J.D. Hansel

Musical

A Star Is Born (1954) Review

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This movie may have made a big splash in its day, but I don’t think it gets talked about much anymore.  I can understand why – in many respects it’s very generic.  It’s the kind of romantic epic/tragicomedy that feels like textbook Oscar-bait, just mixed together with show-tunes.  That  being said, it’s a pretty solid film.  It may start out boring, but as it goes on, the performances get more impressive, the drama gets more captivating, and the musical numbers get more enjoyable.  The look of some of these numbers alone is reason enough to watch the film, and I see this as one of the greatest examples of theatricality in cinema at its best.

But at the end of the day, as expected, the appeal is Judy Garland.  I’ve always known she was a great singer, but this is the movie that shows the full range of her acting abilities.  What’s amazing is how she takes a character that’s absurdly cliché and makes her distinct.  Along with her co-star, she made me really care about a story in which I thought I would have no interest, creating a level of sincere, beautiful drama I hardly ever see.

So yes, much of the movie is trite and forgettable, and the film starts off quite boring – I imagine it stays boring for those who don’t like musicals – but it redeems itself in spades.

The Last Unicorn Review

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I think part of the reason why I watched this movie is that I was really in the mood to take a break from the Disney live-action remakes and return to an original fairy-tale movie.  I’m not sure that The Last Unicorn was a good choice though seeing as how it contains so many good and bad elements mixed together, often within the same departments, so I don’t know what to make of it.  The story is a very bizarre one – highly problematic and quite confusing – yet it contains clever little ideas and characters that make me jealous I hadn’t thought of them myself.  The storytelling through the visuals is particularly unclear at times, yet often the animation perfectly captures exactly the feeling the scene ought to have.  The visual style is particularly disjunctive, with character designs and animations that look irritatingly cheap and flat in comparison to Disney’s work, yet the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.  I’m inclined to say that the soundtrack isn’t very good, yet the film’s theme song is stuck in my head, and I have found I quite enjoy it.  The cast may boast some greats like Mia Farrow, but she is oddly overshadowed by the more memorable performances of the bad actors, whose delivery was unlike anything I have ever heard referred to as “acting.”

My problem with this movie is that, every time I think I really like it, the scene that follows always ruins it.  Some of the characters seem fun at first, but eventually get annoying.  The last half of the movie has one mediocre song after another, painfully drawing out the film (even though the run-time is only about an hour and a half).  Because of how much I like looking at the movie, and because of how much I appreciate most of the story, I kept trying to look on the bright side and only see the good in the film, but then something comes up like the tree creature with big breasts and I’m reminded that this is just a Rankin-Bass movie – I can’t expect quality.  At the very least I was hoping this would be a good film for little girls to enjoy  – a movie that’s wholesome enough to merit its “G” rating – but today it would have to cut some parts or change some lines just to get a “PG” rating, thus alienating the viewers who might as well be its target audience.  Consequently, The Last Unicorn strikes me as the kind of movie that’s very good at creating nostalgia for those who grew up with it, but doesn’t hold up for viewers who find it later.

But do you know what this movie really needs?  A Disney live-action remake.  Seriously.  This is the one child-oriented animated film that has enough negative elements to need a re-tooling, and enough positive elements to be made into a great story if it’s put in the right hands.  Most of the main issues are honestly really, really easy to fix, and the story itself isn’t that bad – it’s just the storytelling that’s poor.  Heck, the story even works well as a criticism of other fairy-tales, and it lends itself easily to feminist interpretations, so it’s the perfect subject for the Disney remake project.  Sure, Disney would have to buy the rights from another company, but the result would still be, without a doubt, the best of the live-action Disney remakes to date.

Moana Review

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Approval Voting, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, Approval/Disapproval Voting, Majority Judgment, Borda Count, Cumulative Voting, and Range/Score Voting are just a few of the voting systems that have been theorized in social choice theory and/or practiced by democracies.  The fairness of a democratic election is something that many of us take for granted, but there are actually a lot of problems with many of the most common methods.  Consider Approval/Disapproval Voting, in which the voter expresses which candidates he/she would accept and which candidates he/she would not – essentially the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system of Reddit (as I understand it).  For candidates in an election, it would make some amount of sense for the candidate who most people gave a “thumbs up,” even though he/she wasn’t their favorite, to surpass the candidate whom many loved most and many hated.  In this scenario, most people would get a leader of whom they approved, and fewer people would get the candidate they hated, which is fine for politics.  When assessing art, however, this seems inappropriate, as exemplified by the fact that the high-quality (but highly divisive) La La Land has a lower score on Rotten Tomatoes than the objectively “good enough” Moana.

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it allows the big movie studios to create the illusion that their films are highly praised simply by making movies that are safe, simple, and reliably passable.  Moana is a perfect example of this, because approximately 3% of this movie is special and original, whereas 97% is an old, faithful “hero’s journey” that any movie buff can’t help but find predictable.  There is nothing particularly bad about Moana, but nearly all of its parts seem to exist purely to serve their function in the regular machinery of the standard animated adventure.  I’ll grant that the twist ending (if it can be called such) did surprise me, but the fifteen minutes preceding it went exactly as I predicted, creating a sense that the writers were merely lazy watchmakers.  It seems Clements and Musker assumed they were the only people to have seen the original Star Wars, and I hate to break it to them, but I’ve seen that movie too – and I felt like I’d already seen Moana.  While Frozen has certain elements that are quite predictable and embarrassingly trite, at least it manages to find the right balance of tribute and criticism in regards to earlier Disney films, whereas this film lets Maui joke about its adherence to the old formulas without making changes to address this criticism.

Sure, audiences may enjoy this movie a lot – for now – but eventually people will be shocked by just how little of it is memorable.  The comedy is nearly all predictable, conforming to the same comic style that has made nearly every CGI family film from the past fifteen years feel bland and lacking in wit, but the jokes still got me at times … I just can’t remember them.  The soundtrack has songs that are perfectly serviceable and that employ clever lyrics, but I can’t remember most of them either.  I would go so far as to say that there are no more than three memorable songs on the soundtrack, and that’s being gracious.  (This film’s “I Want” song is still stuck in my head, but I’m not happy about it – it’s far too contemporary and “poppy” in style, so it’s sure to become dated.)  Most of the performances are rather forgettable as well, with only The Rock having his fair share of fun in the recording booth.  That being said, as cliché and forgettable as it may have been, the music and story still worked on me, creating truly beautiful and moving moments at times that I hope I will remember.

The reason why I would recommend this movie, in spite of all I have just said, is that it has many strong moments that everyone should see, albeit in spite of itself.  True, most of the visuals have the usual, boring “Disney CGI” look – what one would expect from a PIXAR short – but some scenes threw the usual conventions away in favor of artistry.  As a giant crab sings the almost anti-melodic “Shiny,” the lights go out, and everything starts to glow in neon colors against dark blues and black.  In terms of visuals, this is about the best I’ve seen from any CG-animated film, and it is accompanied nicely by the portion of “You’re Welcome” that discards any sense of realism for a properly theatrical musical number.  The latter example makes use of Hawaiian art styles to add a special flare, making for one moment in Moana that actually makes it quite distinct in comparison to other films in its genre.  The “You’re Welcome” number is also separated from the rest of the film in that it feels like a Disney classic, as though this was the only song for which Miranda was given more than ten minutes to write it.  It even seems to borrow from Mary Poppins‘ “Jolly Holiday,” giving it a particularly timeless feeling, yet it still feels in keeping with Miranda’s background in freestyle rap music, ultimately seeming to suggest that Dick van Dyke was rapping in Mary Poppins.  Think about that one for a while – the time of the specific moment in Poppins to which I’m referring is 48:05, for those of you playing along at home.

It’s fairly odd to see this kind of film coming from Clements and Musker.  This is the team behind Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid, among others, so making a merely passable film seems beneath them.  On the other hand, this is their first time making a CG film, so hopefully their future endeavors won’t have this same sense of insecurity and will have the kind of creativity continuously that this film has sporadically.

 

Fantasia Review

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As a film student who’s grown tired of hearing that “film is a visual medium,” there’s something quite refreshing about seeing a film that is famous for its visual achievements, yet serves as a great example of how sound can drive storytelling.  The way that Disney and his team turned ballets and symphonies that could have been interpreted in any of a thousand ways into memorable audio-visual experiences is extraordinary.  The method of letting music guide a film’s story (or, in this case, stories) can have widely varying results, yet this presents one of the best, employing a special reworking of “Vertical Montage” theory that creates exactly the sense of audio-visual harmony Sergei Eisenstein would have loved.  I have been fascinated for the past couple months with the idea of creating video productions that experiment with creating shapes and streaks of color that depict what musical sounds might look like, but I see that Disney has at the very least laid the groundwork in this area if not beaten me to the punch.

While it’s true that the film gets tedious and tiring rather quickly, it’s delightful when broken up into bite-sized parts and spread out over a few days, and I suspect that it might work well as the kind of film one could play in the background at a party without worrying that everyone would get distracted.  Not every piece is animated in the style I would have chosen, but the visual style is, overall, gorgeous, with beautiful shades of blue in the cartoons and even more beautiful lights and colors in the brief live-action portions.  I’m not inclined to give a film a good review for its visuals alone, but I don’t think I’m doing that here.  Fantasia strikes me as an artistic achievement that advances cinematic storytelling and paves the way to new kinds of experimental film, all while showcasing Disney’s unassailable power as a creative force.

Animal Crackers Review

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UPDATE 2017-03-01: I wrote that this was the first Marx Brothers film, but it was not.  Excluding Humor Risk – a silent film that was previewed but never released and is now lost – their first film was The Cocoanuts.

The films of the Marx Brothers are generally divided into about three different eras, and this film, being their first, obviously belongs to the first era.  This was the time when they were essentially just taking their stage plays that had done well on Broadway and putting a camera in front of them.  Consequently, most of Animal Crackers really doesn’t feel like much more than a standard comedy play about an unlikely mix-up – one that could be performed at any high school – and now it has been badly filmed with poor editing and the sound quality one would expect from a studio that had just made its very first sound film a few months prior.  The one thing that keeps this film from feeling too much like the above description is the fact that a few of the characters are played by the Marx Brothers, which changes everything.  While it is apparent that the brothers haven’t quite hit their stride yet, their characters are already reasonably well-defined here, or at last as defined as they would ever be (I’m looking at you, Zeppo).  When the boys are allowed to simply be funny, they generally succeed in this film, but much of the movie drags on and focuses too much on plotlines that Marx Bros. fans don’t really care about.  Not all of the jokes are funny, as Groucho admirably admits to the audience, and the random musical numbers are awkward, slow, and forgettable, but over all, it’s still a pretty fun movie that I would gladly watch again.

Top Hat Review

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This film was not what I expected it to be, and yet it was only what I expected it to be.  There are some dance numbers in here that are very nice and impressive, and that feel like what I would expect from this duo, but only one or two, and I had already seen one of them.  For some reason I thought there would be a bit more of the two of them dancing and a bit more fun, with less of the two antagonizing each other.  Most of the film, however, is dominated by their bizarre conflict/romance and a cliché story of mistaken identity.  I’m not sure if it seemed as cliché at the time, of course, but it felt very much like it was just repeating the kind of things one finds in the usual comedic plays of someone like Oscar Wilde, or even Shakespeare.  In a way, this makes it a very standard romantic comedy, although it’s still a very smart one, so it serves as a great example of what a serviceable Classical Hollywood romantic comedy feels like (just with more cool dancing).

Of course, don’t think for a second that I don’t really like this movie.  Certain aspects of some of these dance numbers are brilliant, and a lot of the writing of the dialogue is clever too, which was only improved by the strong characterizations these actors brought to their characters, so I can see why this film is so popular.  Perhaps I’ve been a bit too hard on this movie – it did, after all, give us the song “Cheek to Cheek,” which is one of the greatest love songs of all time – but for whatever reason, I just felt like something was missing.  I’m not sure what.  I feel like the movie was somehow not fun enough, even though I enjoyed myself watching it, and Fred Astaire’s character seemed to be having a great deal of fun the whole time.  Still, since this was my first time actually watching an Astaire-Rogers musical in its entirety, I was hoping for something a little more bright and dazzling, but maybe I’ll find that in another one of their films.