J.D. Hansel

1980s Movie Reviews

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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Creepers/Phenomena Review

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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.

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The Shining Review

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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 . . . .

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Blue Velvet Review

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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.

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The Elephant Man Review

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There is much to be said for a filmmaker that can repeat common stories, scenarios, and twists that we’ve all seen before while still making great work (and evoking a strong emotional response).  David Lynch is one of those filmmakers, as he demonstrated most clearly when he made The Elephant Man.  It’s Lynch’s go at a conventional Hollywood film, and we are very fortunate that Mel Brooks took a chance in bringing young Lynch on board to direct the project before he was well-known.  Obviously, everyone else involved in the project was already established, which means we get to see some great performances, and I would argue that the score is some of John Morris’ best work as a composer.  The story doesn’t really go anywhere, and it’s blatantly based on the old trope that “the monster isn’t the monster, the normal human is the monster,” and yet it all still works very well.  We fear for John when we’re supposed to fear for him, and we wonder if Treves is right in worrying that he’s mistreated John, and we adore Madge Kendal the same way John does.  The drama just works.

As a great combination of Hollywood drama and Lynchian weirdness, I think it’s a film everyone ought to see.

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Terminator Review

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MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Oh, how I love the ’80s.  The ’80s developed the styles of particular cult ’70s musicals into a New Expressionism – one that emphasized deep, vivid colors and bright lights flashing through dark, gray cities.  This mix of warm grays, cold blues, and hot reds spread across theatrical sets was complimented by over-the-top acting of Lloyd, Fox, Moranis, Curry, and others, bringing a theatrical quality to cinema that had not been seen since the days of German Expressionism.  The use of electronic music made everyone feel like the future was just around the corner, but whether that future was exciting or dystopian depended on the movie.  There is, of course, a spectrum to ’80s cinema, and much of it was very light and clean and harmless, but the darker end of the spectrum was home to the dark, dystopian action films: Blade Runner, RoboCop, Aliens, Batman, and perhaps the most emblematic of them all, Terminator.

Regrettably, I didn’t love Terminator quite as much as I’d hoped.  I liked it just fine, but since I’m not usually a big fan of an action movie for action’s sake, I found it somewhat lacking.  Its characters could have been a little bit more interesting, although Schwarzenegger was about as fun to watch as I had expected, and the story could have been a little bit more dramatic or devious.  The ending left me a bit unsatisfied because it means that very little was actually accomplished apart from that which was necessitated by the rules of time – all of the events of the film (that take place in the ’80s) are already predestined, and couldn’t have possibly gone any other way.  The ending would have been more satisfying if their actions in the ’80s somehow prevented all the horrible robot wars of the future or had caused all of the horrible robot wars, but as it was it felt weak.  I don’t really consider this film to be a disappointment, however, because it was exactly what it needed to be – an excursion into fun science fiction with that beautiful ’80s charm.

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