J.D. Hansel

Drama

A Star Is Born (1954) Review

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This movie may have made a big splash in its day, but I don’t think it gets talked about much anymore.  I can understand why – in many respects it’s very generic.  It’s the kind of romantic epic/tragicomedy that feels like textbook Oscar-bait, just mixed together with show-tunes.  That  being said, it’s a pretty solid film.  It may start out boring, but as it goes on, the performances get more impressive, the drama gets more captivating, and the musical numbers get more enjoyable.  The look of some of these numbers alone is reason enough to watch the film, and I see this as one of the greatest examples of theatricality in cinema at its best.

But at the end of the day, as expected, the appeal is Judy Garland.  I’ve always known she was a great singer, but this is the movie that shows the full range of her acting abilities.  What’s amazing is how she takes a character that’s absurdly cliché and makes her distinct.  Along with her co-star, she made me really care about a story in which I thought I would have no interest, creating a level of sincere, beautiful drama I hardly ever see.

So yes, much of the movie is trite and forgettable, and the film starts off quite boring – I imagine it stays boring for those who don’t like musicals – but it redeems itself in spades.

Laura Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

While the exact list of what constitutes a “film noir” is always up for debate, I argue that one of the most under-recognized criteria is that weird and seemingly random moment that has the audience asking, “Where the heck did that come from?”  This film clearly checks that box.

Structurally, Laura is not too unconventional, essentially relying on the three-act structure of most films, but to me it feels like two acts.  This is because one twist in the story (which comes in around the 45-minute, placing it at the very middle of the film) is such a big game changer that it seems to suddenly turn the film in a totally different direction.  It almost becomes a different kind of film, because the way I think about what the point of this movie is is determined by this twist.  Perhaps more significantly, the first half of the film is just plain boring, whereas the second half is entirely captivating.  I almost didn’t finish the film because, in spite of some great performances from this great cast, it wasn’t grabbing me after a half hour.  Seeing as how this is now one of my favorite films in the mystery genre, I think it goes without saying that I’m awfully glad I stuck it out.  (It’s also great to have one of the most famous films in the genre checked off my list, and to know the origins of the great  David Raksin jazz song of the same name.)

What makes it an interesting movie, in my opinion, is the question of subjectivity.  At this aforementioned turning point in the movie, the film grammar suggests that we’ve gone into a dream sequence.  The problem is that we, the audience, don’t know for sure, so we’re spending the second half of the two movies trying to solve two mysteries at once: the murder mystery, and the question of whether or not the protagonist is dreaming.  This makes the film an absolute joy from then on, with more twists and turns to up the hype, and an ending that offers great satisfaction for anyone with the patience to make it this far.  Since this is one of the few famous films noir to have an almost permanent residence on Netflix (streaming), I highly suggest devoting 50 minutes to watching this movie – just 50 minutes – and anyone who isn’t hooked at that point can stop.  On the other hand, anyone who does stick through the whole film gets to experience a great example of what one of the bigger-budget Hollywood films noir looks like, and that alone is worth the wait.

The Third Man Review

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Have you ever seen one of those movies that pulls such a clever trick on you with its slick, surprising writing that you just sit back, swallow your pride, and give it a nice, slow clap?

This is The Third Man, which is one of those odd films known as a “British Noir.”  It’s within the cinematic territory of film noir, most certainly, yet it comes from another country, which goes against some definitions of what can be counted as real film noir.  It’s really a shame, too – I want to count it as film noir because I think it’s the best film noir.  I’ve written before about how film noir is my kind of genre, with over-the-top drama, cynical representations of humanity, and an atmosphere of extreme, theatrical darkness, but there are very few films in the genre that I really enjoy as movies.  Sure, nearly each and every one I’ve seen has looked great, but the stories, characters, and general logical structures have often been severely lacking, so I can really only think of two or three films noir that I can say I love.  Of course, with the addition of The Third Man, it’s three or four, because this is almost certainly my favorite thus far.

It may seem like I’ve been so disappointed by films noir in the past (see Detour) that I could very easily be pleased by a film in the genre that just had a decent story, good plot twists, smart dialogue, and enjoyable characters, but I actually came into this film with high expectations.  The cinematographer on the short film I’m working on at the moment told me it’s her favorite movie of all time, which is an odd thing to hear about a 1940s British drama from a millennial college student.  I was ready to heavily scrutinize this film, but there’s really so little here to hate.  The characters are stronger here than they are in nearly any noir I’ve seen since Double Indemnity, which is probably my favorite American noir, and the visuals here (including atmosphere, camera angles, lighting, editing, location choices – all of it) may be the best I’ve seen in any noir since Key Largo, which is possibly my second-favorite.  I love the writing of this movie particularly because it’s so intelligent in the way it delivers information and transitions to new scenarios, consistently throwing the viewers off guard while keeping them engaged.

The one hinderence to this sense of engagement, however, is the pacing.  Some of the film has excellent pacing, but much of it seems to lag, making for several scenes that are just plain boring.  Even the ending, which I think is fairly difficult to get wrong when it’s been set up so perfectly such that any almost any imaginable ending after the climax’s conclusion would have provided satisfactory closure, is remarkably boring.  I imagine that the slow pacing is largely for deliberate, artistic reasons, but it’s still a major fault on the movie’s part for me because it pulls me out of the story – just as I get sucked into the emotions of the characters, a tedious moment arises that makes me zone out and miss information.  This is very frustrating, and what makes it so strange and disappointing is the film’s regular use of rapid, quick-cutting montage to add intensity to the scene, which should pick up the pace, but actually seems to hold it back.  I think with just a little more focus on the plot, this film would have gotten a higher rating out of me.

All that being said, I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed by a movie in this style/genre before, and I tip my hat to Carol Reed and Graham Greene for telling one of the far best mystery stories I’ve ever heard.

Girls in Uniform (1931) Review

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Mädchen in Uniform is a 1931 sound film about a girl in a boarding school who finds herself falling in love with one of the women who teaches there (see image below).  This film is highly dramatic, and puts the audience in her shoes as she suffers greatly at the boarding school and (minor spoiler warning) considers committing suicide.  It has an all-female cast and a female director, and it’s based on a play by Christa Winsloe.  Needless to say, this is not a Hollywood movie – it comes from Germany – but it was highly successful internationally.  In part because of the time period in which it debuted, it is considered to be an anti-Nazi film, even though Nazis are (to my memory) never seen nor mentioned.  Welcome to European cinema.

What we have here is a film that is doing a lot of things at once.  On the one hand, it shows what girls are like at their most normal and ordinary through its exceptional realism, while at the same time presenting us with girls who are quite strongly attracted to other females and thus represent a distinct minority of the population.  It relies on elements of German Expressionism in some scenes, particularly in its lighting, but most of it has the style of the New Objectivity movement, which was oppositional to the aforementioned movement.  It is a very personal story about the problems that come with a strict, unfeeling manner of bringing up children that lacks compassion and understanding, yet it can also work as an allegory for the issue of overly strict authoritarian governments.  To me, it is the personal story of living in a strict school that gives the film so much power over me, if only because I’m still rather resentful about the arguably overbearing schooling I received, and the perfect blend of realism and theatricality sells it brilliantly.  I do think that most of the first half of the movie is rather boring, but by the climax, it gets my blood boiling in just the right way – a way so few stories since Carrie have been able to do – and for that I appreciate it greatly.

Metropolis Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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NOTE: This is an amendment to an earlier review of the same film.

When I first watched this movie, it was the Giorgio Moroder version (a soundtrack comprised of ’80s pop that only sometimes fit the scene well).  This is because I had little tolerance for silent cinema at the time, and while I still don’t think I’m very good at watching silent movies, I’m improving.  The main reason why it made sense for me to return to this story is that the version I saw from back in the ’80s was missing so much of the movie – a lot of the film was lost and had yet to be restored.  I didn’t realize that at the time, so I stupidly criticized Lang for the unintelligible plot that the incomplete version had (and felt quite ashamed when I learned within the month or so that followed that I had been so ignorant of such important information).  The current (2010) version is missing only about five minutes, which is why it’s called “The Complete Metropolis” in some editions, and its plot is perfectly understandable and enjoyable.  For this and other reasons, although I’m not changing the four-star rating I gave the film before, I think I appreciate the movie even more than I did years ago.

It is very clear that this is a unique work of art from the very beginning.  The film’s opening – specifically the title card – is in and of itself worthy of praise, and it sets the exciting tone for the epic movie that follows.  The film is structured in three acts, more or less, and the cards that tell us how far we are through the movie help to create the theatrical experience.  The theatrical feeling – that is, the feeling of being at a stage show – makes me wish I could see this in the form of a musical, but I know that it is designed to serve a very different purpose.  Lang is borrowing from theater to appeal to the people who would be too embarrassed to go to a film that didn’t resemble high culture in some way: the upper class.  This project of making cinema something for intelligent and sophisticated audiences was very important to many German filmmakers at the time, and it is apparent in the relentless use of biblical references all throughout the film, even including the obscure Canaanite god “Moloch.”  The protagonist is very much a Christ-like figure, but is also at least as much a Moses (since he is, more or less, the son of Pharaoh).  Nods to the Tower of Babel are also mixed in, with Maria entirely reworking the story to support her thesis – an unsettling use of religion that sort of makes Maria, a very moral character, seem almost like a lying demagogue.

The film has such a strange mix of elements that I love and elements that I find frustratingly disappointing.  The binary between the moral Maria who hasn’t a bad bone in her body (and who seems like she might as well be oblivious to the existence of sex) and the robot Maria who embraces all things sexual and wild is a great setup, but it would have been great for the two of them to have had an encounter.  The protagonist is a fascinating character: he has a number of visions that make him either a madman or a supernatural prophet, and the has his most important vision – a nightmare sequence – after he wakes up, whereas any other film would show him having a nightmare and then waking up.  It is actually this nightmare scene that makes the film work for me; it’s my favorite part of the movie because it builds up to such a satisfying climax of the second act, ending just as perfectly as the second Hunger Games film does.  I can’t help but compare it to the film adaptations of Carrie, which send us into the third act with great anticipation to see how everything’s about to fall to chaos, “B-movie style,” although Lang gives us more hype before act three that makes it all that much better.  The problem is that the third act doesn’t offer quite enough excitement to live up to this hype, instead feeling rather long.  The ending, too, is not as satisfying as it could be, mostly because the message that the film keeps preaching about the heart being a “mediator” isn’t very meaningful (and I think I read somewhere that Lang himself didn’t sincerely believe it).

This issue of the vague thesis brings me to the question of what the heck this movie is supposed to be.  Is it a utopia or a dystopia?  I hear that Hitler loved this movie, but I can’t tell if it promotes fascism, socialism, democracy, or some other form of government entirely.  Somehow this movie is very European and very American.  It may be in black and white, but it is very colorful (although perhaps my memories of the lovely tints in the Moroder version have shaped the way I want to see this version).  I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to think about technology after watching this film.  It almost tries to undercut its every move, and yet it still manages to be a very satisfying experience.  There’s a kind of energy in this film that’s infectious, and it’s the kind of movie that I just want to have on in the background all the time because I enjoy its essence more than anything else about it.  After thinking about all of this, one thing has become more and more clear: this must, indeed, be made into a musical.  Get to it.

Carrie (1976) Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

This is one review that I didn’t think I’d ever be writing.  Some readers may recall the first time I reviewed a Carrie adaptation – when I saw the 2013 Carrie movie – at which point I decided that the original Brian de Palma film was not for me. I was in a place in life when I wanted to see the story taken very seriously, and I didn’t want it to be too fun, too silly, too campy – with the possible exception of the ending. For anyone with any familiarity with the Stephen King story, the ending is the part where, no matter how serious and dramatic the adaptation has been up until this point, the viewers had better throw their hands in the air and get ready to ride this roller-coaster down into the pits of Hades, laughing and screaming all the way. Still, this is one of the very few stories for which I feel it is best for a film to do as good of a job as possible at making everything seem very real, believable, and even mundane for the first two acts – employing an almost Our Town-like structure in saving the fantastic elements for the ending.  Much to my surprise, this movie mostly sticks to this form, offering much more realism than I would have expected.  The fact that so much of de Palma’s film makes it feel like these could be real people in a real high school assuages most of the concerns I had about about watching this movie, but the parts that are over-the-top and expressionistic are the kind of fun ’70s cult horror moments that my recent fascination with this sub-genre has made me crave.

When I wrote the review for the 2013 movie, I was in a different place in life.  I wanted to approach this story as seriously as possible and find in it something that could be used to express to the older generations why it is that so many teenagers suffer from depression and anxiety these days.  The 1976 film doesn’t work for that, but it might have served that purpose back in its day, leading me to suspect that – in general – the best version of Carrie is whichever one best expresses the anxieties to the viewers in its time.  The film I watched first may have been best for 2013 (at least for teenage viewers) while the 1976 film was probably best for the 1970s – each feels very much like a reflection of its time.  That’s why the ’76 version needs to be approached differently now – it’s a time-capsule, and the fashions of the era have not aged well.  As I’d initially feared, much of it is comical, but even some of the cheesiest moments with John Travolta feel they could have happened back then.  That being said, part of why I loved this movie so much is the stuff that doesn’t feel normal at all.  I watched this movie specifically because I wanted to see more of the kind of thing Brian de Palma did with Phantom of the Paradise, so I wanted to laugh, to feel confused, to have fun, and to cheer as the style got very expressionistic and experimental.  I came into this movie with the goal of seeing weird little kinks like sped-up dialogue to get us through a scene faster and a split-screen effect that shows two aspects of the same action – and I kind of wanted everything to be a joke.

Still, while that may seem like the exact opposite of what I wanted from this story when I watched the 2013 film, there are some things that I would’ve had to admit are perfect here even if I’d watched this movie back in the summer of 2015.  Julianne Moore may be a great actress, but the mother in this film is obviously superior, making the character seem believably uncanny for most of the film and then delightfully creepy in the end.  Even the Carrie in this film, whom I’d suspected I would have a hard time taking seriously with her acting style and her accent, is generally as relatable, likable, and believable as I’d like, and is exactly as scary as one would hope by the end.  The final scene is absolutely perfect and gave me a bigger scare than anything I’ve seen on screen in a long time – in a good way.  Even the colors, which I thought would detract from the reality of the world, actually make sense because they come from the lights at the prom, so the parts that feel theatrical still feel plausible and very much at home here.  Then, of course, there is the visual poetry in the resemblance between Carrie’s mother and the creepy Jesus figure, which may not have much of a deep meaning in this story, but it’s a heck of a cherry on top.

It’s also worth making it clear that most of the things critics complained about in the 2013 film aren’t very different from the 1976 film that is so critically revered.  The Carrie in this movie is just as pretty as Chloe Grace Moretz, and it actually seems less plausible that Sissy Spacek would have been considered too strange-looking to be one of the popular girls.  Critics complained that the 2013 film isn’t scary enough, but this film isn’t much scarier, and that’s not really the point of the story anyway.  Critics argued that the Moretz film lacked a build-up to the finale that the story requires, but I felt the build-up about equally across each film – although that may have been because I already knew the story before watching either movie.  I will concede that the critics are right in pointing out that, in comparison to de Palma’s work, Kimberly Peirce’s film didn’t seem to do much with the story that stood out – she didn’t get very playful, and one could call her work rather boring – but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing if the aim is making everything feel normal for most of the film (again, I refer to Our Town).  With that said, however, it is the Brian de Palma film that must go down in history as a classic because it manages to be such a great and important drama while being a bundle of fun and laughter.  As far as I’m concerned, while it may not be the kind of horror that most people are used to, this is the ultimate horror classic (excluding horror comedies like Gremlins) and I love it just the way it is.