J.D. Hansel

2017

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.

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.

 

Baby Driver Review

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This is the best film of 2017 I’ve seen so far.  Hands down.  Let’s talk about why.

I love it when I see a trailer for an upcoming movie and think, “Oh my gosh – what is this and how was it able to get made in today’s world?”  What puzzled me about the Baby Driver trailer, or at least the particular trailer I saw first, was that it looked like a generic action movie (by generic I mean it contains many of the most common standards of the genre, like impossible car chases and crime bosses who threaten to kill loved ones and 93 guns going off in every scene), but it actually looked good.  As the trailer explained more about the premise of the movie and what conflicts arise in it, I couldn’t help but think that this film must have come from a brilliant auteur – a Chazelle or Scorsese.  Then, with one name, it all made sense to me: Edgar Wright.

Knowing that Wright is a really smart director, and that I share a lot of his tastes, I went into the theater expecting the film to be pretty good … for a “gun flick.”  I couldn’t have known I would later leave the theater wanting it to win Best Picture.  So, herein lies the first reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it made a great movie out of a not-so-great genre.  Where other films in the genre would rely on CGI for their tricks, Wright amazingly depended on practical effects, giving every scene in a car all the more weight.  I think Wright approached this movie like he was making a movie – not like he was making an “action flick,” but like he was just making a good, compelling film – complete with interesting characters, gripping drama, highly inventive visual storytelling, and awesome music.  He took the film seriously as a work of art, and he made sure his story was as compelling as could be, borrowing from as many genres, styles, and influences as needed to accomplish this feat.

Now, I’ve recently written a lot about the Guardians of the Galaxy series, particularly in regards to its use of music.  There’s a trend that I think started around the late ‘80s – it had certainly become the norm by the early 2000s – of film soundtracks relying on a lot of known pop music (particularly older pop music) to add some fun, familiar elements to the film.  This is so normal for comedies, dramas, and comedy-dramas now that we usually don’t even notice it.  This music is generally non-diegetic, but often crosses into diegetic, and is selected very late in the filmmaking process to help establish the mood of a scene.  Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One” clearly has nothing to do with the story to the movie Bowfinger, at least not in its lyrical content, but it appears frequently in the film purely because its fun, bouncy sound reminds the viewer that the movie is fun.  With Guardians, the music is never an afterthought and is virtually always diegetic (or at least semi-diegetic), often taking the foreground in the scene and having an influence on the plot.  I believe this is a game-changer because it’s one of the only film series today to challenge the theory that film is a visual medium, suggesting that sometimes the music is what drives a movie.

Guardians, you’ve just made a friend.

And this is the second reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it uses music brilliantly.  First of all, its soundtrack is very good.  Secondly, and more importantly, the music is often used to create different kinds of scenes that I don’t think I’ve seen before – scenes in which the visuals are so in-sync with the music that lyrics from the song decorate the sets, or scenes with the music turned up and the dialogue turned down such that we’re only left with the general idea of the events taking place, and that’s all we need.  The scene with “Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up” creates a mood that is both weirdly funny and intensely dramatic at once, almost like The Graduate (but for very different reasons).  Heck, Wright even works a song from a live album into the opening scene, which is almost never done in film if the live recording isn’t remarkably well-known, and he keeps the part with the singer speaking to the audience in, all in a way that feels perfectly natural.  Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most impressive part of the movie, Wright uses music to make us feel close to a character with very little dialogue for a lead – we understand what he’s thinking and feeling through his music, and that’s enough to make us empathize with him completely.

The third reason why this film is the greatest of 2017 so far is that it racks up “points for style” like no film I’ve seen from the past 5 years apart from La La Land and the works of Wes Anderson.  I’ve already noted some of this, like the integration of music into the visuals, but some of it’s in the little things, like the way the clothes in the laundromat are all primary colors to create a sense of childlike joy and freedom in a scene with Baby and Debora having fun.  The beauty of the film is in the dramatic red light on the villain’s face in the climax, and the careful use of black and white in a few select scenes, and the way everyone in America is presumed to wear brightly-colored shirts on a sunny day (to contrast the attire in Wright’s films set in Britain).  Wright brings back his old trick of tying what’s playing on the television set into the plot, this time very comically, and he even showed his well-known love for my dearest Phantom of the Paradise by giving Paul Williams a great little part.  It takes a special kind of filmmaker to think to do these things, and I’m so glad we’ve been blessed with just the filmmaker we need in Edgar Wright.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 Review

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In my recent UFC on the first guardians film, I mentioned that this movie went an extra mile in its celebration, or perhaps I should say “glorification,” of ’70s pop music in comparison to Volume 1.  So, I’m going to take a look at this in a little more depth.  My spoiler-free version of the review is: it’s really, really fun.  I had a great time.  See it.  Now here come some minor spoilers.

MINOR SPOILER WARNING

The very first scene in the film shows Peter’s mother singing along to the radio while on the road.  Ordinarily, songs playing on the radio, whether in movies or in real life, are seen as mere accompaniments not meant to steal the focus, but the way she throws herself into the song makes the important part of her experience of driving (that is, the part of the experience being celebrated) the song itself.  This is reflected on a larger scale in the next scene as a gigantic action sequence takes place in the background, with Groot in the foreground as he dances to “Mr. Blue Sky.”  This places what any film student raised on “visual medium” thinking would consider the point of the scene, the fight scene, in the role of adding ambiance (which is normally the role of the soundtrack) while the soundtrack takes the foreground.  In a later fight scene, Gunn is so intent on glorifying the song being played, “Come a Little Bit Closer,” that the orchestra and choir used for the score – which, in any other movie, would serve to add weight and scope only to visuals – actually play and sing along with “Come a Little Bit Closer,” making the song sound enormous.

This role-reversal of sight and sound is, in some respects, groundbreaking, but as I suggested in my UFC, one might look at it as a modern reworking of film theory explored in Disney’s Fantasia.  Rather than making the soundtrack subservient to visuals, Walt Disney made a whole movie out of visuals that are subservient to the soundtrack.  Gunn, in a sense, has done the same.  In Guardians 2, every song (if memory serves) is, at one point or another, diegetic, so the characters are generally acting in response to and in accord with the songs.  Furthermore, the songs on the soundtrack are not always entirely fitting for the scenes with which they are paired, instead contrasting with the visuals such that the soundtrack and the video track change each other’s meaning, arguably conforming to Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of “vertical montage.”

Why does this matter?  Because the first movie uses the glorification of the soundtrack as a celebratory experience binding us only to Peter Quill.  In this film, the music has had an effect on the whole guardians family, and it’s not only something that binds them, but binds us to them.  This makes us feel like we’re part of the family, and like we’re joining a ’70s music dance party with the guardians, which heightens the fun – even in comparison to the first film.  This is also helpful because this is meant to be the movie that lets us see how the guardians function now that they have spent more time bonding together and becoming a family, so using the music for this purpose seems just perfect.  (The soundtrack to this film is, for the record, just as good as the soundtrack to the first – if not better – this time using more tracks that are either very well-known or not very famous at all, which has introduced me to some of my new favorite songs.)

This film actually seems a little less slow and boring than the first, even though it engages in more “family drama.”  I think part of the reason why it can get away with this is that the family dynamics in this film are oddly very fascinating and lend themselves to captivating drama.  Another reason why this works is that Gunn carefully threw imagery relating to family, parenthood, and reproduction all throughout this film, making for a very adult commentary on these issues that seems smart, without losing its sense of fun.  Of course, all of this is balanced out with immature jokes and nods to ’80s nostalgia, so everything comes together here absolutely beautifully.  This is surely one of the best sequels to have ever come from Hollywood.

The LEGO Batman Movie Review

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SPOILER WARNING

This film’s strengths and weaknesses both pertain to the issue of “heart” in film.

If not for the fact that this is a spin-off of The LEGO Movie, the writers would have been free to simply fill the entire film with fun Batman jokes and absurd mix-ups and lunacy that only make sense in an animated comedy.  The LEGO Movie, however, has a lot of heart to it that tied the film together nicely and offered a solid foundation for its comedy.  I argue that LEGO Movie is probably one of the better examples of heart done well because, by that point in the movie, it feels needed and welcomed, as opposed to being forced down our throats at the very beginning like in other family films.  I often think back on an argument between Siskel and Ebert (which I explained in my Scrooged review) in which Gene Siskel said Back to the Future II should have stopped to take the time to add more heart.  I think this is a fairly stupid position to hold seeing as how a movie should really bring in heart at times when it is necessitated by (and it necessitates) the story, but unfortunately, The LEGO Batman Movie makes its heart-warming scenes feel almost out of place, even though they inform much of the story and supply the main character motivation.  Somewhere in the crazy, convoluted mess that was the writing process for this film – consisting of a grand total of five people getting screenwriting credits – the story kept getting reworked until the final result felt like certain scenes were in the script simply to satisfy a “kids movie checklist” of some sort, and most of the bullets on the list pertained to grabbing the heartstrings.  Since I watched this film in a theater filled with children, it was very easy to tell that these scenes simply did not succeed at grabbing the audience.

The rest of the movie, however, is filled with the best kind of heart: passion.  LEGO Batman is one of those films with the rare quality of feeling like a great fan project was given a Hollywood budget and free range.  The film may be loaded with fan-service and a little too dependent on the laughability of previous incarnations of Batman, but it just loves its world and its characters so much that the passion is infectious.  The beauty of the thing, of course, comes from the fact that this is a LEGO-based film, so it can do things with Batman that couldn’t work with the real Batman, and that couldn’t work with a parody, but work perfectly in the space in between.  After all, who doesn’t want to see the Dynamic Duo fight off the gremlins, the Joker recruit Godzilla, or freaking Voldemort casting spells in the Bat Cave?  In a Batman movie that audiences took somewhat seriously, this would enrage people, and in a YouTube parody, it wouldn’t have much power or meaning, but in this movie, it is both official and non-canon at once.  Consequently, the writers were able to put Batman against all of his greatest enemies at once at the start of the movie, making the audience wonder where on earth they could possibly go from there, and then live up to that question by raising the stakes to a level that we never knew could be part of the game.  The movie somehow managed to bring back so much classic Batman material dating back to the 1940s (including an obscure villain played by Vincent Price on the 1960s series) and bring in great new material (Batman vs. King Kong, a touching Batman/Joker bromance, etc.) without feeling overcrowded.

My one regret is that the theater didn’t have more excited, happy Batman fans in it to laugh with me.  Please see it with friends and have a good time.