J.D. Hansel

1982

The Last Unicorn Review

by

I think part of the reason why I watched this movie is that I was really in the mood to take a break from the Disney live-action remakes and return to an original fairy-tale movie.  I’m not sure that The Last Unicorn was a good choice though seeing as how it contains so many good and bad elements mixed together, often within the same departments, so I don’t know what to make of it.  The story is a very bizarre one – highly problematic and quite confusing – yet it contains clever little ideas and characters that make me jealous I hadn’t thought of them myself.  The storytelling through the visuals is particularly unclear at times, yet often the animation perfectly captures exactly the feeling the scene ought to have.  The visual style is particularly disjunctive, with character designs and animations that look irritatingly cheap and flat in comparison to Disney’s work, yet the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.  I’m inclined to say that the soundtrack isn’t very good, yet the film’s theme song is stuck in my head, and I have found I quite enjoy it.  The cast may boast some greats like Mia Farrow, but she is oddly overshadowed by the more memorable performances of the bad actors, whose delivery was unlike anything I have ever heard referred to as “acting.”

My problem with this movie is that, every time I think I really like it, the scene that follows always ruins it.  Some of the characters seem fun at first, but eventually get annoying.  The last half of the movie has one mediocre song after another, painfully drawing out the film (even though the run-time is only about an hour and a half).  Because of how much I like looking at the movie, and because of how much I appreciate most of the story, I kept trying to look on the bright side and only see the good in the film, but then something comes up like the tree creature with big breasts and I’m reminded that this is just a Rankin-Bass movie – I can’t expect quality.  At the very least I was hoping this would be a good film for little girls to enjoy  – a movie that’s wholesome enough to merit its “G” rating – but today it would have to cut some parts or change some lines just to get a “PG” rating, thus alienating the viewers who might as well be its target audience.  Consequently, The Last Unicorn strikes me as the kind of movie that’s very good at creating nostalgia for those who grew up with it, but doesn’t hold up for viewers who find it later.

But do you know what this movie really needs?  A Disney live-action remake.  Seriously.  This is the one child-oriented animated film that has enough negative elements to need a re-tooling, and enough positive elements to be made into a great story if it’s put in the right hands.  Most of the main issues are honestly really, really easy to fix, and the story itself isn’t that bad – it’s just the storytelling that’s poor.  Heck, the story even works well as a criticism of other fairy-tales, and it lends itself easily to feminist interpretations, so it’s the perfect subject for the Disney remake project.  Sure, Disney would have to buy the rights from another company, but the result would still be, without a doubt, the best of the live-action Disney remakes to date.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High Review

by

It’s very rare for a film with virtually no plot to make for a really good and captivating movie experience, but Fast Times is an exception.  It serves as a good example of what I’m currently calling a “layout piece,” which is a work of art or writing that seeks to offer as comprehensive of an overview of a certain subject as possible while remaining an understandable summary, usually by using the highlights of the subject as tent-poles.  Think of it as a “greatest hits” album – by the end of it, you should have a pretty good understanding of both the standard, recurring qualities of the work in question and the moments which stand out.  Some of my textbooks are good examples as well, but Fast Times is special because it’s a fictional, narrative layout piece, so it constructs situations that express (and critique) its subject matter.

So what is the subject matter?  The ’80s, of course!  By the end of the movie, the viewer has a feeling of having just lived through a year of high school in the 1980s – I feel like I’ve been there and can tell my family all about what it was like.  The film doesn’t focus on facts or statistics about the time period, and cares little for objectivity – it was only made in 1982, after all – but it captures the way the ’80s feel.  It feels as though all of these characters really existed in every high school, and all of the situations presented seem to be only slight exaggerations of the plausible.  I never had a teacher like Mr. Hand, but I sure feel like I did.  This kind of “emotional realism” is what makes the comedy work and the stories (if they can be called such) so enjoyable.  The combination of the soundtrack and the cast makes it work about as well as an emblem of the 1980s as Footloose, but its careful mix of comedy and drama makes it work well as a film, too.  It may not be a perfect movie, and it gets rather boring at times, but it’s still an experience everyone ought to have.

Tootsie Review

by

Because I’m a film student, and because I have a particular fascination with comedy films, I am sometimes asked which movies make me laugh out loud.  As much as I enjoy laughing, I must confess that very few comedy films – even the greats – consistently succeed at getting a big belly laugh out of me (purposely, that is).  Fortunately, I now have one more movie that does the trick for me, which shouldn’t be unexpected seeing as how Tootsie is considered one of the greatest and funniest comedies of all time.  With this in mind, it seems strange and surprising that Tootsie is such a cliché film, filled with most of the Hollywood tropes of comedy cinema from the past four decades.  I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to see another movie about a man dressing in drag, but somehow, in spite of its lack of originality (and perhaps general weakness) as a story, it’s one of the smartest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

I am a firm believer in the John Cleese doctrine that “all comedy is critical,” but this movie showed me just how well the “observational comedy” of the stand-up comedian – comedy that starts with “Have you ever noticed . . .” and ends with “What’s up with that?” – converts to cinema.  This film is a captivating study in the psychology of gender, revealing that the way we think about men, women, and romance is very different from the way that we think we think about them.  The story repeatedly emphasizes just how difficult it can be to be a woman, and better yet, it does so without being preachy.  Even with a too-familiar story and some really cruel characters – as are common for romantic comedies – the perfect performances by this stellar cast sell everything flawlessly.  While this is nothing ground-breaking, no proper study of the assumptions we make about gender is complete without viewing this film, and just importantly, Tootsie is purely and simply fun.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid Review

by

This film seems to have three aims: paying tribute to Classical Hollywood, parodying film noir, and successfully integrating actors from old movies into the film’s story only using footage of them taken from their classic films.  With its first goal, the film is successful.  The love that this crew and cast have for classic movies – down to the lights, sets, and costumes – is abundantly evident and infectious.  This is a perfectly serviceable “nostalgia fest,” but as a movie, it’s not that funny.  There are a few good laughs in the film, such as the spin on Lauren Bacall’s classic line, “Just put your lips together and blow,” but the comedy was generally underwhelming (and occasionally juvenile).  I think this is because the movie was both a tribute and a parody – it simply repeated elements of film noir and played them as parody if they seemed funny and as tribute if they weren’t.  Had the creative team focused more on putting comedic twists on the film noir tropes they were supposed to spoof, I think the movie could have been much better, but as it is, it almost seems as though the comedy was an afterthought.

For its third task, however, Dead Men is impressive and satisfying.  In a time before CGI, it’s hard to think of how Steve Martin could share a scene with a young Fred MacMurray, but this film pulls off the trick fairly convincingly.  It’s true that the difference between the scenes shot in the 1940s and the scenes shot in the 1980s is very noticeable from the film quality, but the effect is still better than Rogue One‘s cartoon Peter Cushing.  This is not only a technical feat, but a testament to great writing, masterfully crafting a story that can use old dialogue in new ways (besting even the interview collages of “Weird Al” Yankovic).  This third task is the part of the film that stands out – the part that shows Reiner and Martin’s intelligence.  So, as the saying goes, “two out of three ain’t bad,” but if the primary goal is for it to be entertaining and make people laugh, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid leaves much to be desired.

Blade Runner Review

by

I must say, I did not like this film as much as I hoped I would – as much as I expected I would.  That being said, since my expectations were based only on what I knew of its exemplary visual style and eerie aura, they were “sky-high” to say the least.  What I soon discovered is that it’s the kind of movie that’s more of an environment than anything else, in that (after seeing it and learning the plot) it can be kept on in the background to set the tone or mood of the room, like a fireplace or lava lamp.  Much like The Dark Crystal, the goal here doesn’t seem to be to tell a new and exciting story so much as it is to explore a world.  However, the story and world are completely intertwined here, both necessary to explore, reveal, and shape one another, which makes it a good film.

I suppose I should explain the reasoning behind my previous statement.  At the root of a story – or at least the great majority of mainstream novels, classic fables, and Hollywood films – is a very simple concept: given this unique set of conditions, here is the surprising outcome that follows.  Need an example?  Under the conditions that a boy travels through time to the year when his parents met, he could accidentally keep them from falling in love, erasing his own existence.  I hypothesize that what is most often the driving factor in determining what movies we want to see based on their trailers is in fact our desire to find out “what would happen if . . . .”  When we heard about a movie with the premise that toys come to life if no one’s looking, we were curious enough about what would follow from these conditions that we paid Pixar plenty of money just to see them show us . . . three times.

While I would certainly not wish to imply that any story based on this logic is a good one, I do think that this shows how Blade Runner is a step above other ambiance films.  Consider again The Dark Crystal.  The whole point of the film is exploring this unique world, but most of the key aspects of this world that make it unique are essentially inert as far as the plot is concerned.  The puppet designs, inventive sets, and practical effects do not necessitate the plot and mostly aren’t necessitated by the plot (or at least not specifically, because the story only requires that fantasy elements of any sort be present to signify the kind of world it is).  Reciprocally, the fact that there are weird sandy turtle hippies called Mystics and purple Shakespearean pterodactyls called Skeksis does not entail that they were once the same species before a big crystal broke – that stuff had to be added so the movie could have something of a story.  With Blade Runner, the world’s defining quality is a problem with robots (that are indistinguishable from humans) running amok.  From this premise, it follows that authorities would try to find, follow, and destroy these robots, and so it is no surprise that the story follows someone working with the authorities to do just that.

Still, the story is not the most interesting I’ve ever heard, and I wonder if perhaps this is because the movie is rather slow.  I can deal with the slow pacing because I enjoy getting to wander around in this special, vivid version of Earth that’s been so creatively envisioned, but consequently, the movie runs rather long for such a simple storyline (at least in the version I watched, which is the original two-hour theatrical cut).  It’s largely the visuals and sound that make this film work, not to mention the actors, and I generally do not reward a film based solely on mastery of these secondary elements – which are arguably mere affectations.  This film, however, unlike other artistic works such as 2001, uses its visuals, sounds, and people not as a substitute for plot, but to highlight and saturate the plot.  They do not distract from the story’s drama – they bring it vivid life, which does not make this movie perfect, but does make it a very special film that must never go unappreciated.

109 Blade Runner