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J.D. Hansel

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The Elephant Man Review

November 11, 2016 by JD Hansel

There is much to be said for a filmmaker that can repeat common stories, scenarios, and twists that we’ve all seen before while still making great work (and evoking a strong emotional response).  David Lynch is one of those filmmakers, as he demonstrated most clearly when he made The Elephant Man.  It’s Lynch’s go at a conventional Hollywood film, and we are very fortunate that Mel Brooks took a chance in bringing young Lynch on board to direct the project before he was well-known.  Obviously, everyone else involved in the project was already established, which means we get to see some great performances, and I would argue that the score is some of John Morris’ best work as a composer.  The story doesn’t really go anywhere, and it’s blatantly based on the old trope that “the monster isn’t the monster, the normal human is the monster,” and yet it all still works very well.  We fear for John when we’re supposed to fear for him, and we wonder if Treves is right in worrying that he’s mistreated John, and we adore Madge Kendal the same way John does.  The drama just works.

As a great combination of Hollywood drama and Lynchian weirdness, I think it’s a film everyone ought to see.

149-the-elephant-man

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1980, 1980s Movie Reviews, Based on a True Story, David Lynch, Drama, Essential Classics, Four Stars, Halloween Movie, Historical, Mel Brooks, PG

Pan’s Labyrinth Review

June 16, 2016 by JD Hansel

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS (mildly) GRAPHIC IMAGES

Oh, and also, spoilers.

As of the moment I’m typing this, I’m not sure I’ll be able to publish this review.  I have had so many complex thoughts and feelings about this film since I watched it in early May that I don’t know how to boil my thoughts down to something readable.  If I had to pick a place to start though, I’d start with a Google search.  Could you do me a favor right now?  Do a Google image search for Pan’s Labyrinth before continuing to read this review.  Got it?  Now take a look at this poster:

Pans_Labyrinth_movie_poster

This is a fairly standard poster for the film.  Most of the posters looked something like this, emphasizing the fantasy elements.  The Google image search just showed several pictures of the fantasy creatures in the movie, but almost none of the real-world story that takes up at least half of the movie.  What story is that?  The one about the brutal fascist in post-war Spain who beats a man to death by smashing a bottle into his face, then deliberately cuts his own neck, then gets his face sliced open, then gets heavily drugged, and finally shoots his stepdaughter.  With this in mind, let me propose my own poster for the film, and this will serve as a makeshift abstract to my explication of the movie’s true focus: the devil in the details.

sadistic pan's labyrinth poster 01

This movie is a wee bit obsessed with graphic violence – or at least what I, a little squeamish wimp, would consider graphic violence.  It’s harder for me to watch than Twelve Years a Slave – I’d put some scenes in Passion of the Christ territory.  The violence is done not in a fun way that emphasizes the fantasy elements, as is the case with a Marvel movie, but in a way that adds painful realism to the film.  The movie is designed to be anchored in an uncomfortable reality – and by gosh does it try to be uncomfortably realistic – to prompt a desire to explore fantasy.  Here’s my first problem with this: we don’t need to be shown reality to remember that we want to escape it.  Each and every person who has seen Pan’s Labyrinth already exists in reality, and most of us only pay for movies so we can escape into a fantasy for a little while, which makes the side of the story in fascist Spain rather redundant.

Here’s another issue I have with this approach: it’s deceptive.  Again, consider the first poster.  This suggests that we’re getting something in the vein of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or Time Bandits, or The NeverEnding Story, or Willow, or maybe just a slightly darker Wizard of Oz.  At first, the movie makes it seem plausible that this is where we’re headed.  Then, as the scenes in the real world grow in number and length, it becomes clear that the weed of realism all but consumes what tiny garden of fantasy the filmmaker has presented.  This makes Guillermo del Toro, the writer/director/producer/god of this picture, a fascinating artist in my opinion – he’s extremely knowledgeable of old mythology and fairy tales, and he obsesses over Phantom of the Paradise even more than I do – yet he was very conservative with creative, dramatic, and whimsical fantasy when writing this film.

When the fantasy is present, however, it’s often rather weak in my opinion.  Now, admittedly, I am spoiled when it comes to fantasy because I’m accustomed to tentacled sea witches, hands that form talking faces, a giant animatronic plant, and medicine that changes color when poured into different spoons (and I still haven’t figured out how on earth they were able to pull off that last one).  Still, the fact that I’m used to seeing fantasy set to a high bar is no reason for me to accept fantasy that’s set to a lower bar.  Sometimes this movie does do a good job with some of its fantasy elements – using very nice costumes for all of its many (and by many I mean two) humanoid fantasy creatures – but for the most part, we get hideous CG.  The scene with the stones that inexplicably make a giant frog vomit itself out of its body is certainly unlike anything that’s been done in film before, but I think the reason why no previous movies had ever done such a thing is that it makes absolutely no friggin’ (or froggin’?) sense.

The worst thing about this fairy tale is that I think it almost works.  The faun is, as I learned from reading interviews with del Toro for a research paper I wrote on this movie, traditionally the trickster in ancient mythology.  The fact that it is the faun offering an escape for the protagonist – a little girl named Ophelia – puts him in a position to be the devil of a “Faust” story, because he can offer her everything she’s dreamed of if only she’ll comply with his (seemingly mostly harmless) demands.  Now, everyone loves a good “Faustian” movie – it’s clear that I do because of my infatuation with Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors, and it’s clear that del Toro does too because he wanted to name his daughter after Phoenix from Phantom of the Paradise.  What del Toro does instead is make the faun seem untrustworthy, and then reveal he’s really not trustworthy, only to ultimately reveal that he’s been totally doing the right thing all along … or at least that’s what the movie tries to suggest.  When the movie ends with Ophelia arriving in the strangely heavenly Underworld, the faun is just chillin’ there, and it turns out his unethical commandment to take blood from a baby was just testing her to make sure she would disobey when it came down to morality.  While it’s true that this test is far more ethical than God’s test of Abraham with the order to kill Isaac, this still puts the faun right up at the line of what my conscience can stand, so it seems out of place for him to be seen as an angelic figure in the Underworld.  I intend to explain later how del Toro’s view of the faun’s role in the story actually makes him even more devilish than this, but for now, the key takeaway here is that the faun is just serpentine enough to be the antagonist of a “Faust” story, leading Ophelia further and further down a path of bad decisions until she can’t escape (hence the “labyrinth” theme).  This “Faustian” story seems incomplete without a Serling ending: she arrives in the Underworld to find that it’s actually Hell.

Having explained my issues with the fantasy, it seems to me that the next step in my cathartic diatribe is to address the supposed themes of empowerment and liberation.  Because I already wrote a research paper on this subject for my university, I would be bored if I had to write the same material again, so I will instead summarize my views on this as briefly as possible, leaving the paper I wrote online for any curious readers to view if they so choose.  In short, it seems as though this is a story that may be empowering for women, and the creation of the film may be inspiring to filmmakers who aspire to obtain just as much creative control over their films as del Toro had over this one.  Both of these perspectives strike me as misguided, because the way I see it, the movie fails to effectively deliver its message about the freedom in disobedience, fails to follow through with its message of the power of women, fails to free the director as an artist, and fails to offer a liberating conclusion.

Let’s start with the first point.  Guillermo del Toro has stated that the movie is largely focused on the “virtue” of disobedience.  As he stated in one interview, “Disobedience is one of the strongest signals of your conscience of what is right and what is wrong. . . . Instinct and disobedience will always point you in a direction that should be natural, should be organic to the world. So I think that disobedience is a virtue and blind obedience is a sin.”  Throughout the film, he uses the theme of choice (echoing the fairy tales and mythology he knows so well) to reveal who the characters truly are, and the paramount choice in the movie is Ophelia’s act of disobedience against the faun.  While I could easily argue that the idea of getting a drop of blood from a baby isn’t exactly the most morally deplorable concept conceived in cinema, the issue here that concerns me the most is that her disobedience against the faun earlier in the film, even though she had no choice but to be disobedient, is deplorable.  Her disobedience regarding a freaking grape caused fairies to die.  A baby can recover from a tiny prick on the finger, but those poor, innocent fairies can’t recover from death (until they inexplicably . . . well, do recover from death, because with how inconsistent the logic of this movie has been so far, I guess anything goes).

Then there’s the matter of the women’s empowerment themes.  Think about this for a minute.  Both Ophelia and that other lady I kept confusing for Ophelia’s mom (What’s her name?  Mustang?  Chevy?  Corvette?) had every reason to kill the captain, and we know they would have been fully justified in doing so.  They also displayed the ability to kill the captain, but oddly enough, neither of their clever, creative tactics to fight against the captain actually succeed at killing the guy.  I’m guessing that Ophelia’s intent was only to disorient him with the drugs, not kill him, but I find it hard to believe that the knife Honda Accord stabbed right through the captain’s chest was just meant to be a paper-cut.  Miraculously, because the one thing del Toro did take from Phantom when he wrote this story is Swan’s ability to survive a stab through the heart, the captain just keeps going.  In spite of his wounds and his drugs, he succeeds in killing Ophelia, and then keeps going until Volkswagen’s brother shows up to save the day by simply shooting him.  Sure the girls had far more clever ways of fighting him, and sure they had more of a direct relationship with him that would make it more climactic for them to be the ones who defeated him, but apparently it takes a man with a gun to do the job.  Tune in next time when Humphrey Boghart can’t kill Major Heinrich Strasser, but Sam the piano-player knocks him dead with a good punch in the face.

My third point about the director’s freedom may not seem related to the content of the film so much as the story behind its production, but I believe it’s actually relevant to the meaning of the film as a whole.  Remember what I said before about del Toro’s use of the theme of choice to explore the characters?  Here’s how he elaborates on that: “Extremes are incredibly powerful in cinema and the fact that this 11-year-old girl is much more comfortable in her skin than this fascist that hates himself so much that he slits his own throat in the mirror and negates his father’s watch and does these crazy things, that gives the girl power and gives the other guy the illusion of power and the choice of cruelty. Choice is key in what we are.”  What choice is he referring to in regards to the captain?  His obsession with little details.  Captain Violent Vile Vidal is seen in the film using a magnifying glass multiple times to reflect the fact that he’s “So obsessed by the little things – how shiny his boots are, how well his watch runs . . . that he loses perspective of the larger stuff.”

I took the above quote from his audio commentary on the DVD, and I cannot help but find his commentary track hilariously ironic.  Throughout his commentary, he himself focuses on the tiny details in every single scene.  He had images of the faun subtly carved into parts of the house, and he had a particular color palette for each of the film’s locations, and he made sure there was moss in the labyrinth that would show off the blue and green filters he used for those scenes, and he put gears behind the captain’s desk to visually “rhyme” the gears in his watch, and he came up with a special design for the legs of the faun costume that would allow the performer inside to “puppeteer” the legs in a style based on bunraku puppetry.  I know all this from just the first 25 minutes of his two-hour recording.  I find it amazing that he had to fight hard to keep total creative control over this project, only for it to nearly destroy him, taking “45 pounds off my body” due to his fixation on detail, which was his slavery more than it was his freedom.  Clearly, this filmmaker’s primary condemnation of his evil protagonist, consumption by an obsession with tiny details, is just as much a problem for him as it is for the character he so despises.  Ironic, isn’t it?

Let’s bring my tirade back to the contents of the movie.  The fourth point that I must address, as outlined five paragraphs ago, is my issue with the conclusion.  It may feel like I already dealt with the conclusion when I brought up Casablanca, but there is much more to it than the matter of who gets to kill the villain.  Since the first minute of the movie, I was promised that there’s a very real magical world at the end of this story, and Ophelia is going to get there.  Because this movie is intended to be everything I hate in cinema, the reality of the fantasy is left open to interpretation for most of the film.  Towards the end, however, del Toro practically negates this mysterious theme by showing a wall of the labyrinth opening up for Ophelia magically, before closing up for the captain, which makes it hard for the viewer to think of a way that the magic could all be in her head.  This makes it appear that the ending is not open to interpretation – that the story definitely does end with Ophelia reaching the Underworld.  The problem with this is that it’s just not believable; it’s almost as though del Toro was trying to make sure the audience wouldn’t buy it.

Throughout cinema, I’ve found that suspension of disbelief can go very, very far into fantasy, but its bounds are found in human reactions.  When a certain silly super hero suddenly becomes gigantic in Cival War, it’s a little hard to swallow since the previous Captain America movies tended to be too serious for that kind of thing, but with Stark referring to it as a “fantastic abilit[y],” I buy it.  In Pan’s Labyrinth, Ophelia should still be sad about losing her brother, and should feel at least a little sense of loss since she’ll never see anything or anyone she cared about in her home-world again.  Similarly, the king and queen should be leaping out of their thrones to embrace their beloved child.  Instead, we get a picture that’s unlike the way this scene would play out if the motivations of the characters were consistent with their personalities, interests, and experiences, and more like the way people behave in a dream – with inexplicable behavior that does not naturally follow from character and motivation.  This suggests that the ending is merely a dying vision, which means our beloved protagonist is dead.  To make it clear that this is not my subjective reading of the film based on my experience, the evidence backing up this interpretation is found in the presence of the fairies in the Underworld, even though those are the exact same fairies (and del Toro has stated that they definitely are the very same fairies) who were decapitated by the Pale Man.

Guillermo del Toro has attempted to get around this problem, but the way he does this creates further problems.  He says that the presence of those same fairies is evidence supporting his reading of the film, which is that the Pale Man was just the faun in disguise.  First of all, shut up.  I’ve seen video of Penn and Teller showing how the old trick of sawing a woman in half is usually done, and then they somehow proceed to saw her in half in a different way that I can’t figure out for the life of me, but I doubt even they could succeed at biting off someone’s head, leaving him/her undoubtedly decapitated, and then reveal that the guy was fine the whole time.  Still, even if we assume that the faun did posses the near omnipotence required to pull off such a feat, this means that he terrified this little girl with the most gruesome of party tricks for no good reason.  As I may have mentioned earlier, her character isn’t even being tested here, because she’s under the influence of fruity voodoo, and it’s an even stupider test if the faun is involved in each and every part of it.  This is unethical manipulation, meaning that the faun is in no position to test Ophelia’s morality since he is lacking in morality himself, thus hurting the logic of the film even more.

So there’s a simplified list of my biggest issues with Pan’s Labyrinth.  I really wanted to love this movie, but it wasn’t what it appeared to be.  I find it amusing that the film is not only hypocritical in its condemnation of Captain Vidal’s perfectionism, but also because it’s just as much of a deceptive, manipulative trickster as the faun.  I’ll do anything short of nailing 95 of its flaws to a church’s door to persuade others to share my contempt for this film.  This is the movie that made me so incredibly angry after seeing its ending that I walked to the nearest shop to buy an umbrella to beat a cardboard box with so I could get my rage out before trying to sleep that night, and I can think of no other cinematic experience that has made me respond so violently.  I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.  So it sucks that it’s actually very impressive.

It’s amazing that del Toro was able to pull off this movie without Hollywood, and it’s honestly one of the most impressive films I’ve seen in a long time.  This filmmaker pulled from a bazillion myths and fairy tales to create his own original, memorable, and modern fairy tale that stands out against all other fairy tale movies that came out at its time.  As a filmmaker, his attention to the grammar of film on a visual level is unbelievable, creating a “ballet” as he called it between the camera and the actors, and using straight lines and vertical wipes for the captain’s world to contrast with the curvatures and horizontal wipes of Ophelia’s world.  Since I generally value storytelling with sound as much as I value storytelling with visuals, I must also mention that the soundtrack has an absolutely excellent theme song, which establishes a “hauntingly beautiful” kind of tone for the fantasy elements.  He manages to use the trickiest of emotions for a film to present – heart – with no sense of sappiness, creating a beautiful scene between Ophelia and her then-unborn brother.  The simple irony of Mercedes (hey, THAT’S her name!) wiping off the knife after stabbing Captain Vidal the same we she did when she used the knife to serve him is one of the most satisfying moments to date in the cinema of the 21st century.

So, as much as I want to give this movie the lowest rating possible, what I have written above has shown that I cannot, but not just because it has its good moments.  I really do consider this to be the most hypocritical film I’ve ever seen, but just as the faun is in no position to judge Ophelia’s morality, I’m in no position to judge this movie’s hypocrisy, because I am just as hypocritical.  The fact is, I’ve been writing the most detailed review of my life, very carefully noting each and every one of the film’s flawed details, and I’ve been referring to interviews and the audio commentary to ensure that I make my point as clearly as possible.  It’s been at least a month since I finished watching Pan’s Labyrinth, and since then I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it aggressively trying to formulate my thoughts as well as possible, without missing any opportunity to criticize it.  My research paper on Pan’s for my college went well over the page requirement even though I wrote the vast majority of the paper in just two days, and this review is even longer than that research paper was.  I had to request that my county’s library system send a copy of the DVD to my local library so I could continue through the audio commentary where I left off, and I intend to finish the commentary track after I’m done with this review, because after all this time I’m still not done obsessing over this abominable movie.  I haven’t been working on any other reviews since I did The Parallax View back in May, because this film has had me mentally enslaved.

Clearly, my primary condemnation of this filmmaker’s primary condemnation of his evil protagonist, consumption by an obsession with tiny details, is just as much a problem for me as it is for him as it is for the character he so despises.  Ironic, isn’t it?

117 Pan's Labyrinth

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2000s Movie Reviews, 2006, Fantasy Worlds & High Fantasy, Halloween Movie, R, Two Stars

Phantom of the Paradise Review

May 23, 2016 by JD Hansel

Whoops.  I only meant to watch the first few minutes of the movie before going to bed, so I wonder, how did I end up staying awake into the middle of the night to finish it?  Oops.  I meant to return it to the library after I watched it, and yet somehow it stayed in my computer with PowerDVD running different scenes from it everyday, which I accidentally kept watching.  Oh, poopy – I had other music I meant to listen to, so why have I been listening to this soundtrack so much over the past month?  Uh oh, it looks like a Blu-Ray copy of this movie somehow became a priority on my birthday wishlist, even though I had more important needs than another Blu-Ray for my collection.  Crap!  I wasn’t supposed to be happy that I actually got the Blu-Ray for my birthday instead of an external hard drive!

And to think, horror isn’t really a genre I go for, so I wasn’t even supposed to like this very much.  Whoops-a-daisy.  By gosh, it sure is amazing what mistakes can be made because of something nearly flawless.

But seriously folks, I can see the movie’s mistakes.  I see the inconsistency in the camera quality, and the continuity errors with the Phantom’s makeup.  I can tell that the editing isn’t always entirely professional, like when it accidentally indicates that Phoenix has noticed a gun, even though she hasn’t.  Somehow, I find these little blemishes to make the movie a little more human, and to make it all the more fun.  It is no surprise that this is a ’70s cult classic.  It’s a movie I’ve been meaning to see for a while since Paul Williams is always talking about it, and I’m a big fan of his, but I just wish I’d realized that I needed to see it sooner so I could immediately start preaching the good new of Phantom of the Paradise to all the world.  I can’t help but feel as though this ignorance was a big mistake on my part.

Whoops.

112 Phantom of the Paradise

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1970s Movie Reviews, 1974, Cult Film, Dark Comedy, Fantasy, Four and a Half Stars, Halloween Movie, Horror, JD's Favorite Movies, JD's Recommended Viewing, Musical, PG, Satire

Phantom of the Opera (2004) Review

May 22, 2016 by JD Hansel

Since my last review was of a movie from 2004, it’s only natural that I would follow it with another film from 2004 that has absolutely nothing in common with it whatsoever.  How’s that for a segue?  Terrible, I know, but I have no other explanation for how I ended up watching (and reviewing) such a ridiculous movie.  The stage musical, as far as I’m concerned, is fine, in spite of its issues, but I can see how adapting such a strange production into a film would be challenging.  Joel Schumacher took on this challenge with a bit too much confidence it seems, because he clearly took a lot of creative chances, trying out whatever would seem most interesting.  Sometimes this worked okay, but for the most part, the result was a rather awkward movie.  Not terrible – it’s still interesting and the music and visuals are often impressive – but focusing on the portrayal of the main characters alone is enough to make one wonder, “How on earth could this be what they were aiming for?”

I have nothing much else to say, except that it seems rather needless.  Just see the stage show.  Or, cut to the chase and by the title song from the soundtrack, listen to that a bunch of times with the synth sound blasting through a sub-woofer, and then I’d say the key part of the Phantom experience is covered.  On the other hand, there is a movie musical that adapts the same story in a way that also takes several big, strange, creative chances, and it works quite well.  I’ll save all that for my next review, but for now, let us all remember Schumacher’s Phantom the only way we can: by making a confused face and shrugging in unison.

All together now.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

111 The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2000s Movie Reviews, 2004, Halloween Movie, PG-13, Two and a Half Stars

The Witches Review

October 31, 2015 by JD Hansel

Freaking Roald Dahl.

This article could be focused on any of a few potential rants about this writer.  It is no secret that children’s authors always seem to end up being very . . . difficult people (for lack of a better term), and in a way, Dahl was to Henson what Travers was to Disney.  I could just give Dahl a hard time for being a pain to poor Jim, but that’s not good for a review.  I could instead choose the more obvious rant about how awful it is to make a profession out of terrifying children, but the problem with that is simply that children sometimes like to be scared.  I think it was Walt Disney who said, when accused of making the villains in his animated films to scary,  that children enjoy it if they can peek through their parents’ fingers.  For this reason, I am not against putting a good scare in a children’s film.

My bone to pick with Dahl is a problem with a particular type of scare that is not necessarily limited to stories for children (although that is the genre in which it’s most common): The Awkward Terror.  The Awkward Terror is what I call those moments when there is a misunderstanding concerning the way one should respond to a bad scenario, but rather than making it into awkward comedy, it’s played as horror.  Don’t get me wrong – discomfort has an important place in storytelling: when done in comedy, it leads to the awkward realization that the character forgot to wear pants, and when done in drama, it leads to a good scare when the shadow of a man with a knife is on the shower curtain.  However, when an uncomfortably awkward situation (one in which people can’t figure out how to respond appropriately) meets the uncomfortably chilling spook, I have found that the different types of enjoyment that come from these discomforts cancel each other out, leaving me only uncomfortable with no element of fun.

Now it’s example time.  In an episode of R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour, a boy finds himself in a circus tent dressed as a clown, unable to remove his makeup or attire.  As several other clowns surround the boy (who has always had a fear of clowns) he finds his parents there, and rather than displaying the appropriate response of feeling bad for him, they gleefully take off their human disguise to reveal that the boy and his family have always been members of the clown species.  This is terribly awkward as there is no comprehensible response to someone realizing he’s turned into a clown, just as I would not know how to react if someone standing in front of me were to suddenly become a fruit.  There is no reaction to such a bizarre, unnatural phenomenon, and one would be foolish to expect people to enjoy seeing  a spectacle like someone turning into a fruit.

Roald Dahl is stupid enough to turn someone into a fruit.  Not in The Witches, of course, but in his more famous book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Violet memorably becomes a giant blueberry.  If everyone in the scene responded with sheer terror and tried to save her right away, perhaps the scene could have worked better, but the way people just stand there confusedly as Wonka remains calm and the Oompa Loompas sing in a circle around her makes me squeamish to this day.  Not in a fun, spooky way – in a way that’s just nauseating.  This is the kind of thing Dahl does often that rubs me the wrong way, so I should have known I would dislike the film adaptation of his book that’s practically an ode to the Awkward Terror, The Witches.

Imagine if a whole movie was centered around something as awkward as a person turning into a fruit, but instead of being in a setting of fantasy (in which it might almost be permissible), it’s set in a realistic, normal, everyday place.  That is what Witches is all about: a boy goes to a hotel where he is turned into a mouse.  When different characters see these mice that used to be the boys they loved, their reactions are inevitably incorrect no matter what they are since there cannot be a realistic reaction to such an intangible scenario, which is a clear sign that this whole concept should have been avoided altogether.  It makes the entire film both uncomfortable and unbelievable, without offering a strong plot, strong characters, strong dialogue, or strong morals to make up for it.

To get to the point of this review, the film is a waste of time.  It seems that there are some Henson productions that Muppet fans joke about because of how odd they are, and others that we simply do not address.  Although this is the last film for which Henson was a producer of any sort, he’d had so little involvement in the story that he couldn’t save it, so we Henson fans honestly never give it as much thought as we give The Jim Henson Hour, or even his failed Little Mermaid series.  I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy a film so tedious that it doesn’t get to its inciting incident until halfway through the running time, so dull that it makes Rowan Atkinson’s character a bore, and so idiotic in theme that I cannot believe it was ever released.  If this flick is watched for any reason, it should be watched for the puppetry, effects, and other excellent elements of the visual style that make this film wickedly impressive as visual art (which is what earned the film as many stars as I’ve given it).  While critics may praise it on the grounds that it will give children quite a scare,  I berate it because it offers a big scare instead of a good scare.  If a movie wants to scare people, it should make sure the emotion it’s grabbing is fear, not disgust.

80 The Witches

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 1990, 1990s Movie Reviews, criticism, Family, Fantasy, film, Halloween Movie, Horror, jd hansel, Jim Henson, Movie review, One and a Half Stars, PG, review

Hotel Transylvania 2 Review

October 24, 2015 by JD Hansel

This sequel feels very sequel-ish.  In spite of the fact that this storyline is refreshingly different from that of the first Hotel Transylvania,  most of my feelings towards this movie are exactly the same as my feelings towards the first.  It feels like an extension of the same film, with a story that shows what would inevitably follow the events of the first film, and a script that relies heavily on its predecessor’s running gags.  This one does seem slightly lacking in the cleverness and creativity of the first film, but it has the added bonus of a good Mel Brooks character.  I certainly did enjoy watching the movie, and I laughed out loud at Drac’s description of using FaceTime, but since my count of predictable moments reached 18 (if memory serves), I can’t pretend it was a fabulous film.  (I suppose I was impressed with a lot of the visuals – particularly when it comes to classic cartoon animation styles – but this is also something that can be said of the first Hotel Transylvania.)  Aside from thoughts I already described in my review of its prequel, I really don’t have much in the way of strong thoughts or feelings about this movie at all.

79 Hotel Transylvania 2

Filed Under: Film Criticism, New Movie Reviews Tagged With: 2010s Movie Reviews, 2015, Adam Sandler, Animation, criticism, Family, Fantasy, film, Halloween Movie, jd hansel, Mel Brooks, Movie review, PG, review, Three Stars

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