J.D. Hansel

PG-13

La La Land Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I should not be writing this review.  I am not capable of doing the film justice having only seen it once.  There are many movies that have left my friends, family, and peers thinking they ought to watch them multiple times to make sure that they’ve taken everything in, and usually these are either mind-bending thrillers (think The Matrix or Spy Game) or pseudo-intellectual Oscar-bait like Mulholland Drive.  Most of the time, I feel no need to see these movies again – I tend to pick up on everything I want to upon my first viewing – but for La La Land, I think I’d need many more viewings before I can fully comprehend the scope of its intellectual assessment of its own situation.  As I’ve written about before, we are in a time in film history when cinema is growing more reflective than ever before, submerging itself further into the worlds it has already created to find the nooks and crannies of the Wizard World or the Death Star that it may have missed at first.  This applies to genres as well.  When the romantic comedy was revamped with When Harry Met Sally, the “rom coms” that followed in the 1990s clearly confronted the movies of Classical Hollywood and addressed “the compatibilism question” – how do we bring together the people of today with the genres of yesterday in a way that feels believable?  The musicals of today, such as Into the Woods, Muppets Most Wanted, and The Jungle Book, haven’t really addressed this question head-on, resulting in an embarrassingly awkward transition in Jungle Book from a dark, ominous shot of a giant, scary ape to a bouncy little ukulele song.  La La Land has the intelligence to recognize that we actually need to sit down and talk about the compatibilism question, but I don’t think it’s very sure of what the answer is.

It’s interesting to me that Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as having “thrillingly assured direction,” because the nature of the director’s assurance is fairly complex.  To me he seems unsure as to what the movie ought to be exactly, yet he refuses to allow it to be anything other than what it is.  The film is very technically impressive and is shot with great care, but just because he understands the film’s essence on a technical level does not mean he has a grip on what it is as a story (or as an argument).  The film is fairly insecure, sometimes suggesting that it will do a certain musical number a certain way, then backing out of it as though it would be too corny for 2016, before finally overcoming its skepticism (and embarrassment) and diving into theatricality.  Still, there is always a sense that Classical Hollywood is watching over the characters in this film, waiting to see what they’ll do with a genre that doesn’t belong to them, showing that the director knows exactly where his film stands: it is being scrutinized closely by both the past and the future, wondering if it is truly capable of pleasing both masters.

The compatibilism question takes three forms in the movie, first asking how an old-fashioned musical film can succeed today, then asking how jazz can continue to thrive, and finally asking if two different dreamers of two different dreams can have a lasting partnership.  As for question one, its answer seems to be that the contemporary drama and the classical musical are, inevitably, an awkward pairing, but it’s decided that this awkwardness is okay.  There are times when a jazzy musical number ends with a ringtone, or an old cartoonish iris-opening transition presents a profane term that would never have been used in the days of Singin’ in the Rain.  It’s an odd clash, but a cute and coquettish clash, not unlike a couple in a romantic comedy.  The film also has elements of the mid-19th century musical that don’t work very well today, and these can stir up debate and arguments among viewers pertaining to the issue of how this genre should be handled in the new century.  For example, consider how the film might be asking questions about race in much the same way that musicals like Singin’ in the Rain feature white men borrowing from black dance, and La La Land features a white man explaining black music.  The film goes so far as to include musical numbers that contribute nothing to the plot at all – an often forgotten element of the mid-century musical – and this is part of what makes the film so divisive: it has flaws built in that I suspect were carefully designed to make some viewers hate it (and make most viewers debate it).

Regarding the jazz question, the film shows its hand a bit more, presenting an explicit answer to the question through John Legend’s dialogue, and thus revealing the film’s intellectual pursuit to viewers who haven’t yet caught on.  Here too, however, the film is somewhat ambiguous, presenting the contemporary jazz music as unsatisfactory, impure, and greatly problematic for our characters.  Even the song it uses to represent the future of jazz (“Start a Fire”) is mostly comprised of pieces of older genres, mixing jazz, Motown, soul, funk, disco, and ‘80s pop, revealing a reticence to accept the modern even from the characters that claim to embrace it.  On the other hand, this choice may have just been made so that the director, who seems to prefer older music himself, can tolerate it.

The third question – the question of the couple – is the area where I am most critical of and disappointed with the film’s argumentation.  This is the reason why I almost deducted half a star (or even four of the stars) from my rating.  The problem here has to do with the logic of cinema, which generally ought to resemble a symbolic logical sentence (A ⋀ B → C → D, for example).  This is the basis for one of the holy and unbreakable rules of screenwriting: the ending may be unexpected, yet it must be set up and inevitable.  Obviously, La La Land does not follow this rule, because the decision for Mia to end up with another man comes out of the blue and seems entirely arbitrary.  There is no rational reason for her to choose to be with someone other than her true love, nor is there anything in the film’s plot that suggests she would forgo the rational/emotional/intuitive choice to serve some other purpose.  This ending is ultimately a non-sequitur, so the film’s conclusion that Mia and Sebastian’s romance cannot work is seemingly a random one with little or no basis in the logic of the story.

What makes this so frustrating is that the film seems to make the case that their romance could have worked had they made better choices.  This is, of course, suggested by the fantasy sequence in the film’s final act, during which Mia imagines the better way the story could have gone had things been just slightly different . . . or so it seems.  What seems hard for some viewers to notice is that this fantasy is actually a completely impossible one – their story could not have gone this way.  Sebastian could not have known that Mia wanted him to kiss her after she first heard him play their song; he could not have attended Mia’s play and remained dedicated to the source of his income that was required in order for him to open his jazz club; he could not have veered off the main road at the end and coincidentally stumble upon his own jazz club (which somehow managed to exist without him).  This is only Mia’s fantasy of what life could have been like if she had magically gotten every little thing she wanted regardless of how much it cost Sebastian and regardless of whether or not it was even humanly possible.

The reason why this ending is so important is that it relates to questions about the musical romance as a genre.  Traditionally, the Classical Hollywood romance story exists almost solely for the formation of the heterosexual couple – to convince its audience for the thousandth time that the formation of a happy and healthy romance between a man and a woman is possible.  If the film has not made this case in such a way that the viewer believes it, the narrative and/or genre does not function.  The fact that Mia and Sebastian were not able to form a lasting romantic couple means that the genre has failed – it tells us that Classical Hollywood’s way of forming a couple does not work for people in the modern world.  In other words, the fact that the genre could not serve its function today answers the first compatibilism question with a definite negative.  Whether he meant to or not, the director told us that his attempt at making a mid-20th century musical in the 20th century was a failure, regardless of how well the film has been received.  The problem with his answer, of course, is that he did not show his work, instead selecting an arbitrary ending that gives his argument a random conclusion rather than a logical and satisfactory one.

As much as I detest this laziness of writing, I still must give this movie the highest of praises because I believe it is very, very good for the future of cinema.  Even if its logical argument is very poor, at least this film is different from most of the films that the “cinematic elite” embrace in that, rather than prompting the viewer to ask meaningless questions the way that Mulholland Drive does, this film uses the argumentative power of cinema to get the audience thinking about real and important questions (in this case pertaining to the future of media).  This could lead to other films that can ask the viewer questions about ethics, laws, cultures, progress, the environment, and any intellectual topic imaginable, all without sounding preachy.  In this sense, La La Land has the potential to shape this century’s cinema into something great – something that is highly intelligent and that is beneficial to humankind.  (It’s worth noting that the film’s ending is an attempt to do the kind of “open to interpretation” endings that Lynch and other “art film” directors love, so this film’s director clearly has a fondness for the kind of pseudo-intellectual ambiguity that the “cinema elite” adores, but this element of the film hopefully won’t hinder the potential positive effects that I have outlined in this paragraph.)

Perhaps more importantly, I think this film just might be a greater movie experience than nearly any other film made within the past ten years because this movie is alive!  In a time when nearly every movie released from Hollywood is hideously drab, gray, and monochromatic, this film has color!  In a time when nearly every filmmaker tries to capture an almost depressing realism with the camera, this film has theatricality!  In a time when nearly every Hollywood soundtrack sounds like a collection of durges, this film has boogie!  Director Damien Chazelle has found that the perfect combination of visual beauty and musical beauty can sometimes be enough to form emotional beauty, using pure spectacle and unfiltered passion to overpower and enthrall me, filling me with bubbly excitement and childlike wonder from the very first scene.  Never before have I found myself tearing up within the first few minutes of a movie, and never have I given myself over to a musical number the way I did with “Fools Who Dream.”  It’s true that not every moment in the film is captivating, and I may have checked my watch over a dozen times while watching it, but its best scenes were so riveting, enchanting, and divine that its flaws are forgivable, and I may never have had so many tears fill my eyes from just one film in my entire lifetime.

Therefore, I must give this film the highest of praises – long live La La Land, the greatest work of art of this century!

Rogue One Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

By the end of 2016, it seemed as though everyone on the Internet was in the mood to rant about how every movie Hollywood makes is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or in-universe story.  This, of course, is not true – just watch the previews before one of the big hit dramas out in theaters today or check the homepage of Rotten Tomatoes.  Still, there is definitely a movement in cinema right now towards returning to the many stories it has told and trying to find something new here, to varying degrees of success.  Instead of relying just on the genre system that guided Classical Hollywood, which was essentially a means for the studios to make money by telling the same story over and over again, the ’80s have given us a blockbuster and franchise system, which is now moving further from focusing on original stories and towards revisiting familiar stories.  Perhaps the various modern twists on fairy tales are responsible for this obsession with re-visitation, and maybe Wicked is to blame for that trend, but regardless of the cause, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.  This just means that audiences have to learn to approach stories differently, particularly when dealing with in-universe stories that aren’t focused on the main characters from the original franchise.  This didn’t seem to be a problem for most people who saw Fantastic Beasts, but surprisingly, it has made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story a very divisive film.

I think it’s safe to say that there are very few other films in history that have been designed specifically to both contextualize and by contextualized by another film on the level that Rogue One is.  This is very new for cinema, but it isn’t for Star Wars – they’ve had TV shows in this universe that were inspired by a single (almost insignificant) line of dialogue from New Hope, so this shouldn’t seem that strange to people.  Yet, somehow, the lack of an opening crawl is too much for some people to handle.  For me, it doesn’t matter whether or not it feels like a Star Wars movie, or even a Star Wars story, so long as I believe that it’s in the same universe as Star Wars and its story makes me look at the main films with greater understanding and appreciation of their context.  This is all true for me, so any reservations I might have have been appeased, allowing me to focus just on enjoying the story.

So is it a good story?  Well, at the very least it feels like an original story.  This is one quality that other films in the franchise have not had, much to their detriment.  The villains and side-characters are all great, but the two leads are fairly uninteresting.  I will say that I understood the protagonist’s perspective throughout, rooted for her, and could tell that she was not one to be trifled with – she was fierce.  Each of the characters serves his/her purpose, the drama is intense, the humor is hilarious, the action is more awesome and impactful that most of the action scenes I’ve ever seen, and the story plays with elements of the Star Wars universe well.  (Also, Vader is amazing, his first appearance sending chills down my spine, and his second blowing me away.)

With all this in mind, I have a difficult time understanding why so many people I know have been so disappointed.  This movie has the perfect balance of serious war themes and fun excitement.  Just imagine if a good fan project was given a huge load of money and told to go crazy.  That’s the feeling of this movie.  Because of how much it seems like a fanatic’s passion project, it really feels like a victory for the fans.  This is enough to make it satisfactory, but with the added bonuses of clever references to other characters and an amazing ending, it’s very pleasing.  Sure some of the CGI is terrible, but I still see this as a film that is paving the way to great things in cinema’s future, 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.

Touch of Evil Review

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Very often for these reviews, I like to take the general critical consensus of a film’s worth into account for the star rating.  I usually don’t let what the professional critics have to say influence the body of my review very much, but for the number of stars, it’s nearly always a factor.  This is because I want the star rating to serve as at least one of the following: an objective, logical analysis that reduces the influence of the specific emotional context of my viewing of the film and just focuses on quality; the extent to which I recommend the film to others; a “protest vote” to counter the views of the other reviewers; a bold statement to bait its viewers to read the article that goes with it.  Sometimes I go for somewhere in the middle of all four, but I usually use the reviews of the other critics to help my more objective ratings by rounding them up to a higher number of stars when I’m stuck in a dilemma.  For this film, I’m definitely rounding up due to critical consensus – I just can’t figure out what my own feelings are about the film, but I can’t think of anything wrong with it either.

I have no issue with the protagonist, apart from the fact that the casting is comically bizarre, and most of the other characters are fine by me as well.  Welles’ character in the film is obviously a delight, and his handiwork as a director is as much of a big, eye-catching performance as his acting is.  The lighting is wonderful, making for excellent “noir” visuals, and the way that some of these scenes are shot is exceptionally impressive.  The choice for the music is particularly interesting because its very fun for a drama from this time period, including a lot of classic (then-contemporary) rock ‘n’ roll, making for some unique juxtaposition.  The film has a few truly great scenes throughout, and the climax is just perfect.  As much as I like the story of Welles’ character, it really feels like there isn’t a whole lot of story in the film – at least not for the first half.  It can feel kind of slow and boring at times, leaving me wondering why I’m supposed to be interested, but these moments are balanced out with moments that are shocking, dazzling, or otherwise intriguing, making for a very fascinating piece of work in the end.  If Touch of Evil is the last film noir, as many historians say it is, it’s nice to see the genre went out with a bang.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Review

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SPOILER ALERT

Ignorance is a very important part of how people experience the world; one might even go so far as to call it a fundamental human value.  We constantly rely on our ability to block out thoughts that distract us from the pertinent matters in our lives and that keep us from processing the situations we face in a way that makes sense to us.  There is no way for a middle-class citizen of the western world to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and content while regularly considering the unsung realities of nearly every aspect of human life: free will is illusory, life is quickly coming to an end, most of us will be forgotten by history, we all spend our money on things we desire while those who need our money starve, we unconsciously harbor many unethical biases, and so on and so forth.  In cinema, ignorance is perhaps the most important value, because the average Hollywood movie is only enjoyable if it can trick the audience into focusing only on an ignorant form of empathy (the kind that psychologists like Paul Bloom find harmful when applied to reality) so that they can be as engrossed in the story as possible.  Fantastic Beasts completely fails at keeping the viewer, or at least me, blissfully ignorant, instead leaving me questioning and challenging some of the most important premises of the narrative and making me painfully confused.

Regrettably, I found myself completely forgetting most of what I saw in this movie shortly after I left the theater, so it is very difficult for me to recall specific examples of my complaints about the film, but I know that my main problem overall while watching it was that I didn’t know how I was supposed to think or feel about anything that happened.  By the time I’d made it about a third of the way through, I had been wishing that I had read the novel, but I was informed by my sister that the book Rowling wrote with the same title as this film is not a novel, so I have no idea how anyone is expected to read this movie.  The plot’s problem on a large scale is that the context makes so little sense: why the heck should I believe that the only result of muggles finding out about the wizard world is their annihilation, and how can I do this without being frustrated with the wizarding community?  The only reason why the wizards would feel the need to kill all the non-wizards is if they were concerned that the non-wizards would be outraged that the wizards had kept their magic to themselves, in which case the non-wizards would be absolutely right – the wizarding community has been unethically ignoring the needs of those in poverty, in war, and in every horrible event that has occurred in human history, simply for their own convenience.  Rowling’s inability to keep me ignorant of this fact is detrimental to the story, and ultimately, I thought the villain proposed better policies than the president (who was an unreasonable jerk in her last scene).  This left me unsettled by the way that Newt took her side and went along with the nonsense that he knew from his experience with Queenie and Kowalski was needlessly causing pain.

The characters, too, are somewhat problematic.  I think the film might have been more interesting had it been about Tina, whose role seemed to be more focused than Newt’s, but her part is fine as it is.  The villain’s role in the film seemed odd to me, in part because it felt like Johnny Depp was wasted, and in part because it felt like they were trying to pull a twist ending, which couldn’t have possibly worked after the cinematographer so blatantly revealed who the villain was at the beginning of the film, making the only twist at the climax the awkward revelation of a funny-looking Johnny Depp.  The kids in the cult also seemed to have their story handled clumsily: at first I suspected the child who turned into the black Tasmanian Devil watercolor thing was Ezra Miller’s character, but then the movie informed us that this couldn’t be true because you have to be younger than him to turn into the flying scribble monster, but then the movie inexplicably nullify’s its own premise, which is absolutely terrible storytelling.  It’s a little bit strange to see just how much Newt and Tina seem to like each other on a romantic level seeing as how she looks much older than him, but this, too, is forgivable.  I’ll even give Newt’s habit of mumbling unintelligibly a pass, because ultimately, my real problem in the film is with Queenie and Kowalski.

Queenie is essentially a magical Marilyn Monroe – hyper-sexualized, yet ultimately innocent, and generally content with the way men throw themselves at her – which is odd coming from a feminist storyteller like Rowling.  As a little bit of a storyteller myself, I know from experience that adding a mind-reader to the story can cause problems, especially in a romance: she’s essentially stripping him down on a psychological level, violating the most sacred form of privacy known to humankind, and it’s all shrugged off by the other characters as a little quirk.  The inclusion of this character also has serious consequences for the logic of the Potter universe, meaning I have questions about how a mind-reader can be fairly graded on his/her Hogwarts exams, or why it is that dark wizards don’t use mind-readers to extract information from (and blackmail) their enemies.  To make matters worse, the believability of the story suffers from the fact that this beautiful woman is randomly in love with a chubby baker, and as much as she says that he’s an amazing person, we aren’t given any reason to believe this.  Everything amazing about him must be in his brain, and she’s the only one who can access that, leaving the romance they shared ultimately off-screen on a purely psychological level, thus completely distancing the audience from their romantic experience.  The other problem with their relationship, of course, is the ending: she is forced to say goodbye and make him forget her, then waits a few months for some reason, and then inexplicably shows up in his life again, presumably assuming she’ll be able to have a romantic relationship with him while hiding the fact that she knows everything about his past and his psychology, which has got to be the clunkiest ending to a romantic story I have ever witnessed.

I think what bothers me most about this film is that it could have been something very special – maybe the best Potter film to date – but instead it’s as annoying as Prisoner of Azkaban.  In terms of setting, it could obviously be an enormous amount of fun to see what wizards would do in the Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age – but the closest we get to the kind of whimsy that should have filled the film is the weird CG singer in the speakeasy that felt like a leftover from the Special Edition edits of Jabba the Hutt’s den in Return of the Jedi.  I think this could have been a fascinating drama about conflicts in the wizard community because of the laws concerning no-maj relations, or it could have been a neat story about a revolt against the wizarding establishment.  As it is, however, it’s just a weird story about an uninteresting smuggler of wild animals who wants to release a magical bird in Arizona.  I don’t understand it, and I’m not crazy about it, but I can’t say it’s not entertaining.  It’s a fine popcorn flick for anyone interested in seeing some of the weird monsters and critters Rowling’s made up for the Potter universe in an original story with a generally good cast.  It’s just not exactly … fantastic.

Scrooged Review

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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got into a big argument on their TV show back in the 1980s because of the film Back to the Future: Part II.  Ebert thought it was a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy, but Siskel found it lacking in a certain quality that the first film in the series had.  “The first film had a heart to it, and I don’t think there’s any reason why a screwball comedy couldn’t take time out to have heart.  . . . I really found it kind of unpleasant to watch in a way.”  Ebert conceded that the first film moved the audience emotionally, and the second film didn’t do that, but I don’t understand what either of them were talking about here.  There’s nothing heartwarming about the story of a boy who doesn’t like his parents, and then inadvertently changes them into likable people and ends up richer.  I think people are desperate to see heart in a movie any chance they get, even if it doesn’t belong there, and when they can’t see it, they feel like the movie is missing something fundamental.  Frankly, this is nonsense.

Heart is a very delicate thing – it can easily turn to sap if the filmmaker isn’t careful, but it amazes me how many people will take heart even when it is sappy crap.  I’ll never understand how anyone can watch the climax of the movie Elf without vomiting rainbows and pooping out snowflakes – it’s just disgusting – but this is the only way most people want to feel when they watch a Christmas movie.  This is the only way I can make sense of Ebert’s very harsh review of 1988’s Scrooged, which he thought was so horribly lacking in the heart of the original story that it seemed to him like the filmmakers must not have read it, especially because of Murray’s particularly harsh performance in the film.  I, in turn, wonder if Ebert has ever read the story, because this film captures exactly what the story needs to be in order to be applicable to the modern era.

The original story by Dickens is not exactly a light, fun, and heartwarming story – at least not until the end.  Scrooge is a thoroughly horrible person, and it is very important to the story that he starts off without a shred of human decency.  He doesn’t care if the poor and hungry die, arguing it would “decrease the surplus population.”  While it may be tempting for some to feel that Murray should have been more like his funny characters in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, this would completely undercut the story’s message.  We want to be those characters in those films, but it is crucial that Murray’s character in this film is not very likable in this film – even a Tony Stark type would be too charming for the story to function.  Also, a writer that wants to be purely heartfelt and whimsical would use Faeries of Christmas Past, not ghosts, but this story is designed to be so eerie and dark that the light of Christmas morning is like a breath of fresh air for the reader.  Much like with Our Town, the story makes its case well because it forecasts death and doom, and it uses its darkness in order to keep the positive message from being so cheery as to seem unrealistic and so sweet as to seem disgusting, while also motivating the audience to live better lives.

It’s also important that the film take the heartless approach that it does to most of the film because it’s not a straight adaptation of the story: it’s a modern-day comedy, and that has different requirements than a traditional adaptation or a drama would.  Comedy, unlike what many people suppose, is not a particularly cheery genre by nature – it’s actually, in its purest form, quite brutal.  Comedy assaults the ego, making a mockery of humankind and all of its accomplishments, revealing absurdity in the things we hold most sacred, including Christmas.  This movie understands that, so it makes Murray a total jerk, the man he fires a drunken psycho, and the Ghost of Christmas Present a cartoony, merciless sadist, creating the sense that the film must have been directed by Yakko Warner or Daffy Duck.  It also modernizes the story with a  Nora Ephron approach before the films of Ephron’s era of romantic comedy even came out: it addresses the old story it’s retelling pretty directly, displays skepticism towards its relevance or believably in the post-Vietnam era, dismisses it as pure fiction, and then ultimately decides to go along with it anyway.  The films of the late ’80s and 1990s that revisited old stories and genres had a different audience that was not as willing to believe in stories with pure and concentrated heart, so the smart ones knew to tell the audiences that they knew the story was a silly fairy tale, and this allowed the audience to humor it anyway.  This film uses its dark humor wisely to give the audience the licence to believe in an otherwise unbelievable story, which is exactly what it needed to do.

It’s interesting to compare Scrooged to other modern Christmas classics, such as Elf, which have a lot more heart to them.  With Elf, not everything is sweet: his father is a jerk at the start, and the people of New York are initially reticent about embracing Christmas cheer, but these scenes with real-world problems and minor profanity are used to make the unrealistically jolly world where people say “cotton-headed ninny-muggins” seem entirely absurd.  The film then makes an awkward turn-around towards the end and insists that the world of jolliness must entirely trump the world of the normal people, as though the jolliness is inexplicably no longer absurd, but an important part of the human experience.  This is easily accepted by the people of New York without believable justification, and everything feels excruciatingly forced.  In Scrooged, on the other hand, nobody ever has to believe in the ghosts Murray encountered, and the characters only go along with Murray’s musical number because he’s crazy enough to fire them if they don’t and the TV crew is being held at gunpoint by a lunatic.  One film makes the case that faithful belief, even in something everyone in real life knows is obviously a lie, is intrinsically good, the other makes the case that we sometimes have to embrace a little bit of craziness because we’re a desperate, crazy species in a depraved, crazy world, which is clearly more honest and ethical.

In short, even though I have my issues with it, this is already one of my favorite Christmas movies.  It’s over-the-top, delightfully dark, and incredibly clever, even if it could use a few more laughs than it has.  It’s another one of those movies that feels like an ’80s movie should: it’s too dark for it to be made as a kid’s film today, but too childlike to be a movie for adults today, so it’s right in the sweet spot.  Its costumes, sets, and special effects are just right, and it even has a little bit of a Tim Burton feel to it, which is probably largely due to Danny Elfman’s perfectly fitting score.  I will say that I thought some of it could have been a little bit more original.  (For example, I got the impression that the Ghosts of Christmas Past wouldn’t be literal ghosts, but real people whom Murray’s character interprets to be the ghosts, but they went the boring literal way, which I guess worked out fine because of their unique casting choices for the first two ghosts.)  If you’re looking for Rankin-Bass levels of good holiday cheer, you and Roger Ebert can go look elsewhere, but this is the film I’m looking forward to watching at Christmastime for years to come.