J.D. Hansel

Drama

Dark City Review

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READ THIS REVIEW BEFORE SEEING THE FILM

For what it’s worth, I really tried to watch this movie the right way.  I had been warned that the film has an opening voiceover (added by the studio due to concerns that humans are stupid) which gives away many of the biggest surprises, reveals, and twists.  So, I did my filmic duty and muted everything up until the opening titles, which is what everyone who sees it ought to do.  Unfortunately, I forgot that I had the closed captions turned on, so I still had something important spoiled for me, but it wasn’t much more than had already been spoiled by the guy who had informed me about the voiceover in the first place.  I think the best way to avoid this issue is to just watch the director’s cut, which does not spoil itself at the start and remains more true to what the film was meant to be.  I eagerly look forward to watching the director’s cut for myself, if only because, in spite of its problems, I actually greatly enjoy this movie – so much so that I started watching it again from the beginning almost immediately after it ended.  No matter how many times the movie explains itself (and it is a lot), it manages to stay surprising and interesting, holding my attention from start to finish.

One of the things that makes it so captivating is the editing, which is incredibly fast.  When I started watching the movie from the beginning for a second time, it felt normal to me, but during my initial viewing, it threw me off with its rather awkward speed and tight transitions, throwing out so much of the space to catch one’s breath between cuts/scenes that other films offer.  It’s obviously visually outstanding – that’s arguably the point of the film – but I think there’s more to it than that.  Yes, it’s about getting lost in another world and exploring a strange, anxiety-inducing place, but it also makes an argument for how the human mind/soul works, and it makes it well.  Its story may be nothing remarkable, but that doesn’t matter – It’s still one of the most thrilling films I’ve ever seen.  If not for the film’s inability to keep its mouth shut and let me figure it out for myself, and if not for the film’s disinterest in making me feel emotion, I would be hailing it as practically perfect and as one of the all-time greatest movies ever made.

La La Land Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I should not be writing this review.  I am not capable of doing the film justice having only seen it once.  There are many movies that have left my friends, family, and peers thinking they ought to watch them multiple times to make sure that they’ve taken everything in, and usually these are either mind-bending thrillers (think The Matrix or Spy Game) or pseudo-intellectual Oscar-bait like Mulholland Drive.  Most of the time, I feel no need to see these movies again – I tend to pick up on everything I want to upon my first viewing – but for La La Land, I think I’d need many more viewings before I can fully comprehend the scope of its intellectual assessment of its own situation.  As I’ve written about before, we are in a time in film history when cinema is growing more reflective than ever before, submerging itself further into the worlds it has already created to find the nooks and crannies of the Wizard World or the Death Star that it may have missed at first.  This applies to genres as well.  When the romantic comedy was revamped with When Harry Met Sally, the “rom coms” that followed in the 1990s clearly confronted the movies of Classical Hollywood and addressed “the compatibilism question” – how do we bring together the people of today with the genres of yesterday in a way that feels believable?  The musicals of today, such as Into the Woods, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Jungle Book, haven’t really addressed this question head-on, resulting in an embarrassingly awkward transition in Jungle Book from a dark, ominous shot of a giant, scary ape to a bouncy little ukulele song.  La La Land has the intelligence to recognize that we actually need to sit down and talk about the compatibilism question, but I don’t think it’s very sure of what the answer is.

It’s interesting to me that Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as having “thrillingly assured direction,” because the nature of the director’s assurance is fairly complex.  To me he seems unsure as to what the movie ought to be exactly, yet he refuses to allow it to be anything other than what it is.  The film is very technically impressive and is shot with great care, but just because he understands the film’s essence on a technical level does not mean he has a grip on what it is as a story (or as an argument).  The film is fairly insecure, sometimes suggesting that it will do a certain musical number a certain way, then backing out of it as though it would be too corny for 2016, before finally overcoming its skepticism (and embarrassment) and diving into theatricality.  Still, there is always a sense that Classical Hollywood is watching over the characters in this film, waiting to see what they’ll do with a genre that doesn’t belong to them, showing that the director knows exactly where his film stands: it is being scrutinized closely by both the past and the future, wondering if it is truly capable of pleasing both masters.

The compatibilism question takes three forms in the movie, first asking how an old-fashioned musical film can succeed today, then asking how jazz can continue to thrive, and finally asking if two different dreamers of two different dreams can have a lasting partnership.  As for question one, its answer seems to be that the contemporary drama and the classical musical are, inevitably, an awkward pairing, but it’s decided that this awkwardness is okay.  There are times when a jazzy musical number ends with a ringtone, or an old cartoonish iris-opening transition presents a profane term that would never have been used in the days of Singin’ in the Rain.  It’s an odd clash, but a cute and coquettish clash, not unlike a couple in a romantic comedy.  The film also has elements of the mid-19th century musical that don’t work very well today, and these can stir up debate and arguments among viewers pertaining to the issue of how this genre should be handled in the new century.  For example, consider how the film might be asking questions about race in much the same way that musicals like Singin’ in the Rain feature white men borrowing from black dance, and La La Land features a white man explaining black music.  The film goes so far as to include musical numbers that contribute nothing to the plot at all – an often forgotten element of the mid-century musical – and this is part of what makes the film so divisive: it has flaws built in that I suspect were carefully designed to make some viewers hate it (and make most viewers debate it).

Regarding the jazz question, the film shows its hand a bit more, presenting an explicit answer to the question through John Legend’s dialogue, and thus revealing the film’s intellectual pursuit to viewers who haven’t yet caught on.  Here too, however, the film is somewhat ambiguous, presenting the contemporary jazz music as unsatisfactory, impure, and greatly problematic for our characters.  Even the song it uses to represent the future of jazz (“Start a Fire”) is mostly comprised of pieces of older genres, mixing jazz, Motown, soul, funk, disco, and ‘80s pop, revealing a reticence to accept the modern even from the characters that claim to embrace it.  On the other hand, this choice may have just been made so that the director, who seems to prefer older music himself, can tolerate it.

The third question – the question of the couple – is the area where I am most critical of and disappointed with the film’s argumentation.  This is the reason why I almost deducted half a star (or even four of the stars) from my rating.  The problem here has to do with the logic of cinema, which generally ought to resemble a symbolic logical sentence (A ⋀ B → C → D, for example).  This is the basis for one of the holy and unbreakable rules of screenwriting: the ending may be unexpected, yet it must be set up and inevitable.  Obviously, La La Land does not follow this rule, because the decision for Mia to end up with another man comes out of the blue and seems entirely arbitrary.  There is no rational reason for her to choose to be with someone other than her true love, nor is there anything in the film’s plot that suggests she would forgo the rational/emotional/intuitive choice to serve some other purpose.  This ending is ultimately a non-sequitur, so the film’s conclusion that Mia and Sebastian’s romance cannot work is seemingly a random one with little or no basis in the logic of the story.

What makes this so frustrating is that the film seems to make the case that their romance could have worked had they made better choices.  This is, of course, suggested by the fantasy sequence in the film’s final act, during which Mia imagines the better way the story could have gone had things been just slightly different . . . or so it seems.  What seems hard for some viewers to notice is that this fantasy is actually a completely impossible one – their story could not have gone this way.  Sebastian could not have known that Mia wanted him to kiss her after she first heard him play their song; he could not have attended Mia’s play and remained dedicated to the source of his income that was required in order for him to open his jazz club; he could not have veered off the main road at the end and coincidentally stumble upon his own jazz club (which somehow managed to exist without him).  This is only Mia’s fantasy of what life could have been like if she had magically gotten every little thing she wanted regardless of how much it cost Sebastian and regardless of whether or not it was even humanly possible.

The reason why this ending is so important is that it relates to questions about the musical romance as a genre.  Traditionally, the Classical Hollywood romance story exists almost solely for the formation of the heterosexual couple – to convince its audience for the thousandth time that the formation of a happy and healthy romance between a man and a woman is possible.  If the film has not made this case in such a way that the viewer believes it, the narrative and/or genre does not function.  The fact that Mia and Sebastian were not able to form a lasting romantic couple means that the genre has failed – it tells us that Classical Hollywood’s way of forming a couple does not work for people in the modern world.  In other words, the fact that the genre could not serve its function today answers the first compatibilism question with a definite negative.  Whether he meant to or not, the director told us that his attempt at making a mid-20th century musical in the 20th century was a failure, regardless of how well the film has been received.  The problem with his answer, of course, is that he did not show his work, instead selecting an arbitrary ending that gives his argument a random conclusion rather than a logical and satisfactory one.

As much as I detest this laziness of writing, I still must give this movie the highest of praises because I believe it is very, very good for the future of cinema.  Even if its logical argument is very poor, at least this film is different from most of the films that the “cinematic elite” embrace in that, rather than prompting the viewer to ask meaningless questions the way that Mulholland Drive does, this film uses the argumentative power of cinema to get the audience thinking about real and important questions (in this case pertaining to the future of media).  This could lead to other films that can ask the viewer questions about ethics, laws, cultures, progress, the environment, and any intellectual topic imaginable, all without sounding preachy.  In this sense, La La Land has the potential to shape this century’s cinema into something great – something that is highly intelligent and that is beneficial to humankind.  (It’s worth noting that the film’s ending is an attempt to do the kind of “open to interpretation” endings that Lynch and other “art film” directors love, so this film’s director clearly has a fondness for the kind of pseudo-intellectual ambiguity that the “cinema elite” adores, but this element of the film hopefully won’t hinder the potential positive effects that I have outlined in this paragraph.)

Perhaps more importantly, I think this film just might be a greater movie experience than nearly any other film made within the past ten years because this movie is alive!  In a time when nearly every movie released from Hollywood is hideously drab, gray, and monochromatic, this film has color!  In a time when nearly every filmmaker tries to capture an almost depressing realism with the camera, this film has theatricality!  In a time when nearly every Hollywood soundtrack sounds like a collection of durges, this film has boogie!  Director Damien Chazelle has found that the perfect combination of visual beauty and musical beauty can sometimes be enough to form emotional beauty, using pure spectacle and unfiltered passion to overpower and enthrall me, filling me with bubbly excitement and childlike wonder from the very first scene.  Never before have I found myself tearing up within the first few minutes of a movie, and never have I given myself over to a musical number the way I did with “Fools Who Dream.”  It’s true that not every moment in the film is captivating, and I may have checked my watch over a dozen times while watching it, but its best scenes were so riveting, enchanting, and divine that its flaws are forgivable, and I may never have had so many tears fill my eyes from just one film in my entire lifetime.

Therefore, I must give this film the highest of praises – long live La La Land, the greatest work of art of this century!

Key Largo Review

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This film is essentially “Film Noir’s Greatest Hits.”  It has Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in leading roles, sharing the spotlight with a wealthy mob boss played in the most Edward-G.-Robinsony way possible by none other than Edward G. Robinson.  In a supporting role is Claire Trevor of Murder, My Sweet and Raw Deal, and one of Robinson’s main gangsters is played by Dan Seymour, whom some may remember as Capitaine Renard from To Have and Have Not.  Character actor Marc Lawrence – Cobby in The Asphalt Jungle – also makes an enjoyable appearance, so the gang’s all here.  The film is as claustrophobic, dramatic, and violent as anyone could want from a film noir, with a satisfying sense of witty cynicism.  That being said, there are a few ways in which this stands out from the usual film noir stereotypes.

Most films noirs – and most films in general – change locations, but this story is about people who are stuck in one building for the whole movie.  The particular location the film chooses is particularly odd: it’s in a hotel on the beach in Key Largo, which is radically different from the general consensus that film noir concerns urban settings.  The movie cleverly uses this to its advantage, employing a hurricane to amp up the usual noir trope of heightening drama with rain by making the rain more intense and to take out the building’s electricity.  The power outage serves as both another way to create anxiety among the cast, which feels very noir, and as a great excuse for making the lighting more extreme.  The result is a lighting style that is more expressionistic than any shadows I’ve seen in any film noir since Stranger on the Third Floor, and it’s absolutely delightful.  It’s also very different for a film noir to avoid themes of male anxieties about women completely (or, in other words, to avoid a femme fatale or similar type), and Lauren Bacall seems almost out-of-place in her “loving, devoted wife” role.

While I think some parts of the film, such as the Bogart-Bacall romance, could have been more interesting than they are, I do think this is one of the greatest films noirs I have ever seen, and perhaps one of the greatest films I’ve seen at all.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover Review

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I’ve been meaning to see this film for a long time – unlike most people my age, it’s been on my radar for years, and I have often joked about its incredibly long title.  Upon seeing it, I’ve found that it’s approximately what I thought it would be, only better.

It’s very much an artsy movie that seems to focus on visuals, themes, and cinematic experiments than entertaining, but it actually gets rather captivating and exciting in the second half.  The characters are, to my surprise, very interesting, with many characters I root for and one character who reminds me (and reminded the professor who was showing the film when I saw it) of a certain bushy-haired billionaire who’s been in the news lately.  The fear of “The Thief” intensifies as the film progresses, making for an intense and chilling third act.  All of this, of course, gets elevated and enhanced by the excellent soundtrack, and of course by some of the greatest visuals in cinema history.  Director Peter Greenaway seems to care very little for making a film that feels like real life, instead preferring a theatrical atmosphere, an unbelievable ending, and at least one subtle moment that is physically impossible (specifically the moment when a the wife’s dress changes colors instantly to match her surroundings).  While I must confess that some of it feels somewhat slow and boring, and there is definitely an aura of pseudo-intellectualism coupled with needless violence throughout, the film basically works because of its ironic conclusion, which is just as dramatic and chilling as it is ridiculously absurd.

It’s a bit awkward and grim for my tastes, but at least it’s fresh and well-done.

Network Review

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The first part of this film I ever saw was the famous scene with everyone shouting from their windows.  It was in a film history course I took a few years ago, and ever since I saw the clip, I’d been really wanting to see the whole film.  That scene really moved me when I first saw it – it spoke to me in a way that the most touching and emotional of scenes from other classic movies don’t – but I had to wait to watch it until I was in the right mood.  Since that course was back in early 2014, it seemed like late 2016 was a good time, ensuring that the scene wouldn’t be so fresh in my memory that it would be spoiled.  For this most recent viewing, once I could tell the scene was coming, I turned off the lights, sat up close to the screen, and let it overpower me.  Because the scene is so greatly enhanced by its context in the plot, I found myself quivering as tears fell down my face, and all I could do was remark at the beauty of what I was experiencing.  I’ve found myself tearing up while writing this review just at the thought of it, and this is a very unusual sort of experience for me.  This is exactly what cinema should be doing, and in a time when artsy drivel like 2001 is seen as the kind of thing the elite film critics want from Hollywood, it’s nice to know that a film with true meaning and power is still regarded as a great cinematic achievement.

As for the rest of the film, it’s not bad.  It can be a little boring at times, but most of it is pretty satisfying in its comedy, its irony, or at the very least its brutal honesty.  The film shows us exactly what we would like to think the evil overlords behind our television programming would be saying and doing behind closed doors.  The balance between comedy and drama is pretty good, particularly with the way the lines between the two are blurred.  I will say that I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of names and faces, but the story kept me interested.  The writing is smart, the characters are what they ought to be, and the ending is just perfect (and it merits comparison to the ending of another of my favorite ’70s movies, Phantom of the Paradise, to gain an appreciation of the cinema of the Vietnam-era and the years that followed).  What’s most impressive about the story is that it manages to be very dramatic, very absurd, and very believable all at the same time, such that the ridiculous solution proposed at the end of the film leaves the viewer gaping and thinking, “By gosh, at this point that actually seems plausible!”

Essentially, the movie is an interesting analysis of the normalization of madness, and it raises the question of just how sane a species we truly are.

It’s a Wonderful Life Review

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This movie is not supposed to be a classic – it happened by accident.  It was a flop at the box office (far more so than The Wizard of Oz) and only got played on TV because the studio let its copyright on the film lapse in the 1970s.  Because so many people watched it as children with how often it was on television, it became a tradition to watch the movie every Christmas, but that doesn’t mean it’s that great.  It’s one of those movies that we remember as being great from our childhood, so we can still enjoy it, much like with the Rankin-Bass specials.  The difference is that It’s a Wonderful Life feels more original with the classic, memorable, charming moral of its fable, more high-quality with its top-notch director, long run-time, and great cast, and more like it fits in stylistically with the family of Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and other films that just feel emblematic of Classical Hollywood.  At the end, however, it feels like a pretty average Classical Hollywood film to me: sometimes boring, sometimes charming, sometimes impressive, and sometimes absurdly (and dare I say stupidly) weird.

First of all, its structure is about as bizarre as that of a film noir.  While Out of the Past has its interesting part in the first act and what feels like a boring afterthought for its second, this film spends the first two acts on generally humdrum exposition, leaving its iconic fantasy story for the ending.  Consequently, the whole film seems long and drawn-out, and while I can appreciate how interesting it must have seemed when it first came out because its high concept was completely new to cinema at the time, I couldn’t really stay all that interested seeing as how I knew exactly how the story ends.  I will say that the character of Mary Hatch/Bailey (Donna Reed) kept me interested in the story for a while, but the way that George Bailey (Stewart) treats her in most scenes, and the way he behaves in general, struck me as entirely unappealing and unrelatable.  I have a very difficult time caring about what happens to Bailey in general, but I will say that the film’s ending oddly warmed my heart far more than any movie I’ve seen in a long, long time.  The strength of the ending, however, is counterbalanced with the weirdness of the scenes at the beginning with the blinking stars, which were nearly a face-palm moment for me.  This film is a mix of a great many distinct and interesting things, some positive and some negative, and while I can’t say that I like it, I do think its concept is one worth consideration, and I can appreciate the original ideas it has brought to the art of the moving image.