J.D. Hansel

Halloween Movie

Rocky Horror Picture Show Review

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This movie is often compared to Phantom of the Paradise, with fans of each film arguing about which is better.  While I would certainly put myself on “Team Phantom” in this debate, I’m not sure that this is a fair comparison seeing as how they are so incredibly different.  Phantom is careful and thoughtful, setting up a story that manages to be simple, yet detailed, derivative, yet surprising.  Rocky Horror just happens.  While it can be said that each film is something wild that happens to the viewer, Rocky Horror isn’t as focused on a story, a causal chain, a logic, a message, or an argument – it’s just things happening.

The kinds of things that happen are a mix.  Some of the music is great and memorable, but a lot of it is completely forgettable.  The soundtrack is largely just average ’70s pop, without much to make it stand out, so after a while it all runs together, and it becomes a little bit annoying when one song ends only for another to begin.  In a way, however, this is part of the beauty of the film.  It doesn’t really care what it is, so long as it keeps on being whatever the heck it’s supposed to be.  This ‘devil may care’ attitude empowers the film to be charmingly weird, with excellent visuals, bizarre humor, unconventional editing, random turns in the plot, inexplicable changes of character, and very memorable performances.

The structure is essentially a series of “Big-Lipped Alligator Moments.”  Generally, a movie is supposed to have two kinds of transitions: “therefore” and “but then.”  This film, on the other hand, has only one transition: “and now this is happening, and now this is happening, and now this is happening.”  While the musical upon which this film is based is clearly the result of at least one “trip,” the movie feels like a dream – it feels mostly random and spontaneous, but there are important recurring themes and logical connections between different parts of the film (such as the appearance of Tim Curry in the wedding photos).  The film offers no explanation for itself and no apologies – it just drags the viewer along for a wild ride with no questions asked, and for that I greatly appreciate it.

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.

Suspiria Review

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As I’ve continued my new journey through old horror movies, I’ve decided to return to the director of Phenomena/Creepers to see what is probably his most famous and acclaimed work, Suspiria.  Another of Dario Argento’s semi-Italian films with weird dubbing, this film caught my attention because I read a description of it somewhere that called it “candy-colored,” and based on what I saw in photos, that seemed to be an appropriate description.  This is, in terms of visuals, one of the top three greatest films I have ever seen in my life, and it insists on lighting and coloring its interesting sets in the most theatrical style possible with no interest in explaining why everything turns red when the lights go out or why the walls have illustrations that sing of Lewis Carroll.  When the visuals are put together with the wonderfully creepy score, it creates an eerie, powerful, and beautiful experience in nearly every scene.  That being said, this film is evidence of the fact that a series of great and interesting scenes or moments does not constitute a great story.  The plot is simply impossible to follow and hardly anything in this movie makes any sense.  It has good moments, but they do not function within a machine of set-ups and pay-offs or anything resembling quality dramatic, ironic storytelling.

I’m giving this film a big pass on the stupidity of its plot because of how fun and scary it is in all the right ways, and because I’m a sucker for old cult films with Jessica Harper, but I’m still rather upset that it hasn’t been released on Blu-Ray yet.  I know they’ve been working on it, but I can’t help but feel that my review is inevitably insufficient until I get to see all of the film’s magnificent beauty in the highest quality possible.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Review

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It’s rare for me to see a film with a plot as difficult to follow as this one.  Even though I searched online for plot descriptions to help me out, I got lost during many parts of the film, which might be a sign of bad filmmaking, but might just mean part of the film is missing.  Fortunately, this movie isn’t so much about plot as it is about visuals, moods, moments, characters, realizations, and experiences.  It has a visual style that many films have emulated, but not nearly enough, and depending on the score that accompanies it, it can be a totally wild experience (right down to the inter-titles).  I certainly have my issues with the film – it’s really rather boring at times, and I’m not wild about much of the confusing storyline – but when critics all over the world praise and hail this film as a gem of cinema, I have to agree.  The reason why I have to agree is that I am forever in this film’s debt for offering cinema the kind of theatrical style that I adore, and that alone makes it one of the greatest contributions to the history of film.

In the future, though, let’s try to make German Expressionist visuals that don’t use that annoying yellow tint for half the film, okay?

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Creepers/Phenomena Review

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I think I’ve written before about my love for nanar, which is the French term for a movie that’s so bad that it becomes enjoyable.  I know I’ve written before about my love for movies that are nanar in some scenes and legitimately impressive in others.  Since I am finding more and more films that seem to fit this category, I’ll call this type of film a génial–nanar blend.  Usually I only note one of these kinds of films if I absolutely love it, which was the case for Masters of the Universe, but sometimes there are parts that are bad enough to be mildly enjoyable in some scenes and decent in others.  This is a bit more common and less noteworthy, so we don’t often think much of these films, but one that stands out for me is Phenomena, or as it was known in the United States, The Creepers.

Phenomena is the title I use for it because it’s the name of the original, longer version of the film, which is the version that I saw, so those who’ve seen it as Creepers may have seen a much worse film than I did.  This is an Italian film from Dario Argento, a name I didn’t recognize since I’ve never been much of a horror buff, but he seems to be a bit of a name in the field.  The star of the film, however, is not an Italian, but a young Jennifer Connelly, and seeing as how I’m obsessed with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, I had to see this movie.  She does a decent job with most scenes, but fortunately there’s some cheesy and over-the-top acting in there to make the film nice and campy.  That being said, the consequence of an American star in an Italian film is that most of the characters are dubbed, and very badly at that.  This just serves to make the film exceptionally comical, but also very odd seeing as how the moments of what seem like entirely incompetent film-making are matched with moments displaying cinematic mastery – sometimes both seem to happen at once.

I still haven’t worked out exactly how génial–nanar blends come about, or how they’re even possible, but at least I now know that their home is in classic campy horror films.  There’s something about the desire to create a strong, original, and uncomfortable (yet somehow still fun) affect that is built into the old cheesy horror films, and it seems to be exactly the kind of thing that generates the génial–nanar.  I guess there’s no nanar like nanar noir, and between this and Phantom of the Paradise, I’ve learned that I actually like the horror genre far more than I thought I did.  The trick seems to be to approach cinema with a sense of fun, whimsy, experimentation, and love for entertaining.  I’m still not a big fan of being afraid, but blood as fake as this film’s blood, music as fun as this film’s music, and a script as nutty and lovably stupid as this film’s script, I’m willing to put up with a few jumps and skipped heartbeats to enjoy an experience like this film’s camp.

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The Shining Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

One of the tasks I’ve taken up recently is familiarizing myself with more classic horror cinema.  I’m usually not the type to enjoy being anxious and afraid, so it’s taken me a while to see the classics of this genre.  Fortunately, The Shining is an easy one for me to appreciate.  While it is scary, it’s not all about jump scares and other cheap tricks – it’s classy, as one would expect from Kubrick.  It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s thought-provoking, it’s suspenseful, and it’s memorable.  Even though it may not have totally sucked me in, I must say that I was consistently impressed with the cinematography, the editing, the acting, and the fascinating story.  I think that Scatman Crothers’ character (Dick Hallorann) could have been a little less creepy, because it’s very important that the audience likes this character, but I still rooted for him at the appropriate time.  It’s not entirely clear to me what everything in the movie meant exactly – and I do think some parts are meant to be open-ended – but that doesn’t affect the story too much.

It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one of my favorite Kubrick films, and I highly recommend it come next Halloween – just don’t expect it to be anything like the book . . . .

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