PG-13

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)_/¯

Selma Review

April 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

I cannot relieve that I’m reviewing this movie right now. I just don’t feel qualified to comment on it. Since I still review most of the films I watch, if only so I can keep practicing my writing and keep fine-tuning my cinematic eye, I still feel uncomfortable expressing my opinions about it. I’m no historian, and the vast majority of history that I do know pertains to talking socks, so I cannot review this as an informed critic. Consequently, I will have to talk about this from the perspective of what I do know – how the movie made me feel.

This was shown as a part of one of my classes at the university where I’m currently studying film, and I’m very glad that it was. It’s one of the most interesting and enjoyable films that’s been shown in the class thus far, if only because it does a good job at telling a good story. Generally, this isn’t exactly the breed of movie I go for – the pseudo-realistic lighting and colors, the strict basis in history, the focus on oppression, revolution, and inspiration – it doesn’t tickle my fancy the way that surrealistic fantasy does. However, I was moved in all the ways I should have been moved, I felt good and bad at the appropriate times, and I’d like to think I may have gained some insight and perspective on both the man and the event. (Most importantly, the use of “The Banana Boat Song” was perfect.) This film was fascinating and enjoyable, and I think that, for now, is all I really need to know in order to give it a thumbs-up.

Allegiant Review

April 23, 2016 by JD Hansel

Um . . . okay.

There’s a part of me that wants to say Veronica Roth painted herself into a corner with Insurgent by pushing the story outside of the place that made it almost unique, so I want to go easy on the movie. However, she really opened the door to speculation and imagination, because just about anything could have been beyond the wall, which makes me wonder why this part of the story wasn’t more intriguing and satisfying. I have so little to say about the movie because it made me feel so little. I think I’m experiencing from this movie what most “professional” critics experienced while watching the first two films in the series – a painful lack of inspired substance.

I do think there is enough cleverness and creativity in the world-building at play in this story for it to be a sufficient spectacle, and I also think that it did a good job at making me curious about what was to come. I suppose when this is added to the simple pleasure of spending more time with already familiar characters, it really can be a pleasant film to watch, which is why I did not have a bad time seeing it. In the future, however, I should hope that a movie with this large of a budget will do the work it takes to “wow” me.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Review

April 21, 2016 by JD Hansel

Hi. I’m J. D. Hansel.

Not the usual J. D. Hansel though – that is to say, not the J. D. who’s already seen the movie that he’s trying to review, and has had time to form an opinion about it. I’m J. D. in the middle of watching the movie. I am one hour, six minutes, and 39 seconds into The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and at this time I cannot say with certainty that I’ll be able to finish the film, because the protagonist has just been dared to do the unthinkable. While I do not wish to give it away, I need to make one thing clear – this is my worst nightmare. This movie is terribly horrific because it’s filled with my biggest social fears. I don’t feel safe while watching this film.

I haven’t been this uncomfortable in ages. What started as a seemingly innocent comedy has had me sweating in a cold room, and biting my fist to keep from yelling. I had to stop the movie because I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve gone to do some chores, and I’ve gone for a walk, but PowerDVD is still sitting in my taskbar, eager to move on, and I still can’t muster up the courage to see what’s going to happen next. I even had to get the DVD case out of my sight, because just thinking about the film makes me shaky, queasy, and rather dehydrated. I’m trying to stall by getting other things done, so I’m in the middle of typing up an email to a Muppeteer I admire at the moment, because even that doesn’t make me quite as anxious as what I think I’m about to see if I play the movie for just ten more seconds. I might try to go play a video game to take my mind off of it, or perhaps I’ll do some packing to move back into my college dorm after spring break, but I still don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this nightmare.

It’s me again – the “normal” J. D. Hansel, under the influence of hindsight bias and time to overthink things, as usual. I’m glad that I’m back, because looking back on this film (which I watched almost a month ago), I can appreciate it more now than I could at the time when I was watching it. My problem, naturally, is that I cannot decide which opinion is more “true” or “pure” – the opinion formed while experiencing the film, or the opinion formed a little bit afterward while looking back at the whole. For this particular movie, I think that the answer is the former. Why? Because, I just now took a look at this movie’s trailer (as I often do to refresh my memory), and immediately my senses have returned to the state depicted in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MnX1wT7BRU

So, in order to recover a little bit, pardon me for a moment while I bang my fists on the keyboard and scream at the ceiling. SZAD.s.kaskssklksalaSZKLJsklkuhdkwkwqp’;wsikjnd9jhergpeehuefwmgwr,’l;wersdffeuhgdefrnklj4wert3pmoljmqhudf7yhegkmrergmk;vbdfidvbfzusdwf’l,ERT./dvslop;sdf.,lerg ,gert

In summery, this is one of the most important, absurd, genuine, horrible, amazing, beautiful, creative, bizarre, genius, unethical, idiotic, awesome, frustrating, glorious, deceitful, outstanding, terrifying, enlightening, enraging, cliche, original, heartfelt, heartbreaking, game-changing, life-changing, and stupefying works of art in the entire timeline of the galaxy. My inability to process such a thing fills me with unspeakable frustration. This is one of those rare films that will haunt me until I die. I know this is rather late in the article to present a thesis statement, but I suspect this aggravation is mostly due to the fact that it should just be a stupid, meaningless, unoriginal teen dramedy, but instead, it uses the deepest fears that were meant to be left unspoken to an extent that Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock, Rod Serling, and the original Snuffleupagus puppet combined could never parallel.

Since it seems impossible for me to figure out how many stars I ought to give this film, I’ll have to try to focus on some aspects other than the horror. The author of the book, Stephen Lucifer Chbosky, directed this film, and this has both good and bad effects on the movie. The good effect, of course, is that he knows how to tell the story, since it’s his story, and I firmly believe that the writing and directing of a film are generally best done by the same person. This film serves as evidence for this theory of mine, because much of the story is expressed excellently in ways that any other director would probably not try. Not to mention, one scene uses music even more powerfully than the average musical film in the scene featuring “Come on Eileen” – and this kind of perfection is what cinema was meant to be. However, since his background is in writing more than directing, and since he had not yet directed a film on this scale, some of his work is technically lacking. I’m specifically thinking of the scene towards the beginning in the bleachers (when Sam is introduced), because the editing is so unprofessional and awkward that I laughed so hard that I fell on the ground.

Still, it is the characters and conflicts that make a movie more interesting than the technical side of things, so these are what I’ll prioritize. The characters are largely likable when they’re supposed to be, and Charlie is as relatable as the author intended. Each of the actors performed completely believably, although frequently I found I couldn’t quite believe Watson’s American accent – not that I could have done a better English accent, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. The characters and conflict had all been done in such a way that I couldn’t help but get really invested in the story, but I think this leads to my problem with the film.

One of the greatest sensations I have experienced is when I watch a movie or television program that uses the social anxiety of the audience to make a scene that is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The awkwardness of the situations towards the end of Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and the Next Gen. episode “Hollow Pursuits” can generate two very different emotional responses at the same time, one of which has me peeking through my fingers, and the other has me rolling with laughter. What must be kept in mind is that this only works if the balance is kept just right, with the laughter serving as a spoon full of sugar. In this film, it’s clear that the balance is off – I couldn’t laugh when I wanted to laugh because I felt far too uncomfortable; frankly, I felt violated.

I felt as though the movie had struck me right in the heart, and used my fears to destroy me. Even now, over a month after I watched the movie, the anxiety it induced is still too strong to be considered wholly ethical. Oddly, however, my problem with the film is not so much its attack on the audience, but the way it tries to make everything better with the ending. The ending is when the movie tries to seem caring for its audience by putting a little Hello Kitty Band-Aid on the bloody slash it slit. The happy ending is highly inappropriate, and is even deceitful, since the only friends he made in school (aside from the teacher) are only seen on occasion when they come to visit, meaning our protagonist logically should feel lonely and miserable during 90% of the school year. The worst part is that it’s in the guise of a very cliche young adult novel dramedy, making it the kind of movie that’s not supposed to be a masterpiece, which just adds to the disrespect I feel the film is showing me. If the movie is going to injure me this badly, it needs to finish me off, to put me out of my misery by making a depressing ending that will make the horrors I experienced worth something. I’ve often considered how fun it would be for me to make the most depressing film of all time, so it could be used as a tool to show what it’s like to have depression, but to do that I would have the decency to go all the way and end the film with a thought that will make the viewers wish they were dead – with none of Chbosky’s false hope for consolation.

While I am exceedingly tempted to give this movie four and a half stars (part of me even demands five) for being so powerful, impacting, and unbelievably moving, I’m afraid that I must give this a low, low, low rating for its cruel abuse of the medium of cinema. However, I must recommend it to everyone, and even tout it as a great achievement of cinema, because it’s a more elegant and beautiful abuse than I could have ever imagined.

Romero Review

April 1, 2016 by JD Hansel

I have decided to relieve myself of duty. For almost 21 months now, I have been reviewing every movie I watch for my first time, with only a few exceptions (such documentaries, or movies I have only seen through Mystery Science Theater and related productions). At this time, however, I am concluding this journey by ending the “mandatory” status of my online movie reviews. This is the 100th movie I have reviewed in this series, so it is a fitting place to end. Why is this particular film special enough to serve as the conclusion to an important chapter of my life’s story? Because I believe that experiencing Romero was a significant turning point in my life; for I now understand the nature of humankind.

Pardon me for being even more pretentious and over-dramatic than Romero itself, but this is a very telling film about what people always have done, and what we always shall do. What we see in this movie is the struggle to combat oppression. Over and over and over again, all throughout history, people are required to stand up and fight just to be called people. Humans are always finding new excuses to oppress people, as can be seen in just the recent history of Africa, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, and of course the United States, among several others that my readers will just have to research for themselves. I haven’t time to list every instance in the past century in which an entire populations have been denied their basic rights, and have been treated worse than animals.

This is what humans do. We harm without reason, we kill without cause, and we torture for pure pleasure. We silence those with whom we disagree and deafen ourselves with the gunshots that kill them. We invent new ways to kill more people more quickly, to hurt more people more violently. We dehumanize anyone we feel we must in order to manage our own fragile, pathetic emotions. This is what we do. This is what we are.

However, it is not all we are. What makes the human race such a fascinating species is not the fact that we are so oppressive and abusive that revolutions of liberation are commonplace, but rather the fact that we have made these revolutions commonplace by refusing to tolerate intolerance. People consistently demand liberty and are even willing to die in order to obtain liberty for the posterity of their people. If evil is in power, we will find a way to overthrow that power, no matter how long it takes us to do so. This is what we do.

This is what we are.

This movie contains many other elements that I could obviously discuss in more depth. The Hollywood white-washing is, of course, quite embarrassing, and the way that this movie cherry-picks information (such as the unsettling fact that the United States was supporting the oppressive government of El Salvador at the time by providing training and arms for the abusive soldiers) can be frustrating. I have little to add about any connection to certain characters in the story, and some of the characters were a mustache shy of a cartoon villain, but I will say that Raúl Juliá’s performance as Romero truly did move me. If one considers it to be a religious film – which I suppose is fair since it was produced in part by a Catholic production company – than it is certainly one of the best. It may be slow and boring at the start, but the more the film reveals about the evils humankind must endure, and about the powerful response humankind fires back at these evils, the more the viewer must appreciate the beauty of liberation.

Insurgent Review

January 14, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

With a bad Italian accent a la The Amanda Show, say it with me: “This is better – much better!”

As we all should know because I’m super important, I have my issues with Divergent. This world and its people are entirely nonsensical, and I had such a hard time taking it all halfway seriously. Fortunately, this film is just the game-changer that the franchise required. Never in a million years could I believe that these “founding fathers” thought it would be wise to separate the people into factions like this. However, I’d totally buy that a bunch of people who’ve been driven to insanity by a terrible war decided to throw a bunch of people in a pen, separate them by their primary skills, and see who gets killed. Furthermore, the experiment shows that Divergents can arise even in a world of just singularly skilled people. The only way they could improve on this to clear up any other logical issues is if they explain that the premise of Divergent was actually just a table top game, but the experimenters got drunk and decided to make a government out of it.

With the structural mess out of the way, I can finally address everything else in this movie. The score and soundtrack are drab as usual, and much of the screenplay is regrettably predictable, but aside from that, it’s a pretty decent flick. Apparently, most critics thought this was a step back for the franchise, and the reviews for this film are much worse than those of the first. I disagree, in part because I just like stories that serve as a bridge from the first story in the franchise to the climax (meaning there’s less exposition and more mystery and hype), but also because the plot simply gets more interesting. One of the best things a story can do to add hype is make sure its characters on the run from a ticking time bomb of sorts, and they have to beat the clock. While the Hunger Games films have an element of this, the games themselves don’t start until at least halfway through the movies, whereas Insurgent (knowing its characters aren’t quite compelling enough to pull off an hour of characters just hanging out, shooting promo videos, impressing sponsors, resting on trains, etc.) puts Tris on the run right from the get-go, and it’s only a matter of time until the powers that be track her down.

This movie also plays around with character dynamics a lot, which adds a touch more dimension to the characters that have been largely flat thus far. Can Four’s mother be trusted, or is he right to suspect her of evil intentions? Is Tris going to be able to keep from revealing that she killed her best friend’s brother? Is Peter a good guy, a bad guy, or still figuring it out? How much can Caleb trust that Jeanine won’t be too inhumane to his sister? Can Four bring himself to shoot Eric? And what do the founding fathers have to tell the people of the future? Regardless of how predictable many parts of this movie may be, the lives of these characters get wonderfully messier, and things do take bigger and better turns and twists that make sure the audience is having a heck of a time.