J.D. Hansel

Film Criticism

The Visitors Review

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Alternative Title: Les Visiteurs

My uncle never liked Monty Python was he was younger – he just found it too stupid to be enjoyable.  Eventually, as he got older, he kind of came around, but he attributes it to getting old and losing a few brain cells.  I have a hard time understanding that because I love Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but I found myself experiencing a similar disdain for immense stupidity while watching this film.

Les Visiteurs is a French comedy about a knight and his servant in the year 1123 who accidentally travel to France in 1992 and have to get back.  It’s a very stupid, stupid comedy, but the French people, weirdly enough, love it.  It was #1 at the French box office in its day, and it is the fifth-highest-grossing film in the country today, so the professor of my French Film and Culture class had to show it.

The professor noted that the film has some resemblance to Monty Python, but, while I can see that, I think it’s too focused on making gross, obvious, and in-your-face jokes, without the more cerebral critique of humanity’s pathetically mechanical nature that Python does so well.  The film also has many bothersome scenes showing grotesque transformations of faces, which remind me of some of the films based on the works of Roald Dahl in that the imagery is more unsettling and uncanny than entertaining.  I don’t hate the film – some parts are funny – but maybe I’ll appreciate it more if I lose a few brain cells.

Brotherhood of the Wolf Review

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Alternate Title: Le Pacte des loups

I feel the need to highlight this French film that isn’t very well-known in the States, even though it should be.  It’s an entertainment film, much like what one would expect from Hollywood, but there’s a key difference.  In the middle of its fights scenes and romance, there’s a running theme of the significance of the Age of Reason.  Consequently, it’s a skeptic’s alternative to Sleepy Hollow – a neat Halloween movie that does a better job of celebrating critical thinking.  While it is rather slow, it’s also dramatic, creepy, and clever.  Try it on for size one night when you’re in the mood for some chills.

National Lampoon’s Vacation Review

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I think road trip movies are among the most challenging to write.  There’s usually very little sense that the events of these films must occur, or that they must occur in the order in which they do, which tends to make everything feel arbitrary.  This, in turn, can make for a very weak movie – unless the comedy is strong.  Unfortunately, and much to my surprise, the comedy isn’t strong here.

I think I only laughed a handful of times throughout the film – maybe four – and I’m not sure how that’s possible from John Hughes.  The key difference between this film and Hughes’ better work seems to be that he usually features very likable main characters.  The characters in this film are jerks, so I don’t enjoy watching them.  I also felt throughout that much of the humor was relying on highly judgmental stereotypes of people and places, so I find the film somewhat offensive.

That being said, the best case I can make for the film is actually related to the aspects to which I take offense.  I think it has a lot of what I call “cultural utility.”  It’s a very useful film in that it can be used to understand American culture better.  It’s very rare to see a depiction of the white American middle class that so perfectly captures its hatred of white trash, its sexual tensions, its struggles to embody the ideas we have of what the white middle class should be, its racist fears, its respect for religions it doesn’t understand, and its all-around pathetic insanity.  For anyone outside the United States who wants to understand why and how Americans seems so crazy, watching this film is a good place to start.

Sleepy Hollow Review

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It’s always a pleasure to see a spooky movie that doesn’t rely too much on jump scares, instead reveling in a charmingly eerie aesthetic with creepy visuals.  In fact, it’s even a pleasure to find a film that’s not just trying to be a horror movie, but is specifically trying to be a Halloween movie.  It’s a special pleasure to watch a Halloween movie that’s not just throwing clownish, irritating exaggerations of Halloween character types at me the whole time.  This is the kind of pleasure I have come to expect from few directors but Tim Burton, who brings his knack for nightmarish aesthetics to the Washington Irving tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Now, to be clear, this is not Burton at his best – by this point in his career we’ve already entered the phase in which he’s making everything bland and gray – but it’s still a fun watch.  Johnny Depp is as over-the-top as one would hope, without being annoying, and the rest of the cast is largely comprised of some of my favorite British actors.  The only problem here is that this great cast is working on great sets with a great director to bring to life a not-so-great screenplay.  It’s a predictable story with the usual bashing of “men of reason” for having too much certainty.  Yes, that’s right – the people who believe 100% in a headless horseman of all things accuse the sensible detective of having too much faith, all because he’s pretty sure he ought to be looking for a real, living murderer rather than an undead legend.  Now, I’ve seen this foolishness in enough Hollywood films that, for a silly fantasy story, I can almost let it go, so I can still mostly enjoy the movie.  The story may be weak and a little slow, but it’s still something I can see myself putting on the big TV every few Octobers.

Little Shop of Horrors (1960) Review

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Not a lot of people remember that this film was, for a while, a legend in Hollywood.  Countless directors told the tale of “The Movie Made in Two Days.”  The story goes that one filmmaker noticed that a set would be available on a studio lot for two days longer than it was needed, so he asked to have the set to shoot his own film on those two days.  He then wrote the script for a relatively short feature film, put together a cast, rehearsed it with them, and then shot all of the footage in just those two days.  One has to wonder, then, how does one make a feature in so short a time-span?

Easy: don’t worry about quality.  The film doesn’t mind at all that it’s stupid and ridiculous – in fact, it loves its own stupidity.  This was, after all, marketed as a comedy, which is only sensible since the idea of a low-budget horror movie about a talking plant is laughable.  I think because it appreciates its own “campiness,” I’m inclined to appreciate it as well.  The fact that it doesn’t take itself too seriously makes for a movie that’s loads of fun, and that even has a few moments here and there that I wish could have been in its sacred remake (for example, I love the clever use of the cartoon drawing for the credits).

It may be stupid, but it’s also smart, and that’s why it’s more than deserving of its status as a cult classic.