New Movie Reviews

Romancing the Stone Review

July 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

I’m a little conflicted. This movie is loaded with clichés. I generally don’t like it when a film is very cliché, but this movie is different. First of all, it’s from the early ’80s, so many of these things that seem cliche today may have been totally original at the time. Secondly, the fact that the movie is cliché does not mean it’s boring – it’s actually very exciting.

I’m not a fan of action for action’s sake, but the action in this film works well. I’m very impressed by the way that what would traditionally be considered a “man’s action flick” that makes up one part of the story and the “chick flick” that makes the rest of it are integrated excellently to make a rounded film that anyone can enjoy. It’s a very ’80s movie with a fun adventure, good performances, interesting twists, enjoyable romance, and one heck of a theme song. It’s no surprise that this team-up of director Robert Zemeckis and composer Alan Silvestri soon led to Back to the Future, but let’s not let the magnificence of the BttF franchise overshadow the delightful movie that launched Zemeckis in the beginning.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape Review

July 18, 2016 by JD Hansel

Some of my readers – if I may presume I have readers – may be aware that I have three younger brothers. The oldest of the three is Brian, who has down-syndrome, which has made my family’s dynamic an interesting one. As of the time I’m writing this, he’s eighteen years old, and he adds a lot of joy to the family, although he also adds some challenges that we wouldn’t have with a more ordinary teenager. Brian, however, is not the reason I watched this movie. I watched it because of my youngest brother, Grayson, who insisted that I watch it with him. For whatever reason, he adored the movie, but as is common for him, he couldn’t explain why. I was willing to humor him and watch it since it had such critical acclaim, but it unfortunately strikes me as the average “critic porn.”

I have so little to say about this movie because the movie gives me so little to review. What’s actually accomplished by the events of this film? How is the ending necessitated? How does it even make sense? Where do they even live in the end? What the heck was the point of the plotline with FoodLand? Oh, and the other question – why do I care?

I don’t understand what substance Johnny Depp’s character has that’s supposed to make me like him or root for him. I also don’t understand why I’m supposed to like the girl that he likes. When she says the line, “I’m not into that whole ‘external beauty’ thing,” I immediately dismiss her as the kind of pseudo-intellectual hipster that’s not worth my time. So why is she worth the screen time? And if I’m really supposed to care about her, how does the movie expect me to be satisfied with an ending in which she only sees our main characters for a couple months of the year?

What I think I understand is why it’s received such acclaim. The acting is good, considering what the characters are. I have to give credit to Leonardo DiCaprio for his excellent performance, but of course good acting is never the best measure of a film. The “story” is fairly interesting, and I must credit the film for keeping me from getting too bored, which could have happened easily with a film in this genre. It obviously deals with a tricky subject matter, which always gets the attention of the critics, but even with how similar my experiences with my family can be to the experiences of the family in this film, I just don’t care enough about the family to really enjoy the movie. I get what it’s trying to do, and it does that well, but I would never try to do what it’s trying to do, simply because I don’t care for Oscarbait.

Now You See Me 2 Review

July 15, 2016 by JD Hansel

Oh, shut up.

Why is it that everyone (encompassing the world’s audiences, the world’s critics, and the world’s John Olivers) is acting as though this movie is worthless? Well, I think there’s a certain psychological effect – I’ll call it “Sequel Blindness” – at work here. I remember being stunned by the reviews that Muppets Most Wanted received, because the movie was getting hammered for problems that were worse in its universally acclaimed predecessor: the overuse of fourth-wall jokes, the cliché plot, and the “kiddie” vibes. Somehow, the critics were willing to overlook these flaws in the first film because that was the Muppets’ comeback to cinema after a twelve-year hiatus, but once they were used to Muppets being in movies again, they could suddenly see all of the problems that they missed before, but they only saw them when they came to the franchise for a second time. This is the effect of Sequel Blindness: when a sequel makes critics rethink the franchise by bringing them back to it after time to reflect on the predecessor, allowing flaws in the franchise to become more noticeable, prompting them to erroneously attribute the flaws to the sequel. While the original Now You See Me got very mixed reviews, I still think this is what happened with Now You See Me 2.

Don’t get me wrong – the movie has its flaws and its fair share of scenes that make no sense, so I wouldn’t call it an excellent film. It is, however, a good film, that feels like it’s allowed to make no sense since the first one didn’t make sense. In the original Now You See Me, the “girl Horseman” walks into a bubble and starts floating around in it, which is followed by flashlights changing the numbers on pieces of paper in perfect synchronicity with the magicians’ act. This impossibility is presented because the filmmakers wanted to do a movie that showcased the tricks that might become possible to pull off at some point in the future, but when the sequel contains equally implausible feats, critics complain that there’s no point in asking how the tricks were done (even though that was never the point of the franchise).

I do wish the reviews would focus more on the ways in which this movie improves on its predecessor. It has more emotion and heart, and in a way that I actually think was done acceptably. It has better comedy – particularly in one of Daniel Radcliffe’s scenes that made me laugh hysterically. It has a better “girl Horseman” by far, and I’d happily watch Lizzy Caplan’s character in her own spin-off. So stop complaining about the movie. It’s stupid in many ways, I must admit, but it’s a fun kind of stupid, so just enjoy it.

The Birds Review

July 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

With High Anxiety being my favorite Mel Brooks film, one would expect that I would be well-versed in the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Quite contrarily, after watching Strangers on a Train for a film history class I took a few years ago, I was turned off by Hitchcock. I felt like whenever he was trying to have me waiting in suspense, I found myself just waiting. I put off watching his films for another day, simply because I didn’t feel like being bored, but I eventually felt like I may have been missing out on some important films. I decided to give him another go, trying out one of the films he’s best known for, if not the film he’s best known for, The Birds.

While I had a little bit of a hard time getting into it at first (since its pace is almost annoyingly slow at times), I was quickly impressed more than I thought I would be by the characters and dialogue. The conversations that the characters had when they weren’t dealing with a bird attack were actually very interesting for the most part, and it’s always good when character interactions are enough to keep me interested. Then, during the now-cliché panicked bar scene – that scene in all the disaster movies with the flustered witness of the attack, the bartender who tries to keep things under control, the skeptic who happens to be an expert on the subject, and the lunatic who believes it’s the end of the world – I was delighted by how Hitchcock had perfected this kind of set-up. The addition of the panicky mother made the scenes in the bar that much better.

Oh, and I suppose the scary elements are sort of an important part of this film, being its mark on the history of cinema and all, so I’ll briefly say that I liked them. The scary scenes weren’t exceptionally terrifying in the sense I’m used to, but maybe that’s a good thing. I despise jump scares, so it’s nice that Hitchcock did a good job at keeping me on the edge of my seat and fearing for the well-being of the characters I’d come to really like, all without relying on too many cheap gimmicks. While the ending somehow manages to be both gripping and underwhelming at the same time, making for a movie experience that feels a little awkward, I think that this picture is nicely crafted work of cinema that’s creative, fascinating, and supplies just the kind of experience it needs to to make it into the film history books.

Captain America: Civil War Review

June 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Well, okay, here’s one thing that no one else has said: I didn’t go into this movie taking a side. I did declare myself as Team Cap or Team Iron Man at any time, because I tend to be on Team Shut Up and Talk Like Civilized People, but I suppose that wouldn’t make for as interesting of a movie. It’s challenging for a movie like this to make the audience very understanding of both sides, and then turn around and make us want to see everyone we love in this franchise beating the snot out of each other. Remarkably, the movie not only accomplishes this daring feat, but also puts the characters on the wrong sides (without making the audience bat an eye at it). Allow me to briefly explain what I mean.

Please, consider the following: Captain America is the one who would ordinarily want to work with the government, especially since his roots are with the U. S. military, and Stark is the type of person who would never want to give control over himself to anyone else, since it would hurt his ego to be the U. N.’s puppet; and let’s not forget that Romanoff has weirdly decided to fight against Cap’s team, at least for the most part. In the end though, I think the most impressive thing about this is that, in the midst of all this drama, the movie is a heck of a lot of fun. It may be rather awkward at some points and tedious at others, but between the creative action sequences, the perfect cast, the smart dialogue, the surprising twists, the bizarre inclusion of Ant Man, and the spectacular Spider-Man, Civil War hits all the right spots. It’s one of Marvel’s finest films – quite possibly its best to date.

This Is the End Review

June 27, 2016 by JD Hansel

I watched this film on my last night as a teenager because it seemed like a fun way to mark the end of an era, but it ended up reminding me of the end of a different era. Once upon a time, people made outrageous comedy films that broke new grounds of absurd, all without relying on needless expletives and gratuitous violence to keep the viewers’ attention. Duck Soup, Airplane, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Young Frankenstein, Gremlins 2, Sleeper, Seven Day Week, The Naked Gun, Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Silent Movie, Beetlejuice, CLUE, and of course The Muppet Movie are among the classic comedies that have impressed me by relying on unfathomable absurdity, stupidity, and impossibility to keep the audience entertained, rather than jokes about coke and rape and Michael Cera’s CGI butt-cheeks. Sure, plenty of the movies I listed above have jokes that get rather dirty, and some of them have a bit of language from which I prefer to refrain, but these are secondary to the inherent toony lunacy of the worlds they present. The fact that this movie starts off very realistically, creating the sense that what we’re seeing is meant to be taken as our world, puts the filmmakers in a corner from the onset by forcing them to make light of a situation they made serious.

Think about this: the world ending isn’t a silly concept. The world ending at the hands of a singing plant is a silly concept, and the world ending from an attack by a giant boob is a silly concept, and even the world ending because the U.S. accidentally lets a bomb get dropped on Russia is a silly concept. What’s the difference? It starts with the fact that these are the kinds of ideas that leave people dying to know how in blazes the filmmakers handled them. They’re weird ideas, and they’re hard to wrap one’s mind around. However, I do think that the concept of the world ending because … it’s just the end of the world, in a biblical style, could lend itself to lots of great comedy. The primary problem standing in the way of this is what I mentioned above – the weed of realism is choking the fun out of cinema, and it breaks my heart. All that being said, even though this film is very much in the genre of “just scream profanities” comedy, it has its fair share of clever moments. At the very least I’m impressed with the filmmakers’ ability to get a feminist icon to take part in a scene that essentially boils down to a rape joke (the audio commentary says their goal was to “make it rapey; make that the joke”) which I find ethically unsettling, but still artistically impressive in a mildly evil sense. Given the nature of the beast, it is a surprise that the movie is as clever, creative, and respectable as it is, so I’d give it a passing grade.