PG-13

Star Wars – The Force Awakens Review

December 24, 2015 by JD Hansel

I love home video. I absolutely adore it. I get nostalgic about VHS tapes, I collect DVDs, I obsess over digital copies, and I drool at the majesty of a beautiful Blu-Ray on an HD screen. I must emphasize this because I’m about to say something a wee bit unfavorable about home video: it may have ruined cinema. Not completely, of course, but I think that we’ve lost something special about the movie theater experience.

Because home video has been so prominent since before I was born, I don’t know personally what going to the movies was like at the time, but I’ve heard the stories. I’ve heard how the crowd cheered in joyous support at the premiere of Muppet Christmas Carol when the dedication to Jim Henson and Richard Hunt appeared on screen. I’ve heard how the boys let out a snide “oooOOOooh…” in unison in the bedroom scene in 1968’s Romeo and Juliet. I’ve heard how the test audience for Ghostbusters went wild when they saw “scene missing” as a placeholder for a shot that had yet to be composed. I’ve heard how they edited silent pauses after the Marx Brothers’ jokes because the audience would laugh so long and loudly. I’ve heard how much more of a community experience it used to be back before we got used to watching movies in private – before we trained ourselves to take no involvement in a collective movie experience.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens made the movie theater into the big, loud, excited, delighted, happy family it was meant to be. There was applause for the Star Wars logo, applause for the Lucasfilm logo, and even for a spaceship. Everybody could feel the immense joy in the room when a familiar face came on screen. The jokes hit home with everyone. The twists had us all on the edge of our seats. Seeing this film was one of the best experiences of my life because, for the first time in a long while, I was truly experiencing a film rather than just looking at a film. Not to mention, the movie itself floored me.

I felt like a child again, even though I didn’t watch Star Wars films much growing up. This movie actually made me into a bigger Star Wars fan than I have ever been in my life. I was simply reverted to a time when watching a movie was joyous and exciting, getting more delightful by the minute, and I couldn’t have been more excited. When I remembered to use my grown up brain to analyze the film, I was impressed by the effects, the acting, the visuals, the score, the dialogue, the story structure – everything about it. This is the kind of experience that the movies are all about, and I feel privileged to live in such a historic moment when the event of a lifetime is on big screens everywhere.

THG: Mockingjay – Part 2 Review

November 30, 2015 by JD Hansel

(MINOR SPOILERS)

The last film in a franchise is nearly always the hardest film in the lot to make, and the hardest to watch. It has the burden of being the “goodbye” that we know we won’t be satisfied with, but we won’t be satisfied without either. Ultimately, we want a sense of completion, but we also need a sense that, after the credits roll, everything will stay as it should be in the world of the film. Good characters are rewarded and satisfied, bad characters are punished, and the scope/nature of any character’s death fits the scope/nature of his or her life. Whatever part of the movie’s finale the viewers are pondering while leaving the theater becomes what the franchise means to them. This is a task of gigantic proportions that must be handled with extreme care, and I say The Hunger Games: Mockingjay -Part 2 is a good example of a conclusion that feels just about right.

The most impressive thing, however, is that we spend the whole movie (as we have for the whole franchise) rooting for Katniss to kill Snow, but once she has the chance to shoot him, we don’t want her to. This is an incredible feat to pull off, and it serves to turn the saying “remember who the real enemy is” into a question of what the real enemy is. A series that started as a controversial story about children going to war has evolved into a timeless fable about human nature. The dangers of history repeating itself offer more powerful terror than any of the horrific moments seen previously in the franchise, and the entire history of their dystopia is called into question during just one conversation. Our view of some of the characters change entirely, but I was happy to see that the most important characters got just about the endings they deserved, with hope in the future for the characters we care about most.

So, it pulls off the sequel game well, but setting my sequel standards aside, what do I think of it as a film? Well, the acting is just right, as usual, and the script seems largely well-written. The soundtrack is pretty standard, but I seem to recall enjoying some unique parts of the score here and there. The visuals seem even more gray than usual in this one, which is a pity, but I suppose I’m used to all that by now. Sadly, this movie did not have the kind of moving moments that nearly brought me to tears in the second and third films, but it did have one moment (the one captured in the image below) that had me on the edge of my seat trying to keep from cheering. This moment, however, is what makes it a great wrap-up, so I must conclude that this is not my favorite film in the Hunger Games franchise, but as a franchise finale, I adore it.

Edward Scissorhands Review

October 22, 2015 by JD Hansel

Ah, now this is a movie for Halloween season. It’s a classic tale of a man-made monster, and like most good monster stories, it shows us that the real monsters are always people. Naturally, I was very excited about seeing this movie, and I had high hopes because it’s a Tim Burton film. Burton was, visually speaking, the best director out there (until he abused his CG privileges), and Edward Scissorhands is as gorgeous as one could hope. Between the unique setting, the strong characters, the delightful soundtrack, and the perfect cast, it really has an atmosphere of its own, making it entirely unforgettable. I was pleased by the superb performance by Johnny Depp, and thrilled to see Vincent Price in the role he was born to play. Everything is just for the story being told.

If only the story itself were better, this would be an excellent motion picture. Alas, the story is almost entirely lacking in conflict or plot (a.k.a. “story”) for the first half. It takes a very long time to get going, and once it does, it’s rather cliché and predictable. The pace is absurdly slow for much of the film, with only some scenes toward the end feeling particularly exciting, and the ending is not entirely satisfactory. However, we do see the main villain defeated, and we do learn the lesson that we all knew from the get-go we were going to learn, so I suppose the movie offered everything it promised. Because of the issues with the screenplay, however, it just didn’t offer everything I would have wanted.

Mean Girls Review

September 29, 2015 by JD Hansel

First order of business: low pass filter. Maybe it was just the version of the film I happened to be watching – I watched it on Netflix – but there was a very high-pitch ringing sound that would appear in a few shots, seemingly from background noise that was not edited out by the sound editors. It became an annoyance because it was one of the very few things keeping me from really enjoying the film, and I suspect it probably could have been solved with a basic low pass filter. (The fact that my number one issue with the film is so minuscule and irrelevant is a good indicator that this is a good movie.) I think the sound is actually the worst part of the film, if sound includes the soundtrack, which does have some ugly tracks and some pathetic soundtrack clichés.

In fact, clichés are the film’s second-biggest problem, and even they are generally rather tame. It is clear that Mean Girls is trying to be smarter than the average high school girl movie, and with Tina Fey’s writing, it succeeds at doing so, but some of the same old scenes we’ve seen before in every other movie in the genre still find their way in throughout. Since I know I just wrote this in my Divergent review, I hate to repeat it so soon, but it is very relevant: a great film is not one that is without imperfections, but one that overcomes them with strong characters and stories that give the audience a good time. For me, between the cleverness of the story, the perfection of the cast, and the third point that I can’t think of but has to be included anyway because of the rule of threes, I had a good time.

Divergent Review

September 16, 2015 by JD Hansel

MINOR SPOILERS

It is easy for me to see why critics hated this film: it seems to ride on the success of other films in its genre without supplying sufficient creativity to rise above its clichés. To make matters worse, I could write a 20-page paper on the baffling inanity of the structure of this world – not just in terms of its government, but also the natural laws and human behaviors, such as the reluctance of the vast majority of the courageous Dauntless (even those raised in the faction) to jump into the hole before Tris. If the government of this world had been designed by an elite, aristocratic administration of some sort, as seen in The Hunger Games, it would be obvious why such a pathetic social structure would be contrived. In this film, however, there is no one who benefits from the system; everyone is trapped in one nation, under no one, divided, with liberty and justice for none. While this flick may have pulled in significant box office money by simply being fascinating, it is fatally flawed in that, much like other films that present fascinating new worlds, this one struggles to have any reality to it as soon as the viewer gives any aspect of it one moment of thought. I cannot help but yell at the people of the world in the screen for tolerating – nay – encouraging this kind of foolishness for so long.

The problem with having an unbelievable world (not necessarily in the sense that it contains elements of fantasy, but in the sense that its people do not respond to their circumstances in a way that real human beings would) is that the characters inevitably must behave in non-relatable ways in order to make the story function, as noted in the example of the hole above. For another example, since bravery does not necessarily entail resourcefulness, several people in Dauntless should have been able to fight their hallucinogenic fears by challenging their reality in the way Tris did, all without being considered Divergent. The issues go on and on, but at the heart of the picture are major flaws in the division of the factions:

The difference between the Factionless and the Divergents is unclear, as both exemplify those who do not fit into any particular group;
Dauntless is fundamentally idiotic because, when bravery is the only virtue, there is no place for ethics;
Both Abnegation and Amity are focused on caring and well-being, so separating them into two factions seems redundant – especially since those who grow the food are best fit to feed the Factionless;
Abnegation, Amity, and Candor are all focused on ethics, which is unnecessary because – while this may be a very counter-intuitive or controversial thing for me to propose – ethics lies in the domain of reason, and Erudite should naturally be the most ethical of all;
Within Erudite it is only logical that sub-factions would appear, as intellects are generally free-thinkers who will reach separate conclusions on the best way to live;
This whole franchise should clearly be about a battle between Erudite and Dauntless, but Erudite should be the heroes, not Dauntless, since Erudite could actually have virtues (other than bravery) to keep them ethical.

This list could be far more detailed, but I think I have made my point. For these reasons, it seems to me that the author started with dramatic scenes in which the characters (whom she’d meant to fully develop before it slipped her mind) confronted their darkest fears, and then the rest of the book was filled in with redressed portions of The Hunger Games and The Giver.

Yet somehow, in spite of the nonsensical details, I still enjoyed the film. I actually started watching Divergent many months ago, but had to stop because the disc was scratched, so it was skipping over important parts of the film. Remarkably, even having seen most of the movie already, I had a good time re-watching all of it. I truly believe that a movie can get away with making little or no sense at all so long as the audience is invested in the characters and the plot. After all, the Harry Potter franchise is widely praised as brilliant, even by critics, but Cinema Sins has amply displayed its lunacy on a number of occasions (for example, anyone who had a small amount of liquid luck could drink it while searching for the “extremely rare” ingredients required to produce liquid luck, and then he/she could have an infinitely growing supply, resulting in a perpetual monopoly on the stuff).

In all fairness, the character of Tris is rather uninteresting in a way, and I suspect it’s because she is a little too relatable to the average teen and is devoid of distinct characteristics from other heroines in the genre. However, she is always given dramatic decisions to make and always makes a surprising choice, which keeps the viewer watching her every move and captivated by her unique mind. The important lesson to be learned here is one that dates back to The Wizard of Oz: a film is not judged by how close it comes to perfection, but by how its characters, ideas, and stories captivate the audience in spite of the imperfections. When I think about Divergent this way, it is clear to me that I was constantly aware of the movie’s flaws – which admittedly was probably because I was watching much of it for a second time – but I was too genuinely amused by what the characters were experiencing to let that stop me from enjoying myself.

Anchorman 2 Review

September 12, 2015 by JD Hansel

I oddly don’t know what to say about this film. Parts of it were funny, and nearly all of it was strangely fun, although I’m generally not a fan of the brand of humor Ferrell and Carrell tend to do. In the first Anchorman movie, there was just something about the film’s “devil may care” attitude with doing whatever felt fun, no matter how little sense it made, that gave it a bizarre charm; there is still some of that present in this one. The simple problem is that the movie has a classic case of “sequelitis”: it can’t emulate its predecessor without rehashing old material, and it can’t do anything new without diverging from whatever worked well for the first film. This “sequelitis” really makes this a much weaker movie – although the first wasn’t exactly the greatest comedy of all time – but I still basically enjoyed watching it. I knew going in that I wasn’t about to see anything brilliant, so when something legitimately clever and entertaining happened, I experienced the benefits of living by Great Grandpa Hansel’s old mantra: “Expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.” In some ways Anchorman 2 may be underwhelming, and sometimes it feels like the whole thing is forced, but the characters and story are generally fascinating enough to keep me invested, so I’m satisfied.