J.D. Hansel

Dramedy

Dead Poets Society Review

by

A devilish lie lurks here.  Maybe not so much in the film’s message as in the minds of the characters, or at least in the way the audience is bound to interpret the story, but somehow, the lie is here.  As the film presents its separation of creativity, freethinking, and love for the arts from tradition, orthodoxy, and formality, it is assumed that the realm of the logical is on the latter side – the dark side – but this is not the case.

What Hollywood needs to learn to understand is that the logical and the conventional are not one and the same.  In fact, “appeal to tradition” is a logical fallacy.  The characters in this film who represent order, propriety, and convention are on the wrong side of logic with many of their attitudes, concerns, beliefs, and actions.  That being said, once the audience understands this, the film is immensely enjoyable.

This film works through the anxiety that comes with youth better than most other films I’ve seen on the topic.  I think its power in this regard probably comes from the issue I just described: we see young people put in a situation in which they are taught that freethinking is bad thinking and dogma is logical.  We all know that this is wrong, and it is this understanding we have of the devilish lie that fuels the film’s drama.  It is because of this that the film is so gripping, heart-wrenching, frustrating, and sometimes almost terrifying.  While the film is sometimes cheesy, and not all of it dates well (I’m looking at you, scenes with the girl), but it is an intense experience that resonates with me on a special level, and I love that.

Bonnie and Clyde Review

by

Bonnie and Clyde is one of the most divisive films in the history of American cinema.  On the one hand, many critics praised it for being something entirely new.  Roger Ebert wrote, “It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.”  By contrast,  it was called needlessly aggressive, violent, purposeless, and unfocused by a great many critics, but we’ve mostly forgotten that.  All that we remember is that it was shockingly different from Classical Hollywood, and so we’ve decided it was a great movie.  And maybe it was.

Now it’s not.

Now there is very little of interest here.  The main characters are uninteresting, the comedy isn’t very funny, the violence isn’t much of a spectacle, and the bold style of editing just isn’t striking anymore.  I do think there are a few likable things about this movie, but not enough for it to be considered one of the greatest films of all time.  It was different from other films, but not different in any ways that are really worth praising (compare to The Graduate or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).

So why isn’t my star rating lower?  Simple: Gene Freaking Wilder.  It’s one of his best performances, and he made the whole movie well worth the watch.  To be fair, there are some other scenes I like as well – the opening credits, for example, or … well, really most of the beginning of the movie, after which it largely goes downhill – but only Gene Wilder’s part can be said to be truly great.  For the rest of the film, I’ll repeat the same old adage I’ve said time and time again: if I don’t care about the characters, I won’t care about the story.  It’s possible for a film to be good even without a great story, but this film is too dependent on a story that was done better by Trouble in Paradise and Gun Crazy for that to be possible.

Taxi Driver Review

by

I’d like to talk about a French movie called La Haine.  Easily one of the most historically significant French films of the last 25 years, La Haine (or Hate) tells the story of young men of different ethnic backgrounds living in one of the poorest parts of France who are the victims of police brutality.  While the American tendency is to make all characters that the audience is expected to read as “victim type characters” very nice, sweet, and innocent, this film has a brutal realism to it – the characters are not the loveliest people.

They are very aggressive, rude, profane, and obsessed with drugs and guns.  The only jokes they know how to tell involve having sex somebody’s mother or sister.  They are wrapped up in maintaining an impossible self-image of pure masculinity, never showing weakness, always being ready to shoot anyone who stands in their way.  While I can’t relate to them much, I do feel for them: their attitudes, interests, and behaviors are all part of a persona they feel they must assume in order to stand up to unjust authorities – a persona thrust upon them by American pop culture.

While a variety of artists, films, and film genres clearly affected the film and/or the characters in it, the only movie I recall being cited explicitly as a source of self-image for these kids is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.  The famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene (in addition to the scene pictured below) is performed by a character in this film who feels like he has no power and no future – all he has is the fantasy of pulling out a gun like Robert De Niro and shooting a cop.  I think that’s because the purpose of Taxi Driver is to resonate with people who just want to be masculine, dominant men, which is why the whole film is nothing but a showcase of what masculinity looks like without the “fun parts.”  Without the fast cars, monster trucks, explosions, wild sex, rocking out, and sports games, all that’s left to make a movie manly is precisely the contents of Taxi Driver – no more, no less.

The plot concerns a retired war veteran returning to his home city in America and trying to find a way to readjust – a clever nod not only to the contents of films noir but also to the historical phenomenon that film historians/theorists propose prompted the film noir genre.  He becomes a taxi driver and sees a variety of strange characters and concerning events, which Scorsese used to show us the darkness of New York on a level that few other directors have been able to achieve.  Then he stalks a woman, so that’s not good.  Then he and that woman attempt to have a romantic relationship, but it doesn’t go very well.  Then he buys a bunch of guns and decides to become a vigilante, hoping to rescue a very, very young prostitute from her situation.

The number of events in the story are few, although they happen over the span of a rather long, slow movie, and there aren’t many engaging twists and turns in the story, so what gives?  Why is this movie considered so great?  I already mentioned the film noir references, and I think a lot of people admire the lengths to which Scorsese goes to show how awful a place New York City can be, all without losing the sense of realism.  People also surely like Scorsese’s ability to use very subtle camerawork to create a unique style of uneasy “swaying” that makes the viewer feel continuously unsettled.  It’s all apart of the idea that great filmmakers aren’t the ones who follow the Hollywood formula really well to please a large audience.  The great director, it is believed, is one who comes up with his/her own distinct ideas for specific events, moments, vignettes, and characters he/she wants the audience to see, then carefully crafts them with clever dialogue and unconventional cinematography, then packages them together in just the right order to give the audience the experience he/she wants.

That’s not quite my idea of a great film – it’s close, but it’s not quite there.  At the end of the day, film is a communication medium, and that means I can’t only look at how well the filmmaker uses the channel of communication (the channel being video) – I have to look at the value of that which is being communicated.  I think the reason why I like the show Louie more than Taxi Driver, even though Louis C. K. meets that same definition of a great director I offered in the previous paragraph in Louie, is that Louis is expressing something that speaks to my values and showing me things I would want the whole world to see.  He shows life in the rotten parts of the city from a perspective that makes sense to me.  I can’t say that for the popular Scorsese films, which seem to approach the world from the perspective of an animal rather than a rational agent.

I really don’t know how to care very much about what happens in the movie, so it’s hard for me to care about the movie.  I don’t really connect much with the characters, and based on this film I don’t think I connect much with Scorsese either.  The only people who do connect with either of them through this film, I estimate, are people who enjoy their own manliness too much.  I can greatly appreciate the interesting character studies, the fascinating exchanges between the (very different) characters, and the craftsmanship involved here – I’m really glad that Scorsese showed me so many things that so few people have ever seen before on or off the screen – but that’s not enough.  It simply doesn’t resonate with me.

Moonrise Kingdom Review

by

You know what’s an ugly color?  Yellow.  Yellow is a really sucky color.  It can make a movie look pretty terrible, or at least it’ll make the color scheme seem smelly.  In fact, one of the main reasons I’ve waited so long to watch a Wes Anderson film is that I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach all of the colors (or at least hues) he tends to use that make me sick.  The second reason is my distaste for films that are overly quirky for the sake of being quirky.  Much to my surprise, I found that I can appreciate the film’s colors and quirks because Anderson can appreciate the beauty in the fakeness of things.

The important thing to remember about the film is that it takes place in a strange version of the 1960s, and the film is very conscious of that.  Anderson doesn’t stylistically approach the decade the way that most filmmakers would though.  Perhaps because he’s playing with themes of childhood and nostalgia in the film, he uses color, grain, and visual effects to make the film look like an old photograph from the ‘60s or ‘70s, which is exactly what any of us today would have to use to get a glimpse what the time period was like for kids.  No one could ever have a jacket as vividly red as the narrator’s in real life – real life doesn’t look like that – but in old photos it would seem normal, and photos of our childhood inform our memories of what the world used to look like.  It’s a very strange effect, but it makes for a look and feeling that’s oddly warm and charming.

But there’s much more to the visual style than that.  Anderson has a knack for playing with size and perspective, somehow making many of the props and set pieces look like little toys.  I think part of this is done with camera tricks, and some is done by using small models of props and set pieces instead of the real thing.  This gives the sense that everything on his set is one of his little toys to play with, as though making a statement in favor of Auteur Theory the characters are just as much his puppets as the characters in his stop-motion film are.  Now, most people don’t notice this as much as they notice his unique cinematography – his habit of framing his subjects symmetrically, moving the camera steadily in elaborate tracking shots, and filling the frame with things dropping and sliding and jumping and spinning so nothing is ever too boring.  Since I’d seen a clip or two from this movie a few years ago, I figured I would find it irritating, but in context, I don’t mind it.  I think I’m okay with it because, on the one hand, Anderson is clearly having too much giddy, childlike fun doing it, and on the other, he keeps it limited to what will help the scene/story more than distract from it.

And this story is good.

The story itself is rather quirky, but it builds up to its least plausible parts very carefully, so it still feels like it’s been written carefully – not like everything has been thrown at the wall, as I would have expected.  And I think it has been written carefully.  The story is both innocently childlike and unsettlingly adult, somehow blending emotions one would only expect to feel in an old Tim Burton film with an empathetic love for these characters.  It’s incredible that characters with so little visible emotion grab the heartstrings the way these characters do – I don’t understand how it’s possible – but they keep the viewer completely sucked into the story.  In fact, I believe this movie tells one of the most intriguing and captivating stories ever told, and it tells it beautifully.  So, yes, some aspects of the film stray far from what I usually like, but Anderson keeps me engaged on a level that few others can, and he seems to have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.  I’m not sure if I liked this movie for itself or just because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but I can say that I look forward to watching it again.

Forrest Gump Review

by

My brother got very upset with me a few weeks ago when he found out that I, the film major in the family, hadn’t seen Forrest Gump, and understandably so – it’s one of the most famous movies ever and it’s by my favorite director.  That being said, we must remember that it’s not a film that critics praised or that academics have felt the need to seriously studied.  It’s one of those films that has actually been the subject of much study and scrutiny just from the average movie-goer, if only because of its rather biased historical revisionism.  However, now that I’ve seen it myself, I’d like to look at another strange aspect of the film: the story.

What makes this movie really stand out as a story, not just as a technical accomplishment, is that Gump himself has no ambitions in most of the film.  He doesn’t really plan on going to college, or plan on meeting the president(s), or plan on going to the army, or plan on starting his own shrimp business.  He doesn’t even try to do these things.  I know that’s related to the theme of the movie, but it shouldn’t make for a good story.  The fact that Forrest is by and large a passive character (at least emotionally) should also make the film rather boring, yet it’s entirely captivating.

I think it works well because it alternates between two interlinked stories: one being a comedy, the other being a drama.  The comedy comes from the fact that Forrest has clearly lived the most interesting life imaginable, but he has no conception of just how absolutely amazing it is.  Most scenes in this movie could easily make for movies of their own – how Elvis learned his dance, how Lennon wrote “Imagine,” etc., but instead we observe all of them briefly through the eyes of someone who can’t appreciate them, which has a funny kind of irony to it.  The audience is waiting to see how he’ll behave around the next famous person he’ll meet, and the next one, and the next one.  It’s more of a running gag than a story, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

The dramatic story is actually the story of Jenny.  She, too, lives through an unbelievable life.  Her story, however, is much clearer.  Ever since childhood, she’d rather run from her problems (or wait for them to go away) than confront them.  She’s accepted the fact that people take advantage of her and mistreat her, and she allows it, while at the same time, she runs across the country trying to escape her past and find herself.  Of course, she realizes in the end that she could have had the happy, fulfilling life she wanted if she’d just allowed Forrest to love her, but instead she insisted on running.  It’s rather tragic, but at least the last few months of her life are happy enough.

The synthesis of these two stories may reveal the Major Dramatic Question: Will Forrest and Jenny ever tie the knot?  I do think that’s the main pull of the story, but it’s not used the way most narrative scholars and writers would say it should be.  Only a few scenes are focused on moving the characters towards the climax, and they’re all scattered about, mixed in with scenes that don’t push the plot forward at all.  It’s never clear that Forrest’s main goal in life – in everything he does in the film – is to resolve this particular conflict, so naturally it feels like most of the film doesn’t have much conflict.

On the other hand, every now and again, a story is written about a character with such a strong personality and such an interesting life that an audience is willing to be with that character through anything, even if there’s virtually no conflict.  At the end of the day, I’d gladly sit on that bench next to Forrest and listen to him telling his stories just because he’s (perhaps paradoxically) so interesting to listen to, which makes for a good movie.  Would it work well as a play?  Probably not.  It might not even work well with any other actor, writer, director, etc., but somehow, as it is, Forrest Gump makes for one heck of a movie.  And that’s about all I have to say about that.

Toni Erdmann Review

by

The past few years have seen a strikingly large number of films that have made a big splash unexpectedly, shaking up cinema and dividing critics.  From La La Land to Deadpool, or maybe even LEGO Batman, much of the fun of seeing a popular movie from 2016 is the experience of bafflement brought on by how unlikely it is that such a film could get a wide release in theaters with how far it strays from what studio execs normally like.  Toni Erdmann presents the European side of the story.  Some people I’ve known who’ve seen it find it entirely ordinary, whereas some critics think it’s a sign that cinema’s not dead.  As a contemporary German film, one would expect a certain set of features that this film does, in fact, have: hyper-realism, a focus on real world issues (without neatly simplifying them to straightforward sermons), unsettling use of nudity, sex, and violence, and unconventional engagement with America’s entertainment industries.  That being said, it does all this with a strange style – with a sentiment that’s difficult to pinpoint because it swings so far from being very objective, logical, and factual to being fun entertainment cinema, and then fully into raw depression.  With such a strange hodgepodge of emotion, it’s difficult for people to discern how best to categorize the film in terms of genre.

While it’s been marketed as a comedy, this feels sort of like cheating since most of the film isn’t as fun as the trailers (which give the impression of a Coen Brothers film) would have one believe.  There is clearly such a strong element of family drama in the film, and arguably some sort of political drama as well, in a sense, that there is good reason to think of this as a drama with comedic moments, but fortunately, the term “dramedy” allows us to stop worrying about such a dispute.  I would argue, however, that the film is first and foremost a comedy, and that’s because of how the film engages with Freudian comedy theory.  When the movie engages with comedy, it’s a kind of awkward comedy that doesn’t just let the viewer laugh at characters who act strangely or get into awkward situations, a la The Office, but rather makes the audience feel personally uncomfortable.  I almost feel bad about being in the room at a time when the characters are so vulnerable, and consequently I can’t help but laugh for the sake of release, and it’s also funny because of how unaware the characters seem to be of the absurdity of their own situation.  I think this is why, while the whole movie is, in a word, relentless, the funny scenes stand out as the most memorable.  The film essentially presents a panorama of all the different kinds of “confrontation with the uncomfortable” that cinema has to offer, but it’s the funny scenes that make it something particularly special.