J.D. Hansel

Episodic/Package/Compilation

History of the World – Part I Review

by

I absolutely love it when a film has such a strong creative essence that it immediately relays its muses to me, who inspire me to express the experience in a review (in much the same way that a songwriter might be overcome by the need to play the expression of his/her passion).  At those moments, the essence of the film appears before me as a dream awaiting a poet’s articulation.  Other films, however, leave me scratching my head (and leave my muses shrugging) as I try to figure out what to make of whatever I’ve just seen.  These are the moments that make me look at Roger Ebert with jealousy, knowing that he could nearly always express exactly how he felt about a movie, no matter the film’s complexity.  Unfortunately, History of the World – Part 1 is a puzzler for me, since I really want to love the film, but I just don’t think I do.

The film has its moments that hit home and are very strong, but it has a lot of moments that simply don’t do it for me.  Unfortunately, the movie can’t decide whether it’s comprised of comedy sketches, vignettes, or (not very) short films.  This inconsistency in length means that many scenes leave me thinking, “that’s it?” while others make me cry, “it’s still going?”  I think that consistency – or, better yet, a narrative (or some focused structure) to tie everything together – would do the film some good.  That being said, I love the “Inquisition” number, and I’m more moved by Mel’s take on 2001: A Space Odyssey than I am by the actual Kubrick film.

I generally wouldn’t hold a vignette-based film to my Pausibility Test (I measure a film by how content I am with pausing it and coming back to it in a few weeks) because the nature of such a film has built-in stopping points, which makes pausing natural.  The problem with this film, however, is that I was content with pausing the movie mid-segment, and I suspect that’s because of the characters.  Ebert helped clarify this for me by pointing out that we are presented with cardboard cut-outs of Jews, monks, etc., but there is not much detail added to make them funny or interesting.  Instead, our interest in each character is dependent on the performers.  While I didn’t necessarily “have a blast” watching the movie, I cannot be as hard on it as Ebert because I suspect that many scenes from it will stick with me for the rest of my life.

64 History of the World - Part 1

Pulp Fiction Review

by

So,there are some movies I’d recommend that people see without any knowledge of what the film is about, what’s going to happen, or who’s in the film.  The Truman Show is a good example, as is Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  Then there’s a movie like Pulp Fiction.  I think I was only able to like it because I knew all about it going into it.

I knew the type of storytelling and approach.  I knew it was a weird Tarantino film that would jump around, and I knew he had carefully structured everything so that he was ahead of the audience, and no one could ever predict where the story would go next.  I knew he would use everything that the movies have trained us to expect to happen in a story against the audience to trick them.  I knew to expect that I would never know what to expect, and most importantly, I knew better than to play The Movie Game.

The Movie Game is my term for when the audience member tries to figure out where the plot is going, and what will resolve everything, with the understanding that the movie has to set up its twists and turns ahead of time, and the story will follow the standard structure.  This is partially based on a great quote from screenwriter Terry Rossio: “You know that the audience will try to guess where you’re going with the story.  It’s a given.  It’s fun.  After all, they’re sitting there virtually motionless in the dark for two hours, with nothing better to do but second-guess you.”  When The Movie Game is too easy, it’s a boring game, so it’s a bad movie.  I played a great game with The LEGO Movie, and the movie won.  I beat Frozen, but it was still a good game, and therefore a good film.

Naturally, when I get most upset by a movie is when I feel cheated, particularly because the movie doesn’t follow any normal structure, so I don’t get to play my favorite game.  The way to avoid feeling cheated is simply to know what game the movie is playing before going in, rather than assuming it’s playing the same game as I am.  What game is Pulp Fiction playing?  I have no flippin’ clue, but it’s not quite as fun as The Movie Game.

It’s nice, every once in a while, to see a movie that does storytelling really differently.  However, because of how different the storytelling is from what I’d ever seen in a movie before, and because I didn’t get to play the game, it didn’t feel like a real movie to me. It felt like a crazy Tarantino art project.  I happened to find out that Tarantino felt the same way about it when it first came out. I respect it since so much in the film is impressive, but it didn’t feel quite like I was watching a movie, nor was it quite as entertaining as a more ordinary film.  The entertainment value is lost to some extent when the movie doesn’t build in any normal sense, so some scenes are essentially pointless.  Again, they may be impressivescenes, but they serve no purpose other than displaying themselves because the director feels like showing these scenes to the audience because they mean something to him, even though they mean nothing, in some cases, to an overarching story.

I don’t identify with the characters, so they are not my favorites, but they are strong. The dialogue is perhaps more profane than it needs to be, which I generally view as a Cinema Sin of sorts because that generally means the writer is either going for shock value, or simply can’t think of anything meaningful or interesting to write.  However, the writing is very, very impressive – Tarantino is pretty darn good at dialogue.  The way he interwove the three main stories was clever.  The soundtrack is nice overall, and the visuals, while sometimes more bloody than I like, were overall very well done as well.

So, in the end, I really like this movie for what it is, but I don’t know that I like it much as a movie.  When I don’t get to play The Movie Game, I feel a little like I’ve been invited over to a friend’s house to play a game with him, but he’s just playing it by himself and encouraging me to watch him; I don’t feel included, and that’s just boring.  I think I’ve certainly learned a lot about film, storytelling, and myself from watching it, which means it has good reason to be considered a classic.  So, I like it.  It’s good.  But give up on The Game before it begins, because he just isn’t playing along.

47 Pulp Fiction