Fantasy

Hotel Transylvania Review

September 9, 2015 by JD Hansel

This is the first of a few films I’m going to review this month that are at the very least passable on the grounds that, in spite of their clichés and shortcomings, they unfailingly hold a grip on my enjoyment simply by being so strangely interesting. Hotel Transylvania is, by all means, a stereotypical CG animated film, with shameless repetition of embarrassing tropes, as I can easily explain by summing up the film. An overprotective widowed father (see Finding Nemo) whose “innocently villainous” demeanor makes him a bizarre parental figure (see Despicable Me) lives in a world populated with monsters (see Monsters Inc.) and runs a hotel to provide solitude the legendary figures (the film’s primary, if not only, defining feature) in order to protect his daughter from the dangers of the outside world (see Tangled). The stupid teenage protagonist gets a crush on the girl who’s voiced by a pop star (see The Lorax) and finds that she wants her freedom (see Brave), and now the protagonist has to avoid being caught for deceiving everyone (see A Bug’s Life) while the couple hopes they can fulfill her dreams of going to paradise (see Up). This isn’t even mentioning the fact that it ends in a random musical number set to a pop song, making it even more reminiscent of Despicable Me, or the running gag concerning an awkward old lady doing something inappropriate while uttering a catchphrase with an odd accent, which in this case is the monster who eats things and says, “I dint do that,” but it’s basically “bad kitty” from Madagascar.

While the whole film feels too familiar, these are merely the ugly little details that fill the gaps between the beautiful experiences of seeing such great, strong characters trying to figure out how to handle the protagonist’s incredibly difficult situation whilst navigating through this frighteningly inventive world. The way that the characters – and other magical/mythical elements – are consistently used in ways I never would have considered. The movie is silly, smart, and surprising, which makes it a good family movie to share with anyone. I can almost forgive the horrendous cliché of the part when the loud party music comes to a halt just as someone is yelling something personal to someone else, creating a very “CG family film” scene that’s both awkward and sad. That being said, the only reason why that scene alone hasn’t earned this film a terrible rating from me is this: I already miss the film’s delightful characters, and I’m eager to join them again when the sequel arrives.

Lucy Review

July 30, 2015 by JD Hansel

This film seems to be, at least to some extent, emulating 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I’ll give it the same criticism I’d give to Kubrick: “If you’re going to contribute to the discussion of human evolution, all I ask is that you please use complete sentences.” Notice how that last sentence of mine was quite full, risking being overcrowded, but at least it got its whole point across in the best way possible. That is what I like. I like it when ideas are fully explicated, and it should show that the writer has cooked up some good food for thought, rather than just gesturing in the general direction of a kitchen saying, “make your own.” Don’t get me wrong – I’m perfectly capable of coming up with my own ideas, and inventing stories to describe them, but when a filmmaker concocts an idea only halfway with the intention of leaving the explaining to me, I get stuck with all of the tedious labor. This just makes the creator seem lazy. The key problem with Lucy is that it serves as a great prompt for someone to fully explicate its ideas in a more creative and interesting story, but a truly great film would have a hypothesis at its core, not a prompt.

Now I suppose I must explain what I mean when I say a prompt or a hypothesis. A prompt (according to my mental movie dictionary) says, “Here’s a thing that could happen.” A hypothesis says, “If this happened, here are some of the implications and conflicts that could arise.” This is the difference between “What if a teenager got a time machine?” and “If a teenager got a time machine, what would happen if he accidentally kept his parents from falling in love?” I wonder if the old adage “show, don’t tell” has taught filmmakers to show ideas rather than exploring their implications. The way that Lucy explores the idea of a person gaining access to 100% of the mind consists of the following: Dr. Exposition (Morgan Freeman) runs through a checklist of what would happen at a given percentage of access to the brain, in spite of the fact that he has no way of knowing this since it’s all guesswork, and then Lucy coincidentally displays that behavior at the exact same time. There are missed opportunities for good storytelling at every corner: the drama of her parents losing their daughter, the comedy of watching her clumsily try to use powers she hasn’t mastered, the sadness of the loss of her friendships, the confusion of figuring out where the powers came from, the arguments about what to do with the knowledge she has, the irony of a girl who flunked math suddenly being an expert, the heartbreak of her growing apart from her lover… okay, I got that last one from Her, but it would still work, if the writer had given her a decent boyfriend. Alas, the film is mostly interested in going through a laundry list of special effects, and the plots are secondary. Here’s the bizarre part: this movie held my interest.

I didn’t care all that much about Lucy as a character because the film puts a roadblock at any potential route to empathy. At the beginning of the film, she’s clearly not the type of person anyone with half a brain would want to befriend, and we haven’t learned enough about her to empathize yet. Then, she progressively becomes less and less human throughout the “story,” thus placing her in the mental category of “non-person,” and we humans have a hard time remembering to care about anything in that category. To make plot all the more futile, conflict is practically non-existent since there is no appropriate adversary for an omnipotent goddess, and it’s a given that she will inevitably succeed unharmed. My enjoyment of the film is relying almost entirely on my relationship with the director, who keeps tossing interesting ideas and visuals my way for me to enjoy. Sometimes he gets so pretentious it’s laughable, but I must admit that I was pretty entertained on the whole, and the film even passed my Pause Test. It tries to substitute drama with intensity, and it kind of pulls off this trick by being concise.

So, in the end, it may not be a brilliant masterpiece, but it keeps the viewer curious about what’s coming next, and it satisfies the curiosity adequately, making for a good cinematic experience.

Inside Out Review

June 28, 2015 by JD Hansel

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

PureFlix is – and I expect always shall be – my archenemy, but Pixar sure does come close.

Pixar seems to exist only to irk me specifically more than anyone else on the planet, and it has a few tricks for doing this that serve as “the Pixar old standbys.” To me, a movie that tries to tug on the heartstrings too soon is like a guy who gropes a woman’s bum in the first minute of a blind date. It is blatantly violating, and yet Pixar gets away with it constantly. Both Pixar and Disney have become notorious for killing off characters seemingly solely because they don’t know how else to hold our attention, or they think we’ll feel unsatisfied with our Disney experience if we don’t meet a certain tear quota. I think it is largely because of Pixar that killing off a character in a children’s movie is no longer an act of courage, but ironically of cowardice, fearing that the audience cannot be emotionally moved enough by the characters without a death involved. They also have one of the fundamental principles of storytelling backwards: anyone who’s taken a high-school-level class in journalism ought to know that empathy with a character is used to make the audience care about a situation, so to use a situation to try to make people empathize with a character is taking the horns by the bull. Yet, somehow, projects under Lasseter’s thumb frequently use emotional, tragic circumstances in an attempt to make us care about a character – in lieu of simply writing a character that’s interesting from the get-go regardless of circumstances.

Above all, Pixar is notorious for an awe of “The Aw.” “The Aw” can refer to either the sound a canned sitcom audience makes when a character is sad, or the sound that a stereotypical (or perhaps typical) preteen girl makes when brought joy by immense cuteness and sentimentality. As a proud skeptical cynic, I find that watching Pixar with a crowd is comparable to being a punk rocker at a Carpenters concert – the urge to puke is overpowering. Sometimes watching Pixar makes me feel more like being in a very strict religious school, except the intense dogma has been replaced with intense sappiness that is inflicted upon me. Now, the studio that lives to make us cry – a prime directive I find mildly immoral and satanic – has the audacity to make a film about the importance of sadness.

So why in the name of Bing Bong do I love this movie?

Well, it was pleasant, impressive, and simply fun in every way from start to finish, and actually seemed to be aimed right at me for a change. The film is the most imaginative commentary on the human mind I have ever seen, only closely followed by Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. As a big believer in the notion that the replacement of practical effects, puppetry, hand-drawn animation, and painted sets with CGI has largely been to the detriment of film, and I do think the film could have benefited from being a 2D or puppet film instead. I must recognize, however, that this is probably the best all-CGI film I’ve seen in terms of visuals, so it’s certainly on par with The Lego Movie in at least one regard. The way the human mind is imagined in this film is just so clever that one wants to spend forever wandering about this world, much like in The Wizard of Oz.

I also consider Inside Out to be Oz-like in terms of story structure, and unlike some films, this pulls off an Oz storyline without seeming weak or unoriginal for a second. I think every screenwriter should study Inside Out as an example of how to write a nearly perfect screenplay. It’s a very interesting premise to begin with, and the execution of the idea satisfies by exploring all of the areas of the mind that one would hope to see explored. Pixar’s take on dreams was spot on, it’s take on memories was clever, and its joke about facts and opinions was absolutely brilliant. Somehow this script is mostly a series of wonderfully clever jokes, but they never get in the way of the plot. The characters were all delightful, and the casting was superb. I liked essentially every character in this movie – even Sadness.

This, of course, leads to my thoughts on both the portrayal of Sadness, and the use of sadness. The role of Sadness essentially seems to be adding weight and significance to important people, places, and things in our lives by revealing how painful it would be to lose them. This is just a modification of the age-old contrast excuse: bad must exist in order for good to have meaning. Pardon me for getting philosophical, but I’m not a fan of this argument since knowledge of bad would actually be all that is required for good to have meaning, and no actual, existent bad is necessary in any form. This means that sadness is still an unnecessary emotion if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge, understanding, perspective, and good reasoning. While Inside Out’s solution to the Sadness problem is not perfect, I do think it is acceptable, but I personally would have emphasized the important role sadness has in empathy. This brings us to Bing Bong.

Somehow they found a way to incorporate death, and it’s in the most bizarre way, especially when one considers that people can recollect things that they’ve long forgotten, so a mere mention of Bing Bong from Riley’s mom could resurrect him. Still, the decision to kill of Bing Bong is an odd one simply because it’s not really necessary, which just makes it feel like an excuse to get the audience crying. I suppose that he was, by the end of the movie, just dead weight, but he could have stuck around. The cleverness of using his wagon to get back up over the Cliffs of Insanity made that scene powerful and impressive enough as it was, and the wagon had no need to stall. This is, however, nitpicking.

Amazingly, nitpicking is all I can do to criticize it. This comes so amazingly close to the perfect screenplay that I am just as impressed as I’d hoped I would be. I am so happy that Pixar finally made a hilarious, charming, and imaginative movie that’s right up my alley. At last I can congratulate Lassiter, Docter, and the rest of the Pixar team for a job well done.

Left Behind (2000) Review

May 4, 2015 by JD Hansel

Oh boy, here we go …

For the most part, you can just take Kevin McCreary’s review and insert it here. I would, however, like to address a few things myself, and I’ll start with the positives. First of all, there are actually some really nice shots in this film that are theatrical enough to be right up my alley. Second, the film takes its time before it starts shoving the Bible in our faces, allowing the story’s development to take center stage for a while. Third, it’s tough for a religious movie to say “this is the world you’re living in” without it feeling both preachy and unrealistic, so I think it may work in this movie’s (or perhaps this genre’s) favor to do something more in the vein of sci-fi/fantasy.

That being said, the movie is still pretty silly, rather preachy, a little unbelievable, and a bit too cliche. I always like the rule that events can be unrealistic, but the reactions of the human characters to these events must be realistic if we are to take the story at all seriously, and I don’t think this movie makes the human characters quite believable enough for the story to work. The movie begs to be riffed, as I did throughout. It doesn’t do the best job at holding my attention, so I actually paused the movie one day and abandoned it for a few weeks. My long break from the film was also due to the fact that I found it kind of depressing – several cars and planes crashing, people losing loved ones, and especially dogs lost without their owners are all ideas I’d rather not associate with a benevolent supreme being.

So, in the end, it’s not the worst movie I’ve seen, but it’s far from the best. Oh, and please, no more bookend voice-overs in religious movies ever again.

Harvey Review

April 23, 2015 by JD Hansel

It’s been weeks since I watched Harvey. I thought it was fitting to watch it on Easter, but then I never got around to reviewing it until now. So I’ll just review it now, and hopefully I’ll remember most of it.

Harvey, the third film in my unexplained series of reviews of movies that start with “Ha,” is a pleasant film. The plot concerns a man who repels most people he meets because he has a large invisible rabbit for a friend. It is based on a play, and it feels like watching a play the whole time. It is clever and funny, but since the main character (played by James Stewart) isn’t very real or relatable to me, the film didn’t totally hold my attention the whole time.

The plot was structured well in my opinion, and sort of reminded me of Shakespeare’s style. The ending was a little weak, but it was still nice. There were a few shots in the movie that looked pretty good, and some shots that were somewhat of impressive from a technical standpoint, but it’s a rather ordinary-looking film on the whole. Some of the lines are good, but the humor is by no means brilliant since it’s nearly all relying on the same joke: no one knows how to handle this crazy guy’s invisible friend Harvey. Still, it’s certainly a decent comedy film that will get a few laughs from its viewers.

So, in the end, it’s probably worth seeing. It’s not necessarily a must-see, but it’s a cute movie that is nice to watch every once in a while.

Harry Potter 8 Review

April 5, 2015 by JD Hansel

Let’s talk about Hermione. By that, of course, I mean let’s really overanalyze her character and make theoretical presumptions about her mindset without having read the books. What, you don’t want to talk about Hermione? You just want a review of the movie?

No. We’re talking about Hermione.

I love this character. Hey – I see that smug smile on your face, and no, I don’t mean it that way! I mean I care about this character because I empathize with her. I like her approach to life … unless of course what I really like is my assumption of what her approach to life is. Let’s think about this – she’s muggle-born, and that means she’s doomed to be mocked, scorned, and called a – cover your ears, kids – mudblood. Ouch. So, putting myself in her shoes, I think about what the best way to handle the insecurity that comes with such a burden would be.

Here’s the cool thing about wizardry: it’s established by Hagrid early on in the franchise that pretty much any wizard can cast the same spells with about the same effect as any other wizard, after enough practice. There isn’t much in the Harry Potter world, or at least not the cinematic world, to suggest that the purebred wizards always do better wizarding than those with human blood mixed in. So, it would seem that being a great witch or wizard is not determined solely by nature, but is in fact largely just know-how. Essentially, in a world in which everyone has access to the same spells, and with practice can use them to about the same effect, whoever has the most knowledge has the most power.

Let’s bring it all back to Hermione. She could have handled her insecurity about being muggle-born in a number of negative ways. However, Hermione, in her awesomeness, was wise enough to instead take on a pursuit of knowledge, which would naturally give her power over most other witches and wizards regardless of bloodline. This is where the genius of Hermione lies; it’s not in her book smarts, but in her passion for learning. She doesn’t need to be a chosen one, a prodigy, or a legend in order to have power. She has her brain. So, when I sat down to watch the final film in the franchise, I was waiting to see how good ol’ Hermione ends up.

I’ll come back to that in a moment, but first let’s get the real review-ish part of this review out of the way. The film looks as good as its last two predecessors, with a score that’s about the same, although maybe slightly vamped up. The story is by and large very fascinating because it keeps the audience asking new questions while simultaneously answering old questions. I was mostly sucked in, although it’s hard for me to care about what happens to Harry as much as I care about what happens to Little Miss You-Know-Who. I could have used more focus on the relationships in this than on the Horcruxes, but it’s still cool all in all. I love the Snape twist. I was actually very thankful for the epilogue scene because the series didn’t feel like it had enough closer without it, and it made it a little easier to say goodbye to these guys.

But Hermione. What was her reward for her brilliance? Surely J.K. would reward being wise more than being chosen by fate, right? After all, to do otherwise would essentially value superstition and luck over reason and thinking. Guess what! In this movie, Hermione has more bad ideas than good ones, feels like a side character, marries Ronald, and is upstaged by the outstanding development of … wait, I have to go look up his name again … oh, right, his name’s Neville Longbottom. I forgot. I’m not making it up; I really did.

I’d have jumped up and cheered had the wand Harry was using, upon flying into the air, flew through the sky over to Hermione, but noooooo . . . it makes far more sense for it to go to Longbottom. Look, Longbottom is allowed to really grow as a character, and he’s allowed to avenge his parents, but it’s just not right for him to be given more glory than Hermione. Heck, when I was a little boy, I’d get to suck on a red Dum Dum lollipop if I was reasonably well-behaved at the doctor’s office. That’s a decent prize for a small feat, but since Hermione has just been flippin’ brilliant throughout the whole franchise, she deserves a lot more than getting to suck on a redhead dum-dum for the rest of her life. Does it show that I don’t particularly care for Ronald? I really don’t. His only role in the franchise seems to be showing up, eating, panicking, swearing, and leaving, and I had no interest in seeing him together with Hermione, who honestly seemed to have more chemistry than Harry anyway.

I digress. Wait, no I don’t. I’m still not totally okay with this. I care about Hermione, and I don’t even know if she ever gets to reunite with her parents. The movie could have focused on her a lot more than it did, but on the whole, it was a good, fun film that seemed to give the series the completion it deserved. It just didn’t give Hermione what she deserved. Ten points from Gryffindor.