J.D. Hansel

New Movie Reviews

Suspiria Review

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As I’ve continued my new journey through old horror movies, I’ve decided to return to the director of Phenomena/Creepers to see what is probably his most famous and acclaimed work, Suspiria.  Another of Dario Argento’s semi-Italian films with weird dubbing, this film caught my attention because I read a description of it somewhere that called it “candy-colored,” and based on what I saw in photos, that seemed to be an appropriate description.  This is, in terms of visuals, one of the top three greatest films I have ever seen in my life, and it insists on lighting and coloring its interesting sets in the most theatrical style possible with no interest in explaining why everything turns red when the lights go out or why the walls have illustrations that sing of Lewis Carroll.  When the visuals are put together with the wonderfully creepy score, it creates an eerie, powerful, and beautiful experience in nearly every scene.  That being said, this film is evidence of the fact that a series of great and interesting scenes or moments does not constitute a great story.  The plot is simply impossible to follow and hardly anything in this movie makes any sense.  It has good moments, but they do not function within a machine of set-ups and pay-offs or anything resembling quality dramatic, ironic storytelling.

I’m giving this film a big pass on the stupidity of its plot because of how fun and scary it is in all the right ways, and because I’m a sucker for old cult films with Jessica Harper, but I’m still rather upset that it hasn’t been released on Blu-Ray yet.  I know they’ve been working on it, but I can’t help but feel that my review is inevitably insufficient until I get to see all of the film’s magnificent beauty in the highest quality possible.

Girlfriends Review

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This is a very interesting film, perhaps because of how uninteresting it is in some ways.  It is unique in that it explores the lives of normal women who live as roommates until their friendship is rocked when one of them gets married – and I do think it is highly unusual to see this level of focus on either everyday, run-of-the-mill activities or the regular urban female experience.  The film has little interest in plot, but that doesn’t make it boring.  It’s essentially a series of scenes that make one ponder the concepts of the will, the self, and agency, each suggesting that they do not function the way we like to imagine they do.  It doesn’t have particularly dramatic drama, and it doesn’t have particularly comedic comedy, but for those looking for subtle variations on a philosophical theme (with a side of Christopher Guest), this film hits the spot.

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Review

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It’s rare for me to see a film with a plot as difficult to follow as this one.  Even though I searched online for plot descriptions to help me out, I got lost during many parts of the film, which might be a sign of bad filmmaking, but might just mean part of the film is missing.  Fortunately, this movie isn’t so much about plot as it is about visuals, moods, moments, characters, realizations, and experiences.  It has a visual style that many films have emulated, but not nearly enough, and depending on the score that accompanies it, it can be a totally wild experience (right down to the inter-titles).  I certainly have my issues with the film – it’s really rather boring at times, and I’m not wild about much of the confusing storyline – but when critics all over the world praise and hail this film as a gem of cinema, I have to agree.  The reason why I have to agree is that I am forever in this film’s debt for offering cinema the kind of theatrical style that I adore, and that alone makes it one of the greatest contributions to the history of film.

In the future, though, let’s try to make German Expressionist visuals that don’t use that annoying yellow tint for half the film, okay?

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The Chosen Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

I’ve seen a number of films about religion over the years, but I haven’t seen one quite like this.  It’s a bit more analytical in its approach – it looks at the characters in a positive light for the most part, but isn’t particularly preachy.  It simply lets the viewer reflect on differences among sects of the Jewish community during a time in history that was particularly important for the Jews, making it nostalgic for some older viewers and educational for most millennials and non-Jews.  That being said, it does try very hard to put the father of the Hasidic family in a positive light, particularly with the unsurprisingly moving musical score by Elmer Bernstein (although it’s not his best work), which I just don’t buy.  I just don’t think the way this character handled raising his son was acceptable, and his defense is inadequate.  Add to that the fact that his choice to excommunicate Reuven (along with his son’s choice to obey his father’s orders to keep away from Reuven) seems entirely unjustified, and it’s essentially impossible for me to respond to the film in the way the filmmakers want me to.  Overall, it is a reasonably well-made film, but I just can’t fully get behind it because its characters’ values seem so vastly distant from mine.

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Mulholland Drive Review

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what effect the “Books Are Always Better” movement has had on cinema.  Just to be clear, I am referring to the notion that the novel is a superior medium, both intellectually and in terms of affect, to the medium of film.  While I intend to write more on the subject in the future, for now I’ll just say that cinema has spent the past several decades – perhaps its entire lifetime – trying to prove itself as a medium that can both have a certain kind of intelligence, elegance, and subtlety about it, addressing the first insult to its ego, and have a powerful, intimate, and subjective emotional effect like books do, addressing the second.  These are the two main marks of quality and refinement in cinema, and film critics have been striving for years to emphasize the films that display these qualities so that film, and in turn film critics, can have some dignity.  On a related note, in a class on literature I had at my previous college, the professor (and many of the students) had a fondness for a quality of interpretive ambiguity – the literature that was considered to be truly excellent and meaningful was the literature that gestured towards a variety of possible meanings, but ultimately left its meaning up to the subjective feelings of the reader.  This is seen as an intersection of intellectualism and a personally emotional effect because it seems to require thinking on the part of the audience and it relies on subjectivity, which is why so many filmmakers have foolishly bought into the idea that this ought to be the goal of all literature, including film.  Mulholland Drive is one of the films that has impressed people because of how well it manages to be entertaining and interesting as a film while staying at this intersection that is so highly regarded in literature.

I think it boils down to how people think about photogénie.  This is a term used in reference to the aspect of cinema that is essentially, distinctly, and uniquely cinematic, and it is usually associated with Jean Epstein’s theory that film is not meant to focus on characters and plot so much as its elements and powers that no other media have (e.g. its tendency to break the rules of time with editing techniques, or its ability to show large, complex movement).  The dominant view right now, from what I can tell, is that cinema is at its best when it focuses on its sheer power to emotionally overwhelm the spectator, not on the logic of its plot.  While I will write further on this later, I argue that the pure essence of cinema has more to do with simulating a logical sequence of events following from an understood set of premises for the spectator to analyze intellectually and/or emotionally.  Naturally, I find it hard to get behind a film that has complete disregard for everything I believe cinema ought to be, and I find it exceptionally lazy to set up a great story that has no conclusion or meaning.  It’s a huge disappointment, but at least it is somehow strangely captivating.

In the end though , I still think it’s just finely polished garbage.

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Gun Crazy Review

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SPOILER WARNING

In my last review, I wrote a bit about how I’m currently fascinated with génial–nanar blends – films that are very impressive and enjoyable in some scenes, yet are so stupid, bizarre, or unimpressive that they become enjoyable in other scenes.  One of the best examples of this type of film is unsurprisingly found in the film noir genre: Gun Crazy, also known as Deadly Is the Female.  While I don’t think it’s meant to be a comedy, many scenes are so strange or absurd that they seem laughable, giving me a feeling that’s no so different from what I get when I watch Duck Soup in that it feels almost like a child’s idea of how to make a movie rather than a rational adult’s.  What I think Gun Crazy demonstrates is that this group of films, in which I would include Gun Crazy, often achieves this state by trying to be completely interesting, surprising, or unique.

First, consider the strange aspects of this film.  The protagonist is obviously a very odd choice for a romantic lead in a crime drama because of his tall, lanky, silly appearance, which is only made sillier by his awkward smile and his unexplained obsession with guns.  Towards the beginning of the film, two characters are presented as children – Clyde Boston and Dave Alastair – who are dressed as adults and look exactly the same when they grow up.  Towards the end, Annie is randomly crazy enough to steal the baby from Ruby’s house to keep herself (and Bart) from getting shot by police.  The foggy, swampy environment of the ending looks nothing like the rest of the film, and wouldn’t naturally occur in that location, breaking what little sense of realism the film had maintained.  Best of all is the line that was nominated for inclusion in AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes: “We go together, Laurie. I don’t know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together.”

Now consider just how much of Gun Crazy is clever and creative.  The opening titles are presented over the background that becomes the first scene, meaning the cast and crew held on that shot for a few minutes before they started moving – nothing novel, but certainly something rare and interesting.  As far as the storytelling goes, there is great irony in the fact that the protagonist first encounters his lover when she shoots him and their relationship ends when he shoots her.  The bank robbery scene that was shot all in one take is highly impressive from a technical standpoint, not to mention how difficult it must have been for the performers to time everything properly and improvise any needed dialogue.  Even some of the weirdest things can be viewed from a perspective that makes them seem clever.  For example, one might see the representation of young Clyde and Dave as miniature adults as an indication that much of the film (or at least the opening scene that takes place in the past) is being presented from Bart’s perspective according to his memory.

Ultimately, all of these positive elements and bizarre elements seem to come from the same directorial approach: making the film as interesting as possible – striving to make things unique at all costs.  Trying things that people have never done before in cinema can lead to the greatness of Citizen Kane or the ridiculousness of a Joel Schumacher film.  In spite of its resemblance to other film noir, it clearly strives to be very much its own film, refusing to let anyone say that it is not unique.  This isn’t the greatest answer to my question of how we get génial–nanar blends, and it is not my final answer – in fact one professor of mine found it very inadequate, arguing instead that it has something more to do with affect.  Still, the desire to make something very different from what everyone’s seen before, something that’s very captivating and memorable at all costs, does seem to be at least a preliminary requirement for the génial–nanar.  I don’t think anyone else would have thought to make a film noir with a tiny touch of the western and a big load of goofiness, but the fact that this mixture was somehow able to get produced in the height of the studio system’s panicked identity crisis is enough to make it the unique novelty that audiences never knew they wanted.

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