Art Film

Blue Velvet Review

November 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

It’s a little bit surprising to me that this was so popular. It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen freaking Daisies. What’s strange is that it doesn’t go all the way into the unfathomable and surreal – this is not Un Chien Andalou. Parts of it feel like a slightly warped version of a Hollywood teen film, and parts of it feel like an artsy French film, but all of it feels like Lynch’s brand of the uncanny. The film exists to make the spectator uncomfortable, and yet it stays grounded in something that is comfortable – a nostalgic representation of a small town that reminds me of home . . . until he turns that into something mildly unsettling as well. The use of the fireman waving from his truck as it passes by turns from charming to creepy with virtually no change, and that’s the brand of the uncanny that Lynch does perfectly, making for a thriller experience. At the same time, he mixes this with scenes that are more blatantly disturbing, yet kind of comedic, while ultimately ruining “In Dreams” for me.

A good example of this special style of his appears around nine minutes into his semi-concert movie Duran Duran: Unstaged, at which point a tunnel appears that leaves the viewer thinking, Is that even real?, before it clicks that it’s just a normal tunnel that everyone has driven through a million times. He can make anything seem like something from another planet, but that’s not all there is to his style. He also can present excellent visuals with beautiful extreme colors and throw in some neat visual effects. He can make the viewer care about a character even if he/she seems really odd. He uses good songs for his soundtracks and finds interesting uses for them. He can play with psychological anxieties and Freudian symbols, thus arousing fascinating interpretation of his work. So I suppose I can see why it was so popular now that I think about it – it’s the ideal Lynch film, never allowing the viewer to be at ease or anything but confused, and yet it tells a believable, concrete, and easy-to-follow story in a way that makes the story much more interesting than it would be in the hands of any other director. On the other hand, I hope to high heavens I never see that lipstick-covered face of Dennis Hopper again.

Yuck.

Birdman Review

November 22, 2015 by JD Hansel

I need to start with a spoiler warning since I don’t want to hold myself back from writing about whatever I find is most worth writing about, and this film has many interesting elements that I could focus on for much of the review if I chose to do so: it has a unique, seamless editing style that effectively creates the illusion of one continuous shot for the vast majority of the film (which eventually gets annoying since we humans need breaks in what we experience, but for most of the film it’s more of a spectacle than a burden), it has excellent performances from its superb cast, and its visuals are often very pleasing and impressive, but I think those who know my tastes well can guess that I want to talk about the ambiguity factor – after all, I am known for my issues with needless ambiguity, and this a perfect example, because, if given some thought, it becomes clear that either interpretation of the ending is stupid: either Keaton jumps to his death, meaning Stone has no reason to smile the way she does, or he randomly possesses the ability to magically fly like a bird for some reason; and to think, this all could have been avoided if not for the fact that critics love ambiguity, which makes sense in a way – it offers the viewer the chance to write a little portion of the film that makes it meaningful to him/her as an individual, but it relies on the erroneous assumption that the meaning the viewer projects onto the work of art actually matters, but here’s the catch – you, the viewer, don’t matter.

Your two cents are worthless.

If a work of art lacks definition and meaning to the extent that an observer can project his own meaning onto it without being right or wrong, it’s not deep.

It’s shallow, but with style. It gestures towards possible meanings, but does not commit to any of them.

I can best explain it this way: a film that challenges it audience intelligently says, “when life gives you lemons, should you give them to the poor and hungry?” An ambiguous film, on the other hand, just has a blind man hold up a coconut and say, “when life gives you melons,” and then it ends. The second film in my example may leave the viewer asking more questions, which creates an illusion of thoughtfulness, but I’d say the first film is more important.

In other words, no matter how amazing the visuals may be, how perfect the editing may be, how smart the writing may be, or how spot-on the performances may be, it is important for a film that wants to add to any discussion to use complete sentences, or else it isn’t much of a contribution, it’s just a

Lucy Review

July 30, 2015 by JD Hansel

This film seems to be, at least to some extent, emulating 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I’ll give it the same criticism I’d give to Kubrick: “If you’re going to contribute to the discussion of human evolution, all I ask is that you please use complete sentences.” Notice how that last sentence of mine was quite full, risking being overcrowded, but at least it got its whole point across in the best way possible. That is what I like. I like it when ideas are fully explicated, and it should show that the writer has cooked up some good food for thought, rather than just gesturing in the general direction of a kitchen saying, “make your own.” Don’t get me wrong – I’m perfectly capable of coming up with my own ideas, and inventing stories to describe them, but when a filmmaker concocts an idea only halfway with the intention of leaving the explaining to me, I get stuck with all of the tedious labor. This just makes the creator seem lazy. The key problem with Lucy is that it serves as a great prompt for someone to fully explicate its ideas in a more creative and interesting story, but a truly great film would have a hypothesis at its core, not a prompt.

Now I suppose I must explain what I mean when I say a prompt or a hypothesis. A prompt (according to my mental movie dictionary) says, “Here’s a thing that could happen.” A hypothesis says, “If this happened, here are some of the implications and conflicts that could arise.” This is the difference between “What if a teenager got a time machine?” and “If a teenager got a time machine, what would happen if he accidentally kept his parents from falling in love?” I wonder if the old adage “show, don’t tell” has taught filmmakers to show ideas rather than exploring their implications. The way that Lucy explores the idea of a person gaining access to 100% of the mind consists of the following: Dr. Exposition (Morgan Freeman) runs through a checklist of what would happen at a given percentage of access to the brain, in spite of the fact that he has no way of knowing this since it’s all guesswork, and then Lucy coincidentally displays that behavior at the exact same time. There are missed opportunities for good storytelling at every corner: the drama of her parents losing their daughter, the comedy of watching her clumsily try to use powers she hasn’t mastered, the sadness of the loss of her friendships, the confusion of figuring out where the powers came from, the arguments about what to do with the knowledge she has, the irony of a girl who flunked math suddenly being an expert, the heartbreak of her growing apart from her lover… okay, I got that last one from Her, but it would still work, if the writer had given her a decent boyfriend. Alas, the film is mostly interested in going through a laundry list of special effects, and the plots are secondary. Here’s the bizarre part: this movie held my interest.

I didn’t care all that much about Lucy as a character because the film puts a roadblock at any potential route to empathy. At the beginning of the film, she’s clearly not the type of person anyone with half a brain would want to befriend, and we haven’t learned enough about her to empathize yet. Then, she progressively becomes less and less human throughout the “story,” thus placing her in the mental category of “non-person,” and we humans have a hard time remembering to care about anything in that category. To make plot all the more futile, conflict is practically non-existent since there is no appropriate adversary for an omnipotent goddess, and it’s a given that she will inevitably succeed unharmed. My enjoyment of the film is relying almost entirely on my relationship with the director, who keeps tossing interesting ideas and visuals my way for me to enjoy. Sometimes he gets so pretentious it’s laughable, but I must admit that I was pretty entertained on the whole, and the film even passed my Pause Test. It tries to substitute drama with intensity, and it kind of pulls off this trick by being concise.

So, in the end, it may not be a brilliant masterpiece, but it keeps the viewer curious about what’s coming next, and it satisfies the curiosity adequately, making for a good cinematic experience.

Mad Max: Fury Road Review

May 30, 2015 by JD Hansel

Okay, let’s do something weird. Let’s compare Mad Max: Fury Road to Avengers: Age of Ultron. I think this is an interesting comparison since they’re both sequels in big action movie franchises that happen to be out in theaters at the same time right now. They both have large fan bases since their characters have been around for many decades. What makes this comparison especially interesting is that they both have simple, largely cliché storylines that we are all familiar with, but everyone seems to be mostly okay with this since a strong, unique story is not the focus of either film.

As I noted in my review of the Avengers sequel, Age of Ultron’s story seems to be an excuse for the characters to play off of one another, and that is the story’s only purpose. The story is not meant to surprise and wow, but there is the obligatory surprise death, as well as some unique twists and turns in the story to make it more interesting. Fury Road is fascinating since the story is an excuse to do some crazy action sequences. The story is simply about getting from point A to point B, then back to point A. Again, there are some surprises and unique touches, and this film does go out of its way to add several clever little details that make its post-apocalyptic world absolutely ingenious.

That being said, there is a serious problem in this focusing choice. As I have said before, you can say that film is a visual medium, but the medium is really about telling stories. At the heart of a story are its characters, so it follows that an old, cliché story can be made new and interesting just by having strong characters driving the story, as seen in Age of Ultron. (It is incredibly important that the audience is invested in the characters in order for this to work, and the investment must not be exclusively from circumstances, or else the empathy may run out when the circumstances change as the story turns.) So, there is danger to putting characters over story, but it can be done well, which I cannot say for putting action and visuals over both story and characters. This focus puts the technical aspects involved in achieving investment in the characters and story over the investment itself, which is rather silly.

In regards to very visual-oriented films, I have three main criticisms, all of which can be avoided if a visual film is very careful. First of all, visual storytelling is very desirable only if the story is worth telling in the first place. Secondly, there’s an old saying that reminds me of the place of visuals in film: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” What concerns me whenever I hear someone say that film is a visual medium is that they may get the impression that film is about the visuals, even though visuals are merely film’s means of expression, which I know because of the meaning of the concept of communication itself. Third, what is the purpose of a beautiful window that looks out to nothing but a brick wall?

The question that must now be asked, as I have been asking myself that since I saw the first ten minutes of the film, is this: is Mad Max guilty of the pitfalls mentioned above? Well, addressing the first crime, the story may very well be worth telling, but it has actually been told before. The plot can basically be summarized as follows: a girl escapes her dreary civilization and goes on a journey with some friends and new acquaintances to get to a beautiful green place where their dreams can come true, only to go right back home to where she started in the first place. That is the plot to The Wizard of Oz. Oz also had a brilliant visual style, but people remember the characters, and what the characters said, far more than the visual style, which I don’t think could ever be said for a film like Mad Max. In regards to the second and third criticisms, the point of the film, from what I can tell, was to make a good-looking action movie, and everything else was secondary. So, yes, it is very guilty.

I suppose that means I should hate this movie, but I don’t. Throughout the movie, I was constantly experiencing overwhelming admiration, which is a credit to the film. That being said, what I wanted to experience was not only admiration, but entertainment, and that was lacking because of the criticisms explained above. Compare this to Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors, which is visually excellent, but the visuals are always serving to express the mood of the piece, the context of the story, the emotions of the characters, the theme of the music, and other elements that make the story work better. In Mad Max, I see the visuals serving to create an interesting and visually amazing context for the story, but the story still seems to be lacking. Part of this is due to the characters.

Many of the characters are just fine, but there were few who really made me care about whether they lived or died. The titular character, Max, was not one of the few. As noted in the Walker brothers’ fantastic review of this film, Max is really more of an observer than anything else, and he could essentially be played by anyone. By the end of the movie, viewers should ask themselves, “What do I really remember about Max that makes him unique?” The answer is probably, “very little,” which is unfortunate. The real protagonist in the film, Furiosa, is a bit more interesting, but not by all that much. The best scene in the movie, however, is a short scene in which the film actually takes a breather (thank heavens) and allows for a nice conversation between Nux and Capable, which made me finally CARE about some of the characters.

My final point, which I once again borrow from the Walker brothers’ review, is that this movie is a great experiment. Much like with Pulp Fiction, I like it a lot as an experiment or project, but I have a hard time calling it a movie. This is so vastly different from my schema of movies (or at least good movies) since I have always seen the movie theater as a temple built to glorify great storytelling, and I do not see Mad Max as such. I do see Mad Max: Fury Road as being great art, and a groundbreaking achievement in cinema. I admire and respect what it brings to the table for moviegoers and filmmakers, and I hope it will lead to many great action movies in the future, which is why I recommend that fans of film see it. (Not to mention, everyone must see the guy with the fiery guitar, who adds a lot to the already impressive soundtrack.) However, I will continue to criticize the film harshly because I stand by my strong ideology that people do not go into a movie theater to watch a movie, but rather to experience a story.

Pulp Fiction Review

March 25, 2015 by JD Hansel

So,there are some movies I’d recommend that people see without any knowledge of what the film is about, what’s going to happen, or who’s in the film. The Truman Show is a good example, as is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Then there’s a movie like Pulp Fiction. I think I was only able to like it because I knew all about it going into it.

I knew the type of storytelling and approach. I knew it was a weird Tarantino film that would jump around, and I knew he had carefully structured everything so that he was ahead of the audience, and no one could ever predict where the story would go next. I knew he would use everything that the movies have trained us to expect to happen in a story against the audience to trick them. I knew to expect that I would never know what to expect, and most importantly, I knew better than to play The Movie Game.

The Movie Game is my term for when the audience member tries to figure out where the plot is going, and what will resolve everything, with the understanding that the movie has to set up its twists and turns ahead of time, and the story will follow the standard structure. This is partially based on a great quote from screenwriter Terry Rossio: “You know that the audience will try to guess where you’re going with the story. It’s a given. It’s fun. After all, they’re sitting there virtually motionless in the dark for two hours, with nothing better to do but second-guess you.” When The Movie Game is too easy, it’s a boring game, so it’s a bad movie. I played a great game with The LEGO Movie, and the movie won. I beat Frozen, but it was still a good game, and therefore a good film.

Naturally, when I get most upset by a movie is when I feel cheated, particularly because the movie doesn’t follow any normal structure, so I don’t get to play my favorite game. The way to avoid feeling cheated is simply to know what game the movie is playing before going in, rather than assuming it’s playing the same game as I am. What game is Pulp Fiction playing? I have no flippin’ clue, but it’s not quite as fun as The Movie Game.

It’s nice, every once in a while, to see a movie that does storytelling really differently. However, because of how different the storytelling is from what I’d ever seen in a movie before, and because I didn’t get to play the game, it didn’t feel like a real movie to me. It felt like a crazy Tarantino art project. I happened to find out that Tarantino felt the same way about it when it first came out. I respect it since so much in the film is impressive, but it didn’t feel quite like I was watching a movie, nor was it quite as entertaining as a more ordinary film. The entertainment value is lost to some extent when the movie doesn’t build in any normal sense, so some scenes are essentially pointless. Again, they may be impressivescenes, but they serve no purpose other than displaying themselves because the director feels like showing these scenes to the audience because they mean something to him, even though they mean nothing, in some cases, to an overarching story.

I don’t identify with the characters, so they are not my favorites, but they are strong. The dialogue is perhaps more profane than it needs to be, which I generally view as a Cinema Sin of sorts because that generally means the writer is either going for shock value, or simply can’t think of anything meaningful or interesting to write. However, the writing is very, very impressive – Tarantino is pretty darn good at dialogue. The way he interwove the three main stories was clever. The soundtrack is nice overall, and the visuals, while sometimes more bloody than I like, were overall very well done as well.

So, in the end, I really like this movie for what it is, but I don’t know that I like it much as a movie. When I don’t get to play The Movie Game, I feel a little like I’ve been invited over to a friend’s house to play a game with him, but he’s just playing it by himself and encouraging me to watch him; I don’t feel included, and that’s just boring. I think I’ve certainly learned a lot about film, storytelling, and myself from watching it, which means it has good reason to be considered a classic. So, I like it. It’s good. But give up on The Game before it begins, because he just isn’t playing along.

Amelie Review

August 2, 2014 by JD Hansel

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, Amélie is the 2001 French film that inspired the Travelocity commercials featuring the garden gnome. It’s about a young woman whose life seems rather empty, so she starts trying to do good deeds to make the world a better place. It’s all in French, so you’ll have to watch it with subtitles if you don’t speak that language, and since I never ever watch movies for which I must do that, I was interested in giving it a try. I’m glad that I did, because it was quite an experience.

Naturally, a concept for a film like the concept I described would make one question if the story is any good, but it actually is quite clever. It all builds well and interconnects, keeping the audience interested and providing a satisfying ending. What’s neat about it is its unique and bizarre style, with artistic special effects used throughout in a way that no American comedy would try. If you appreciate very strange and weird comedies, or different approaches to film-making, I think you’ll really like this film. It’s certainly done very well.