2015

The Peanuts Movie Review

April 6, 2016 by JD Hansel

I am fairly certain that, in the world of comedy (if not the world in general), it is a sin for me to say that I have never been much of a Peanuts fan. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the works of the Peanuts characters – I do enjoy their most famous Christmas special, among other staples of Schulz’ work – but I simply wasn’t exposed to them early enough in life to appreciate them the way so many others do. The Peanuts specials and comics have a kind of humor that is generally rather slow and deliberately underwhelming, as it focuses on a mumbling failure who tends to dread living. I certainly do identify with this kind of character, and I greatly appreciate Schulz’s approach to writing for the character, which is summed up in this simple, classic quote of his: “Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning.” With this in mind, I can’t help but look at the 2015 Peanuts film as a perfect example of both what it is I love about the Peanuts, and what it is that I just don’t know how to appreciate.

Right from the start, this film was full of surprises. The trailer alone stunned me with the distinction of its animation style, as it is probably the best use of CG animation I have seen since at least Inside Out, if not The Lego Movie. Because of the purity of the style, the film had earned my respect before I had even seen it, but then again, I was unsure as to whether or not it would be worth seeing. I am now glad that I did choose to see the film, because if I thought that the animation style was surprising, I was quite shocked to see how much I enjoyed the humor. No Peanuts production or comic had ever made me laugh so hard, and I think this is largely due to the way most of the jokes relied on the animation style. By doing this as a CG film rather than 2-D, this movie ensures that it does not appear to be a continuation of the old Peanuts specials, but rather an homage to the comedy and animation of older cartoons, making for an experience that’s easy to enjoy. However, both the laughs and the surprises grew fewer and fewer as the movie progressed, and I was bothered to find myself losing interest.

This is the problem. I eventually found myself playing a video game on the Wii U while the film was still on, because there was so little need to pay attention during most of the movie. The plot was predictable enough, so I didn’t really need to keep a close eye out for much, and the overall storytelling approach didn’t interest me much at all. Half of the movie seems to be spent on an irrelevant B-story taking place in Snoopy’s daydreams of chasing the Red Baron, which might have been worth including had they used the classic song, but even the superb sight gags towards the end of his fantasy aren’t quite enough of a pay-off to make it worth my time. The main story, obviously focused on Charlie Brown, was cute and relatable, but was still a little lacking in substance, and could have been over with much quicker. The ‘A’ story could have been a ‘B’ or ‘C’ story, and the Snoopy bits could have been two or three very brief scenes, which would have left room for a stronger ‘A’ story.

All that being said, this is a good movie. It’s fun, clean, and has both the frustration with life and the delightful purity required to make it feel like a classic Peanuts production. Getting a G-rated movie in 2015 was already miraculous, but it’s even more satisfying to find that it’s a good movie that adults can enjoy just as much (or maybe more) than children. It has a lot of charm and heart, which are very hard to generate without being sappy, but this movie does the job just fine. Forgive me for ending on such a cliché, low-hanging joke, but I can’t resist: “You’re a good movie, Charlie Brown.”

Insurgent Review

January 14, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

With a bad Italian accent a la The Amanda Show, say it with me: “This is better – much better!”

As we all should know because I’m super important, I have my issues with Divergent. This world and its people are entirely nonsensical, and I had such a hard time taking it all halfway seriously. Fortunately, this film is just the game-changer that the franchise required. Never in a million years could I believe that these “founding fathers” thought it would be wise to separate the people into factions like this. However, I’d totally buy that a bunch of people who’ve been driven to insanity by a terrible war decided to throw a bunch of people in a pen, separate them by their primary skills, and see who gets killed. Furthermore, the experiment shows that Divergents can arise even in a world of just singularly skilled people. The only way they could improve on this to clear up any other logical issues is if they explain that the premise of Divergent was actually just a table top game, but the experimenters got drunk and decided to make a government out of it.

With the structural mess out of the way, I can finally address everything else in this movie. The score and soundtrack are drab as usual, and much of the screenplay is regrettably predictable, but aside from that, it’s a pretty decent flick. Apparently, most critics thought this was a step back for the franchise, and the reviews for this film are much worse than those of the first. I disagree, in part because I just like stories that serve as a bridge from the first story in the franchise to the climax (meaning there’s less exposition and more mystery and hype), but also because the plot simply gets more interesting. One of the best things a story can do to add hype is make sure its characters on the run from a ticking time bomb of sorts, and they have to beat the clock. While the Hunger Games films have an element of this, the games themselves don’t start until at least halfway through the movies, whereas Insurgent (knowing its characters aren’t quite compelling enough to pull off an hour of characters just hanging out, shooting promo videos, impressing sponsors, resting on trains, etc.) puts Tris on the run right from the get-go, and it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be track her down.

This movie also plays around with character dynamics a lot, which adds a touch more dimension to the characters that have been largely flat thus far. Can Four’s mother be trusted, or is he right to suspect her of evil intentions? Is Tris going to be able to keep from revealing that she killed her best friend’s brother? Is Peter a good guy, a bad guy, or still figuring it out? How much can Caleb trust that Jeanine won’t be too inhumane to his sister? Can Four bring himself to shoot Eric? And what do the founding fathers have to tell the people of the future? Regardless of how predictable many parts of this movie may be, the lives of these characters get wonderfully messier, and things do take bigger and better turns and twists that make sure the audience is having a heck of a time.

Star Wars – The Force Awakens Review

December 24, 2015 by JD Hansel

I love home video. I absolutely adore it. I get nostalgic about VHS tapes, I collect DVDs, I obsess over digital copies, and I drool at the majesty of a beautiful Blu-Ray on an HD screen. I must emphasize this because I’m about to say something a wee bit unfavorable about home video: it may have ruined cinema. Not completely, of course, but I think that we’ve lost something special about the movie theater experience.

Because home video has been so prominent since before I was born, I don’t know personally what going to the movies was like at the time, but I’ve heard the stories. I’ve heard how the crowd cheered in joyous support at the premiere of Muppet Christmas Carol when the dedication to Jim Henson and Richard Hunt appeared on screen. I’ve heard how the boys let out a snide “oooOOOooh…” in unison in the bedroom scene in 1968’s Romeo and Juliet. I’ve heard how the test audience for Ghostbusters went wild when they saw “scene missing” as a placeholder for a shot that had yet to be composed. I’ve heard how they edited silent pauses after the Marx Brothers’ jokes because the audience would laugh so long and loudly. I’ve heard how much more of a community experience it used to be back before we got used to watching movies in private – before we trained ourselves to take no involvement in a collective movie experience.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens made the movie theater into the big, loud, excited, delighted, happy family it was meant to be. There was applause for the Star Wars logo, applause for the Lucasfilm logo, and even for a spaceship. Everybody could feel the immense joy in the room when a familiar face came on screen. The jokes hit home with everyone. The twists had us all on the edge of our seats. Seeing this film was one of the best experiences of my life because, for the first time in a long while, I was truly experiencing a film rather than just looking at a film. Not to mention, the movie itself floored me.

I felt like a child again, even though I didn’t watch Star Wars films much growing up. This movie actually made me into a bigger Star Wars fan than I have ever been in my life. I was simply reverted to a time when watching a movie was joyous and exciting, getting more delightful by the minute, and I couldn’t have been more excited. When I remembered to use my grown up brain to analyze the film, I was impressed by the effects, the acting, the visuals, the score, the dialogue, the story structure – everything about it. This is the kind of experience that the movies are all about, and I feel privileged to live in such a historic moment when the event of a lifetime is on big screens everywhere.

THG: Mockingjay – Part 2 Review

November 30, 2015 by JD Hansel

(MINOR SPOILERS)

The last film in a franchise is nearly always the hardest film in the lot to make, and the hardest to watch. It has the burden of being the “goodbye” that we know we won’t be satisfied with, but we won’t be satisfied without either. Ultimately, we want a sense of completion, but we also need a sense that, after the credits roll, everything will stay as it should be in the world of the film. Good characters are rewarded and satisfied, bad characters are punished, and the scope/nature of any character’s death fits the scope/nature of his or her life. Whatever part of the movie’s finale the viewers are pondering while leaving the theater becomes what the franchise means to them. This is a task of gigantic proportions that must be handled with extreme care, and I say The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -Part 2 is a good example of a conclusion that feels just about right.

The most impressive thing, however, is that we spend the whole movie (as we have for the whole franchise) rooting for Katniss to kill Snow, but once she has the chance to shoot him, we don’t want her to. This is an incredible feat to pull off, and it serves to turn the saying “remember who the real enemy is” into a question of what the real enemy is. A series that started as a controversial story about children going to war has evolved into a timeless fable about human nature. The dangers of history repeating itself offer more powerful terror than any of the horrific moments seen previously in the franchise, and the entire history of their dystopia is called into question during just one conversation. Our view of some of the characters change entirely, but I was happy to see that the most important characters got just about the endings they deserved, with hope in the future for the characters we care about most.

So, it pulls off the sequel game well, but setting my sequel standards aside, what do I think of it as a film? Well, the acting is just right, as usual, and the script seems largely well-written. The soundtrack is pretty standard, but I seem to recall enjoying some unique parts of the score here and there. The visuals seem even more gray than usual in this one, which is a pity, but I suppose I’m used to all that by now. Sadly, this movie did not have the kind of moving moments that nearly brought me to tears in the second and third films, but it did have one moment (the one captured in the image below) that had me on the edge of my seat trying to keep from cheering. This moment, however, is what makes it a great wrap-up, so I must conclude that this is not my favorite film in the Hunger Games franchise, but as a franchise finale, I adore it.

Hotel Transylvania 2 Review

October 24, 2015 by JD Hansel

This sequel feels very sequel-ish. In spite of the fact that this storyline is refreshingly different from that of the first Hotel Transylvania, most of my feelings towards this movie are exactly the same as my feelings towards the first. It feels like an extension of the same film, with a story that shows what would inevitably follow the events of the first film, and a script that relies heavily on its predecessor’s running gags. This one does seem slightly lacking in the cleverness and creativity of the first film, but it has the added bonus of a good Mel Brooks character. I certainly did enjoy watching the movie, and I laughed out loud at Drac’s description of using FaceTime, but since my count of predictable moments reached 18 (if memory serves), I can’t pretend it was a fabulous film. (I suppose I was impressed with a lot of the visuals – particularly when it comes to classic cartoon animation styles – but this is also something that can be said of the first Hotel Transylvania.) Aside from thoughts I already described in my review of its prequel, I really don’t have much in the way of strong thoughts or feelings about this movie at all.

Paper Towns Review

August 3, 2015 by JD Hansel

Alright, I think it’s time for us to have “the talk.”

As a proud cinema snob, this is tough for me to talk about openly, but we need to discuss the true implications of “the C word” – cliché. We critics have always assumed that it’s a Cinema Sin for a story to be cliché and/or stereotypical. Obviously, a film would ideally be entirely original, and would set itself apart from even its best imitators. On the other hand, while it might be disheartening to think that one of our favorite critiques to use against the mediocre could be a moot point, we may have to admit that rejecting the unoriginal can cheat a film that would be absolutely brilliant… had it only come out a few years earlier. Let’s really think about this: can an otherwise good movie be condemned solely for its inappropriate chronological placement?

Sometimes we do appreciate a film that reuses old ideas in better ways, and I think Doug and Rob Walker have extinguished Inside Out criticisms definitively on multiple occasions. The problem arises when a story is pleasant enough to be enjoyable, but it uses a stereotypical formula for its genre – without adding enough originality or twists to give it significance. For the “based on a book all the teenage girls and their mothers have read” genre, there is a trick to dodge this, namely built-in fill-in-the-blanks for unique character details, but is that enough to keep the audience from feeling like they’re watching the genre rather than a movie? In the case of Paper Towns, that is exactly the problem, and to drive the point home, I counted the number of clichés responsible for this effect that appear throughout the film.

It’s thirty five. That is scary.

To clarify the kind of clichés I’m talking about, I will further explain the concept of built-in fill-in-the-blanks. Please refer to the now infamous Tumblr post entitled “John Green’s writing process” by clicking here. This writing style, which seems rather common today, uses a Mad Lib formula to add bizarre little details and fun idiosyncrasies to each character, usually consisting of a curious mismatched adjective/noun pairing. This adds flavor to the story, but it can quickly grow stale, because one can only see so many combinations in the vein of Patrick’s cancerous balls in TFioS or Margo’s random capitalization in Paper Towns before it’s all the same. The most prominent combo of this nature in the film is the “black Santas,” which sounds so, so, so much like it comes from a Mad Lib that I’m starting to think John Green really does employ a dartboard in his writing process.

That being said, I’m limited in the extent to which I can criticize the film due to the other tricky dilemma that makes critics uncomfortable – adaptations have to stick to their source material, for better or for worse. Any problems I have with the film from a writing standpoint can really only take up about half of my review, and my problem with clichés should take up only a small portion of that, because I really don’t like shaming a film purely for its similarity to others in its genre (especially since the book came out a few years before all these clichés became so established). So, I guess the real question to ask about this movie is: did I have a good time experiencing it? I’d say I did. It’s a pleasant film that never fails to entertain with its lovable cast (particularly Jaz Sinclair, whose charm will take her far, I suspect) and its interesting plot, which was paced and stylized appropriately. The dynamic of the characters, particularly during the Pokémon scene, is enough to make the film quite pleasant to watch, and it leaves me wanting more… unless maybe I wanted more because the ending was anticlimactic, but let’s not think about that.