Essential Classics

To Be or Not to Be (1942) Review

September 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

Many consider this to be one of the greatest comedy films of all time, and I am happy to say that I have joined the many in that opinion. I’m afraid I have very little to add here that hasn’t been said, so I will keep my comments brief and simply urge all readers to watch this film. While it may not be my favorite comedy, it is one that I greatly appreciate, and one that I intend to emulate. It perfectly established so many great tricks to make a film extra-funny, and these are techniques that can still be employed today without losing much strength. Much of its brilliance and beauty come from the fact that it’s a comedy about World War II that was made and released during World War II, and yet the really great thing about it is how well it plays with an audience of young people today (as I had the good fortune of witnessing myself). Because I saw the Brooks film some years before seeing the Lubitsch original, there were some parts of the movie that annoyed me simply because I was hoping this film would offer more of the great moments I was used to seeing in the way I was used to seeing them. That being said, this film takes everything a different direction – its own unique direction – that I think is worth a little analysis.

After reading an analysis of the film from a few decades ago by cultural theorist Mladen Dolar, and reading Ebert’s review of the Brooks/Johnson remake, I am fascinated by two elements of this film’s humor. The first is the way it manages to be over-the-top without being over-the-top. While watching this film, I was a little let down during the soliloquy sequences, because the remake made me expect Jack Benny to totally lose his cool on stage and follow the man in the audience to the edge of the stage. This film doesn’t do that, instead focusing on understatement of big problems. This is tied to my second note, which is how petty everyone is. I think films are can be found on a rectangular spectrum-like chart with a particular type of fictional world in each corner:

Type A: The audience and the protagonist are sane, normal, and relatively smart people, but some people are inhuman, evil monsters.
Type B: All humans are inhuman, evil monsters.
Type C: The audience and the protagonist are sane, normal, and relatively smart people, but some people are short-sighted, ignorant, silly fools.
Type D: All humans are short-sighted, ignorant, silly fools.

I sorted them in order of popularity, and maybe I’ll make up a graphic representation later, but for now we can call our imaginary chart “The Fictional Cynicism Diagram.” This film is noteworthy for being an early example (if not one of the only really good examples) of a film that belongs right in the last corner, Type D. Most stories are somewhere in the middle, but this sets a tone that wouldn’t become more common until mockumentary shows and Tina Fey productions became popular. For a film made during the second world war to have this approach to even the Nazis, refusing to let them be anything but flawed, foolish humans, just like our heroes, is amazing. That’s what makes this a landmark film, and why its one of my favorites.

Mad Max Review

September 16, 2016 by JD Hansel

What . . . the what? I’m very confused about what on earth this movie is supposed to be. The entire selling point of Mad Max – and the story synopsis on the back of the DVD case – is Max’s revenge plot. But this plot is just the third act. The entirety of acts one and two is spent setting up a conflict, rather than following one. I’m not saying that every film must follow the standard Hollywood narrative format, but the best deviations from this format are the ones that deviate to saturate the conflict, not distract from it. In comparison to my expectations, most of Mad Max just feels dull and pointless.

This film raises the usual questions that I struggle to answer when writing on a film I don’t like:

Is it a good film even though it’s not my cup of tea?
Can it be held accountable for not living up to its marketing if the film’s marketing is the problematic part?
And is it really a bad thing when a film does not make it clear how it should be approached/read?

To answer the first question, I do think it is possible for me to recognize films that have many positive elements, even if I don’t particularly like them. I have spent far too much time writing about Pan’s Labyrinth because I know that it is a very impressive film, yet somehow I hate it immensely. I’m not sure that this movie is the same kind of situation. Mad Max does not strike me as remarkably well-crafted, even for what it’s trying to be, regardless of whether or not I happen to like what it’s trying to be. Perhaps the problem is that I cannot tell what it is that I was supposed to be getting out of it, but now that I know what the movie is about and what it spends its time focused on, I still don’t think I’d appreciate it more on my second viewing. Its story is simply lacking.

For the second question, I don’t think I have a good answer. If a movie’s marketing is really bad, but the film itself ends up being spectacular, I don’t think I could fault it much for the marketing. After all, the marketing is not necessarily apart of the film itself, and is generally not really controlled (or even influenced much) by what the director and producer say. On the other hand, if a film gives me less than what the marketing had me expecting, that’s a negative thing. It shows that there’s potential there for a good movie, but the filmmakers didn’t make something as good as what the film could have been. On the other other hand, what’s especially difficult here is discerning when a film is just “different” from its marketing, but not particularly better or worse. With Mad Max, it’s clear to me that all of the time spent “world building” in the first hour could have been spent on an exciting plot that properly mixed in the world building, sort of like The Princess Bride, and that would’ve been far more entertaining (without deviating from what was advertised or what the movie promised).

The last question is perhaps the most controversial, and what could easily make me seem like an idiot to a heck of a lot of people. I’m going to answer this question with a yes, but I’m not sure that it’s a yes in every case. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my review of Pulp Fiction, which I have come to disagree with over time. It seems to me that I only liked the film because I had heard Tarantino explain in an interview how to approach and/or process it. I have come to recognize that, without an explanation of how to approach it, I couldn’t have understood it. Not only that, but I couldn’t have understood how to understand it. That, I think, is the key – I don’t need a filmmaker to hold my hand and explain everything to me, but I need to know what language I’m seeing before I can read it, or what game I’m playing before I can win it; the difficulty of the game is irrelevant.

I don’t really know if this review will make sense to anyone else. I’m not even sure that it makes sense to me. My goal has simply been to explore why I feel the way I do about this movie, and hopefully to understand myself (and cinema) better for having done so. Mad Max is certainly a special film that has some value to it, but the vast majority of the film did not grab me, and I was left wanting much, much more. Perhaps my problem is not so much the film as it is the glimpses it shows of what it could have been.

The Birds Review

July 13, 2016 by JD Hansel

With High Anxiety being my favorite Mel Brooks film, one would expect that I would be well-versed in the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Quite contrarily, after watching Strangers on a Train for a film history class I took a few years ago, I was turned off by Hitchcock. I felt like whenever he was trying to have me waiting in suspense, I found myself just waiting. I put off watching his films for another day, simply because I didn’t feel like being bored, but I eventually felt like I may have been missing out on some important films. I decided to give him another go, trying out one of the films he’s best known for, if not the film he’s best known for, The Birds.

While I had a little bit of a hard time getting into it at first (since its pace is almost annoyingly slow at times), I was quickly impressed more than I thought I would be by the characters and dialogue. The conversations that the characters had when they weren’t dealing with a bird attack were actually very interesting for the most part, and it’s always good when character interactions are enough to keep me interested. Then, during the now-cliché panicked bar scene – that scene in all the disaster movies with the flustered witness of the attack, the bartender who tries to keep things under control, the skeptic who happens to be an expert on the subject, and the lunatic who believes it’s the end of the world – I was delighted by how Hitchcock had perfected this kind of set-up. The addition of the panicky mother made the scenes in the bar that much better.

Oh, and I suppose the scary elements are sort of an important part of this film, being its mark on the history of cinema and all, so I’ll briefly say that I liked them. The scary scenes weren’t exceptionally terrifying in the sense I’m used to, but maybe that’s a good thing. I despise jump scares, so it’s nice that Hitchcock did a good job at keeping me on the edge of my seat and fearing for the well-being of the characters I’d come to really like, all without relying on too many cheap gimmicks. While the ending somehow manages to be both gripping and underwhelming at the same time, making for a movie experience that feels a little awkward, I think that this picture is nicely crafted work of cinema that’s creative, fascinating, and supplies just the kind of experience it needs to to make it into the film history books.

Blade Runner Review

May 12, 2016 by JD Hansel

I must say, I did not like this film as much as I hoped I would – as much as I expected I would. That being said, since my expectations were based only on what I knew of its exemplary visual style and eerie aura, they were “sky-high” to say the least. What I soon discovered is that it’s the kind of movie that’s more of an environment than anything else, in that (after seeing it and learning the plot) it can be kept on in the background to set the tone or mood of the room, like a fireplace or lava lamp. Much like The Dark Crystal, the goal here doesn’t seem to be to tell a new and exciting story so much as it is to explore a world. However, the story and world are completely intertwined here, both necessary to explore, reveal, and shape one another, which makes it a good film.

I suppose I should explain the reasoning behind my previous statement. At the root of a story – or at least the great majority of mainstream novels, classic fables, and Hollywood films – is a very simple concept: given this unique set of conditions, here is the surprising outcome that follows. Need an example? Under the conditions that a boy travels through time to the year when his parents met, he could accidentally keep them from falling in love, erasing his own existence. I hypothesize that what is most often the driving factor in determining what movies we want to see based on their trailers is in fact our desire to find out “what would happen if . . . .” When we heard about a movie with the premise that toys come to life if no one’s looking, we were curious enough about what would follow from these conditions that we paid Pixar plenty of money just to see them show us . . . three times.

While I would certainly not wish to imply that any story based on this logic is a good one, I do think that this shows how Blade Runner is a step above other ambiance films. Consider again The Dark Crystal. The whole point of the film is exploring this unique world, but most of the key aspects of this world that make it unique are essentially inert as far as the plot is concerned. The puppet designs, inventive sets, and practical effects do not necessitate the plot and mostly aren’t necessitated by the plot (or at least not specifically, because the story only requires that fantasy elements of any sort be present to signify the kind of world it is). Reciprocally, the fact that there are weird sandy turtle hippies called Mystics and purple Shakespearean pterodactyls called Skeksis does not entail that they were once the same species before a big crystal broke – that stuff had to be added so the movie could have something of a story. With Blade Runner, the world’s defining quality is a problem with robots (that are indistinguishable from humans) running amok. From this premise, it follows that authorities would try to find, follow, and destroy these robots, and so it is no surprise that the story follows someone working with the authorities to do just that.

Still, the story is not the most interesting I’ve ever heard, and I wonder if perhaps this is because the movie is rather slow. I can deal with the slow pacing because I enjoy getting to wander around in this special, vivid version of Earth that’s been so creatively envisioned, but consequently, the movie runs rather long for such a simple storyline (at least in the version I watched, which is the original two-hour theatrical cut). It’s largely the visuals and sound that make this film work, not to mention the actors, and I generally do not reward a film based solely on mastery of these secondary elements – which are arguably mere affectations. This film, however, unlike other artistic works such as 2001, uses its visuals, sounds, and people not as a substitute for plot, but to highlight and saturate the plot. They do not distract from the story’s drama – they bring it vivid life, which does not make this movie perfect, but does make it a very special film that must never go unappreciated.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World Review

April 29, 2016 by JD Hansel

Given my immense appreciation for comedy, I cannot help but appreciate an ode to comedy. Comedy can be such a powerful force for good, making the burdens of life more bearable, and bringing important issues to light in a way that people can easily handle. The beauty of comedy is that, even at its filthiest, it is a pure art form, in the sense it exists simply to bring about happiness. When one considers the element of challenge in justifying the emotional investment required for film with the emotional reservation required for comedy (all on the part of the spectator, that is), it borders on miraculous when a good comedy film is released. This is why I consider comedies to be one of the greatest cinematic achievements, if not the very greatest, known to date.

. . . And I guess this one’s okay.

By gosh, does it drag on. I wouldn’t mind the run-time if I could enjoy any of the characters, but what the film lacks is a group of characters (even if it’s a very small group) that’s mixed in with these annoying, stubborn, loud, rotten, mercenaries. Give me a Ferris Bueller or an Alvy Singer who will look me right in the eye and guide me through the insanity – this way the chaos becomes something to bond over with the movie as opposed to something that isolates me. In spite of the presence of many great actors I usually enjoy (Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Jonathan Winters, etc.), the closest that the movie came to having a character I enjoyed was the police chief. His life was so miserable that I was quite depressed during the scenes in which I had to hear his wife and daughter on the phone, so the part of the movie I found most uplifting was when it looked like he was going to get a new life. That would have made the whole movie worth all the trouble.

I really do have several big problems with this movie, although I can’t quite call it a bad film. Yes, I am bothered by how they wasted some great comedians (by using Stan Freberg, known for songs and voices, as a non-speaking background role). I’m bothered by the needless subplots that focus on characters who don’t matter to me. I’m bothered by how little I laughed during the movie, and by how few times they wrote halfway decent roles for women or those in minorities. It bothers me that the screenwriters somehow, almost unfathomably, managed to make me dislike the characters to the point that I didn’t want to watch them, but still sympathize with them to the point that I felt bad when things went wrong for them. There is much to dislike in this movie. However, as much as I’m tempted to give it a relatively low rating, I’ll go easy on it. Why? Because by the end of the film, one thing is made very clear – laughter is one of the most important, magical, and precious things we have in this life, and this movie won’t let us forget that.

Rashômon Review

April 5, 2016 by JD Hansel

I like stories. I especially like stories when they are delivered with the standard Hollywood three-act narrative. It’s a good structure for movies, and I think that’s because of the logical form at play in the medium. Nearly every film that’s ever been screened – or perhaps every fiction ever invented – has built its story, whether or not the writer(s) realized it, on the following idea: given this fascinating set of circumstances, these fascinating events are what would/could follow (or, to express it in propositional logic, “C → E“). It makes sense that the first act would establish the circumstances and the main character that will be used to express their consequences, followed by a second act in which several chaotic events take place as a result of the established circumstances, a climax with the culmination of all of the chaos thus far, and finally a conclusion that sorts everything out into some sort of inevitable, orderly result. Naturally, I always get nervous when a director decides to break this form in favor of his/her own idea of whatever would be interesting to present on film. For this film, however, Kurosawa somehow managed to use the same logical principles, but with a different form than Hollywood’s, that strangely works beautifully for this story.

From the beginning, the tone of the film puts the audience in a mood to hear a story, as we see what almost seems like an equivalent to a man walking into a bar our of the rain to tell a story to the bartender. We know right away that we’re about to hear a dreadful tale, and the flashbacks are no surprise. Flashbacks had been long-established by this point, so everyone knew what they were and how to “read” them. We also understand the cinematic grammar of a court hearing, so the way that the flashbacks are organized and presented makes sense. Ultimately, the form of this film still retains the basic concept of presenting circumstances and the events that would follow from them, but if Hollywood’s form is a bowling ball hitting the pins, Kurosawa’s form is a cue stick hitting the triangle of object balls – the point isn’t to push everything in one direction, but to scatter in every direction. In other words, Kurosawa uses a structure that shoots various mutations of a story in different directions, and we are meant to make sense of the general ideas running throughout all of them in order to make sense of the conclusion.

What is perhaps most impressive about this movie is that it offers satisfaction without answering the film’s main question. While I do not wish to give too much away, I will say that the ending is a hopeful response to the events of the film . . . in a way. Rather than having a conclusion that is set up directly by the events that take place in the story, this film ends with more of an Our Town ending by ending on an answer to the film’s theme, and even the film’s form. The form of the film is inseparable from the plot, so both the form and plot keep the audience curious about what’s to come. We can still play “the movie game” of trying to guess where the plot will go because the grammar of the film is intuitive enough, but the ending makes one realize that the game is not the point. The point, like with most stories, is the moral we learn from the fable, which makes Rashomon a very fascinating sort of fairy tale.