J.D. Hansel

Dramedy

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.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High Review

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It’s very rare for a film with virtually no plot to make for a really good and captivating movie experience, but Fast Times is an exception.  It serves as a good example of what I’m currently calling a “layout piece,” which is a work of art or writing that seeks to offer as comprehensive of an overview of a certain subject as possible while remaining an understandable summary, usually by using the highlights of the subject as tent-poles.  Think of it as a “greatest hits” album – by the end of it, you should have a pretty good understanding of both the standard, recurring qualities of the work in question and the moments which stand out.  Some of my textbooks are good examples as well, but Fast Times is special because it’s a fictional, narrative layout piece, so it constructs situations that express (and critique) its subject matter.

So what is the subject matter?  The ’80s, of course!  By the end of the movie, the viewer has a feeling of having just lived through a year of high school in the 1980s – I feel like I’ve been there and can tell my family all about what it was like.  The film doesn’t focus on facts or statistics about the time period, and cares little for objectivity – it was only made in 1982, after all – but it captures the way the ’80s feel.  It feels as though all of these characters really existed in every high school, and all of the situations presented seem to be only slight exaggerations of the plausible.  I never had a teacher like Mr. Hand, but I sure feel like I did.  This kind of “emotional realism” is what makes the comedy work and the stories (if they can be called such) so enjoyable.  The combination of the soundtrack and the cast makes it work about as well as an emblem of the 1980s as Footloose, but its careful mix of comedy and drama makes it work well as a film, too.  It may not be a perfect movie, and it gets rather boring at times, but it’s still an experience everyone ought to have.

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.

Watermelon Man Review

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There are three things that interest me about this film.

First, I don’t know how to categorize it.  Is it a blaxploitation film?  A dramedy?  Maybe just a comedy?  An art film?  Fantasy?  It certainly seems to be a cult film, and an unconventional comedy of some sort, but comedy’s usually aren’t as enthused with stress and anger as this seems to be.  It’s definitely a satire of some sort, but not of a usual sort, instead preferring to be its own unique work of art.

The second thing that fascinates me is that it manages to be the most intense film I’ve ever seen, and yet I’d never heard of it until I was watching it.  I’d heard of the song, which I was a little disappointed to learn was not in the film, but not the film.  While the director is recognized as a very significant and influential one, this film isn’t regarded as highly significant, in spite of its immense power.  I came out of that film more exhausted than I would have been if I’d been watching any other film while doing push-ups.  It confronts the audience with racial stereotypes and societal problems in a way that’s jarringly blunt, and it left me wanting to take a nap afterward, but that’s not a bad thing.  It never allows the spectator to be comfortable for more than a second.  It makes the viewer think, and it has shaped my view of the 1970s, and even today, more than anything else I’ve seen in a long time.  The beautiful thing about it is that it shows how intense and powerful a film can be in a meaningful way, as opposed to meaningless displays of power that are usually praised.

What’s especially fascinating about the film is that, although it’s a very engaging film, it actually puts being a film on the back-burner.  In a sense, it’s more of a cinematic essay, or maybe a cultural scrapbook.  The plot does not care to explain itself in the slightest – it knows it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t care.  It doesn’t quite feel real, but that adds to the unease.  It doesn’t resolve itself well, at least not in any conventional sense, and that’s very deliberate.  The movie doesn’t exist to satisfy an audience, but to challenge its audience, refusing to focus on anything other than its argument.  While it’s by no means a perfect film, and it’s not really my style for the most part, it’s an excellent example of how a message movie can be done in a way that’s more convincing than it is preachy.  I still don’t know just what to call it, but whatever it is, it’s something kind of special.

Oh, and it gets bonus points for the Paul Williams cameo – the best part of ’70s cinema.

The Graduate Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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

I’m a little bit surprised to say that this film is better on its second viewing, but not too surprised.  I think sometimes it helps to “get used to” a film’s essence, or a film’s ending, in order to appreciate the film’s greatness.  The interesting thing about The Graduate is how well it works as both a comedy and a drama.  The tone of the film can be described as such: imagine if a filmmaker told his actors in secret that they were making a comedy film, but told the cinematographer and camera crew that he was trying to make a drama, and then tried to see how long they could make the comedy before anyone figured out it wasn’t a drama.  That’s the feeling of The Graduate, and while other dramedies have often gone for a similar effect, The Graduate is the film that pulls it off, perhaps because of its playful style.  Mike Nichols seems to become the seducer himself, baiting the viewers in with comedy, but manipulating and emasculating them all the while.  Nichols understands that people often laugh when they are vulnerable, and the brilliance of this film is its ability to use the drama to make the audience vulnerable enough for its comedy to be effective.  The drama and the comedy both play on the same discomfort – a fear of a sort of castration – which may make it a great drama for male viewers, but also establishes the film as being almost exclusively for men because of its constant focus on the American male experience.

I’d like to take the time to systematically go through the ways in which the film explores the anxieties of the young American male, but before I get to the sexual side of this issue, I’ll start with the “formal” aspects.  What I mean by “formal” in this case is the use of traditional models of the successful American man to form oneself into this ideal image.  The typical image of the young person of the late 1960s involves a very passionate, driven person who aims to change the world by screaming in the streets while holding a cardboard sign, but this film presents a later view of the essence of the college kid – a  spaced out, zoned-out, dazed haze.  The film tells us that he has been a successful undergrad student with seemingly good grades and a potential future in graduate school, and has also been a track star and was very well-liked in college, yet he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, no satisfaction from what he’s done so far, and is completely lacking in ambition.  Even for someone like me, a very ambitious person with big goals in life and concrete ideas for achievements I’d like to make in my career, this is still relatable because of how difficult it was for me to choose a college, a place to live, and so on.  Mr. Robinson tells Ben that he wishes he could be young again, buying into the idea that “these are the best years of your life” (not the character’s exact words, but similar) and that people in college have a special freedom of choice.  This film shows that notion to be faulty, instead showing how being  in one’s early twenties is a perfect example of the Kierkegaardian idea of being “lost in the infinite” – having too many choices to be able to make a good one.

What makes this matter so stressful is that he must make a choice.  The fact that he has such a bright future ahead of him forces him to live up to the image of the bright future.  The fact that he is smart means he must continue to be smart, and the fact that he is handsome means that he must marry someone beautiful, and the fact that he has studied at a good college means his next college must be better, and the fact that his parents are wealthy means that he must find a great job, and so on and so forth.  When most people think of encouragement and parental pride as something positive, this film’s thesis is that his parents’ bragging not only sets extremely high expectations for him to constantly hope he can attain, but also leaves him out of the process of forming his identity, making it no surprise that he lacks vision and drive.  Every success he has and every compliment he receives becomes another picket in the fence that’s closing the young man into his ever-shrinking pen.  This film, perhaps like The Breakfast Club, tries to recognize the paradox in that what America calls personal growth is actually an experience of personal compression – society squeezing its youth into a narrow mold.  Being the perfect kid is revealed to be both incarcerating and distancing, as one comes to look at oneself as an image formed in the minds of others that is separate from the autonomous self, but has unfortunately replaced the self as the newly formed identity.

After considering how the film has depicted the daily anxieties of the young male, one must then consider how it depicts the nightly anxieties of the young male – the Freudian nightmare.  Everything that Mrs. Robinson does serves to make her absolutely terrifying to the young male viewer.  While I know it’s generally bad form to use the word you in an essay, I must ask you to make this story as personal as possible and put yourself in Ben’s shoes: a woman who looks like your mother and has known you since you were a small child tricks you into going with her into her house, blocks the door so you cannot avoid seeing her naked body, tempts you into an ongoing secret affair with her, makes you look like an unintelligent fool, challenges your experience and ability to perform adequately in sex, ruins your relationship with your newfound love, calls the police on you, convinces everyone that you raped her, sics her husband on you, and finally marries your lover off to another man.  Ben is tricked, trapped, used, patronized, and ultimately framed.  The audience is inclined to celebrate when he still wins the day and gets the girl, but the ending shows that Ben has woken up from his nightmare only to find himself back in the anxiety of his daily life – his lack of identity and future.

The film’s only focus is on intensifying these anxieties, and the film’s strength is creating the feeling that Mrs. Robinson is holding a giant pair of scissors just under the viewer’s balls.  The film obsesses on this theme almost to a fault, as the film is happy to leave plot holes and skip important parts of the story just to get back to the scenes that showcase anxiety.  The film does not show how, why, or when Ben came to love Elaine and find her to be the only person he could talk to, as the movie even goes so far as to cut out the audio in one of their few on-screen moments of romantic conversation, as if to hold up a sign for the audience that the romance is not what the viewer is supposed to care about.  Nichols even went so far as to give the audience no indication of how Ben escapes the police who arrive at Robinsons’ house to arrest him – a scene that one would think is fairly important – and yet he sees no problem in including two musical montage sequences in a row that are nearly identical, seemingly just because they stay on point with his thesis.  His aggressive focus on the male experience can also have the effect of alienating female audiences, since the story does not play to their interests or anxieties as much, and the drama of Elaine’s life (finding out that her ex-boyfriend raped her mother and has now followed her to her college) is almost entirely overlooked.  Still, it uses its topical conservatism to its advantage by making the most of what it does explore, with a visual style that is adamant on making Ben seem as blocked and confined as possible for the majority of the film’s shots.  In a way, however, one would expect the cinematography to focus less on a claustrophobic effect and more on a dizzying effect, since the film’s thesis can be summed up with one great quote from Søren Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

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Burn After Reading Review

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It’s always a little bit embarrassing for me to say that I don’t “get” a certain kind of humor.  In general, the inability to understand a joke that others find humorous is often a sign of a lack of understanding of the world as a whole – a sign of immaturity.  It usually shows that the person who does not laugh is “out of the loop” and does not have the perspective (or intelligence) to understand either the mechanics of the joke or the nature of the joke’s subjects.  This is why I have always hated to reveal that I “just don’t get it” when I watch a film by the Coen brothers.  Burn After Reading, much like the small fraction of the rest of their work that I’ve seen, simply doesn’t do it for me, and I have a hard time explaining why.

Some might think that I am making too big a deal out of a simple matter of differing tastes, but I don’t think that comedy is quite as subjective as the public believes.  I think that appreciation or depreciation of certain jokes or certain kinds of comedy can be indicative of a level of thoughtfulness or intelligence, and the comedy of the Coen brothers is generally thought of as a more sophisticated kind of comedy.  I think that this sense of sophistication comes from the fact that they do comedy that is not explicitly comedic – the actors don’t go too far over the top, don’t wink at the camera, don’t crack jokes, don’t engage in funny physical comedy, don’t release a steady stream of witty one-liners the way Woody Allen does, and don’t have the sense of “putting on a show” that is nearly always a part of the comedic aesthetic.  The comedy is in how uninteresting and pathetic these people are, but even the traditional comedy style of England, which is known for focusing on the uninteresting and pathetic people more than the fun, wisecracking comic type that America has celebrated, tends to “play up” the comedy much more than the Coen brothers do.  I think the subdued nature of the comedy creates the sense that the comedy is a bit harder to find, perhaps to the point that someone could walk into the film mid-way and believe it was a drama for a few minutes.  This in turn creates the sense that the comedy must only be visible to those who are smart enough to see it, but I think this is illusory – I know that it’s supposed to be funny that Clooney’s character has so little control over the way he’s wired to behave that he can’t help but find a new woman to have a secret affair with the moment that his current secret lover looks like she’ll become his wife, but it’s only funny to the point of making me roll my eyes.  I’m not interested in laughing at people who are just pathetic, annoying suckers – I’m just annoyed with them because I’m surrounded by the same kind of annoying people every day, and their loss is more of a cause for a sigh of relief than for a laugh.

This film is an example of how the Coen brothers simply fail to understand how to properly walk the tiny tightrope that is the comedy narrative.  The comedy film is such a difficult thing to do well because of its inherent contradiction: cinema is, as Roger Ebert rightly noted, an empathy-generating machine, while comedy and empathy are forever at odds.  The audience can’t care too much about the characters or else it won’t be funny when something bad happens to them – it will be dramatic – but they also can’t be too apathetic about the characters or else they will have no interest in the plot.  It is finding the type of character that is amusing, interesting, and somewhat likable, without seeming so real or relatable as to be taken seriously, that makes comedic entertainment possible.  From what I’ve seen, the trick seems to be to make the characters relatable through childlike naivete, while still keeping them irrational and foolish.  Consider Cookie Monster – he is forever obsessed with cookies, and we laugh at both his inability to obtain them and his inability to see how absurd his obsession is, but we still feel happy for him when he does get a cookie.  We laugh at early Hermione Granger when she is saddened by the news that exams have been cancelled, but when she is saddened by being a disliked outcast, this is played as drama, showing the way the two kinds of misery function.  Very often, this need for a character to “straighten out her priorities” is enough to make for the “adorable loser” type of character that we enjoy in the work of Henson, Chaplin, and other comedic greats, but the work of the Coen brothers doesn’t fit into either category of misery, and doesn’t work for me.

What does work for me, however, is the ending.  The cuts to the men at the C.I.A. who are trying to figure out what on earth is wrong with all these crazy people are delightful.  While I’ve never been a huge fan of either version of The Office, I do very much agree with Rainn Wilson’s observation that the show’s awkward moments are not as funny as the reactions of the other cast members in response to those moments.  The look to the camera is funny because it relies on the other way that comedy functions in narrative – instead of enjoying the silly misery of the adorable loser, we enjoy the fun that one of the characters is having observing people being fools or losers.  Burn After Reading could have worked if it had some sane characters appearing throughout who recognized the absurdity of the other characters, but the characters are just not funny enough on their own.  They are annoying and stupid and boring and they made for a tedious film.  It took me a very long time to watch it because I couldn’t stomach it all in fewer than three sittings, and frankly I feel like it was time poorly spent.

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