J.D. Hansel

1993

The Nightmare Before Christmas Review

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This film has been a source of inner conflict for me for a long time.  I saw most of it years ago, but I couldn’t finish it.  I found it too boring, even though I recognized its creativity.  I thought that I could overcome this dilemma by coming back to it a few years later, but sadly, I’m still caught in the same spot.

This film is brilliant.  Its visuals are absolutely stunning, and the attention to detail is so praiseworthy that one would have to bow down to Henry Selick in order to overstate how great the detail is.  Even the very idea of the film, with all of its characters and little gags, is pure genius.  In a way, I love this film.  The problem is that it gets very dull very fast.

The reason for this is that the film only has one note – or at least it holds the same note too long.  There are a few moments that stand out in the film as contributing something different to the film from its usual aesthetic: the scene in Christmas Town, the scene in which the toys attack the children on Christmas, and the scenes in which Santa is in the clutches of the Boogie Man.  All of these scenes are strong, and I like them a lot – the first is charming, the second is very Gremlins, and the third is very Tim Burton.  Apart from these, however, most of the film is just the same few feelings and motifs on repeat.

Some of this is due to the writing, and the actors might be partly to blame also, but this one mostly falls on Elfman.  “This Is Halloween” is a good, catchy song, but almost all the other songs run together and are nearly impossible to tell apart.  They all use the same few chords and are very limited in the emotions they express.  Consequently, the film feels like a broken record.  So I don’t think I could stand to watch this film every year, but since there’s clearly a lot to love hear, I’ll try to squeeze it in a couple times a decade.

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.

Schindler’s List Review

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Seeing as how I’m obviously in no position to write a review of this film, I’ll just comment on one aspect of the film that I believe ought to set an example for other filmmakers.  This movie is one of the few exceptions to the general rule that Spielberg specializes in a sentiment that J. D. Hansel will never understand or learn to like, but what I appreciate here in particular is Spielberg’s understanding of the value of black and white.  By the 1990s, it’s no wonder why audiences had come to assume that color films were the default and black and white films are deviants.  It’s nice to see a film that sees how making a black and white film in the age of color has its advantages.  Black and white allows the filmmaker to make some scenes on location with strikingly raw realism and others on a set with highly-stylized film noir-like expressionism, with all of them fitting together beautifully.  There’s no sense that this film is inconsistent in style (even though it is) because the modern viewer sees all of it as the same style: black and white.

Since Orson Welles would say that one of the main benefits (if not the main benefit) of colorless film is that the actors look better and their performances hit harder, which I think I can agree with, I have to ask the question: why should we even have color if film works better without it?  The answer, in my view, is this: color is only worth using if you’re going to use it well.  Usually this means vibrancy and theatricality, like the color in Dick Tracy, but other times it means using color as a communication device for purely practical reasons.  With the girl in the red coat, Spielberg shows that using color in a way that’s simply functional (in this case it’s just an identifier, nothing more) can actually create a greater sense of meaning than the use of color in the average color film.  With such a masterful film that holds the special honor of being both highly unconventional and extremely popular with audiences, there’s a lot that I could take away from it, but this was the main lesson for me, and I think it’s a very, very good one.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape Review

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Some of my readers – if I may presume I have readers – may be aware that I have three younger brothers.  The oldest of the three is Brian, who has down-syndrome, which has made my family’s dynamic an interesting one.  As of the time I’m writing this, he’s eighteen years old, and he adds a lot of joy to the family, although he also adds some challenges that we wouldn’t have with a more ordinary teenager.  Brian, however, is not the reason I watched this movie.  I watched it because of my youngest brother, Grayson, who insisted that I watch it with him.  For whatever reason, he adored the movie, but as is common for him, he couldn’t explain why.  I was willing to humor him and watch it since it had such critical acclaim, but it unfortunately strikes me as the average “critic porn.”

I have so little to say about this movie because the movie gives me so little to review.  What’s actually accomplished by the events of this film?  How is the ending necessitated?  How does it even make sense?  Where do they even live in the end?  What the heck was the point of the plotline with FoodLand?  Oh, and the other question – why do I care?

I don’t understand what substance Johnny Depp’s character has that’s supposed to make me like him or root for him.  I also don’t understand why I’m supposed to like the girl that he likes.  When she says the line, “I’m not into that whole ‘external beauty’ thing,” I immediately dismiss her as the kind of pseudo-intellectual hipster that’s not worth my time.  So why is she worth the screen time?  And if I’m really supposed to care about her, how does the movie expect me to be satisfied with an ending in which she only sees our main characters for a couple months of the year?

What I think I understand is why it’s received such acclaim.  The acting is good, considering what the characters are.  I have to give credit to Leonardo DiCaprio for his excellent performance, but of course good acting is never the best measure of a film.  The “story” is fairly interesting, and I must credit the film for keeping me from getting too bored, which could have happened easily with a film in this genre.  It obviously deals with a tricky subject matter, which always gets the attention of the critics, but even with how similar my experiences with my family can be to the experiences of the family in this film, I just don’t care enough about the family to really enjoy the movie.  I get what it’s trying to do, and it does that well, but I would never try to do what it’s trying to do, simply because I don’t care for Oscarbait.

124 What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Sleepless in Seattle Review

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I find this movie to be simply pleasant.  There isn’t much about it that is spectacular, but nothing about it is necessarily bad.  It has a very nice soundtrack, and not a bad plot, but both of these are shamelessly borrowed from other movies.  Still, it makes it sentimental in a way that I think is okay.

The characters are likable enough, and they’re written pretty well.  Their motives and desires are pretty understandable and relatable.  The one thing that bugs me is that the movie talks enough about destiny, magic, and fate to make the audience accept that these are all working in favor of the protagonist, and we are supposed to like that.  This gives the writers “permission” to fill the sucker with Dius ex machina, while also showing faith in destiny to be a very positive thing, with which I personally disagree.  This kind of comes across as lazy writing, especially since it’s the writer’s job to make it seem like nothing can possibly work out for the protagonist, and this movie seems to proclaim from the beginning that destiny’s going to ensure that everything works out.

For that reason, and the fact that the plot doesn’t strike me as anything absolutely outstanding, I think the movie is a little weak.  However, in its simplicity it manages to be remarkably pleasant, and I see why it’s a classic.

44 Sleepless in Seattle

 

Matinee Review

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In Universal’s 1993 film Matinee, I was not surprised that John Goodman seemed perfect for the part of Lawrence Woolsey, a filmmaker known for making cheesy/horrifying monster movies.  However, I was surprised to see that much of this movie was focused on a bunch of kids, and even more surprising was that the child actors playing them were really quite good and believable.  While the film starts off slow, and seems to struggle to establish all of its main characters in a fast but logical way, around 40 minutes in it gets really interesting and lots of fun.

It’s a shame that the film is not more appropriate for young kids since the kids in the movie are pretty much the main focus of the film.  Sadly, there were not that many big laughs, but it was still delightful watching these great characters interact, and watching the way that this film brilliantly satires old monster movies.  Overall, Matinee has good writing, good acting, good directing, and even good music.  It’s simply fun.

02 Matinee