New Movie Reviews

Creepers/Phenomena Review

November 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

I think I’ve written before about my love for nanar, which is the French term for a movie that’s so bad that it becomes enjoyable. I know I’ve written before about my love for movies that are nanar in some scenes and legitimately impressive in others. Since I am finding more and more films that seem to fit this category, I’ll call this type of film a génial–nanar blend. Usually I only note one of these kinds of films if I absolutely love it, which was the case for Masters of the Universe, but sometimes there are parts that are bad enough to be mildly enjoyable in some scenes and decent in others. This is a bit more common and less noteworthy, so we don’t often think much of these films, but one that stands out for me is Phenomena, or as it was known in the United States, The Creepers.

Phenomena is the title I use for it because it’s the name of the original, longer version of the film, which is the version that I saw, so those who’ve seen it as Creepers may have seen a much worse film than I did. This is an Italian film from Dario Argento, a name I didn’t recognize since I’ve never been much of a horror buff, but he seems to be a bit of a name in the field. The star of the film, however, is not an Italian, but a young Jennifer Connelly, and seeing as how I’m obsessed with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, I had to see this movie. She does a decent job with most scenes, but fortunately there’s some cheesy and over-the-top acting in there to make the film nice and campy. That being said, the consequence of an American star in an Italian film is that most of the characters are dubbed, and very badly at that. This just serves to make the film exceptionally comical, but also very odd seeing as how the moments of what seem like entirely incompetent film-making are matched with moments displaying cinematic mastery – sometimes both seem to happen at once.

I still haven’t worked out exactly how génial–nanar blends come about, or how they’re even possible, but at least I now know that their home is in classic campy horror films. There’s something about the desire to create a strong, original, and uncomfortable (yet somehow still fun) affect that is built into the old cheesy horror films, and it seems to be exactly the kind of thing that generates the génial–nanar. I guess there’s no nanar like nanar noir, and between this and Phantom of the Paradise, I’ve learned that I actually like the horror genre far more than I thought I did. The trick seems to be to approach cinema with a sense of fun, whimsy, experimentation, and love for entertaining. I’m still not a big fan of being afraid, but blood as fake as this film’s blood, music as fun as this film’s music, and a script as nutty and lovably stupid as this film’s script, I’m willing to put up with a few jumps and skipped heartbeats to enjoy an experience like this film’s camp.

The Graduate Review: Upon Further Consideration…

November 25, 2016 by JD Hansel

NOTE: This is an amendment to a previous review of the same film.

I’m a little bit surprised to say that this film is better on its second viewing, but not too surprised. I think sometimes it helps to “get used to” a film’s essence, or a film’s ending, in order to appreciate the film’s greatness. The interesting thing about The Graduate is how well it works as both a comedy and a drama. The tone of the film can be described as such: imagine if a filmmaker told his actors in secret that they were making a comedy film, but told the cinematographer and camera crew that he was trying to make a drama, and then tried to see how long they could make the comedy before anyone figured out it wasn’t a drama. That’s the feeling of The Graduate, and while other dramedies have often gone for a similar effect, The Graduate is the film that pulls it off, perhaps because of its playful style. Mike Nichols seems to become the seducer himself, baiting the viewers in with comedy, but manipulating and emasculating them all the while. Nichols understands that people often laugh when they are vulnerable, and the brilliance of this film is its ability to use the drama to make the audience vulnerable enough for its comedy to be effective. The drama and the comedy both play on the same discomfort – a fear of a sort of castration – which may make it a great drama for male viewers, but also establishes the film as being almost exclusively for men because of its constant focus on the American male experience.

I’d like to take the time to systematically go through the ways in which the film explores the anxieties of the young American male, but before I get to the sexual side of this issue, I’ll start with the “formal” aspects. What I mean by “formal” in this case is the use of traditional models of the successful American man to form oneself into this ideal image. The typical image of the young person of the late 1960s involves a very passionate, driven person who aims to change the world by screaming in the streets while holding a cardboard sign, but this film presents a later view of the essence of the college kid – a spaced out, zoned-out, dazed haze. The film tells us that he has been a successful undergrad student with seemingly good grades and a potential future in graduate school, and has also been a track star and was very well-liked in college, yet he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, no satisfaction from what he’s done so far, and is completely lacking in ambition. Even for someone like me, a very ambitious person with big goals in life and concrete ideas for achievements I’d like to make in my career, this is still relatable because of how difficult it was for me to choose a college, a place to live, and so on. Mr. Robinson tells Ben that he wishes he could be young again, buying into the idea that “these are the best years of your life” (not the character’s exact words, but similar) and that people in college have a special freedom of choice. This film shows that notion to be faulty, instead showing how being in one’s early twenties is a perfect example of the Kierkegaardian idea of being “lost in the infinite” – having too many choices to be able to make a good one.

What makes this matter so stressful is that he must make a choice. The fact that he has such a bright future ahead of him forces him to live up to the image of the bright future. The fact that he is smart means he must continue to be smart, and the fact that he is handsome means that he must marry someone beautiful, and the fact that he has studied at a good college means his next college must be better, and the fact that his parents are wealthy means that he must find a great job, and so on and so forth. When most people think of encouragement and parental pride as something positive, this film’s thesis is that his parents’ bragging not only sets extremely high expectations for him to constantly hope he can attain, but also leaves him out of the process of forming his identity, making it no surprise that he lacks vision and drive. Every success he has and every compliment he receives becomes another picket in the fence that’s closing the young man into his ever-shrinking pen. This film, perhaps like The Breakfast Club, tries to recognize the paradox in that what America calls personal growth is actually an experience of personal compression – society squeezing its youth into a narrow mold. Being the perfect kid is revealed to be both incarcerating and distancing, as one comes to look at oneself as an image formed in the minds of others that is separate from the autonomous self, but has unfortunately replaced the self as the newly formed identity.

After considering how the film has depicted the daily anxieties of the young male, one must then consider how it depicts the nightly anxieties of the young male – the Freudian nightmare. Everything that Mrs. Robinson does serves to make her absolutely terrifying to the young male viewer. While I know it’s generally bad form to use the word you in an essay, I must ask you to make this story as personal as possible and put yourself in Ben’s shoes: a woman who looks like your mother and has known you since you were a small child tricks you into going with her into her house, blocks the door so you cannot avoid seeing her naked body, tempts you into an ongoing secret affair with her, makes you look like an unintelligent fool, challenges your experience and ability to perform adequately in sex, ruins your relationship with your newfound love, calls the police on you, convinces everyone that you raped her, sics her husband on you, and finally marries your lover off to another man. Ben is tricked, trapped, used, patronized, and ultimately framed. The audience is inclined to celebrate when he still wins the day and gets the girl, but the ending shows that Ben has woken up from his nightmare only to find himself back in the anxiety of his daily life – his lack of identity and future.

The film’s only focus is on intensifying these anxieties, and the film’s strength is creating the feeling that Mrs. Robinson is holding a giant pair of scissors just under the viewer’s balls. The film obsesses on this theme almost to a fault, as the film is happy to leave plot holes and skip important parts of the story just to get back to the scenes that showcase anxiety. The film does not show how, why, or when Ben came to love Elaine and find her to be the only person he could talk to, as the movie even goes so far as to cut out the audio in one of their few on-screen moments of romantic conversation, as if to hold up a sign for the audience that the romance is not what the viewer is supposed to care about. Nichols even went so far as to give the audience no indication of how Ben escapes the police who arrive at Robinsons’ house to arrest him – a scene that one would think is fairly important – and yet he sees no problem in including two musical montage sequences in a row that are nearly identical, seemingly just because they stay on point with his thesis. His aggressive focus on the male experience can also have the effect of alienating female audiences, since the story does not play to their interests or anxieties as much, and the drama of Elaine’s life (finding out that her ex-boyfriend raped her mother and has now followed her to her college) is almost entirely overlooked. Still, it uses its topical conservatism to its advantage by making the most of what it does explore, with a visual style that is adamant on making Ben seem as blocked and confined as possible for the majority of the film’s shots. In a way, however, one would expect the cinematography to focus less on a claustrophobic effect and more on a dizzying effect, since the film’s thesis can be summed up with one great quote from Søren Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

The Straight Story Review

November 19, 2016 by JD Hansel

Coincidences come up an awful lot in my experiences viewing movies, and one such experience happened not too long ago when I was watching a YouTube video by Doug Walker, “Can an Ending Ruin a Film?” I started watching the video sometime before my class on “art film” on Wednesday, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to finishing it until Thursday. Within the last five minutes or so before that class began, he decided to show The Straight Story, which is David Lynch’s Disney movie. The professor then explained for those of us who missed it, as I think I had, that the film had been subtly telling us everything about the character’s past and motivation, setting up the ending, without ever making it clear that any of the events of the first hour and a half of the film had a point. The ending is when the audience is supposed to put everything together. Interestingly, when I resumed Doug Walker’s video, I found I had apparently paused it just one second before he brought up The Straight Story, making the argument that the ending to this film turns it from a painfully boring film into a brilliant film. Some might take this as a sign of some sort, but I am not a superstitious man – I just see this as a great opportunity to explain why this film actually sucks, even with the ending.

This film is horribly, horribly boring. None of its characters are particularly interesting or likable – most of them are really quite forgettable – and the performances from the cast were not able to redeem the script in this area. There are a few interesting moments that seem a little bit clever, cheeky, or quirky, all in the way one would expect from David Lynch, but they are severely overpowered by the surprising amount of banality in the film. The plot is purposely slow and uninteresting, but as deliberate as this may have been, I have yet to understand what positive effect this was meant to have on the film as a whole. The list of moral lessons and sappy moments throughout the film is unbearably long, and the number of times that I’m supposed to tear up but don’t feel anything by annoyance is nauseatingly high. This is probably how most viewers feel about the film until the ending, but the ending doesn’t change anything for me.

The ending doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t part of a generic, cliché family separation story, so it isn’t exactly a big shock or an exceptionally moving moment. When the brothers are reunited, I’m waiting to see what happens – to get more specific information about what exactly makes their conflict unique – but the film ends with little time spent on the brother. The goal of the ending is to use the audience’s knowledge of Harry Dean Stanton (the brother, Lyle) and his previous film roles to fill in the gaps about what kind of guy his character in this story is supposed to be, ideally filling in the gaps about the conflict between the Straights. This is rather silly, because I haven’t seen any other film of his, and even if I had, that tells me nothing about who this character is supposed to be. It’s a gimmick that I doubt would work with the likes of John Wayne or Ben Stein, and it certainly doesn’t work here. I think the main problem is that Richard Farnsworth (Alvin Straight) just isn’t likable enough for me to care about the conclusion to his story, so the story entirely falls flat, and the film leaves much to be desired.

The Shining Review

November 18, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILERS

One of the tasks I’ve taken up recently is familiarizing myself with more classic horror cinema. I’m usually not the type to enjoy being anxious and afraid, so it’s taken me a while to see the classics of this genre. Fortunately, The Shining is an easy one for me to appreciate. While it is scary, it’s not all about jump scares and other cheap tricks – it’s classy, as one would expect from Kubrick. It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s thought-provoking, it’s suspenseful, and it’s memorable. Even though it may not have totally sucked me in, I must say that I was consistently impressed with the cinematography, the editing, the acting, and the fascinating story. I think that Scatman Crothers’ character (Dick Hallorann) could have been a little less creepy, because it’s very important that the audience likes this character, but I still rooted for him at the appropriate time. It’s not entirely clear to me what everything in the movie meant exactly – and I do think some parts are meant to be open-ended – but that doesn’t affect the story too much.

It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one of my favorite Kubrick films, and I highly recommend it come next Halloween – just don’t expect it to be anything like the book . . . .

The Asphalt Jungle Review

November 17, 2016 by JD Hansel

(SPOILER ALERT)

It’s surprising to me just how much better this film is on my second viewing – how much easier it is to follow and enjoy watching it after having already seen it before. That’s not to say I really liked it the second time I watched it – in fact I never finished watching it a second time – but it is easier to appreciate. The film has a structure that’s hard to work out on the onset, and the first few minutes of the film give the impression that the story will follow the perspective of the police officers more than the criminals. Without any clear protagonist, and with an ensemble cast with intricate relationships, it’s easy to get lost in the story, as I did when I first started watching it. There’s also the fact that I generally have little interest in crime and heist films, which made me hope for better motivations behind the characters’ actions so I could have an easier time getting invested. On the second viewing, however, it has become clear to me that this film is very careful and detailed, making it rather fascinating. I’m particularly fascinated by the role of women in the film.

I think it is quite safe to say that the filmmakers planned on having a mostly male audience, seeing as how the main characters in the film (or at least the ones who push the plot along) are men, so the film looks at women from a few male perspectives. There seems to be a dichotomy presented between the “good life,” represented by adhering to domestic norms, and the wrong way of living, represented by inappropriate lust (or, to a lesser extent, greed). The professor seems to have no interest in settling down with a wife – his ideal retirement is chasing the pretty Mexican girls around in the sunshine. The film seems adamant about making the point that greed, lust, and criminality are all in the same family of things that ought to be avoided, and it is no surprise that Doc’s lust becomes his undoing. Similarly, Emmerich’s affair seems to be at the very least related to his unhappy ending. When Bob Brannom suggests that Emmerich went broke because of Angela (Marilyn), Emmerich denies it, saying it was his extravagant way of living, but I argue Emmerich would have no need for his many properties if he didn’t need places to have his affair. “Doll” tries to pull Dix into the conventional, domestic, married life, but he inexplicably resists, instead pining after the horses of his home.

Interestingly, the film only touches on the subject of how crime can hurt one’s family. The brief memorial service scene seems to mostly serve the function of reminding the audience of the consequences of criminal behavior, which is a message the film probably needed to drive home quite severely in order to get approved. If a big proponent of Sobchack were to try to figure out why a family would be brought into this film, it seems that the reasons would be purely functional: to raise the stakes so the drama of the heist is more interesting, and to help the film get its approval. I can’t help but wonder how entirely different the film would be if one woman had been involved in the heist itself and how the perspective on women the film presents might completely change.

Unfortunately, a film that’s fascinating in hindsight is not the same as one that’s entertaining from the start, which is really what I was hoping to see. Some of the characters are really good and leave a strong impression, and I think that’s largely due to the great performances from Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, and of course Marilyn, but somehow this isn’t enough to keep the film interesting. I recognize that it’s a well-made film in many respects, but it’s not my kind of thing. I think I’ll have to finish my second viewing sometime, or maybe even watch it a third time, because as of right now, I’m wondering if I’ll ever decide if the film’s ending is an unsatisfying bummer or a work of poetic genius.

Blue Velvet Review

November 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

It’s a little bit surprising to me that this was so popular. It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen freaking Daisies. What’s strange is that it doesn’t go all the way into the unfathomable and surreal – this is not Un Chien Andalou. Parts of it feel like a slightly warped version of a Hollywood teen film, and parts of it feel like an artsy French film, but all of it feels like Lynch’s brand of the uncanny. The film exists to make the spectator uncomfortable, and yet it stays grounded in something that is comfortable – a nostalgic representation of a small town that reminds me of home . . . until he turns that into something mildly unsettling as well. The use of the fireman waving from his truck as it passes by turns from charming to creepy with virtually no change, and that’s the brand of the uncanny that Lynch does perfectly, making for a thriller experience. At the same time, he mixes this with scenes that are more blatantly disturbing, yet kind of comedic, while ultimately ruining “In Dreams” for me.

A good example of this special style of his appears around nine minutes into his semi-concert movie Duran Duran: Unstaged, at which point a tunnel appears that leaves the viewer thinking, Is that even real?, before it clicks that it’s just a normal tunnel that everyone has driven through a million times. He can make anything seem like something from another planet, but that’s not all there is to his style. He also can present excellent visuals with beautiful extreme colors and throw in some neat visual effects. He can make the viewer care about a character even if he/she seems really odd. He uses good songs for his soundtracks and finds interesting uses for them. He can play with psychological anxieties and Freudian symbols, thus arousing fascinating interpretation of his work. So I suppose I can see why it was so popular now that I think about it – it’s the ideal Lynch film, never allowing the viewer to be at ease or anything but confused, and yet it tells a believable, concrete, and easy-to-follow story in a way that makes the story much more interesting than it would be in the hands of any other director. On the other hand, I hope to high heavens I never see that lipstick-covered face of Dennis Hopper again.

Yuck.