J.D. Hansel

Foreign

Delicatessen Review

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I think the first time I ever saw a scene from a French film was in one of my classes at Harford Community College.  The professor showed a brief clip in which residents of an apartment were all moving in unison to the rhythm of a couple having sex on a bed.  I never knew where it came from, but I would have liked to see the whole film since this scene struck me as both humorous very artistic.

I think the first time I ever saw a French film all the way through was when I watched Amélie.  Consequently, the stylistic choices of Jean-Pierre Jeunet formed my entire schema of what a French film was for a very long time – I think I assumed that his style was normal for French cinema because I didn’t realize the scene I had seen from Delicatessen was by the same director.  Now that I’ve seen many more French films, I can clearly see how Amélie and Delicatessen clearly belong in their own little corner doing their own little thing.

After a bit more consideration, however, what’s struck me is just how different the two films are.  Amélie, while it engages with the dark and gloomy, is extremely romantic, and Delicatessen, while it engages with romance, is extremely dark and gloomy.  Delicatessen takes pride in its repulsiveness, and for some strange reason, I appreciate that.  It’s a very icky movie, and I think it may have started a lot of bad trends in the filmmaking styles of the 1990s (bland color schemes, excessive fish-eye lenses, etc.), but it’s still clever, slick, and a well of creative inspiration.  Don’t make the same mistake I did – now that you know about it, see it sooner rather than later.

The Visitors Review

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Alternative Title: Les Visiteurs

My uncle never liked Monty Python was he was younger – he just found it too stupid to be enjoyable.  Eventually, as he got older, he kind of came around, but he attributes it to getting old and losing a few brain cells.  I have a hard time understanding that because I love Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but I found myself experiencing a similar disdain for immense stupidity while watching this film.

Les Visiteurs is a French comedy about a knight and his servant in the year 1123 who accidentally travel to France in 1992 and have to get back.  It’s a very stupid, stupid comedy, but the French people, weirdly enough, love it.  It was #1 at the French box office in its day, and it is the fifth-highest-grossing film in the country today, so the professor of my French Film and Culture class had to show it.

The professor noted that the film has some resemblance to Monty Python, but, while I can see that, I think it’s too focused on making gross, obvious, and in-your-face jokes, without the more cerebral critique of humanity’s pathetically mechanical nature that Python does so well.  The film also has many bothersome scenes showing grotesque transformations of faces, which remind me of some of the films based on the works of Roald Dahl in that the imagery is more unsettling and uncanny than entertaining.  I don’t hate the film – some parts are funny – but maybe I’ll appreciate it more if I lose a few brain cells.

Brotherhood of the Wolf Review

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Alternate Title: Le Pacte des loups

I feel the need to highlight this French film that isn’t very well-known in the States, even though it should be.  It’s an entertainment film, much like what one would expect from Hollywood, but there’s a key difference.  In the middle of its fights scenes and romance, there’s a running theme of the significance of the Age of Reason.  Consequently, it’s a skeptic’s alternative to Sleepy Hollow – a neat Halloween movie that does a better job of celebrating critical thinking.  While it is rather slow, it’s also dramatic, creepy, and clever.  Try it on for size one night when you’re in the mood for some chills.

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.

Toni Erdmann Review

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The past few years have seen a strikingly large number of films that have made a big splash unexpectedly, shaking up cinema and dividing critics.  From La La Land to Deadpool, or maybe even LEGO Batman, much of the fun of seeing a popular movie from 2016 is the experience of bafflement brought on by how unlikely it is that such a film could get a wide release in theaters with how far it strays from what studio execs normally like.  Toni Erdmann presents the European side of the story.  Some people I’ve known who’ve seen it find it entirely ordinary, whereas some critics think it’s a sign that cinema’s not dead.  As a contemporary German film, one would expect a certain set of features that this film does, in fact, have: hyper-realism, a focus on real world issues (without neatly simplifying them to straightforward sermons), unsettling use of nudity, sex, and violence, and unconventional engagement with America’s entertainment industries.  That being said, it does all this with a strange style – with a sentiment that’s difficult to pinpoint because it swings so far from being very objective, logical, and factual to being fun entertainment cinema, and then fully into raw depression.  With such a strange hodgepodge of emotion, it’s difficult for people to discern how best to categorize the film in terms of genre.

While it’s been marketed as a comedy, this feels sort of like cheating since most of the film isn’t as fun as the trailers (which give the impression of a Coen Brothers film) would have one believe.  There is clearly such a strong element of family drama in the film, and arguably some sort of political drama as well, in a sense, that there is good reason to think of this as a drama with comedic moments, but fortunately, the term “dramedy” allows us to stop worrying about such a dispute.  I would argue, however, that the film is first and foremost a comedy, and that’s because of how the film engages with Freudian comedy theory.  When the movie engages with comedy, it’s a kind of awkward comedy that doesn’t just let the viewer laugh at characters who act strangely or get into awkward situations, a la The Office, but rather makes the audience feel personally uncomfortable.  I almost feel bad about being in the room at a time when the characters are so vulnerable, and consequently I can’t help but laugh for the sake of release, and it’s also funny because of how unaware the characters seem to be of the absurdity of their own situation.  I think this is why, while the whole movie is, in a word, relentless, the funny scenes stand out as the most memorable.  The film essentially presents a panorama of all the different kinds of “confrontation with the uncomfortable” that cinema has to offer, but it’s the funny scenes that make it something particularly special.

The Third Man Review

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Have you ever seen one of those movies that pulls such a clever trick on you with its slick, surprising writing that you just sit back, swallow your pride, and give it a nice, slow clap?

This is The Third Man, which is one of those odd films known as a “British Noir.”  It’s within the cinematic territory of film noir, most certainly, yet it comes from another country, which goes against some definitions of what can be counted as real film noir.  It’s really a shame, too – I want to count it as film noir because I think it’s the best film noir.  I’ve written before about how film noir is my kind of genre, with over-the-top drama, cynical representations of humanity, and an atmosphere of extreme, theatrical darkness, but there are very few films in the genre that I really enjoy as movies.  Sure, nearly each and every one I’ve seen has looked great, but the stories, characters, and general logical structures have often been severely lacking, so I can really only think of two or three films noir that I can say I love.  Of course, with the addition of The Third Man, it’s three or four, because this is almost certainly my favorite thus far.

It may seem like I’ve been so disappointed by films noir in the past (see Detour) that I could very easily be pleased by a film in the genre that just had a decent story, good plot twists, smart dialogue, and enjoyable characters, but I actually came into this film with high expectations.  The cinematographer on the short film I’m working on at the moment told me it’s her favorite movie of all time, which is an odd thing to hear about a 1940s British drama from a millennial college student.  I was ready to heavily scrutinize this film, but there’s really so little here to hate.  The characters are stronger here than they are in nearly any noir I’ve seen since Double Indemnity, which is probably my favorite American noir, and the visuals here (including atmosphere, camera angles, lighting, editing, location choices – all of it) may be the best I’ve seen in any noir since Key Largo, which is possibly my second-favorite.  I love the writing of this movie particularly because it’s so intelligent in the way it delivers information and transitions to new scenarios, consistently throwing the viewers off guard while keeping them engaged.

The one hinderence to this sense of engagement, however, is the pacing.  Some of the film has excellent pacing, but much of it seems to lag, making for several scenes that are just plain boring.  Even the ending, which I think is fairly difficult to get wrong when it’s been set up so perfectly such that any almost any imaginable ending after the climax’s conclusion would have provided satisfactory closure, is remarkably boring.  I imagine that the slow pacing is largely for deliberate, artistic reasons, but it’s still a major fault on the movie’s part for me because it pulls me out of the story – just as I get sucked into the emotions of the characters, a tedious moment arises that makes me zone out and miss information.  This is very frustrating, and what makes it so strange and disappointing is the film’s regular use of rapid, quick-cutting montage to add intensity to the scene, which should pick up the pace, but actually seems to hold it back.  I think with just a little more focus on the plot, this film would have gotten a higher rating out of me.

All that being said, I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed by a movie in this style/genre before, and I tip my hat to Carol Reed and Graham Greene for telling one of the far best mystery stories I’ve ever heard.