J.D. Hansel

Fantasy Worlds & High Fantasy

The Fellowship of the Ring Review

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It’s entirely possible that I saw this film already, many years ago, but to my memory, I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it, and I got bored and switched to something else the second time.  My third time, this most recent time, I finally made it all the way to the end.  I didn’t remember the ending, which is why I think I’d never finished the film before (and hence why I’m reviewing it now), but then again, who would?  The film leaves you with the feeling that you just watched a five-hour-long teaser trailer for the second film.  It’s simply a tease – all the great things about this franchise (namely Sméagol and Gollum) come later in the series, whereas this movie offers an introduction to this (fairly bland) fantasy world.  To be honest, I almost fell asleep again this time.

It’s just not my cup of tea.  It’s fine – this isn’t necessarily badly made – but it’s not my preferred kind of fantasy.  I like the colorful and sparkly ’80s fantasy film, which is precisely what Jackson stated he was trying not to do.  He wanted to make a series of films that feel like a grander version of historical fiction, such as Braveheart, but in the history of a fantasy world rather than ours.  That’s not my genre.  I like the kind of fantasy nonsense that he doesn’t like, which is fine.  Beyond that though, I just don’t care enough about the characters, and I don’t like how the story seems to ramble and dilly-dally without clear purpose.

The film has given me an appreciation for some of Tolkien’s writing, but I’m doubtful that Jackson’s way is the best way to adapt the strengths of Tolkien’s work to the big screen.  I love many of the motifs, icons, places, and objects presented in the film – particularly the Ring of Power, which is one of the greatest metaphorical narrative devices in the history of literature – but they’re not organized in a narrative that makes me care enough.  It’s all very Dark Crystal-ish to me.  The film also suffers from predictability, which shouldn’t happen in a film with freaking magic in it.  Again, there’s a lot here that I like, and I wouldn’t mind watching the film again sometime – Jackson seems to be a more than competent filmmaker who certainly has his strengths – but I’d rather skip ahead to the films where more interesting things happen.

Wizards Review

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This movie is extremely different from what I was expecting, which is odd since my expectations were neither rigid nor conventional, so I should have been a tough audience to surprise.  Ralph Bakshi, however, is full of surprises, and his creativity knows no bounds.  Unfortunately, creativity sometimes needs some constraints in order to be understandable to those who are not the thinker, and Wizards lacks the lucidity it requires.  The best example of this is how the film suggests an army in a fantasy world improves its performance simply by watching a projected film reel of Nazis to get pumped up, without any understanding of the Nazi party’s tenants.  It’s a strange idea, but the way it is expressed visually makes it stranger: the reel isn’t projected onto any particular space, instead appearing behind the army as though the Nazi film filled the air and/or the soldiers in the fantasy world were becoming part of the film.  This isn’t simply a matter of openness of interpretation – this is cinematically illegible, and it is typical of the rest of the movie, which seems to follow dream logic more than narrative logic and expects the audience to buy into many unexplained, confusing plot points.  When this is combined with the bizarre characters, unsettling sexual imagery, and poorly executed climax, the result is a film that, in spite of its inspired artistry, has little substance and no coherence, making it regrettably difficult to tolerate.

Alice in Wonderland (1951) Review

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Thanks to Tim Burton, this movie is sometimes called “the good Alice in Wonderland.”  I understand why – nostalgia goggles can do that to even the best of us.  The problem is that this movie just isn’t very good.  Sure, the 2010 film has problems and may be highly annoying to some, but at least its story is actually a story.  The original Lewis Carroll story isn’t a story.  It’s a drug trip.  And that’s what this movie is as well.

Now, I don’t want to fault the movie for problems it could not help but inherit from its source material, which is the only reason I’m giving this movie such a high rating – if Disney had come up with the story, I’d be giving it two and a half stars at best.  I’m still not even sure that the other elements of the movie merit this rating, because a lot of the film is just unbearable.  Surely Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum could have been done in a way that’s less excruciatingly irritating, and surely certain parts of the story could have been given a few more small splashed of humor.  The soundtrack is so-so, with some songs I really like a lot, others I think do the job just well enough, and others I find either forgettable or stupid.

So, I’m giving this a nice rating because of two redeeming qualities: first is the casting of a few of the main characters.  I really like the Cheshire Cat in this movie, and the Mad Hatter is one of the great Ed Winn performances.  The one who really steals the show, however, is Alice, voiced by Kathryn Beaumont.  Her voice is absolutely perfect for the part, and perhaps just perfect in general – I could easily listen to it all day.  The second redeeming quality is the visual style, as this might just be, in some respects at least, the most visually pleasing animated film I have ever seen.  It’s got all of the curves and colors one would want a trippy wonderland to have, and its style also serves to mark its particular moment in animation history.  The resulting film is one that I don’t enjoy watching very much – it was a struggle to finish it quite frankly – but I do enjoy looking at it and listening to it, so I’ll let it slide.

T

 

The Last Unicorn Review

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I think part of the reason why I watched this movie is that I was really in the mood to take a break from the Disney live-action remakes and return to an original fairy-tale movie.  I’m not sure that The Last Unicorn was a good choice though seeing as how it contains so many good and bad elements mixed together, often within the same departments, so I don’t know what to make of it.  The story is a very bizarre one – highly problematic and quite confusing – yet it contains clever little ideas and characters that make me jealous I hadn’t thought of them myself.  The storytelling through the visuals is particularly unclear at times, yet often the animation perfectly captures exactly the feeling the scene ought to have.  The visual style is particularly disjunctive, with character designs and animations that look irritatingly cheap and flat in comparison to Disney’s work, yet the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.  I’m inclined to say that the soundtrack isn’t very good, yet the film’s theme song is stuck in my head, and I have found I quite enjoy it.  The cast may boast some greats like Mia Farrow, but she is oddly overshadowed by the more memorable performances of the bad actors, whose delivery was unlike anything I have ever heard referred to as “acting.”

My problem with this movie is that, every time I think I really like it, the scene that follows always ruins it.  Some of the characters seem fun at first, but eventually get annoying.  The last half of the movie has one mediocre song after another, painfully drawing out the film (even though the run-time is only about an hour and a half).  Because of how much I like looking at the movie, and because of how much I appreciate most of the story, I kept trying to look on the bright side and only see the good in the film, but then something comes up like the tree creature with big breasts and I’m reminded that this is just a Rankin-Bass movie – I can’t expect quality.  At the very least I was hoping this would be a good film for little girls to enjoy  – a movie that’s wholesome enough to merit its “G” rating – but today it would have to cut some parts or change some lines just to get a “PG” rating, thus alienating the viewers who might as well be its target audience.  Consequently, The Last Unicorn strikes me as the kind of movie that’s very good at creating nostalgia for those who grew up with it, but doesn’t hold up for viewers who find it later.

But do you know what this movie really needs?  A Disney live-action remake.  Seriously.  This is the one child-oriented animated film that has enough negative elements to need a re-tooling, and enough positive elements to be made into a great story if it’s put in the right hands.  Most of the main issues are honestly really, really easy to fix, and the story itself isn’t that bad – it’s just the storytelling that’s poor.  Heck, the story even works well as a criticism of other fairy-tales, and it lends itself easily to feminist interpretations, so it’s the perfect subject for the Disney remake project.  Sure, Disney would have to buy the rights from another company, but the result would still be, without a doubt, the best of the live-action Disney remakes to date.

Legend (1985) Review

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I usually avoid explaining the plots to films in my reviews, but just this once, here’s my summary of the story of Ridley Scott’s Legend:

The beautiful Princess Lily is never seen in her castle, nor do we ever see her royal parents, for some reason.  Instead, she prefers to spend her time with the lower class or out in the woods for some reason.  Lily is a completely innocent girl, yet she likes to pull cruel tricks on friends of hers for some reason.  She’s madly in love with a boy named Jack for some reason, and he’s a wild, beastly jungle boy who likes to be among nature and talk with the animals for some reason.  Jack decides to take her to see some unicorns, which are very rare creatures for some reason, but then she decides to touch one for some reason.  Unicorns must never be touched by mortals – even innocent mortals like Lily – for some reason.  She touches it anyway, and in her pride, she challenges Jack to retrieve her ring from the bottom of a deep pond so that he may earn the right to marry her … for some reason.

Meanwhile, a devilish character named Darkness is forced to live down below in the shadows (with limited power) during a period of goodness and light for some reason.  He sends his servants to kill and de-horn the only two living unicorns, which will give Darkness his power back for some reason.  Then an elf shows up to yell at Jack for some reason, and in one version of the film, he challenges Jack to solve a riddle for some reason.  Then the elf says that Jack specifically, a jungle boy he just met and knows nothing about, has to be the hero who goes to the castle of Darkness to save the unicorn, for some reason – and I really would have liked this reason explained to me.  Then a little fairy, whom the elf assumed was just a formless, bodiless ball of light for some reason, reveals herself to be … well, a real fairy with a body and wings and all that, but she makes Jack promise not to tell anyone, for some reason – and I really would have liked to have all this explained to me.  Then she wants him to kiss her for some reason?  And then Lily dances with her sin for some reason as Darkness walks out of a mirror for some reason and reveals that he’s in love with her for some reason?

I know it sounds like this must all make sense in the film.  It sounds like most of this would just seem perfectly natural and unquestioned in context, but there isn’t much context.  In fact, the theatrical cut – the version of the film the studio made to keep people from getting too confused – is more confusing because it has less context.  I understand more about these characters in the director’s cut just because it adds little scenes that give them more dialogue, even when their dialogue isn’t particularly important to the plot.  The director’s cut is unfortunately lacking in some scenes that strengthen the film, including a better ending, but overall, it makes a little more sense.  It’s still pretty darn weird, and I often have no idea what the director’s trying to do, but it makes a little more sense – unless I just felt like it did because it was my second time watching the movie within a few days.  (The director’s cut also has a score that’s surprisingly a bit better – the theatrical version has a cool ‘80s synthesizer score by an electronic band, which I thought I would love, but the director’s cut’s orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith uses an unusual amount of synth as well.)

With this said, I should clarify that this movie is, somehow, really cool.  That’s the best adjective to describe it – “cool.”  It feels like I’m seeing something fascinating, captivating, hypnotic, artistic, impressive, innovative, and a little bit naughty in nearly every scene.  The problem is that these scenes don’t connect well together.  If watched with the American version of the soundtrack, filled with synth music, the movie might as well be a compilation of ‘80s music videos, because it has that same kind of aesthetic and that same amount of narrative.  It’s safe to say that, if my introduction to the film had been a video clip from any individual scene on YouTube, I would immediately be very eager to watch the whole film because of how awesome it looks, sounds, and feels, not realizing that the context of each scene does not enhance its power in the slightest.
This film has no psychological or emotional logic to it, and it hardly makes sense according to surrealist “dream logic.”  While it remains a cult classic because of how it sticks with the people who watched it as kids, and its imagery is indeed difficult to forget even for adult viewers, it has never been hailed for its story – it hardly has one.  It lacks drama, tension, or any sort of emotion because its pieces feel so arbitrary no matter how they’re put together.  Obviously, I don’t ask to have everything explained to me in detail like in Dark City, nor do I ask for everything in a story to be logical, but it is almost impossible for an audience to become invested in a story if it has bland, lifeless characters that act without clear motivations, scenes that take place without clear purposes, events that unfold without clear causes, and rules that must be followed without clear logic to them.  Other films can get away with a sense of arbitrary anarchy because of a fast pace and/or a sense of intense urgency, such as Big Trouble in Little China, but even with a vague “ticking clock” scenario, Legend never instills the right kind of empathic anxiety in the viewer.  Because of its immensely pleasing artistry and its successful transportation and immersion of the viewers into its distinct, yet familiar, fantasy world, it works very well as a film – just not as a movie.

Ladyhawke Review

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One of the personal projects I’ve been meaning to start working on recently is writing an analysis of a sub-genre of fantasy.  I call it the “Eighties Fantasy Quest”, and it’s basically a genre for films that feel very much like ’80s movies, yet focus on an adventure through a world full of mythological characters, fairy tale creatures, “high fantasy” concepts, or new things that feel like they spring from one of these three territories.  Think of The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal, Willow, Time Bandits, Return to Oz, Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and any other films from the ’80s that don’t just have a fantasy element but in fact seem to drown the viewer in magic, mythology, darkness, and dragons.  Obviously, this is a very diverse group of films, so I’ve been trying to find a way to map them out – separating the little girls from the big brutes and the films from Pythoners from the serious adventure thrillers.  To help me with this, I decided to watch a film that seems related to this genre and that’s considered an ’80s classic: Big Trouble in Little China.

I thought Big Trouble was fun and all, but I don’t think it was quite what I had in mind.  It fits into the genre, but for the most part, I didn’t feel like I was “taken away” to another world – and even Masters of the Universe, which largely takes place in our world, managed to give me that feeling.  As much as I enjoyed how immensely ’80s it is, I needed something with more magic, whimsy, and fairy tale-like qualities.  It also has a protagonist that’s more on the “barbarian” end of the spectrum of the EFQ genre – the place where hyper-masculinity is sold to the male viewers, although I couldn’t tell if the film was sincere about it.  Big Trouble has an odd tonal inconsistency in that Jack Burton is sometimes a joke – an American stereotype who thinks he’s invincible, unbeatable, and irresistible, but is actually an ignorant clown – and sometimes he’s genuinely cool.  Regardless, I needed something a little less macho and a little more “classical.”

Enter Ladyhawke, the high-fructose corn syrup to sugar’s Princess Bride – I know it’s not really quite as good, but at times it’s surprisingly very satisfying.  The Princess Bride certainly has the more memorable scenes, quotes, and characters, but Ladyhawke has a lot in its corner as well.  Conceptually, this is the kind of story one wants from a fantasy romance – something more than the usual “long-lost lover rescues damsel in distress from evil royal person” bit – offering a clever set-up for romantic tension and a unique reason for the audience to be concerned with the characters.  This movie doesn’t have as many fairy tale tropes as Princess Bride, or even Labyrinth, but the high concept at its core (which I refuse to spoil for those who haven’t seen the film yet) puts a distinctly “fairy tale” kind of magic at the heart of the story, making the film feel like a fairy tale storybook for adults.  I think with the benefit of a few trolls, wizards, giants, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, goblins, or dragons, it would be just the kind of fantasy story I adore.

With that said, if we shift the focus away from what the film does not do and towards what the film does do, it doesn’t do anything too badly.  It’s playful with the “hero’s journey” arc, giving two (or perhaps three) characters the role of the hero against a villain whom the audience really wants to see killed.  Matthew Broderick’s accent is hilariously inconsistent, but that actually seems to add to the charm of his character, who has some very good dialogue and a cleverly-written ongoing chat with God.  The romance is completely believable, and the movie’s closing has just the right amount of heart in just the right way.  What really sells the story, however, is the score by Alan Parsons, whose band has recorded some of my favorite songs.  The music Parsons brings to the film makes excellent use of the ’80s synthesizer, giving the film that special quality of being both very timeless and very dated in the best way possible.  When all of its odd ingredients are put together, the result is an ’80s classic that will probably hit the spot for anyone in the mood for a truly magical love story.