J.D. Hansel

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The Fellowship of the Ring Review

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It’s entirely possible that I saw this film already, many years ago, but to my memory, I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it, and I got bored and switched to something else the second time.  My third time, this most recent time, I finally made it all the way to the end.  I didn’t remember the ending, which is why I think I’d never finished the film before (and hence why I’m reviewing it now), but then again, who would?  The film leaves you with the feeling that you just watched a five-hour-long teaser trailer for the second film.  It’s simply a tease – all the great things about this franchise (namely Sméagol and Gollum) come later in the series, whereas this movie offers an introduction to this (fairly bland) fantasy world.  To be honest, I almost fell asleep again this time.

It’s just not my cup of tea.  It’s fine – this isn’t necessarily badly made – but it’s not my preferred kind of fantasy.  I like the colorful and sparkly ’80s fantasy film, which is precisely what Jackson stated he was trying not to do.  He wanted to make a series of films that feel like a grander version of historical fiction, such as Braveheart, but in the history of a fantasy world rather than ours.  That’s not my genre.  I like the kind of fantasy nonsense that he doesn’t like, which is fine.  Beyond that though, I just don’t care enough about the characters, and I don’t like how the story seems to ramble and dilly-dally without clear purpose.

The film has given me an appreciation for some of Tolkien’s writing, but I’m doubtful that Jackson’s way is the best way to adapt the strengths of Tolkien’s work to the big screen.  I love many of the motifs, icons, places, and objects presented in the film – particularly the Ring of Power, which is one of the greatest metaphorical narrative devices in the history of literature – but they’re not organized in a narrative that makes me care enough.  It’s all very Dark Crystal-ish to me.  The film also suffers from predictability, which shouldn’t happen in a film with freaking magic in it.  Again, there’s a lot here that I like, and I wouldn’t mind watching the film again sometime – Jackson seems to be a more than competent filmmaker who certainly has his strengths – but I’d rather skip ahead to the films where more interesting things happen.

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.

Bonnie and Clyde Review

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Bonnie and Clyde is one of the most divisive films in the history of American cinema.  On the one hand, many critics praised it for being something entirely new.  Roger Ebert wrote, “It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.”  By contrast,  it was called needlessly aggressive, violent, purposeless, and unfocused by a great many critics, but we’ve mostly forgotten that.  All that we remember is that it was shockingly different from Classical Hollywood, and so we’ve decided it was a great movie.  And maybe it was.

Now it’s not.

Now there is very little of interest here.  The main characters are uninteresting, the comedy isn’t very funny, the violence isn’t much of a spectacle, and the bold style of editing just isn’t striking anymore.  I do think there are a few likable things about this movie, but not enough for it to be considered one of the greatest films of all time.  It was different from other films, but not different in any ways that are really worth praising (compare to The Graduate or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).

So why isn’t my star rating lower?  Simple: Gene Freaking Wilder.  It’s one of his best performances, and he made the whole movie well worth the watch.  To be fair, there are some other scenes I like as well – the opening credits, for example, or … well, really most of the beginning of the movie, after which it largely goes downhill – but only Gene Wilder’s part can be said to be truly great.  For the rest of the film, I’ll repeat the same old adage I’ve said time and time again: if I don’t care about the characters, I won’t care about the story.  It’s possible for a film to be good even without a great story, but this film is too dependent on a story that was done better by Trouble in Paradise and Gun Crazy for that to be possible.

Escape from New York Review

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I’ve heard it said that nearly every movie about a future urban dystopia steals its style from Blade Runner.  While I can certainly see the resemblance between the aesthetic of Blade Runner and that of many later films about the future, it’s worth noting that many ’80s movies were portraying cities with the same darkness, theatricality, vivid color, and nods to film noir cinematography as Blade Runner.  What’s interesting is how using a theatrical and colorful style in both visuals and characters was very common in horror films in the 1970s, but then somehow moved into the mainstream in the 1980s, seemingly without reason.  It makes sense for a horror film to have a mixture of darkness and theatricality, but why did this become a part of the styles of all ’80s movies?

I think the answer is Escape from New York, which I see as a more or less direct predecessor to Blade Runner.  Released in 1981, this movie shows horror director John Carpenter bringing the stylistic elements of horror – including the visual style, the acting style, and the writing style – to both the dystopian sci-fi genre and the action genre.  I suspect that this film took part in making over-the-top lighting more mainstream, but as much as I appreciate this, I think what’s particularly impressive about this film is how it brings much cleverness to the action genre.  Most action movies are just looking for an excuse to fire a gun or set off a bomb, but this movie is interested in creating situations that make the viewer really want to see the action hero – or anti-hero – take action.  There’s a wonderful scene with a street that everyone tries to avoid driving down at night because lines of people on either side of the road wait for unsuspecting cars, line up, and smash the car as it goes along their little conveyor-belt of doom.  There’s technically no reason for this to be considered a “horror” scene since there’s nothing supernatural about it and there’s arguably no suggestion of insanity (merely desperation), but it’s certainly the kind of scene that only a horror filmmaker would write.

Of course, there are other aspects of the writing that are more conventional for the genre – a rescue mission, a countdown, etc. – but even these are done in a way that somehow creates more intensity than most action films.  This makes Escape from New York a thrilling, chilling, and exciting film that’s sure to make the viewer rethink film genres altogether.

Terminator Review

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MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Oh, how I love the ’80s.  The ’80s developed the styles of particular cult ’70s musicals into a New Expressionism – one that emphasized deep, vivid colors and bright lights flashing through dark, gray cities.  This mix of warm grays, cold blues, and hot reds spread across theatrical sets was complimented by over-the-top acting of Lloyd, Fox, Moranis, Curry, and others, bringing a theatrical quality to cinema that had not been seen since the days of German Expressionism.  The use of electronic music made everyone feel like the future was just around the corner, but whether that future was exciting or dystopian depended on the movie.  There is, of course, a spectrum to ’80s cinema, and much of it was very light and clean and harmless, but the darker end of the spectrum was home to the dark, dystopian action films: Blade Runner, RoboCop, Aliens, Batman, and perhaps the most emblematic of them all, Terminator.

Regrettably, I didn’t love Terminator quite as much as I’d hoped.  I liked it just fine, but since I’m not usually a big fan of an action movie for action’s sake, I found it somewhat lacking.  Its characters could have been a little bit more interesting, although Schwarzenegger was about as fun to watch as I had expected, and the story could have been a little bit more dramatic or devious.  The ending left me a bit unsatisfied because it means that very little was actually accomplished apart from that which was necessitated by the rules of time – all of the events of the film (that take place in the ’80s) are already predestined, and couldn’t have possibly gone any other way.  The ending would have been more satisfying if their actions in the ’80s somehow prevented all the horrible robot wars of the future or had caused all of the horrible robot wars, but as it was it felt weak.  I don’t really consider this film to be a disappointment, however, because it was exactly what it needed to be – an excursion into fun science fiction with that beautiful ’80s charm.

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Mad Max Review

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What . . . the what?  I’m very confused about what on earth this movie is supposed to be.  The entire selling point of Mad Max – and the story synopsis on the back of the DVD case – is Max’s revenge plot.  But this plot is just the third act.  The entirety of acts one and two is spent setting up a conflict, rather than following one.  I’m not saying that every film must follow the standard Hollywood narrative format, but the best deviations from this format are the ones that deviate to saturate the conflict, not distract from it.  In comparison to my expectations, most of Mad Max just feels dull and pointless.

This film raises the usual questions that I struggle to answer when writing on a film I don’t like:

  1. Is it a good film even though it’s not my cup of tea?
  2. Can it be held accountable for not living up to its marketing if the film’s marketing is the problematic part?
  3. And is it really a bad thing when a film does not make it clear how it should be approached/read?

To answer the first question, I do think it is possible for me to recognize films that have many positive elements, even if I don’t particularly like them.  I have spent far too much time writing about Pan’s Labyrinth because I know that it is a very impressive film, yet somehow I hate it immensely.  I’m not sure that this movie is the same kind of situation.  Mad Max does not strike me as remarkably well-crafted, even for what it’s trying to be, regardless of whether or not I happen to like what it’s trying to be.  Perhaps the problem is that I cannot tell what it is that I was supposed to be getting out of it, but now that I know what the movie is about and what it spends its time focused on, I still don’t think I’d appreciate it more on my second viewing.  Its story is simply lacking.

For the second question, I don’t think I have a good answer.  If a movie’s marketing is really bad, but the film itself ends up being spectacular, I don’t think I could fault it much for the marketing.  After all, the marketing is not necessarily apart of the film itself, and is generally not really controlled (or even influenced much) by what the director and producer say.  On the other hand, if a film gives me less than what the marketing had me expecting, that’s a negative thing.  It shows that there’s potential there for a good movie, but the filmmakers didn’t make something as good as what the film could have been.  On the other other hand,  what’s especially difficult here is discerning when a film is just “different” from its marketing, but not particularly better or worse.  With Mad Max, it’s clear to me that all of the time spent “world building” in the first hour could have been spent on an exciting plot that properly mixed in the world building, sort of like The Princess Bride, and that would’ve been far more entertaining (without deviating from what was advertised or what the movie promised).

The last question is perhaps the most controversial, and what could easily make me seem like an idiot to a heck of a lot of people.  I’m going to answer this question with a yes, but I’m not sure that it’s a yes in every case.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my review of Pulp Fiction, which I have come to disagree with over time.  It seems to me that I only liked the film because I had heard Tarantino explain in an interview how to approach and/or process it.  I have come to recognize that, without an explanation of how to approach it, I couldn’t have understood it.  Not only that, but I couldn’t have understood how to understand it.  That, I think, is the key – I don’t need a filmmaker to hold my hand and explain everything to me, but I need to know what language I’m seeing before I can read it, or what game I’m playing before I can win it; the difficulty of the game is irrelevant.

I don’t really know if this review will make sense to anyone else.  I’m not even sure that it makes sense to me.  My goal has simply been to explore why I feel the way I do about this movie, and hopefully to understand myself (and cinema) better for having done so.  Mad Max is certainly a special film that has some value to it, but the vast majority of the film did not grab me, and I was left wanting much, much more.  Perhaps my problem is not so much the film as it is the glimpses it shows of what it could have been.

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