J.D. Hansel

1990s Movie Reviews

What About Bob? Review

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I generally try to be a really tough critic.  I never give five stars, and I only give four and a half stars to the movies that grab me in the most intense and personal ways possible or impress me such that I would not object to considering them the greatest films of all time.  Naturally, I try to keep the list of films that get this most esteemed rating as small as possible, with only a few such reviews every year so they only make up about 10% of my reviews.  As I watched What About Bob?, I could tell that this film was in the 4 to 4.5 zone, but I wasn’t sure where, and I regrettably remained unsure even after the film had ended.  Over time, however, I found myself leaning towards 4.5 not only because its particular story and comedy style grab me personally, but because I kept laughing at its comedy after weeks had passed since I watched the film.

I do believe that this film is truly (and perhaps objectively) good, but the reasons why I love it are more subjective.  I have a personal connection to What About Bob? because I love Frank Oz, who directed the film, and I’ve grown fond of his style as a filmmaker and humorist.  He also cast fellow Muppet performer Fran Brill as a fairly significant character in the film, which I greatly appreciate – it’s not every film that pairs Bill Murray with Prairie Dawn.  I also just like comedic stories about craziness, mental illness, anxiety, psychology, and the brain, which is why films like High Anxiety, Silver Linings Playbook, Crazy People, and Inside Out are among my favorites.  I also like comedy that focuses on the dynamic between characters that each have distinct and understandable personalities, a la the early Harry Potter films and certain Muppet movies.

To be more objective, however, the story is cleverly written, and the performances are absolutely excellent. Richard Dreyfuss in particular clearly had a difficult task in that his character must become progressively and consistently less sane, while staying somewhat relatable during most of the film, and I think he handled it very well, delivering most of the film’s best comedy.  I will say that the extent to which I empathize with Dreyfuss’ character does at times get in the way of the comedy, and it is perhaps a consequence of this that the film’s ending feels a little weak, but overall, What About Bob? offers the high level of cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve come to expect from Frank Oz.  I don’t think this movie gets a lot of credit as one of the greats – although it did make Bravo’s list of the “100 Funniest Movies” and a quote from the film is in my movie quotes daily calendar – but regardless of what anyone else might think of it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Dick Tracy Review

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In my experience, if a story and its characters are good enough, I can forgive many aspects of a film that seem lacking.  I can forgive the forgettable music scores and relentlessly bland visuals of most contemporary films so long as I’m invested in what the characters are trying to do.  For this reason, I’ve held the position for many years now that a film’s cinematography, choreography, mise en scène, color scheme, lighting, score, attention to detail, use of the camera for visual storytelling, and even (to some extent) acting are not sufficient reasons to consider a film great – it is the content that matters.  As an intellectual who looks at cinema as a communication medium, this makes sense – great presentation of a bad idea is still a bad idea – so I usually have had no problem appreciating the impressive aspects of a visually pleasing film (see Carousel) or even a film with excellent performances (see American Hustle) while still hating the movie.  However, as I have long feared it would, Dick Tracy has challenged this perspective: the main character, the plot, and seemingly the directing (at least in some respects) are all sub-par at best, but with its stylistic excellence, I cannot help but love this movie with all my heart.

In my attempts to find a way to justify my arguments with my feelings as I’ve thought about what to write for this review, one thought that keeps recurring is how similar this film seems to The Dark Crystal.  Here we have a creative producer who has taken on the task of directing a passion project of his with a visual style that no one has ever seen before, even going so far as to play the lead himself to ensure that everything is done right, and yet something is still very wrong here.  Dick Tracy is just not a likable character, Madonna doesn’t work all that well for the particular kind of sexy that’s required of her, and somehow the very simple plot seems too complex to follow.  Even stylistically there are problems, especially because of the pacing.  It’s incredibly jarring to see the big scene in which Tracy goes and catches a bunch of bad guys, knocking people out all the while, as a very slow jazz song plays over it.  Weirdly though, the fact that it is terrible almost makes it better – I think this belongs in the category of “génial–nanar blends”  These are films that are sometimes so bad that they’re good, and other times so good that they’re great (and occasionally they’re all of these at once).

I think this is a fair case because of just how many strong elements this film has.  I cannot emphasize enough that most of the cast is excellent.  The cameos kept surprising me, although they sometimes seemed awkward – consider Colm Meaney (Miles O’Brien of the Star Trek franchise) as one example, who appears in the background as a police officer in one scene and is easy to miss if the viewer isn’t paying attention.  Dick van Dyke is as delightful as always, Al Pacino is perfect for his part, and Dustin Hoffman had me in hysterics with his unique performance.  For the most part, however, what makes the characters work so well is the way they look.  The make-up and costumes are very much deserving of the awards they’ve won, and the kinds of faces that appear in this movie simply aren’t in any other films at all – this look distinctly belongs to Tracy’s world.  While I could easily put together an image gallery that showcases the make-up, I’ve decided not to do that because I don’t want to give that away for any readers who may not have seen the film.  I do, however, want to show off some of the shots that are cool simply because of the lighting, colors, sets, backgrounds, and camerawork, just to back up my case that this is the best-looking film ever made.  For a taste of what this film’s visual style has to offer – and I’ve only pulled from a particular section in the middle so the rest of the movie’s visuals aren’t spoiled – enjoy the following gallery:

By this point, it should be fairly easy to see why I love this movie, but I want to make it clear that I still don’t think I’m straying too far away from the theoretical principles to which I have claimed to be subscribed.  To me, an interesting story involves following a character who’s in a fascinating situation, and usually what makes the situation interesting is how the character clashes with his/her context.  Here, the situation of being in this kind of warped world with such strange characters is so interesting that virtually any character, no matter how uninteresting, can make this film captivating, as long as he/she is reasonably consistent as a character.  I can’t stand films that try to present an imaginative world in an objective and emotionally distant way, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but a film with an immersive and captivating world (see Dark City) invites the viewer to explore it and get wrapped up in it, which makes full use of cinema in its purest form: transportive simulation.  Perhaps more importantly, however, is the appeal that comes from a different story that the film reflects, which is the story of its own construction.  This film offers a way to watch a director struggle to create the kind of world that his film needs, and the mix of powerful successes and unbelievable failures gives the film a very cinematic sort of drama.  This tension in the film is just enough of a story of its own for the needs I expressed in the first paragraph of this essay to be appeased, making for a very enjoyable movie experience.

Also, I truly do consider this to be, in terms of visuals only, the greatest film ever made, and I would appreciate it if any readers challenged that by offering an example of a film that looks even better.  This is not a request, but a dare.  Please accept it.

Dark City Review

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READ THIS REVIEW BEFORE SEEING THE FILM

For what it’s worth, I really tried to watch this movie the right way.  I had been warned that the film has an opening voiceover (added by the studio due to concerns that humans are stupid) which gives away many of the biggest surprises, reveals, and twists.  So, I did my filmic duty and muted everything up until the opening titles, which is what everyone who sees it ought to do.  Unfortunately, I forgot that I had the closed captions turned on, so I still had something important spoiled for me, but it wasn’t much more than had already been spoiled by the guy who had informed me about the voiceover in the first place.  I think the best way to avoid this issue is to just watch the director’s cut, which does not spoil itself at the start and remains more true to what the film was meant to be.  I eagerly look forward to watching the director’s cut for myself, if only because, in spite of its problems, I actually greatly enjoy this movie – so much so that I started watching it again from the beginning almost immediately after it ended.  No matter how many times the movie explains itself (and it is a lot), it manages to stay surprising and interesting, holding my attention from start to finish.

One of the things that makes it so captivating is the editing, which is incredibly fast.  When I started watching the movie from the beginning for a second time, it felt normal to me, but during my initial viewing, it threw me off with its rather awkward speed and tight transitions, throwing out so much of the space to catch one’s breath between cuts/scenes that other films offer.  It’s obviously visually outstanding – that’s arguably the point of the film – but I think there’s more to it than that.  Yes, it’s about getting lost in another world and exploring a strange, anxiety-inducing place, but it also makes an argument for how the human mind/soul works, and it makes it well.  Its story may be nothing remarkable, but that doesn’t matter – It’s still one of the most thrilling films I’ve ever seen.  If not for the film’s inability to keep its mouth shut and let me figure it out for myself, and if not for the film’s disinterest in making me feel emotion, I would be hailing it as practically perfect and as one of the all-time greatest movies ever made.

The Straight Story Review

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Coincidences come up an awful lot in my experiences viewing movies, and one such experience happened not too long ago when I was watching a YouTube video by Doug Walker, “Can an Ending Ruin a Film?”  I started watching the video sometime before my class on “art film” on Wednesday, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to finishing it until Thursday.  Within the last five minutes or so before that class began, he decided to show The Straight Story, which is David Lynch’s Disney movie.  The professor then explained for those of us who missed it, as I think I had, that the film had been subtly telling us everything about the character’s past and motivation, setting up the ending, without ever making it clear that any of the events of the first hour and a half of the film had a point.  The ending is when the audience is supposed to put everything together.  Interestingly, when I resumed Doug Walker’s video, I found I had apparently paused it just one second before he brought up The Straight Story, making the argument that the ending to this film turns it from a painfully boring film into a brilliant film.  Some might take this as a sign of some sort, but I am not a superstitious man – I just see this as a great opportunity to explain why this film actually sucks, even with the ending.

This film is horribly, horribly boring.  None of its characters are particularly interesting or likable – most of them are really quite forgettable – and the performances from the cast were not able to redeem the script in this area.  There are a few interesting moments that seem a little bit clever, cheeky, or quirky, all in the way one would expect from David Lynch, but they are severely overpowered by the surprising amount of banality in the film.  The plot is purposely slow and uninteresting, but as deliberate as this may have been, I have yet to understand what positive effect this was meant to have on the film as a whole.  The list of moral lessons and sappy moments throughout the film is unbearably long, and the number of times that I’m supposed to tear up but don’t feel anything by annoyance is nauseatingly high.  This is probably how most viewers feel about the film until the ending, but the ending doesn’t change anything for me.

The ending doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t part of a generic, cliché family separation story, so it isn’t exactly a big shock or an exceptionally moving moment.  When the brothers are reunited, I’m waiting to see what happens – to get more specific information about what exactly makes their conflict unique – but the film ends with little time spent on the brother.  The goal of the ending is to use the audience’s knowledge of Harry Dean Stanton (the brother, Lyle) and his previous film roles to fill in the gaps about what kind of guy his character in this story is supposed to be, ideally filling in the gaps about the conflict between the Straights.  This is rather silly, because I haven’t seen any other film of his, and even if I had, that tells me nothing about who this character is supposed to be.  It’s a gimmick that I doubt would work with the likes of John Wayne or Ben Stein, and it certainly doesn’t work here.  I think the main problem is that Richard Farnsworth (Alvin Straight) just isn’t likable enough for me to care about the conclusion to his story, so the story entirely falls flat, and the film leaves much to be desired.

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You’ve Got Mail Review

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I’d like to take a moment to focus on a film called The Shop Around the Corner.  This is a classic Ernst Lubitsch comedy that I highly recommend.  It’s very funny and clever, and it established certain stylistic elements of the romantic comedy that have continued to this day.  In short, two employees of a furniture store don’t get along well, but then one of them discovers that the other has been his pen pal, with whom he’s anonymously been exchanging love letters.  It features a great cast of actors, many of whom I recognized from other films of the era (including the great and powerful Frank Morgan), and the plot is captivating from start to finish.  It becomes particularly interesting when the protagonist, played by James Stewart, starts to use the knowledge he has of his correspondent’s identity to mess with and manipulate her, before ultimately making her fall in love with him.

This leads me to the film that follows in its footsteps, You’ve Got Mail.  This film is very smart in that it takes full advantage of the new technology of the time – the personal email – to tell a new kind of story, while at the same time recycling elements of a classic story.  The characters are very likable, and the story is captivating enough, but the moment that absolutely blew me away is when the film suddenly turns into a line-for-line remake of a scene from The Shop Around the Corner.  It’s one of the greatest homages in history simply because it’s a movie doing an impression of its father, which is hardly ever seen.  That being said, the movie’s main problem seems to be how it is too much like its predecessor: it follows the old story of a man who’s mission is to manipulate the woman until he gets what he wants from her – a story of masculine domination.  Since the film is coming from a female director, I would hope for some sort of a creative break from this old formula, rather than a film that follows along with Hollywood’s boring old habit of making the formation of the couple synonymous with the psychological battle of a man conquering a woman’s mind.  It’s actually very strange to see just how forgiving Meg Ryan’s character is of Hanks’ after he’s completely destroyed her family business, when he could have saved it just by stopping the development of the Fox store’s children’s section and establishing a partnership between the store and the shop, essentially making her store the Fox children’s section.

Now, I’ve spoken many a time before about the ‘80s charm – the special power that ‘80s movies have over me even when I know they’re stupid (or perhaps especially when I know they’re stupid).  I am, however, a child of the ‘90s, so I also get nostalgic about this period as well.  When something strikes me as extremely ‘90s, it can have about the same effect on me as something extremely ‘80s has – it’s emblematic of just how cute we humans are when we think our trends, fashions, technology, music, and life-choices isn’t really as absurd as it will seem in the future.  I think sometime around Vietnam we see American culture hit its mid-life crisis as a result of the country’s depression, so Americans wore their hair long and made over-the-top music and acted more sophisticated than they really were and did everything in their power to embrace a new American value: individuality.  We dragged the rest of western culture into the pits of idiosyncrasy with us, and borrowed from what Europe had that already fit this philosophy: the avant-garde, David Bowie, Python humor, Expressionism, and so on and so forth.  We are still in this crisis today, but while we’re waiting for our kids to dye their hair purple for “2010s Day” at high school, we can just enjoy how charming the sights and sounds of ‘90s cinema can be.  You’ve Got Mail is one of the greatest examples of the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with a trip back to the ‘90s, and everything from its leading lady’s hairdo to its title to its soundtrack (especially that song by the Cranberries) makes the film into a perfect time capsule.

With all this in mind, I can still say that I appreciate the film greatly, even if I find it rather hackneyed, trite, and overly submissive to tired patriarchal tradition.  I can also say that I’m tired of the old stereotype of the male romantic lead always being an obnoxious jerk at the beginning, but this I am also willing to forgive.  Ultimately, the film wins me over because it’s story is fascinating (even if we know how it’s going to play out), it made me care about the characters, and it has a special kind of charm about it.  I tip my hat to Nora Ephron for creating such an impressive and enjoyable contemporary film classic.

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Contact Review

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Please, please read this review.

I don’t think the star rating is an accurate picture of what I think of this movie.  It is an absolutely brilliant drama, clearly showing off the storytelling skills of Carl Sagan, Robert Zemeckis, and Alan Silvestri at their finest.  At the same time, I don’t think this review is adequate either.  I sort of have a hatred for this film.  It’s one of those movies that I want to either give a very high rating or a very low rating, but I can’t decide which.  What makes the movie so difficult for me to process is this: Carl Sagan – one of the greatest champions of scientific, skeptical thinking – gave the world a story that makes a case for faith, and seems to make the case against skepticism itself.

This feels like an abominable treachery from one of the last men I would ever expect to be a turncoat in the movement for scientific reasoning.  While the very, very end of the movie seems to suggest that skepticism isn’t a bad thing, the conclusion of the movie essentially does.  The viewer is put in the position of assuming that the protagonist’s experience, for which she has no evidence, is entirely real, and not at all of her own imagination.  The skeptics, however, decide that her experience must be considered invalid.  We see the believers with their signs outside the courthouse claiming that she really did “contact” alien life, but these people (whom we are led to believe are correct) have no good evidence for their stance.  They are right by happenstance – because their unwarranted belief just so happened to be true – and that is not a healthy way to think.  The messages that this film promotes and the way in which it promotes them may be detrimental to the intellectual safety of anyone who takes this film seriously, which is a prospect that I frankly find horrifying and enraging.

The worst part of all this is that the film is perfect up until the ending.  It is one of the most thoughtful, provocative, intellectual, creative, realistic, imaginative, clever, emotional, smart, gripping, fun, and serious films I have ever seen.  It looks at the idea of alien contact in a way that makes it seem very, very real – both intellectually and emotionally.  I was completely sucked in, on the edge of my seat with my jaw on the floor for most of the film, and I was overwhelmingly impressed with perfect marriage of the screenplay Sagan and his wife had fashioned and the cinematic craftsmanship of Zemeckis.  When one considers that this is a drama, which I see as a genre that is generally intellectually inferior to comedy, it is amazing that its first two acts won me over to the extent that they did.  All it needed to do to be one of my top 25 favorite films of all time was show that the beauty of scientific discovery is directly linked to the beauty of skepticism, but instead its ending turned the film into the same drivel that most sappy dramedies end with: “no matter what anyone says, all that matters is that you believe in yourself.”  No, that’s not an actual quote from the film, but frankly it would have been fitting for the closing credits to feature this exact address from one of the Care Bears.

I will need to consider the film further and read more about Sagan’s view of skepticism, but from what I’ve read in interviews and articles thus far, he lacks a basic understanding of what skepticism is, what atheism is, and how to think with rationality about matters of faith in general.  I must concede, however, that the film is deserving of much praise for being incredibly well-made, and I would have to rate it fairly well.  At least it can be seen as inspirational to young women and girls who may leave this film with an eagerness to go into the scientific field, and whom I sincerely hope will learn for themselves just how beautiful true skepticism really is.

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