J.D. Hansel

1976

Taxi Driver Review

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I’d like to talk about a French movie called La Haine.  Easily one of the most historically significant French films of the last 25 years, La Haine (or Hate) tells the story of young men of different ethnic backgrounds living in one of the poorest parts of France who are the victims of police brutality.  While the American tendency is to make all characters that the audience is expected to read as “victim type characters” very nice, sweet, and innocent, this film has a brutal realism to it – the characters are not the loveliest people.

They are very aggressive, rude, profane, and obsessed with drugs and guns.  The only jokes they know how to tell involve having sex somebody’s mother or sister.  They are wrapped up in maintaining an impossible self-image of pure masculinity, never showing weakness, always being ready to shoot anyone who stands in their way.  While I can’t relate to them much, I do feel for them: their attitudes, interests, and behaviors are all part of a persona they feel they must assume in order to stand up to unjust authorities – a persona thrust upon them by American pop culture.

While a variety of artists, films, and film genres clearly affected the film and/or the characters in it, the only movie I recall being cited explicitly as a source of self-image for these kids is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.  The famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene (in addition to the scene pictured below) is performed by a character in this film who feels like he has no power and no future – all he has is the fantasy of pulling out a gun like Robert De Niro and shooting a cop.  I think that’s because the purpose of Taxi Driver is to resonate with people who just want to be masculine, dominant men, which is why the whole film is nothing but a showcase of what masculinity looks like without the “fun parts.”  Without the fast cars, monster trucks, explosions, wild sex, rocking out, and sports games, all that’s left to make a movie manly is precisely the contents of Taxi Driver – no more, no less.

The plot concerns a retired war veteran returning to his home city in America and trying to find a way to readjust – a clever nod not only to the contents of films noir but also to the historical phenomenon that film historians/theorists propose prompted the film noir genre.  He becomes a taxi driver and sees a variety of strange characters and concerning events, which Scorsese used to show us the darkness of New York on a level that few other directors have been able to achieve.  Then he stalks a woman, so that’s not good.  Then he and that woman attempt to have a romantic relationship, but it doesn’t go very well.  Then he buys a bunch of guns and decides to become a vigilante, hoping to rescue a very, very young prostitute from her situation.

The number of events in the story are few, although they happen over the span of a rather long, slow movie, and there aren’t many engaging twists and turns in the story, so what gives?  Why is this movie considered so great?  I already mentioned the film noir references, and I think a lot of people admire the lengths to which Scorsese goes to show how awful a place New York City can be, all without losing the sense of realism.  People also surely like Scorsese’s ability to use very subtle camerawork to create a unique style of uneasy “swaying” that makes the viewer feel continuously unsettled.  It’s all apart of the idea that great filmmakers aren’t the ones who follow the Hollywood formula really well to please a large audience.  The great director, it is believed, is one who comes up with his/her own distinct ideas for specific events, moments, vignettes, and characters he/she wants the audience to see, then carefully crafts them with clever dialogue and unconventional cinematography, then packages them together in just the right order to give the audience the experience he/she wants.

That’s not quite my idea of a great film – it’s close, but it’s not quite there.  At the end of the day, film is a communication medium, and that means I can’t only look at how well the filmmaker uses the channel of communication (the channel being video) – I have to look at the value of that which is being communicated.  I think the reason why I like the show Louie more than Taxi Driver, even though Louis C. K. meets that same definition of a great director I offered in the previous paragraph in Louie, is that Louis is expressing something that speaks to my values and showing me things I would want the whole world to see.  He shows life in the rotten parts of the city from a perspective that makes sense to me.  I can’t say that for the popular Scorsese films, which seem to approach the world from the perspective of an animal rather than a rational agent.

I really don’t know how to care very much about what happens in the movie, so it’s hard for me to care about the movie.  I don’t really connect much with the characters, and based on this film I don’t think I connect much with Scorsese either.  The only people who do connect with either of them through this film, I estimate, are people who enjoy their own manliness too much.  I can greatly appreciate the interesting character studies, the fascinating exchanges between the (very different) characters, and the craftsmanship involved here – I’m really glad that Scorsese showed me so many things that so few people have ever seen before on or off the screen – but that’s not enough.  It simply doesn’t resonate with me.

Carrie (1976) Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

This is one review that I didn’t think I’d ever be writing.  Some readers may recall the first time I reviewed a Carrie adaptation – when I saw the 2013 Carrie movie – at which point I decided that the original Brian de Palma film was not for me. I was in a place in life when I wanted to see the story taken very seriously, and I didn’t want it to be too fun, too silly, too campy – with the possible exception of the ending. For anyone with any familiarity with the Stephen King story, the ending is the part where, no matter how serious and dramatic the adaptation has been up until this point, the viewers had better throw their hands in the air and get ready to ride this roller-coaster down into the pits of Hades, laughing and screaming all the way. Still, this is one of the very few stories for which I feel it is best for a film to do as good of a job as possible at making everything seem very real, believable, and even mundane for the first two acts – employing an almost Our Town-like structure in saving the fantastic elements for the ending.  Much to my surprise, this movie mostly sticks to this form, offering much more realism than I would have expected.  The fact that so much of de Palma’s film makes it feel like these could be real people in a real high school assuages most of the concerns I had about about watching this movie, but the parts that are over-the-top and expressionistic are the kind of fun ’70s cult horror moments that my recent fascination with this sub-genre has made me crave.

When I wrote the review for the 2013 movie, I was in a different place in life.  I wanted to approach this story as seriously as possible and find in it something that could be used to express to the older generations why it is that so many teenagers suffer from depression and anxiety these days.  The 1976 film doesn’t work for that, but it might have served that purpose back in its day, leading me to suspect that – in general – the best version of Carrie is whichever one best expresses the anxieties to the viewers in its time.  The film I watched first may have been best for 2013 (at least for teenage viewers) while the 1976 film was probably best for the 1970s – each feels very much like a reflection of its time.  That’s why the ’76 version needs to be approached differently now – it’s a time-capsule, and the fashions of the era have not aged well.  As I’d initially feared, much of it is comical, but even some of the cheesiest moments with John Travolta feel they could have happened back then.  That being said, part of why I loved this movie so much is the stuff that doesn’t feel normal at all.  I watched this movie specifically because I wanted to see more of the kind of thing Brian de Palma did with Phantom of the Paradise, so I wanted to laugh, to feel confused, to have fun, and to cheer as the style got very expressionistic and experimental.  I came into this movie with the goal of seeing weird little kinks like sped-up dialogue to get us through a scene faster and a split-screen effect that shows two aspects of the same action – and I kind of wanted everything to be a joke.

Still, while that may seem like the exact opposite of what I wanted from this story when I watched the 2013 film, there are some things that I would’ve had to admit are perfect here even if I’d watched this movie back in the summer of 2015.  Julianne Moore may be a great actress, but the mother in this film is obviously superior, making the character seem believably uncanny for most of the film and then delightfully creepy in the end.  Even the Carrie in this film, whom I’d suspected I would have a hard time taking seriously with her acting style and her accent, is generally as relatable, likable, and believable as I’d like, and is exactly as scary as one would hope by the end.  The final scene is absolutely perfect and gave me a bigger scare than anything I’ve seen on screen in a long time – in a good way.  Even the colors, which I thought would detract from the reality of the world, actually make sense because they come from the lights at the prom, so the parts that feel theatrical still feel plausible and very much at home here.  Then, of course, there is the visual poetry in the resemblance between Carrie’s mother and the creepy Jesus figure, which may not have much of a deep meaning in this story, but it’s a heck of a cherry on top.

It’s also worth making it clear that most of the things critics complained about in the 2013 film aren’t very different from the 1976 film that is so critically revered.  The Carrie in this movie is just as pretty as Chloe Grace Moretz, and it actually seems less plausible that Sissy Spacek would have been considered too strange-looking to be one of the popular girls.  Critics complained that the 2013 film isn’t scary enough, but this film isn’t much scarier, and that’s not really the point of the story anyway.  Critics argued that the Moretz film lacked a build-up to the finale that the story requires, but I felt the build-up about equally across each film – although that may have been because I already knew the story before watching either movie.  I will concede that the critics are right in pointing out that, in comparison to de Palma’s work, Kimberly Peirce’s film didn’t seem to do much with the story that stood out – she didn’t get very playful, and one could call her work rather boring – but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing if the aim is making everything feel normal for most of the film (again, I refer to Our Town).  With that said, however, it is the Brian de Palma film that must go down in history as a classic because it manages to be such a great and important drama while being a bundle of fun and laughter.  As far as I’m concerned, while it may not be the kind of horror that most people are used to, this is the ultimate horror classic (excluding horror comedies like Gremlins) and I love it just the way it is.

Network Review

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The first part of this film I ever saw was the famous scene with everyone shouting from their windows.  It was in a film history course I took a few years ago, and ever since I saw the clip, I’d been really wanting to see the whole film.  That scene really moved me when I first saw it – it spoke to me in a way that the most touching and emotional of scenes from other classic movies don’t – but I had to wait to watch it until I was in the right mood.  Since that course was back in early 2014, it seemed like late 2016 was a good time, ensuring that the scene wouldn’t be so fresh in my memory that it would be spoiled.  For this most recent viewing, once I could tell the scene was coming, I turned off the lights, sat up close to the screen, and let it overpower me.  Because the scene is so greatly enhanced by its context in the plot, I found myself quivering as tears fell down my face, and all I could do was remark at the beauty of what I was experiencing.  I’ve found myself tearing up while writing this review just at the thought of it, and this is a very unusual sort of experience for me.  This is exactly what cinema should be doing, and in a time when artsy drivel like 2001 is seen as the kind of thing the elite film critics want from Hollywood, it’s nice to know that a film with true meaning and power is still regarded as a great cinematic achievement.

As for the rest of the film, it’s not bad.  It can be a little boring at times, but most of it is pretty satisfying in its comedy, its irony, or at the very least its brutal honesty.  The film shows us exactly what we would like to think the evil overlords behind our television programming would be saying and doing behind closed doors.  The balance between comedy and drama is pretty good, particularly with the way the lines between the two are blurred.  I will say that I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of names and faces, but the story kept me interested.  The writing is smart, the characters are what they ought to be, and the ending is just perfect (and it merits comparison to the ending of another of my favorite ’70s movies, Phantom of the Paradise, to gain an appreciation of the cinema of the Vietnam-era and the years that followed).  What’s most impressive about the story is that it manages to be very dramatic, very absurd, and very believable all at the same time, such that the ridiculous solution proposed at the end of the film leaves the viewer gaping and thinking, “By gosh, at this point that actually seems plausible!”

Essentially, the movie is an interesting analysis of the normalization of madness, and it raises the question of just how sane a species we truly are.

Silent Movie Review

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Mel Brooks is known for writing clever stuff, and a lot of that cleverness is in the dialogue.  So, the question is, can Mel do a silent movie well?  I strongly believe that he did.  Silent Movie is delightful in every scene, with a fun cast of characters who are performed very well (with perfect timing of course) by Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, and Brooks himself.  The cameos are used well, and also add to the delight.

From a technical standpoint, the film is impressive, and ironically, I really liked this movie’s use of sound.  The music always fit the scene, as did the sound effects, and the score actually varied in style, but still felt coherent despite its different genres.  I liked the way the movie was shot and edited as well, and Mel generally does a good job with that kind of thing I’ve found.

While I thought the writing was very clever (since I laughed a lot throughout) and I thought the story had about the right amount of simplicity that it would need as a silent movie, there were a couple of things about the writing that bothered me.  Firstly, the characters were all sort of caricatures, and while the protagonist is somewhat relatable and down-to-earth, even he is too over-the-top to be relatable sometimes.  When this happens in a story that essentially is a series of attempts to get celebrities to do the movie, it is easy to stop caring about the story since one eventually grows tired of such a basic and simple plot.

I still think that this is one of Mel’s funniest films, which is why I am surprised that I didn’t hear about it much over the years.  I do not have much of a special connection to the film, or at least not like I did with High Anxiety, which is in my top 20 favorite movies.  However, I think I probably laughed more while watching this than I did while watching Men in Tightsor High Anxiety.  So, because I can guaranty that this movie will get a laugh out of anyone, and because this is probably the most family-friendly film Mel’s done, I highly recommend Silent Movie.

21 Silent Movie