J.D. Hansel

Fantasy

Wonder Woman Review

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This is the short version of this review.  I wrote a version that’s so long that a friend of mine found it absurd and practically unreadable.  So click here if you want my real thoughts on this movie, or read below to get some of the highlights.

I’m not wild about this film.  It’s sub-par.  My reasons for thinking this, however, are not all “film snob” reasons – I don’t care about perfect cinematography.  What I care about is whether or not the filmmakers gave a darn, and it seems to me that they generally didn’t.

I get annoyed when a movie gets away with pretending it’s more progressive than the cash-grab it is.  I get annoyed when a movie acts like it’s offering gritty realism when it’s really just color-graded to make everything gray.  I get annoyed when a movie is hailed for being original when its story follows the same beats as every Hollywood movie I’ve seen before.  I get annoyed when the editing is so unprofessional that I find myself and the viewers around me getting confused about what’s happening.  It’s the kind of laziness that makes me feel awfully disheartened by the state of movies today, and by the state of moviegoers.  We’ve grown to accept mediocrity.

I’ll give the movie some credit though.  I like a lot of its comedy.  Some of its scenes hit the nail on the head when it came to character development, cool-looking “superhero moments,” humor, and sentimentality.  Fine.  But I’m still upset.

The way in which feminism manifests itself in the film is largely through what I call “Mary Sue’s Revenge” moments.  These are scenes in which a female who is obviously highly competent is assumed to need the aid, protection, or mercy of a man, but immediately proves herself to be just as competent as literally anyone could tell she was.  The man’s surprise is always the butt of the joke.  This kind of scene can be found once in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, twice in The Force Awakens (as though it’s hard to tell that Rey can fend for herself), and a million times on the Disney Channel, to offer a few examples.  It’s old, it’s tired, it assumes men are stupid, it assumes that women being impressive should surprise us, and it’s been done to death.

This is balanced out with several scenes in which Diana is portrayed as a naive girl who believes in fairy tales and has no idea how the world works.  In many scenes, she’s the joke of the scene, and men have to explain everything to her, which concerns me.  In most other scenes, she proves everyone wrong in a manner like what I described in the last paragraph – demonstrating her unwarranted faith in a fairy tale to be apparently valid – which also concerns me.  Can we have one movie in which we’re not surprised when the women are capable, and we’re not rooting for the believer in silly old stories?  Heck – her unsupported belief that she had found Eros in Germany led her to kill the wrong man by mistake, and I don’t think of that as promoting positive values.

So here’s the deal.  I’m giving the movie an okay rating.  It’s not because I think the movie’s all that good.  It’s not because the Hollywood execs deserve praise for finally giving audiences what audiences asked for ten years ago.  It’s because it’s simply pragmatic for all of us to say we liked this movie so Hollywood will give us more super-heroine movies.  Only then can someone make one I’ll really enjoy.

 

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Review

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People who have an obsessive passion for and enjoyment of Terry Gilliam films – or at least his more intense and bizarre creations like Time Bandits and Brazil – scare me.   Guillermo del Toro, for example, was overjoyed to see his young daughter giggle with delight at the end of Time Bandits when (spoiler alert) the young protagonist’s parents explode.  He’s happy that she found it funny that the boy’s parents died.  It’s disgusting, but it’s all part of Gilliam – he has a sense of humor that goes for extreme intensity even if it crosses ethical lines, and some film enthusiasts really go for that.  These films are, by and large, not too violent, but it’s often the merciless infliction of wild images and editing onto the audience mixed with the heartless infliction of “comedy without relief” onto the poor characters that makes these films so difficult for some to watch.  Interestingly, upon watching Brazil again many years later for an audio commentary track, Gilliam found he wasn’t sure he liked the film very much because of how brutal its comedy and story were, but it is precisely the fact that the film is too much to handle in one sitting that draws some filmmakers to it.

Edgar Wright is one of the filmmakers who absolutely adores Brazil, and I think it really shows in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the most relentless movie ever made.  It never stops.  It just keeps blasting the viewer with more unconventional and experimental insanity that is incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around, all while retaining a formulaic story that’s perfectly easy to follow.  The only way I was able to survive the movie was by taking breaks – I had to get up and walk to another room, or talk about what I’d just experienced with the friend of mine who so kindly subjected me to this film.  I think I also could have used a snack break, and maybe a few naps.  Technically, the film shouldn’t even be that hard to swallow: it’s not gory, it’s not scary, it’s not intensely dramatic (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy), it’s not addressing sensitive topics, it’s not making me feel “naked” the way The Graduate does, and it’s not flashing wild lights and vivid colors at me like that one irritating Canadian film.  It’s simply difficult to process.

What makes it difficult is the unhinged creativity.  There are no clear rules in this movie.  When a man shows up with sexy demon hipsters singing a musical number as he flies around, you have to accept it, even though there is no setup for it.  Honestly, the movie is so strange that, when one character’s ability to read minds is explained by the fact that he’s a vegan, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.”  Relatively, that does make sense.  It’s the best explanation you’ll get for anything in the movie.  The Hollywood-trained mind isn’t ready for this.

What the film shares with Terry Gilliam is an unsettling contentment with the awkwardly terrifying conditions of its reality.  There’s something very disturbing about seeing nobody react appropriately to the death of a boy’s parents – even if they are really bad parents – and watching old men in an office giddily force their bosses to walk off a blank from a skyscraper to fall to their whimsical deaths.  When something that should alarm people is met with the wrong response, it creates an effect that just feels wrong on a moral level, and that’s all over this film.  Right from the first fight scene, the way that other characters react to the brutality of what they’re witnessing feels off – it feels inhuman – and this makes the film tough to take on its first viewing (although I think it improves over time).  However, what makes it possible for the viewer to adjust as the film progresses is the fact that the movie is largely operating on video game logic, where the impossible is often normalized in ways that would be unsettling if we thought about it, and Edgar Wright has forced us to think about it.  He’s shown us a lot of our blind-spots in regards to video games simply by adapting the aspects of video games that no one has ever thought to adapt before.

I think that’s what I respect about the film.  It tells its story in the way that it believes is the most fun, the most exciting, and the most respectful to the source, regardless of whether or not it’s what people are used to.  There’s a sense that no one on set ever said, “Hey, this is going a bit too far, let’s dial it down.”  Instead, they just followed every urge to do something fresh and exciting, and this philosophy actually paid off with a lot of really funny scenes.  In fact, by putting the viewer in such a scared and vulnerable state, a lot of the comedy is made funnier, and the story’s messages are made more powerful.  So, sure, I may have lost a significant percentage of my sanity from watching this film, but it was absolutely worth it to receive all of the joy the story brings and all of the power a filmmakers can have when he dares to be relentless.

(Still, that demon musical number is just plain stupid.  Obviously.)

An American Werewolf in London Review

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My appreciation of great horror films is always a little bit limited by the fact that I don’t really care for being scared all that much.  There is still some horror out there that I like, but this film doesn’t have that much of it – most of this film’s horror portions are simply slow builds to jump-scares.  Sometimes fun builds, but the point is still the “startle,” which isn’t my kind of horror.  This film does, however, offer my kind of humor.

Most of the movie is really a sort of bizarre ’80s comedy about a college kid and his buddy having a strange experience abroad, and the character comedy is absolutely delightful.  John Landis knows how to make the minor characters funny as well; the casting of Frank Oz here is perfect, and sometimes finding the right character actor is all it takes for great comedy.  I think that’s what I like so much about this film: Landis brings together different elements that don’t usually get put together, but his careful combination creates a rare and beautiful emotional effect on the viewer – an effect of uneasy laughter.  It’s simply a work of really smart craftsmanship, and while not all of it is the kind of entertainment I’m used to, this film is already inching its way closer and closer to my heart.

Coraline Review

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I know everyone who likes Tim Burton and cares about Christmas and animation is supposed to love Nightmare Before Christmas, but I’ve honestly never been a huge fan.  It has positive elements and is very creative, but I find it slow and boring.  I also don’t love the visual style as much as I’d like to – something about it feels lacking to me.  The music irritates me too – that “This Is Halloween” song is pretty good, but the rest of the soundtrack is difficult for me to sit through.  I guess I ought to watch it again sometime soon and see if my tastes have changed now, but I remember not liking it as much as I wanted to.  James and the Giant Peach is another film by the same director, Henry Selick, but I’ve never felt like watching it because what parts of it I did see as a child were really off-putting for me then, so I still think negatively of it now (even if I don’t have very good reasons).  Coraline, however, has intrigued me on some level ever since I saw the trailer when I was much younger, and I’ve been in the mood to watch more stop-motion lately, so I decided to try this one on for size.

By gosh, what a beauty.

We see in Coraline an excellent experiment in taking all of a child’s fears, dreams, anxieties, hopes, annoyances, and pleasures and rolling them up into one nightmarish package.  On the one hand, it addresses fairly normal frustrations for children to deal with – moving away, meeting new, strange neighbors, finding vermin in the house, running out of things to do outside, and dealing with parents who don’t usually show how much they love their children (at least not in the usual ways).  This makes the movie not only relatable, but approachable.  Then there’s the flip side – the part of the film that plays with the viewer’s psychology, almost like a surrealist artist might.  Selick plays with impostor anxieties, false paradise anxieties, deoculation anxieties, “living toy” anxieties, insect anxieties, and more, all while retaining a charming children’s book feel.  It never feels like it’s trying too hard to be a horror movie – it’s just creepy and uncanny without apologies, and it’s entirely fun, whimsical, and brilliantly creative along the way.  While I have some tiny gripes with it and I suspect some parents would find parts of it inappropriate for their children, I consider this film a masterpiece, for both its mouth-watering visuals and its wonderful storytelling.

Dracula (1931) Review

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This is a fun one, folks.  Scary?  On occasion, but it’s mostly just bizarre.  It’s just strange watching one of the first sound horror films because it’s difficult to tell how I’m supposed to react to each scene – I don’t know what’s supposed to be chilling, what’s supposed to be funny, and what’s supposed to be somewhere in between.  I think most of the film is meant to be in the middle – it knows not to take itself too seriously seeing as how it is about Count Dracula, after all.  If it were remade today, it would have to either be completely changed into an entirely different (and probably greatly inferior) thriller, or it would have to be a comedy, because too much of it is just plain silly.

The film’s plot is a little hard to follow at times, and by the end of it I’m left with more questions than answers.  How does his hypnotism work?  Shouldn’t his life be a breeze if he can just hypnotize people into doing whatever he wants?  How does he always manage to stay away from mirrors?  Does he ask how many mirrors there are in any location he plans to enter before his arrival?  And since when can vampires turn into wolves?  Most importantly, how is turning into a bat helpful when you’re pulling a carriage?

But hey, I had a good time – at least when I followed along and when I wasn’t bored – so who am I to complain?  Besides, who doesn’t love Bela Lugosi?  THAT is a fun performance to watch.  The smartest move on the part of the filmmakers was making the movie short, and most other horror films from the time followed suit, making them very easy watches that can easily be squeezed into the schedule of even the busiest movie buff.  This leaves me very interested in watching more of the classic Universal Monster films, if only because the visual style helped establish Hollywood Expressionism, so naturally I find it visually enthralling.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) Review

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The story of Baron Munchausen is an old one, even though there’s really not much of a story here.  I’ve seen the old German film adaptation of this story from the 1940s, and while many hold it as a great classic of cinema, I find it unbearable.  That being said, it is imaginative, and whimsical, so I wondered what a good director/screenwriter would do with it, so I naturally became curious about Terry Gilliam’s version from the ’80s.  (I also have a big fascination with ’80s fantasy cinema, so this one’s been on my list for a long time now.)  Fortunately, Gilliam greatly improved this story by giving it more structure, but unfortunately, he negates his improvements with an ending that makes little sense.

What I like about this film is that there is a clear main cast of characters and a clear quest that serves as a through-line for all of the zany misadventures around the world (and outside the world).  Unlike the 1942 film, it is very clear in this movie which of the characters have special abilities, what abilities those are, and what these characters have to do with the Baron, so none of them throw the audience off-guard or feel too random (it’s particularly helpful that they’re part of the opening exposition).  There’s also a sense that each scene – or at least each location on the baron’s journey – makes a contribution to the story, so the story doesn’t feel too random or arbitrary.  While all of this helps make the movie far more enjoyable to watch by allowing the viewer to focus on enjoying the fantasy, by the end of the film it is entirely unclear what has happened.  There actually doesn’t seem to be any possible explanation for how the events that have occurred could have possibly occurred, unless one buys into the artsy, peusdo-intellectual notion that two or three contradictory stories can be true at the same time in cinema, which is exactly the kind of sophistry I would expect Gilliam to express.  Still, as disappointing and irritating that I find it that the film makes no sense and seemingly has no point, the cast is good, the comedy is fun, and the visuals are, predictably, absolutely delightful, making this film worth the watch for any lover of fantasy.