J.D. Hansel

2010s Movie Reviews

Star Wars – The Last Jedi Review

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This is my favorite Star Wars film.

Yes, I know it has problems.  A lot of problems.  But I’ve come to expect that from contemporary Hollywood blockbusters.  So today, when I look at new movies from Hollywood, I usually only focus on the flaws if a film is so void of substance that there is nothing else upon which I can look.  That isn’t the case here.  There is not only substance to this film, but an intellectual depth, an emotional appeal, and maybe even a level of artistic craftsmanship that I have not seen in any prior films in the franchise.

I’ll take these points in reverse order, starting with the artistry and crafting, spoiling as little as I possibly can considering the topics at hand.  The film is very well put-together, demonstrating an understanding of how to borrow from many very different sources to create a unified whole.  Slate has a list of everything outside of Star Wars Rian Johnson pulled from to strengthen the film, and some of these choices are very clever.  Primarily, I’m impressed with the use of The Rashomon Effect because this is a nod to Star Wars’ inheritances from the samurai films of Kurosawa that uses a particular Kurosawa film that one would never think would be useful to the Star Wars franchise (making it almost a joke, but only for film majors).  I actually didn’t even pick up on that until I read it after the fact.  Still, during the movie, I was blown away by the look of the film – especially Snoke’s room, which has the best set design I’ve seen in any film in the past decade.  The careful use of editing to link Rey to Kylo Ren is also the mark of a daring filmmaker, as is the choice to use practical effects for characters which one would assume they’d surely do with CGI today.  My favorite moment in the film in terms of artistry, however, is that moment of total silence, which is pure and concentrated “cool.”

More importantly, it’s a scene that creates a great affect (and I do mean affect in this case, not effect), which is something Johnson knows how to do better than a lot of other contemporary filmmakers.  While most Star Wars films don’t really grab me, this film pulls me in.  To a large extent, the film does it with its comedy, and this is no surprise: few would argue with the view that The Last Jedi is probably the funniest Star Wars film.  There’s more to it than that though.  I’m invested in Rey’s quest in a way that I was never invested in Luke Skywalker’s “quest” in the original trilogy, and I’m even invested in Luke more than I had been before.  For whatever reason, I find that I just care about the characters more in this film.  Furthermore, Johnson also knows how to build up a desire in the audience and satisfy it.  The scene in which we expect (if only for a half second) that Kylo is going to kill Rey, followed by an epic turn of events, is one of the most thrilling moments in movie history, at least for me, and I can only compare it to the way I felt during the climax of the final Hunger Games film: I didn’t realize just how much I needed to see this moment until right before it happened.

That being said, I know the film wasn’t very satisfying for most Star Wars fans, and I can understand why.  The way that the character of Luke Skywalker is handled in the film is controversial to say the least.  While he’s not eating babies, he’s not necessarily the man that most fans want him to be at this point in his life.  Personally though, I’m happy about that.  I think it’s about time the whiny farm boy gets brought down a peg.  Sure, Luke seems highly irresponsible for staying secluded on this island, but that’s just him channeling Yoda and Obi Wan, who also loafed around lazily as the Dark Side reigned.  We should be hating those two jerks more than Luke, but somehow, he’s getting all the blame here, even though he couldn’t even tell what was going on in the rest of the galaxy having cut himself off from the force.  (Some say it seems petty for Luke to have made such a drastic decision after making one mistake with just one of his trainees, but I argue that, since Luke’s greatness in the original trilogy is found in his dedication to Han and Leia – particularly in Empire – he probably felt like he had ruined their lived by betraying their trust and letting their son fall to the dark side.)

Of course, the main reason why the fans hate the film is that this film wasn’t made for them, as is stupendously explained in this wonderful piece by Andrew Kahn: “The Last Jedi Isn’t for the Fans.”  As this publication points out, it’s about fandom, nostalgia, and mythology – and the dangers of all of them.  This piece from Forbes also covers this subject, so I don’t feel the need to explain it myself, but I will say that this is what makes The Last Jedi so satisfying for me: this is the first Star Wars movie to finally address the importance of critical thinking and a healthy skepticism when it comes to mythology.  In all the previous films, the skeptic – of the stories of the Jedi, of the power of the force, etc. – is always wrong, but here, it’s a lack of a healthy skepticism of myth that causes characters to stumble.  This honest look at the nature of fandom, the danger of mythology, and the immense stress and tension that comes from constantly trying to hold yourself up to the standards of legends, cultural norms, and collectively shared images of ideals.

Without this film, the Star Wars franchise is philosophically barron and culturally toxic, propagating a plethora of regressive ideas about faith and belief.  With this film, however, the franchise is redeemed, and my love for Star Wars is tripled.  This isn’t the Star Wars movie we wanted – and it’s trying hard not to be the Star Wars movie we wanted – but it’s the one we need, the one we deserve, and the only one with the potential to make the world a better place.  The choice to lay the biggest and most controversial elephant in the room of media bare before us all makes this the most daring, and perhaps most important, film of the 21st Century thus far.

Coco Review

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The general rule of thumb when it comes to my opinions on Pixar films is this: other people complain about the ones I like, and I complain about the ones other people like.  I like a different tone and sentiment than the one Pixar usually offers, and it’s the tone they offer that makes so many people love Pixar.  It’s obviously more complicated than this though – even though I’ve heard people complain plenty about Inside Out, it’s generally regarded as a great Pixar movie, and I’m actually in the camp that really likes this one.  My brother, a far bigger Pixar nerd than I, also loved Inside Out, but I like Coco a heck of a lot more than he did, and it’s hard for me to understand this disparity.

The main reason why he didn’t like the movie is that, according to him, it doesn’t feel like a “real” Pixar movie.  He likes how most Pixar films give humanity or “souls” to objects and species that we generally don’t think have them: bugs, toys, cars, rats, monsters, robots, Scottish people, etc.  That being said, The Incredibles doesn’t do this, and Cars 2 does, so go figure.  He does have a point though: Coco feels more like it could come from Disney’s name-brand animation studio just as easily, and it does feel a little more formulaic and cliché than Pixar’s average feature.  (He noted that The Emoji Movie, which came out first, has a remarkably similar plot, and yet The Emoji Movie is the one that gets points off from critics for being too cliché.)  So I probably shouldn’t have enjoyed the film as much as I did.

To be fair, I actually have a bias towards this film – one of the makers of the film came to my college campus and gave us a sneak peak, so I feel a special attachment to it – but according to Rotten Tomatoes, 224 out of 232 critics also liked it, so there must be something here.  Part of why it works is the very fact that Pixar was trying to do something different.  They told a different kind of story than usual with a different style (certainly with darker comedy than usual), and their experimentation shows that they have some range.  The visual style is particularly dazzling, and I think the introduction of this new color pallette to the (generally bland) look of CGI animated films is one of the best things to happen to the animation industry in a decade.

More importantly though, much like with The LEGO Movie, this film knows what it’s doing when it uses the clichés.  It’s taking a formula we’ve all seen before and using it to fully show off a fresh, vivid, imaginative, and highly detailed world.  Pixar is using every trick in the book here – even tricks going back to “Skeleton Dance” – to give us an old-fashioned fantasy adventure film with lots of great music.  Even the film’s opening narration uses a kind of visual storytelling I’ve never seen before, and it serves as a great callback to old shadow puppet shows.  It’s also worth noting that this film will be, for many American children and probably a number of American adults, the first time they see a film that expects them to identify with an explicitly Mexican protagonist, which also makes the film feel fresh to me.

Still, I think I’m mostly pulled in by the emotion in the film.  Pixar hasn’t done a lot of movies about artists.  They’ve done films about characters who want to find their families (Finding Nemo), characters who feel rejected by their families (Toy Story), characters who miss their dead family members (Up), characters who have dysfunctional families (The Incredibles), and so on.  This is a story about family as well, but much like The Little Mermaid, it’s a good, old-fashioned story about someone who wants to do something that’s considered acceptable by the powers that be.  It’s a film about an artistic rebel – and a far more relatable one than Remy.

It’s always music and the arts that grab me emotionally, and this film does a beautiful job of depicting not only how music can connect people and bring out the best in people.  It perfectly captures the experience of being a kid who forms a bond with someone he’s never met because they speak the same artistic language and share a special passion.

I used to be that kid.  For me it was people like Jim Henson.  I can’t help but wonder who it will be for the kids who see this film, and wonder what lives they’ll lead because of it.

Hanna Review

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This movie almost merits two different reviews – it just doesn’t feel like it’s all the same film.  It somehow simultaneously embodies my favorite and least-favorite movements in contemporary American cinema.

As for what bothers me: it’s trying too hard to be artsy.  It thinks it is an art film, even though it isn’t, and it has a pretentious “hipster” vibe.  It really thinks it’s hot stuff, much like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but at least that film did not commit this film’s greatest sin – too many jump-scares.  As I may have said before, the jump-scare is the filmic equivalent to the playground bully who claps in front of children’s faces and mocks them for blinking.  It’s pathetic.  Of course, to complete this irritating aesthetic, much of the film is very gray and bland, which I suppose I should expect from a 2011 film.

However – and now it’s time for the good stuff – there are also scenes with beautiful lighting and colors, which feel as though they belong in a classic Tim Burton film.  These moments are rare, but they are very, very lovely.  Even before this aesthetic change though, the biggest shift in tone is when the electronic music kicks in, which injects the film with life and makes me grin like the Grinch.  Every movie soundtrack should be a little bit more like this movie’s soundtrack – the score is simply divine.  It helps that the film is driven by great characters performed by great actors.  Saoirse Ronan’s transformation is downright uncanny (in a good way), and praise for this is due to both the makeup department and Ronan herself, who makes the viewer believe in and care for a very unusual character.  I like intriguing female protagonists and threatening female villains, so I found it easy to stay engaged in the story.

The film is worth watching (and, perhaps, watching again) because it was clearly crafted with care.  As much as I hate how much the film embodies the errors of its time period, director Joe Wright is doing so much here that is genuinely artistic, original, and clever that, had he simply strayed further from the path, I think he could have made an amazing film.  As it is, however, this hipster of a film does actually have much intelligence – a shocking amount for an action film – and its thoughtful, precise incision of fairy tale elements into the DNA of the story is admirable.  Maybe the film’s good and bad aspects can be reconciled if one sees this as a turning point – a sign that we are moving away from what contemporary films have been and towards a future filled with color, synthesizers, great characters, and very smart writing.  Here’s hoping.

Wonder Woman Review

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This is the short version of this review.  I wrote a version that’s so long that a friend of mine found it absurd and practically unreadable.  So click here if you want my real thoughts on this movie, or read below to get some of the highlights.

I’m not wild about this film.  It’s sub-par.  My reasons for thinking this, however, are not all “film snob” reasons – I don’t care about perfect cinematography.  What I care about is whether or not the filmmakers gave a darn, and it seems to me that they generally didn’t.

I get annoyed when a movie gets away with pretending it’s more progressive than the cash-grab it is.  I get annoyed when a movie acts like it’s offering gritty realism when it’s really just color-graded to make everything gray.  I get annoyed when a movie is hailed for being original when its story follows the same beats as every Hollywood movie I’ve seen before.  I get annoyed when the editing is so unprofessional that I find myself and the viewers around me getting confused about what’s happening.  It’s the kind of laziness that makes me feel awfully disheartened by the state of movies today, and by the state of moviegoers.  We’ve grown to accept mediocrity.

I’ll give the movie some credit though.  I like a lot of its comedy.  Some of its scenes hit the nail on the head when it came to character development, cool-looking “superhero moments,” humor, and sentimentality.  Fine.  But I’m still upset.

The way in which feminism manifests itself in the film is largely through what I call “Mary Sue’s Revenge” moments.  These are scenes in which a female who is obviously highly competent is assumed to need the aid, protection, or mercy of a man, but immediately proves herself to be just as competent as literally anyone could tell she was.  The man’s surprise is always the butt of the joke.  This kind of scene can be found once in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, twice in The Force Awakens (as though it’s hard to tell that Rey can fend for herself), and a million times on the Disney Channel, to offer a few examples.  It’s old, it’s tired, it assumes men are stupid, it assumes that women being impressive should surprise us, and it’s been done to death.

This is balanced out with several scenes in which Diana is portrayed as a naive girl who believes in fairy tales and has no idea how the world works.  In many scenes, she’s the joke of the scene, and men have to explain everything to her, which concerns me.  In most other scenes, she proves everyone wrong in a manner like what I described in the last paragraph – demonstrating her unwarranted faith in a fairy tale to be apparently valid – which also concerns me.  Can we have one movie in which we’re not surprised when the women are capable, and we’re not rooting for the believer in silly old stories?  Heck – her unsupported belief that she had found Eros in Germany led her to kill the wrong man by mistake, and I don’t think of that as promoting positive values.

So here’s the deal.  I’m giving the movie an okay rating.  It’s not because I think the movie’s all that good.  It’s not because the Hollywood execs deserve praise for finally giving audiences what audiences asked for ten years ago.  It’s because it’s simply pragmatic for all of us to say we liked this movie so Hollywood will give us more super-heroine movies.  Only then can someone make one I’ll really enjoy.

 

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Review

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People who have an obsessive passion for and enjoyment of Terry Gilliam films – or at least his more intense and bizarre creations like Time Bandits and Brazil – scare me.   Guillermo del Toro, for example, was overjoyed to see his young daughter giggle with delight at the end of Time Bandits when (spoiler alert) the young protagonist’s parents explode.  He’s happy that she found it funny that the boy’s parents died.  It’s disgusting, but it’s all part of Gilliam – he has a sense of humor that goes for extreme intensity even if it crosses ethical lines, and some film enthusiasts really go for that.  These films are, by and large, not too violent, but it’s often the merciless infliction of wild images and editing onto the audience mixed with the heartless infliction of “comedy without relief” onto the poor characters that makes these films so difficult for some to watch.  Interestingly, upon watching Brazil again many years later for an audio commentary track, Gilliam found he wasn’t sure he liked the film very much because of how brutal its comedy and story were, but it is precisely the fact that the film is too much to handle in one sitting that draws some filmmakers to it.

Edgar Wright is one of the filmmakers who absolutely adores Brazil, and I think it really shows in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the most relentless movie ever made.  It never stops.  It just keeps blasting the viewer with more unconventional and experimental insanity that is incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around, all while retaining a formulaic story that’s perfectly easy to follow.  The only way I was able to survive the movie was by taking breaks – I had to get up and walk to another room, or talk about what I’d just experienced with the friend of mine who so kindly subjected me to this film.  I think I also could have used a snack break, and maybe a few naps.  Technically, the film shouldn’t even be that hard to swallow: it’s not gory, it’s not scary, it’s not intensely dramatic (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy), it’s not addressing sensitive topics, it’s not making me feel “naked” the way The Graduate does, and it’s not flashing wild lights and vivid colors at me like that one irritating Canadian film.  It’s simply difficult to process.

What makes it difficult is the unhinged creativity.  There are no clear rules in this movie.  When a man shows up with sexy demon hipsters singing a musical number as he flies around, you have to accept it, even though there is no setup for it.  Honestly, the movie is so strange that, when one character’s ability to read minds is explained by the fact that he’s a vegan, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.”  Relatively, that does make sense.  It’s the best explanation you’ll get for anything in the movie.  The Hollywood-trained mind isn’t ready for this.

What the film shares with Terry Gilliam is an unsettling contentment with the awkwardly terrifying conditions of its reality.  There’s something very disturbing about seeing nobody react appropriately to the death of a boy’s parents – even if they are really bad parents – and watching old men in an office giddily force their bosses to walk off a blank from a skyscraper to fall to their whimsical deaths.  When something that should alarm people is met with the wrong response, it creates an effect that just feels wrong on a moral level, and that’s all over this film.  Right from the first fight scene, the way that other characters react to the brutality of what they’re witnessing feels off – it feels inhuman – and this makes the film tough to take on its first viewing (although I think it improves over time).  However, what makes it possible for the viewer to adjust as the film progresses is the fact that the movie is largely operating on video game logic, where the impossible is often normalized in ways that would be unsettling if we thought about it, and Edgar Wright has forced us to think about it.  He’s shown us a lot of our blind-spots in regards to video games simply by adapting the aspects of video games that no one has ever thought to adapt before.

I think that’s what I respect about the film.  It tells its story in the way that it believes is the most fun, the most exciting, and the most respectful to the source, regardless of whether or not it’s what people are used to.  There’s a sense that no one on set ever said, “Hey, this is going a bit too far, let’s dial it down.”  Instead, they just followed every urge to do something fresh and exciting, and this philosophy actually paid off with a lot of really funny scenes.  In fact, by putting the viewer in such a scared and vulnerable state, a lot of the comedy is made funnier, and the story’s messages are made more powerful.  So, sure, I may have lost a significant percentage of my sanity from watching this film, but it was absolutely worth it to receive all of the joy the story brings and all of the power a filmmakers can have when he dares to be relentless.

(Still, that demon musical number is just plain stupid.  Obviously.)