J.D. Hansel

Action & Adventure

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.

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.

Brotherhood of the Wolf Review

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Alternate Title: Le Pacte des loups

I feel the need to highlight this French film that isn’t very well-known in the States, even though it should be.  It’s an entertainment film, much like what one would expect from Hollywood, but there’s a key difference.  In the middle of its fights scenes and romance, there’s a running theme of the significance of the Age of Reason.  Consequently, it’s a skeptic’s alternative to Sleepy Hollow – a neat Halloween movie that does a better job of celebrating critical thinking.  While it is rather slow, it’s also dramatic, creepy, and clever.  Try it on for size one night when you’re in the mood for some chills.

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.