Drama

The Shining Review

November 18, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILERS

One of the tasks I’ve taken up recently is familiarizing myself with more classic horror cinema. I’m usually not the type to enjoy being anxious and afraid, so it’s taken me a while to see the classics of this genre. Fortunately, The Shining is an easy one for me to appreciate. While it is scary, it’s not all about jump scares and other cheap tricks – it’s classy, as one would expect from Kubrick. It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s thought-provoking, it’s suspenseful, and it’s memorable. Even though it may not have totally sucked me in, I must say that I was consistently impressed with the cinematography, the editing, the acting, and the fascinating story. I think that Scatman Crothers’ character (Dick Hallorann) could have been a little less creepy, because it’s very important that the audience likes this character, but I still rooted for him at the appropriate time. It’s not entirely clear to me what everything in the movie meant exactly – and I do think some parts are meant to be open-ended – but that doesn’t affect the story too much.

It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one of my favorite Kubrick films, and I highly recommend it come next Halloween – just don’t expect it to be anything like the book . . . .

The Asphalt Jungle Review

November 17, 2016 by JD Hansel

(SPOILER ALERT)

It’s surprising to me just how much better this film is on my second viewing – how much easier it is to follow and enjoy watching it after having already seen it before. That’s not to say I really liked it the second time I watched it – in fact I never finished watching it a second time – but it is easier to appreciate. The film has a structure that’s hard to work out on the onset, and the first few minutes of the film give the impression that the story will follow the perspective of the police officers more than the criminals. Without any clear protagonist, and with an ensemble cast with intricate relationships, it’s easy to get lost in the story, as I did when I first started watching it. There’s also the fact that I generally have little interest in crime and heist films, which made me hope for better motivations behind the characters’ actions so I could have an easier time getting invested. On the second viewing, however, it has become clear to me that this film is very careful and detailed, making it rather fascinating. I’m particularly fascinated by the role of women in the film.

I think it is quite safe to say that the filmmakers planned on having a mostly male audience, seeing as how the main characters in the film (or at least the ones who push the plot along) are men, so the film looks at women from a few male perspectives. There seems to be a dichotomy presented between the “good life,” represented by adhering to domestic norms, and the wrong way of living, represented by inappropriate lust (or, to a lesser extent, greed). The professor seems to have no interest in settling down with a wife – his ideal retirement is chasing the pretty Mexican girls around in the sunshine. The film seems adamant about making the point that greed, lust, and criminality are all in the same family of things that ought to be avoided, and it is no surprise that Doc’s lust becomes his undoing. Similarly, Emmerich’s affair seems to be at the very least related to his unhappy ending. When Bob Brannom suggests that Emmerich went broke because of Angela (Marilyn), Emmerich denies it, saying it was his extravagant way of living, but I argue Emmerich would have no need for his many properties if he didn’t need places to have his affair. “Doll” tries to pull Dix into the conventional, domestic, married life, but he inexplicably resists, instead pining after the horses of his home.

Interestingly, the film only touches on the subject of how crime can hurt one’s family. The brief memorial service scene seems to mostly serve the function of reminding the audience of the consequences of criminal behavior, which is a message the film probably needed to drive home quite severely in order to get approved. If a big proponent of Sobchack were to try to figure out why a family would be brought into this film, it seems that the reasons would be purely functional: to raise the stakes so the drama of the heist is more interesting, and to help the film get its approval. I can’t help but wonder how entirely different the film would be if one woman had been involved in the heist itself and how the perspective on women the film presents might completely change.

Unfortunately, a film that’s fascinating in hindsight is not the same as one that’s entertaining from the start, which is really what I was hoping to see. Some of the characters are really good and leave a strong impression, and I think that’s largely due to the great performances from Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, and of course Marilyn, but somehow this isn’t enough to keep the film interesting. I recognize that it’s a well-made film in many respects, but it’s not my kind of thing. I think I’ll have to finish my second viewing sometime, or maybe even watch it a third time, because as of right now, I’m wondering if I’ll ever decide if the film’s ending is an unsatisfying bummer or a work of poetic genius.

The Elephant Man Review

November 11, 2016 by JD Hansel

There is much to be said for a filmmaker that can repeat common stories, scenarios, and twists that we’ve all seen before while still making great work (and evoking a strong emotional response). David Lynch is one of those filmmakers, as he demonstrated most clearly when he made The Elephant Man. It’s Lynch’s go at a conventional Hollywood film, and we are very fortunate that Mel Brooks took a chance in bringing young Lynch on board to direct the project before he was well-known. Obviously, everyone else involved in the project was already established, which means we get to see some great performances, and I would argue that the score is some of John Morris’ best work as a composer. The story doesn’t really go anywhere, and it’s blatantly based on the old trope that “the monster isn’t the monster, the normal human is the monster,” and yet it all still works very well. We fear for John when we’re supposed to fear for him, and we wonder if Treves is right in worrying that he’s mistreated John, and we adore Madge Kendal the same way John does. The drama just works.

As a great combination of Hollywood drama and Lynchian weirdness, I think it’s a film everyone ought to see.

Raw Deal Review

October 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

Unlike many of my fellow millennials, I have no reservations or concerns about watching films from Classical Hollywood, because I do not share in their fears that old movies are “too boring.” My issue with classic cinema is that it can be uncomfortable recommending or showing older films to friends of mine without explaining to them beforehand that I don’t condone the sexism or racism that sometimes appears in these classic films. When I heard that Raw Deal brings a female perspective to film noir by having a woman narrate, I was hoping that it would be a film noir I could show to friends with no such concerns. Better yet, the professor of the class that was screening Raw Deal said it was his favorite film noir, which sounded like a good sign (as he was also a big fan of Double Indemnity, which I find excellent). Regrettably, I not only greatly disliked the film, but was very disappointed to find no trace of feminism or anything of the sort. While I do think the recurring theme throughout the film is the theme of the choice(s) of its women, I do not think that the film presents the women’s freedom to choose in a positive light.

Most scenes in Raw Deal are part of a set up for the main female choices in the film: Pat’s choice to lie to Joe about Rick’s goon’s phone call concerning Ann, and then her choice tell him the truth. Pat is the character who is most clearly being silenced throughout the film, never getting the chance to take part in the decision-making in her and Joe’s relationship during the first two acts. She’s actually being told what to do by men even before Joe starts – at the prison, she’s told she’ll have to wait to see Joe, which is just the first of many moments in the film that focus on how she’s forced to wait, and then she and Joe are commanded by the security guard to keep their voices up. When Joe starts, if Pat’s narration is to be trusted, the commanding gets alarmingly strict. She hardly gets to finish one sentence once he gets in the car before he tells her to focus on the wheel, and then when she tells him he doesn’t like his plan to use her and Ann to get through the dragnet, he dismisses her concerns immediately and tells her to get dressed. She is similarly told what to do and/or silenced when speaking her mind – either on screen or according to her voiceover – in their car ride to the border, just after they pass the dragnet, at the campfire, when they make their way to Walt’s bar by the beach, and repeatedly throughout their whole discussion when he decides to leave her behind and go to Rick’s. Pat’s narration makes it seem almost as though it’s the story of a woman who’s trapped in a film that’s about her lover’s love story, not hers.

From the perspective of screenwriting theory, it seems like this would be the obvious set-up for a story about a woman who finally learns to make her own choice. While Joe may be the protagonist and dominate the film’s climax, Pat has her own semi-climactic moment when she decides to lie about the phone call. However, the liberation that seems to be displayed in this scene is undercut by her more climactic scene, when she realizes her one big decision in the film was a mistake. If she learns any moral lesson – although that’s debatable – it’s that she should have done as Joe told her in the first place and told him what the man said on the phone call.

Rick goes further in his mistreatment of women, as I suppose one would expect of the villain, and he shows this by keeping his cool after he’s lost his poker game and found out that Joe successfully escaped, but losing it when his lady friend accidentally spills a little bit of her drink on him. (That’s rather small in comparison, even if it is supposed to be the last straw.) Still, it’s ultimately Pat’s narrative that reveals time and time again that she lives in a world in which women’s views aren’t as important as men’s, and I don’t see how her decision to withhold information from Joe changes that. Ann’s choice to shoot a man, which is also set up earlier in the film (with her mentioning in her apartment that she’d be able to stop Joe if she had a gun), but this choice leads to her overwhelming guilt, and ultimately Joe ends up dying hours later anyway. Add this to the number of times they use the word dame and the way the whistle blows when Ann walks out of the prison and it’s clear that the film does not play as well as one would hope to younger audiences who find anti-feminism in film morally unsatisfactory. While I’ve heard some make the case today that the way women are presented and/or treated in film today seems worse that it was back in the days of Classical Hollywood, this is clearly the kind of movie that people are afraid to find when they watch classic films because it perpetuates the view that it is the woman’s place to shut up and obey. At the end of the day, as much as I really appreciate the film’s charmingly “Noir-Expressionist” visual style, I have found nothing else about the film which is particularly noteworthy or memorable, which presents me in the Song of the South conundrum – if all that’s really memorable about the film are the few parts that seem particularly politically inappropriate, should those alone be the memorable part of its reception and ratings?

In this case, I vote yes.

Barry Lyndon Review

October 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

In my recent review of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, I explained that I finally understood just how impressive a director Kubrick was, and had come to respect him much more than I had after seeing 2001. While 2001 was agony, I have found that I enjoy some of his other films, such as Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, and Killer’s Kiss isn’t all that bad either. Better yet, if I found 2001 to be so devastatingly lacking in both emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction, Paths of Glory has made up for the emotional lack in spades, and A Clockwork Orange has done the same for the intellectual lack, with both of these films being brilliant, powerful masterpieces that redeemed him in my eyes. Unfortunately, just as the Israelites of the Old Testament made right with God just before they wandered back into their sinful ways, I was bound to find another Kubrick film that brought his score back down into the negative. This film is Barry Lyndon.

Conceptually, this film is essentially a remake of 2001, only this time it’s set in the world of old paintings instead of the future. Visually, it is absolutely stunning, and his technical innovating that allowed him to create such a fascinating visual experience is evidence of the man’s genius. Once again, however, Kubrick shows his taste for making human characters less and less human in a way that does not serve his film well. His characters are, as one would expect after 2001, mechanical and uninteresting, which I think it is safe to say was his goal. Also like 2001, the run-time is far too long for a story so incoherent and pointless, and there is really only one scene in the film that is particularly good (and emotionally captivating) as far as the characters are concerned. Naturally, these reasons I give for hating the film are, as I expected, exactly the same reasons that others love it.

Clearly, making me dislike the characters is the point, and in a way, making it boring is part of the point as well, which many professional critics have conceded. “[F]or all its dry wit and visual splendor,” wrote Time Out in a recent review, “this 1975 adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel might be the great director’s least satisfying, most disconcerting film – and that’s what makes it extraordinary.” The film is considered fascinating because Kubrick uses the fact that the character has nothing that any sensible person would recognize as a “personality” (for most of the film) as his social criticism on how pathetic humans are. “Barry Lyndon isn’t a great success, and it’s not a great entertainment,” Roger Ebert adds in one of his two reviews of the film, “but it’s a great example of directorial vision: Kubrick saying he’s going to make this material function as an illustration of the way he sees the world.” I can understand and appreciate this effort, and I think I even strongly agree with Kubrick’s thesis – people really are pathetic machines with an utter lack of any devotion to living a good, reasonable life, and are hopelessly seeking a nonexistent state of total happiness; but even if I agree with his thesis, and even if I am impressed with what he’s done to achieve his goal for the film, I do not think that his goal for the film (making the audience annoyed, uncomfortable, and bored for three hours) is either a good goal for a movie or an effective goal for the purpose of supporting his thesis.

The fact of the matter is that critics do not really want what they say they want. Their desire for a blunt critique of how pathetic humans are and how meaningless their lives are, there is a well-known technique for doing that effectively while keeping the audience entertained. It’s called comedy. Comedy, when done properly, shows all intentions to be selfish, all ideas to be myopic, all peoples to be primitive, all societal conventions to be fragile, all masculinity to be non-existent, all propriety to be a joke, all nations to be powerless, all genius to be craziness, all traditions to be childish, all pride to be arrogant, wars to be inconsequential, all actions to be futile, and all humans to be stupid as swine. Yet somehow this is of no interest to critics, who are uncomfortable awarding films of this nature when they could instead award the dramas, which always pretend the feelings of one good individual can make all the difference in the world and which relentlessly hammer in the message that some people are simply bad people because they do bad things because they are bad people because they do bad things. (For more on this subject, I recommend Mladen Dolar’s essay “To Be or Not to Be? No, Thank You,” which explains this concept far better than I.) Dramas are allowed to be fatalistic or libertarian in philosophy, but the realm of determinism has always belonged to the comedy. This is why the most popular kind of film right now in critical, academic, and pseudo-intellectual circles seems to be, from what I’ve seen recently, the dramedy.

The modern dramedy attempts to make a drama film while borrowing the element of “pathetic determinism” from comedy. This offers the intellectual criticism of comedy with the sense of emotional weight and significance brought to a subject by drama. This, I argue, presents the sort of film that Barry Lyndon is – it is a predecessor to the contemporary dramedy in that it presents hopelessly pathetic, semi-mechanical humans (like characters out of a Coen brothers film) in the guise of drama, giving critics everything they say they want. I argue, however, that what they want may in fact be simply comedy: after all, it seems as though it has been much easier for a comedy to get a high score on Rotten Tomatoes recently than it has been for the dramas. I think that drama is not what they want, and it is not even necessarily what they say they want – it’s what they say they say they want. The numbers show that what they want is comedy, but have been trained by tradition to think they must want drama if they’re smart.

What critics (and perhaps most other people) truly want, or so it seems to me, is the chance to seem thoughtful while experiencing the thoughtless. This is what many dramedies do, but it is also what I think many practices in the world of “mindfulness” do. In short, people like to reach a “zen” state of hypnosis or “zoning out” in which they feel like they’re having an experience that is somehow elevated to a higher level of human consciousness. This is why critics have described it as “hypnotic” – it has a mesmerizing quality, and that is something that does not particularly appeal to me, but it appeals to a great many individuals who want to seem intelligent, wise, and/or spiritual. A hypnotic experience is not the same as experiencing genius, insight, or elevation. The problem is that people associate the significance and meaningfulness of something with emotion, and so we feel like something but be especially meaningful if it gives us a special, “higher” kind of emotional experience. For this reason, an emotionally distant comedy that’s very intellectual is often not as desirable to critics or audiences as a drama on the same subject would be or as a hypnotic film would be, simply because it is an emotional experience that makes us feel as though we are watching something important.

While I recognize that this review probably comes across to many readers as an arrogant, ignorant, and even sanctimonious display of hubris, I see no other way to write this review. Think about it: if I am to maintain my view that one’s assessment of a film is not merely a subjective feeling, as anyone who appreciates the function of the film critics ought to understand, but I am also to argue that I do not support the enormous (and almost unanimous) critical acclaim that this film has come to receive, I am logically required to explain some sort of reasoning for how it’s possible that I am right and all the professional critics are wrong. I regrettably have no other choice – without this explanation of my views, anyone could compare the number of stars I have given this film to the number that one finds in a Google search and immediately deem me a thoughtless fool. All of my above writing on the “critics’ delusion” is not to be taken as dogmatic facts from a know-it-all, but as a working thesis I have for what the many worshipers of the films I hate might be missing. At the same time, I obviously don’t mind if other people like films that I don’t, so long as I am not considered thoughtless for hating a film that the “cinema elect” has decided is perfect. I do believe that a large amount of diversity in tastes is healthy for a culture, but this notion that the dramatic and the hypnotic are (by default) artwork of a higher caliber than fun, entertaining artwork is one that I must militantly oppose.

Double Indemnity Review

October 23, 2016 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Before watching this film, I was informed by a reliable source that this is the “perfect film noir,” and its screenplay by Raymond Chandler and cinema god Billy Wilder is commonly regarded as holy. Perhaps it was because of the hype that I did not find the film absolutely perfect, but I have been having a hard time thinking of anything that’s wrong with the film, and it’s been growing on me both in hindsight and as I’ve re-watched certain scenes. I do consider it brilliant, and I hail it as a great cinematic achievement, but maybe its simply not quite my style of film. Much of the visual style is more or less in the cinematographic territory that I most like, and there are good tracks on the soundtrack, and the story is interesting, and the performances are very good, and the pacing keeps me engaged, but I think I still have a hard time loving a story that doesn’t have the kinds of characters that really interest me in it. Duck Soup has one type of character that I like in Firefly, while Labyrinth has a protagonist that reminds me of my youth, and Little Shop of Horrors has a great villain, and Phantom of the Paradise has an even better villain, while Gremlins is a delightful, childlike collective of loony villainy – but Double Indemnity doesn’t have any of the usual character types that tickle my fancy. Still, that’s never stopped me from enjoying films like Mockingjay or Casablanca, and Edward G. Robinson’s character, Keyes, is probably one of my favorite characters in all of cinema at this point, so what’s the problem?

I think that the reason why I haven’t fallen head-over-heels in love with the film is that I’m not wrapped up in the goals of the characters – their motives don’t grab me. Phyllis gives the impression that she’s willing to attempt to kill off her husband simply because she’s grown bored with him, and Walter Neff is willing to attempt murder just for the fun of it – an attitude that comes out of nowhere from this otherwise charming, polite, likable every-man. The results of Walter’s efforts don’t seem to matter to him much, and neither does his life, so it’s very difficult for the audience to care too much about what happens to him. That being said, I still have both an intellectual appreciate and a special soft spot for this film noir classic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves a good drama.