J.D. Hansel

JD's Favorite Movies

Moonrise Kingdom Review

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You know what’s an ugly color?  Yellow.  Yellow is a really sucky color.  It can make a movie look pretty terrible, or at least it’ll make the color scheme seem smelly.  In fact, one of the main reasons I’ve waited so long to watch a Wes Anderson film is that I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach all of the colors (or at least hues) he tends to use that make me sick.  The second reason is my distaste for films that are overly quirky for the sake of being quirky.  Much to my surprise, I found that I can appreciate the film’s colors and quirks because Anderson can appreciate the beauty in the fakeness of things.

The important thing to remember about the film is that it takes place in a strange version of the 1960s, and the film is very conscious of that.  Anderson doesn’t stylistically approach the decade the way that most filmmakers would though.  Perhaps because he’s playing with themes of childhood and nostalgia in the film, he uses color, grain, and visual effects to make the film look like an old photograph from the ‘60s or ‘70s, which is exactly what any of us today would have to use to get a glimpse what the time period was like for kids.  No one could ever have a jacket as vividly red as the narrator’s in real life – real life doesn’t look like that – but in old photos it would seem normal, and photos of our childhood inform our memories of what the world used to look like.  It’s a very strange effect, but it makes for a look and feeling that’s oddly warm and charming.

But there’s much more to the visual style than that.  Anderson has a knack for playing with size and perspective, somehow making many of the props and set pieces look like little toys.  I think part of this is done with camera tricks, and some is done by using small models of props and set pieces instead of the real thing.  This gives the sense that everything on his set is one of his little toys to play with, as though making a statement in favor of Auteur Theory the characters are just as much his puppets as the characters in his stop-motion film are.  Now, most people don’t notice this as much as they notice his unique cinematography – his habit of framing his subjects symmetrically, moving the camera steadily in elaborate tracking shots, and filling the frame with things dropping and sliding and jumping and spinning so nothing is ever too boring.  Since I’d seen a clip or two from this movie a few years ago, I figured I would find it irritating, but in context, I don’t mind it.  I think I’m okay with it because, on the one hand, Anderson is clearly having too much giddy, childlike fun doing it, and on the other, he keeps it limited to what will help the scene/story more than distract from it.

And this story is good.

The story itself is rather quirky, but it builds up to its least plausible parts very carefully, so it still feels like it’s been written carefully – not like everything has been thrown at the wall, as I would have expected.  And I think it has been written carefully.  The story is both innocently childlike and unsettlingly adult, somehow blending emotions one would only expect to feel in an old Tim Burton film with an empathetic love for these characters.  It’s incredible that characters with so little visible emotion grab the heartstrings the way these characters do – I don’t understand how it’s possible – but they keep the viewer completely sucked into the story.  In fact, I believe this movie tells one of the most intriguing and captivating stories ever told, and it tells it beautifully.  So, yes, some aspects of the film stray far from what I usually like, but Anderson keeps me engaged on a level that few others can, and he seems to have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.  I’m not sure if I liked this movie for itself or just because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but I can say that I look forward to watching it again.

The Fisher King Review

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While I think it takes a while to really get going, The Fisher King is almost certainly Terry Gilliam’s best film (perhaps excluding his Python work).  Continuing his exploration of how Western civilization thinks of insanity, he presents a very strange, but charming, romantic comedy about people who are truly not right in the head.  This goes beyond the usual romantic comedy about people who do crazy things for love, and beyond Silver Linings Playbook.  Robin Williams’ character is purely mad – plain and simple – and Gilliam is able to use this to create two very different kinds of effects.

The first effect is that of childlike naivete.  We see a man who wears kiddish pajamas and loves his toys, but he’s not a man-boy.  He just looks at the world a little differently, and he dares to try things most of us wouldn’t.  He believes in fairy-tales and in fairies, and yet he very much understands sex.  He doesn’t judge people for their craziness – he usually just doesn’t see it; he simply sees people who ought to join him in singing some fun old standards like “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”  The way that this benefits the movie the most is in what it allows Gilliam to do as a director and cinematographer: when we see the world through Parry’s eyes, we see a red knight in fiery light riding towards us on a frightening steed and a hundred busy people become a ballroom of dancers the moment his crush appears.  While I can’t say I’m in love with everything about the movie – by no means – I have to say that it’s very charming (and in all the right ways).

The other side of this, however, is the film’s darkness.  The movie largely takes place in a bad part of New York, where Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is selling pornos in a rundown movie rental store.  When an insane man enters his life, it only makes the lives of Jack and Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) even more hellish, which leads to some of the best drama I’ve seen in any film.  Much of the drama comes from Ruehl’s performance as Anne, which rightly won an Academy Award, and which made me empathize with this character in a way I never thought I could.  Even with the movie’s tragic terrorist shooting, suicide attempts, and violent beatings, it’s still the relationship between Jack and Anne that’s the most intense part of the movie, and I didn’t really like either of them at the start.  By the end of the movie, while I have no intention of revealing how the story ends in this review, Gilliam makes us love the last people on earth one would think we could love, and that’s surely one of the greatest accomplishments of any artist in history.

Coraline Review

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I know everyone who likes Tim Burton and cares about Christmas and animation is supposed to love Nightmare Before Christmas, but I’ve honestly never been a huge fan.  It has positive elements and is very creative, but I find it slow and boring.  I also don’t love the visual style as much as I’d like to – something about it feels lacking to me.  The music irritates me too – that “This Is Halloween” song is pretty good, but the rest of the soundtrack is difficult for me to sit through.  I guess I ought to watch it again sometime soon and see if my tastes have changed now, but I remember not liking it as much as I wanted to.  James and the Giant Peach is another film by the same director, Henry Selick, but I’ve never felt like watching it because what parts of it I did see as a child were really off-putting for me then, so I still think negatively of it now (even if I don’t have very good reasons).  Coraline, however, has intrigued me on some level ever since I saw the trailer when I was much younger, and I’ve been in the mood to watch more stop-motion lately, so I decided to try this one on for size.

By gosh, what a beauty.

We see in Coraline an excellent experiment in taking all of a child’s fears, dreams, anxieties, hopes, annoyances, and pleasures and rolling them up into one nightmarish package.  On the one hand, it addresses fairly normal frustrations for children to deal with – moving away, meeting new, strange neighbors, finding vermin in the house, running out of things to do outside, and dealing with parents who don’t usually show how much they love their children (at least not in the usual ways).  This makes the movie not only relatable, but approachable.  Then there’s the flip side – the part of the film that plays with the viewer’s psychology, almost like a surrealist artist might.  Selick plays with impostor anxieties, false paradise anxieties, deoculation anxieties, “living toy” anxieties, insect anxieties, and more, all while retaining a charming children’s book feel.  It never feels like it’s trying too hard to be a horror movie – it’s just creepy and uncanny without apologies, and it’s entirely fun, whimsical, and brilliantly creative along the way.  While I have some tiny gripes with it and I suspect some parents would find parts of it inappropriate for their children, I consider this film a masterpiece, for both its mouth-watering visuals and its wonderful storytelling.

The Iron Giant Review

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The Iron Giant is, in some respects, a concerning and disappointing film.  Whenever a movie has the capacity to encourage children to think more like scientists, but instead chooses to reinforce the old notion that believing in wild alien stories and conspiracy theories is good, this is disheartening.  However, because it is typical of Hollywood films to have a pro-faith stance of some sort, this isn’t a deal-breaker for me – the film is still really well-made and manages to have a lot of heart in a way that doesn’t annoy me, which is hard to do.  With this said, what impresses me most about the film is the way that it goes against common values, at least to some extent, and it encourages children to think in new ways.

The beauty of The Iron Giant is that it exemplifies how a film can be nostalgic about the past while also being highly critical of it, all without contradiction.  It’s clear that the filmmakers are engaging with classic B-movies and comic books, romanticizing the 1950s all the way, but also pointing out how silly the 1950s could be.  The old horror movies of the day are parodied to great effect, but of course there is also a twist on the old story about an alien coming from Mars to destroy humanity, with Earth’s only salvation coming from the United States military forces.  Remember, Indepence Day came out around the same time, so for a film to made the U. S. army look inept, primal, and, to some extent, malevolent, was pretty risky, but I love a movie that keeps American patriotism in check.  It’s unique and daring storytelling like this that must be encouraged in children’s cinema, and for this alone I consider The Iron Giant to be one of the most important animated films of its time.  Add this to the fact that the story (and storytelling) are clever, creative, and captivating, and I conclude that this film is truly a great classic for all ages.

Escape from New York Review

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I’ve heard it said that nearly every movie about a future urban dystopia steals its style from Blade Runner.  While I can certainly see the resemblance between the aesthetic of Blade Runner and that of many later films about the future, it’s worth noting that many ’80s movies were portraying cities with the same darkness, theatricality, vivid color, and nods to film noir cinematography as Blade Runner.  What’s interesting is how using a theatrical and colorful style in both visuals and characters was very common in horror films in the 1970s, but then somehow moved into the mainstream in the 1980s, seemingly without reason.  It makes sense for a horror film to have a mixture of darkness and theatricality, but why did this become a part of the styles of all ’80s movies?

I think the answer is Escape from New York, which I see as a more or less direct predecessor to Blade Runner.  Released in 1981, this movie shows horror director John Carpenter bringing the stylistic elements of horror – including the visual style, the acting style, and the writing style – to both the dystopian sci-fi genre and the action genre.  I suspect that this film took part in making over-the-top lighting more mainstream, but as much as I appreciate this, I think what’s particularly impressive about this film is how it brings much cleverness to the action genre.  Most action movies are just looking for an excuse to fire a gun or set off a bomb, but this movie is interested in creating situations that make the viewer really want to see the action hero – or anti-hero – take action.  There’s a wonderful scene with a street that everyone tries to avoid driving down at night because lines of people on either side of the road wait for unsuspecting cars, line up, and smash the car as it goes along their little conveyor-belt of doom.  There’s technically no reason for this to be considered a “horror” scene since there’s nothing supernatural about it and there’s arguably no suggestion of insanity (merely desperation), but it’s certainly the kind of scene that only a horror filmmaker would write.

Of course, there are other aspects of the writing that are more conventional for the genre – a rescue mission, a countdown, etc. – but even these are done in a way that somehow creates more intensity than most action films.  This makes Escape from New York a thrilling, chilling, and exciting film that’s sure to make the viewer rethink film genres altogether.

Batman Returns Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

A few years ago, I was browsing through channels to find something to watch while doing laundry when I put on a marathon of Batman movies on some cable channel, just so I could educate myself about the hero.  It included Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman Begins, and possibly one or two more, but this was before I cared about watching movies properly, so I didn’t make sure I’d seen each one of them all the way through.  I caught a significant portion of Batman Begins and most if not all of Batman Forever, but since I was occupied with some chores at the time, I wasn’t really paying much attention.  Batman Returns stuck out to me though.  I think I came in somewhere in the middle and checked out somewhere near the end, but I really liked the idea of a superhero and a villain falling in love out of costume and not knowing what to do once they figured out each other’s secret identity (all in a public place where they can’t fight, no less).  While this dramatic device may be the film’s greatest contribution to cinema, and it’s probably the most brilliant aspect of the film (if not of the franchise), I think there’s a lot more where that came from throughout the film.

This movie is probably one of the greatest sequels of all time because it doesn’t feel the need to repeat everything from the first film, nor does it just try to take everything to a much bigger scale like many sequels do – it just plays to the strengths and dynamics of a different set of characters.  True, the idea of the villain tricking “the people” into thinking the hero has turned on them is now a somewhat common sequel trope, but like most of the tropes in the movie, it’s all handled very well.  It helps that Danny DeVito is a practically perfect Penguin, and the rest of the cast is spot-on as well, making for a Gotham City that’s very much . . . itself.  I think that’s what I like about this movie – it loves being what it is, so it goes to the extreme.  Tim Burton also takes his style to an extreme here, showing his ability to capture the eerie quality of simple things, bring the maximum amount of “creepy” out of any scary things, find the beauty in fakeness, carefully integrate models with full-size sets, and light Batman perfectly.  What’s particularly impressive is how a movie filled with so much gray manages to retain warmth, theatricality, and a striking amount of vivid color, making for one of the best aesthetics any film has ever had and possibly surpassing its predecessor in its visual style.

While its ending is a little underwhelming for me and Burton’s pacing is typically slow, most of my problems with the film are mere nitpicks – in the end, this is what a Batman movie is supposed to feel like.  One thing that I think the film could use a little bit more of, however, is camp.  The movie certainly engages in over-the-top theatricality and a little silliness, but I think the Batman I best understand is Adam West’s.  Part of why the news of his passing has been harder for me to take than that of most other recent celebrity deaths is that I know we’ll never have another actor who can play a superhero in a way that makes you take him seriously when he needs to be taken seriously while also keeping him incredibly light, fun, silly, and jaunty.  Maybe we’ll never get another movie that captures the theatricality of Gotham the way the West, Burton, and Schumacher productions did either, but they’ve all been really inspirational to me.  I’ve always considered Spider-Man/Peter Parker to be the hero with whom I best relate, but it’s Batman productions like this one that fill me with excitement and enthusiasm for becoming a filmmaker, and for that I’m very thankful.