have had some fun with it, the writing is generally fairly smart, the comedy is satisfactory, and the performances are good.  I’m not much of a fan of Roberts, and I might have liked her character more with a different person in the role, but I’ll grant that her performance was quite well-done.  The other characters were less impressive – particularly the male lead – but there’s only so much you can do with a character as flat as … well, most of the characters (although Héctor Elizondo as the hotel manager is a treat).  The problem is that, apart from this one twist on the rom-com genre, Pretty Woman is actually pretty generic, even to the point that a number of its scenes (the romantic montage being the best example) are unintentionally funny.  But don’t think I didn’t like this movie – Pretty Woman is one of the most charming films I’ve seen in a long time, and while its initial “wow factor” may be lost, some of its appeal, as it is with other fairy tales, is timeless.

Schindler’s List Review

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Seeing as how I’m obviously in no position to write a review of this film, I’ll just comment on one aspect of the film that I believe ought to set an example for other filmmakers.  This movie is one of the few exceptions to the general rule that Spielberg specializes in a sentiment that J. D. Hansel will never understand or learn to like, but what I appreciate here in particular is Spielberg’s understanding of the value of black and white.  By the 1990s, it’s no wonder why audiences had come to assume that color films were the default and black and white films are deviants.  It’s nice to see a film that sees how making a black and white film in the age of color has its advantages.  Black and white allows the filmmaker to make some scenes on location with strikingly raw realism and others on a set with highly-stylized film noir-like expressionism, with all of them fitting together beautifully.  There’s no sense that this film is inconsistent in style (even though it is) because the modern viewer sees all of it as the same style: black and white.

Since Orson Welles would say that one of the main benefits (if not the main benefit) of colorless film is that the actors look better and their performances hit harder, which I think I can agree with, I have to ask the question: why should we even have color if film works better without it?  The answer, in my view, is this: color is only worth using if you’re going to use it well.  Usually this means vibrancy and theatricality, like the color in Dick Tracy, but other times it means using color as a communication device for purely practical reasons.  With the girl in the red coat, Spielberg shows that using color in a way that’s simply functional (in this case it’s just an identifier, nothing more) can actually create a greater sense of meaning than the use of color in the average color film.  With such a masterful film that holds the special honor of being both highly unconventional and extremely popular with audiences, there’s a lot that I could take away from it, but this was the main lesson for me, and I think it’s a very, very good one.