J.D. Hansel

Fantasy

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.

It’s a Wonderful Life Review

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This movie is not supposed to be a classic – it happened by accident.  It was a flop at the box office (far more so than The Wizard of Oz) and only got played on TV because the studio let its copyright on the film lapse in the 1970s.  Because so many people watched it as children with how often it was on television, it became a tradition to watch the movie every Christmas, but that doesn’t mean it’s that great.  It’s one of those movies that we remember as being great from our childhood, so we can still enjoy it, much like with the Rankin-Bass specials.  The difference is that It’s a Wonderful Life feels more original with the classic, memorable, charming moral of its fable, more high-quality with its top-notch director, long run-time, and great cast, and more like it fits in stylistically with the family of Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and other films that just feel emblematic of Classical Hollywood.  At the end, however, it feels like a pretty average Classical Hollywood film to me: sometimes boring, sometimes charming, sometimes impressive, and sometimes absurdly (and dare I say stupidly) weird.

First of all, its structure is about as bizarre as that of a film noir.  While Out of the Past has its interesting part in the first act and what feels like a boring afterthought for its second, this film spends the first two acts on generally humdrum exposition, leaving its iconic fantasy story for the ending.  Consequently, the whole film seems long and drawn-out, and while I can appreciate how interesting it must have seemed when it first came out because its high concept was completely new to cinema at the time, I couldn’t really stay all that interested seeing as how I knew exactly how the story ends.  I will say that the character of Mary Hatch/Bailey (Donna Reed) kept me interested in the story for a while, but the way that George Bailey (Stewart) treats her in most scenes, and the way he behaves in general, struck me as entirely unappealing and unrelatable.  I have a very difficult time caring about what happens to Bailey in general, but I will say that the film’s ending oddly warmed my heart far more than any movie I’ve seen in a long, long time.  The strength of the ending, however, is counterbalanced with the weirdness of the scenes at the beginning with the blinking stars, which were nearly a face-palm moment for me.  This film is a mix of a great many distinct and interesting things, some positive and some negative, and while I can’t say that I like it, I do think its concept is one worth consideration, and I can appreciate the original ideas it has brought to the art of the moving image.

Ghostbusters (2016) Review

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It’s not often safe to judge a screenplay by its movie – particularly if it’s a big studio film that was surely shaped by piles of notes from lofty executives – but if we grant that the director stayed fairly true to the screenplay he co-wrote then I must say that this is surely one of the worst-written films I’ve seen in years.  At a certain point, I  was getting upset when something in the film was really impressive or enjoyable, because I knew it was giving me false hope that was about to be crushed.  Most of the jokes were either too predictable or too stupid to be predicted, with many of the biggest laughs oddly coming from the film’s laziest running gag: Chris Hemsworth.  (The Hemsworth running gag is strange because it was received by some as being rather progressive, switching out the brainless female eye-candy of some male-oriented films with brainless eye-candy for women, but this actually just fits into two old stereotypes: the idea that women are completely hypnotized by brainless hunks, and the standard trope of sitcoms that men are myopic buffoons who would be helpless without women.)  Very little of value is added to the original story, and the way the screenplay tries to present the lead character (Wiig) as someone who follows the scientific method and relies on good evidence while portraying the skeptic as narrow-minded – even though thinking skeptically and thinking scientifically are the exact same thing – is not only ignorant, but irresponsible in an age of science denial.  Maybe if the four leading women had been given more room to show off their ad-lib skills there could have been much better humor, and I know I’ve seen at least three of them display great comedic prowess in the past, but the film usually sticks to material that does not work well for the Ghostbusters franchise, and that doesn’t work well as comedy.

What’s unfortunate is that I’m not convinced that it had to be a bad film – it certainly had a lot going for it (at least with its cast) – so here’s my laundry list of random things that could have been better.  I suspect that the film could have been much better had it been a sequel; that way there could be a stronger sense of the passing of the baton to a new generation, and the mayor and his assistant could have been handled very differently, making for a more-believable and generally less-stupid story (in which I don’t think all of the characters are total morons).  The fact that they got Bill Murray to come back for the film amazes me, although most of the cameos from original cast members were wasted on needless and unfunny parts.  I do, however, find Neil Casey’s villain to be an intriguing and well-played character whose story offers the most irony and originality to the film.  It’s fairly obvious that the musical number that plays behind the credits was meant to to go into the movie itself, and while I understand why it was cut, the movie appears to have a hole in it, which left me rather confused when the set-up for the number was awkwardly left in the middle of the scene without explanation.  I admire the attempt, however, as it was one of the main ways that the director tried to have fun with the project, which he also did with the visual style to some extent (particularly with the wonderfully Burton-esque parade).  I can very much appreciate the fact that the film has a lot of color, which has been frustratingly rare since shortly after I was born, but the fact that everything on screen either has the look of something that’s been recorded digitally or something made with CGI means the colors have less of a feeling of Technicolor and more of a resemblance to Raja Gosnell’s Scooby-Doo films from the early 2000s.

I don’t know if I can really say I was disappointed seeing as how I didn’t expect much to begin with, but I really wanted the film to be better than I expected.  My hope is that we will soon reach a time when good, funny comedy centered around women is at least as common on the big screen as it is on television, but I don’t see how we’re going to get there if we give Hollywood the message that we’ll settle for this kind of mediocrity.  I know that these performers can be funny, so let’s give them better opportunities to show off their skills.  In the meantime, skip this movie and re-watch the original – it’s a much less frustrating experience.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Review

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SPOILER ALERT

Ignorance is a very important part of how people experience the world; one might even go so far as to call it a fundamental human value.  We constantly rely on our ability to block out thoughts that distract us from the pertinent matters in our lives and that keep us from processing the situations we face in a way that makes sense to us.  There is no way for a middle-class citizen of the western world to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and content while regularly considering the unsung realities of nearly every aspect of human life: free will is illusory, life is quickly coming to an end, most of us will be forgotten by history, we all spend our money on things we desire while those who need our money starve, we unconsciously harbor many unethical biases, and so on and so forth.  In cinema, ignorance is perhaps the most important value, because the average Hollywood movie is only enjoyable if it can trick the audience into focusing only on an ignorant form of empathy (the kind that psychologists like Paul Bloom find harmful when applied to reality) so that they can be as engrossed in the story as possible.  Fantastic Beasts completely fails at keeping the viewer, or at least me, blissfully ignorant, instead leaving me questioning and challenging some of the most important premises of the narrative and making me painfully confused.

Regrettably, I found myself completely forgetting most of what I saw in this movie shortly after I left the theater, so it is very difficult for me to recall specific examples of my complaints about the film, but I know that my main problem overall while watching it was that I didn’t know how I was supposed to think or feel about anything that happened.  By the time I’d made it about a third of the way through, I had been wishing that I had read the novel, but I was informed by my sister that the book Rowling wrote with the same title as this film is not a novel, so I have no idea how anyone is expected to read this movie.  The plot’s problem on a large scale is that the context makes so little sense: why the heck should I believe that the only result of muggles finding out about the wizard world is their annihilation, and how can I do this without being frustrated with the wizarding community?  The only reason why the wizards would feel the need to kill all the non-wizards is if they were concerned that the non-wizards would be outraged that the wizards had kept their magic to themselves, in which case the non-wizards would be absolutely right – the wizarding community has been unethically ignoring the needs of those in poverty, in war, and in every horrible event that has occurred in human history, simply for their own convenience.  Rowling’s inability to keep me ignorant of this fact is detrimental to the story, and ultimately, I thought the villain proposed better policies than the president (who was an unreasonable jerk in her last scene).  This left me unsettled by the way that Newt took her side and went along with the nonsense that he knew from his experience with Queenie and Kowalski was needlessly causing pain.

The characters, too, are somewhat problematic.  I think the film might have been more interesting had it been about Tina, whose role seemed to be more focused than Newt’s, but her part is fine as it is.  The villain’s role in the film seemed odd to me, in part because it felt like Johnny Depp was wasted, and in part because it felt like they were trying to pull a twist ending, which couldn’t have possibly worked after the cinematographer so blatantly revealed who the villain was at the beginning of the film, making the only twist at the climax the awkward revelation of a funny-looking Johnny Depp.  The kids in the cult also seemed to have their story handled clumsily: at first I suspected the child who turned into the black Tasmanian Devil watercolor thing was Ezra Miller’s character, but then the movie informed us that this couldn’t be true because you have to be younger than him to turn into the flying scribble monster, but then the movie inexplicably nullify’s its own premise, which is absolutely terrible storytelling.  It’s a little bit strange to see just how much Newt and Tina seem to like each other on a romantic level seeing as how she looks much older than him, but this, too, is forgivable.  I’ll even give Newt’s habit of mumbling unintelligibly a pass, because ultimately, my real problem in the film is with Queenie and Kowalski.

Queenie is essentially a magical Marilyn Monroe – hyper-sexualized, yet ultimately innocent, and generally content with the way men throw themselves at her – which is odd coming from a feminist storyteller like Rowling.  As a little bit of a storyteller myself, I know from experience that adding a mind-reader to the story can cause problems, especially in a romance: she’s essentially stripping him down on a psychological level, violating the most sacred form of privacy known to humankind, and it’s all shrugged off by the other characters as a little quirk.  The inclusion of this character also has serious consequences for the logic of the Potter universe, meaning I have questions about how a mind-reader can be fairly graded on his/her Hogwarts exams, or why it is that dark wizards don’t use mind-readers to extract information from (and blackmail) their enemies.  To make matters worse, the believability of the story suffers from the fact that this beautiful woman is randomly in love with a chubby baker, and as much as she says that he’s an amazing person, we aren’t given any reason to believe this.  Everything amazing about him must be in his brain, and she’s the only one who can access that, leaving the romance they shared ultimately off-screen on a purely psychological level, thus completely distancing the audience from their romantic experience.  The other problem with their relationship, of course, is the ending: she is forced to say goodbye and make him forget her, then waits a few months for some reason, and then inexplicably shows up in his life again, presumably assuming she’ll be able to have a romantic relationship with him while hiding the fact that she knows everything about his past and his psychology, which has got to be the clunkiest ending to a romantic story I have ever witnessed.

I think what bothers me most about this film is that it could have been something very special – maybe the best Potter film to date – but instead it’s as annoying as Prisoner of Azkaban.  In terms of setting, it could obviously be an enormous amount of fun to see what wizards would do in the Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age – but the closest we get to the kind of whimsy that should have filled the film is the weird CG singer in the speakeasy that felt like a leftover from the Special Edition edits of Jabba the Hutt’s den in Return of the Jedi.  I think this could have been a fascinating drama about conflicts in the wizard community because of the laws concerning no-maj relations, or it could have been a neat story about a revolt against the wizarding establishment.  As it is, however, it’s just a weird story about an uninteresting smuggler of wild animals who wants to release a magical bird in Arizona.  I don’t understand it, and I’m not crazy about it, but I can’t say it’s not entertaining.  It’s a fine popcorn flick for anyone interested in seeing some of the weird monsters and critters Rowling’s made up for the Potter universe in an original story with a generally good cast.  It’s just not exactly … fantastic.

Scrooged Review

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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got into a big argument on their TV show back in the 1980s because of the film Back to the Future: Part II.  Ebert thought it was a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy, but Siskel found it lacking in a certain quality that the first film in the series had.  “The first film had a heart to it, and I don’t think there’s any reason why a screwball comedy couldn’t take time out to have heart.  . . . I really found it kind of unpleasant to watch in a way.”  Ebert conceded that the first film moved the audience emotionally, and the second film didn’t do that, but I don’t understand what either of them were talking about here.  There’s nothing heartwarming about the story of a boy who doesn’t like his parents, and then inadvertently changes them into likable people and ends up richer.  I think people are desperate to see heart in a movie any chance they get, even if it doesn’t belong there, and when they can’t see it, they feel like the movie is missing something fundamental.  Frankly, this is nonsense.

Heart is a very delicate thing – it can easily turn to sap if the filmmaker isn’t careful, but it amazes me how many people will take heart even when it is sappy crap.  I’ll never understand how anyone can watch the climax of the movie Elf without vomiting rainbows and pooping out snowflakes – it’s just disgusting – but this is the only way most people want to feel when they watch a Christmas movie.  This is the only way I can make sense of Ebert’s very harsh review of 1988’s Scrooged, which he thought was so horribly lacking in the heart of the original story that it seemed to him like the filmmakers must not have read it, especially because of Murray’s particularly harsh performance in the film.  I, in turn, wonder if Ebert has ever read the story, because this film captures exactly what the story needs to be in order to be applicable to the modern era.

The original story by Dickens is not exactly a light, fun, and heartwarming story – at least not until the end.  Scrooge is a thoroughly horrible person, and it is very important to the story that he starts off without a shred of human decency.  He doesn’t care if the poor and hungry die, arguing it would “decrease the surplus population.”  While it may be tempting for some to feel that Murray should have been more like his funny characters in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, this would completely undercut the story’s message.  We want to be those characters in those films, but it is crucial that Murray’s character in this film is not very likable in this film – even a Tony Stark type would be too charming for the story to function.  Also, a writer that wants to be purely heartfelt and whimsical would use Faeries of Christmas Past, not ghosts, but this story is designed to be so eerie and dark that the light of Christmas morning is like a breath of fresh air for the reader.  Much like with Our Town, the story makes its case well because it forecasts death and doom, and it uses its darkness in order to keep the positive message from being so cheery as to seem unrealistic and so sweet as to seem disgusting, while also motivating the audience to live better lives.

It’s also important that the film take the heartless approach that it does to most of the film because it’s not a straight adaptation of the story: it’s a modern-day comedy, and that has different requirements than a traditional adaptation or a drama would.  Comedy, unlike what many people suppose, is not a particularly cheery genre by nature – it’s actually, in its purest form, quite brutal.  Comedy assaults the ego, making a mockery of humankind and all of its accomplishments, revealing absurdity in the things we hold most sacred, including Christmas.  This movie understands that, so it makes Murray a total jerk, the man he fires a drunken psycho, and the Ghost of Christmas Present a cartoony, merciless sadist, creating the sense that the film must have been directed by Yakko Warner or Daffy Duck.  It also modernizes the story with a  Nora Ephron approach before the films of Ephron’s era of romantic comedy even came out: it addresses the old story it’s retelling pretty directly, displays skepticism towards its relevance or believably in the post-Vietnam era, dismisses it as pure fiction, and then ultimately decides to go along with it anyway.  The films of the late ’80s and 1990s that revisited old stories and genres had a different audience that was not as willing to believe in stories with pure and concentrated heart, so the smart ones knew to tell the audiences that they knew the story was a silly fairy tale, and this allowed the audience to humor it anyway.  This film uses its dark humor wisely to give the audience the licence to believe in an otherwise unbelievable story, which is exactly what it needed to do.

It’s interesting to compare Scrooged to other modern Christmas classics, such as Elf, which have a lot more heart to them.  With Elf, not everything is sweet: his father is a jerk at the start, and the people of New York are initially reticent about embracing Christmas cheer, but these scenes with real-world problems and minor profanity are used to make the unrealistically jolly world where people say “cotton-headed ninny-muggins” seem entirely absurd.  The film then makes an awkward turn-around towards the end and insists that the world of jolliness must entirely trump the world of the normal people, as though the jolliness is inexplicably no longer absurd, but an important part of the human experience.  This is easily accepted by the people of New York without believable justification, and everything feels excruciatingly forced.  In Scrooged, on the other hand, nobody ever has to believe in the ghosts Murray encountered, and the characters only go along with Murray’s musical number because he’s crazy enough to fire them if they don’t and the TV crew is being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.  One film makes the case that faithful belief, even in something everyone in real life knows is obviously a lie, is intrinsically good, the other makes the case that we sometimes have to embrace a little bit of craziness because we’re a desperate, crazy species in a depraved, crazy world, which is clearly more honest and ethical.

In short, even though I have my issues with it, this is already one of my favorite Christmas movies.  It’s over-the-top, delightfully dark, and incredibly clever, even if it could use a few more laughs than it has.  It’s another one of those movies that feels like an ’80s movie should: it’s too dark for it to be made as a kid’s film today, but too childlike to be a movie for adults today, so it’s right in the sweet spot.  Its costumes, sets, and special effects are just right, and it even has a little bit of a Tim Burton feel to it, which is probably largely due to Danny Elfman’s perfectly fitting score.  I will say that I thought some of it could have been a little bit more original.  (For example, I got the impression that the Ghosts of Christmas Past wouldn’t be literal ghosts, but real people whom Murray’s character interprets to be the ghosts, but they went the boring literal way, which I guess worked out fine because of their unique casting choices for the first two ghosts.)  If you’re looking for Rankin-Bass levels of good holiday cheer, you and Roger Ebert can go look elsewhere, but this is the film I’m looking forward to watching at Christmastime for years to come.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks Review

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Mary Poppins is just plain crazy.  It’s based on a book filled with various adventures that don’t always connect, and consequently the film often lacks coherency.  Some scenes in the movie have absolutely no place in the story, and are merely a pretty spectacle – certainly “Step in Time” seems this way, and no such song would be written for any musical produced after Disney’s The Little Mermaid.  One of the characters (the mother) was given a mission that goes nowhere as far as the story is concerned, just because the writers wanted to give her something to do; in the book she just wasn’t around much, with no explanation.  Some of the actors could not sing properly, while others were completely inept at presenting believable British accents.  Yet, somehow, Mary Poppins is one of the far greatest films of all time.  It is not only a classic, but a top-tier classic, and it could never be replicated.

Interestingly, they tried to replicate it.  The story of Bedknobs and Broomsticks revolves around a magical woman who ends up caring for a few bored British kids (who are clearly designed to give the film the same tone as Poppins) and David Tomlinson (Poppins’ Mr. Banks) takes a main role.  The film features big, Broadway-like musical numbers that add little or nothing to the plot, and the characters randomly spend part of their time in a cartoon world.  The film is very much aware of the historical context of its story and has fun with it, and it also has fun with the special effects that were possible at the time, with some scenes that remind me very much of Spoonful of Sugar.  In short, this is a very careful forgery of the kind of feeling that Mary Poppins had, and while it’s not perfect, it’s still a decent forgery – to the point that it has become a classic in its own right.

I use the word charm quite a bit in my reviews, but I can find no better word for the special quality of Mary Poppins that this film recaptures other than charm (or perhaps Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious).  It’s the little things that make it work so well – the way it’s easy to see how the effects are done, or the way the children frequently interrupt Angela Lansbury’s singing with their little remarks.  Some of the visuals are fantastic (literally), and I especially love the way it looks when they travel with the bed.  The one thing Bedknobs improves upon in comparison to Poppins is its use of David Tomlinson as a showman, because now I feel like his talent was almost wasted for most of Poppins, but apart from that, this film does feel like it’s lacking something.  I think perhaps I would have liked it better if I had watched it growing up, and having only seen it as a young adult, it doesn’t quite “wow” me as much as I would hope – in fact I found much of the plot rather tedious due its lack of . . . well, plot.  It does indeed have a story, but the story is loose (and randomly involves fighting Nazis at the end) because the film is more interested in the emotional effect of its individual scenes than it is the intrigue of its story.  That being said, I can’t imagine The Gnome-Mobile is any better, so I’ll take what I can get.

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