J.D. Hansel

R

Psycho Review

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SPOILER WARNING

I think I’m being very kind with my rating – perhaps overly kind.  While I’m not sure I would say that I had high expectations for Psycho, I will say that I was hopeful.  I have often been curious about how this film would work ever since I heard that it killed off its protagonist within the first act.  I had concerns that the movie would feel like it had no real purpose after that scene, but fortunately, the structure of the movie is perfectly fine.  The problem is that I nearly fell asleep watching it (and that is no exageration) because of how slow and boring it gets at times.  It’s another one of those films that falls into the category of “tederesting” – films that are fascinating and keep me curious about how they will unfold, but don’t grab me emotionally and consequently leave me with an annoying sense of boredom.  I can’t say I dislike it – some parts are genuinely chilling, and the ending is satisfyingly eerie – but it had such a hard time holding my attention that I can’t really consider it one of my favorites.  It may not be the kind of horror classic one watches for a fun date night, but it is a fascinating example of the kinds of strange and surprising stories that can be told when a filmmaker has the boldness to play with the story structure and keep the audience guessing what could possibly come next.  It’s not quite as good as The Birds, but it’s still worth the watch.

Heathers Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

Lately, it seems I’ve been in the mood to watch movies about bad teenagers committing extreme crimes.  I recently watched The Bling Ring, which focuses on the least likable people on the planet breaking into the homes of celebrities and stealing their priceless belongings.  It’s fascinating because it has the feeling of an Animal Planet documentary, giving the viewer a mostly objective look at the lives of creatures that don’t seem to be humans – at least not if my friends, family, peers, and roommates are the standard for “human.”  I thought that I liked it, until I saw the ’80s classic (and life-long member of everyone’s Netflix watch-list) Heathers, which takes a far more interesting approach.  While just as much a satire, this film largely throws realism to the wind and thrusts the audience into a world of mercilessly dark comedy.  I’m not sure exactly how much it made me laugh, but I will say that, when watching this movie, I had more fun – just pure and simple childlike giddiness – than I’ve had watching any other since Suspiria or Animal House – or maybe even my beloved Phantom of the Paradise.

Part of what makes this movie work so well is that it embraces cinema’s area of expertise: not truth, but “truthiness.”  Anyone who knows what my high school was like knows that my experience there did not resemble that of this film’s characters in any way, and yet everything about this movie feels weirdly familiar.  I’ve never met characters like the Heathers, but it feels like I’ve encountered them countless times.  It feels like every high school in America has these same jocks, these same nerds, and this same staff.  It’s almost like a bizarre take on Carrie, offering a chance to see justice done to the people in high school we all kind of wish were dead.  I think that’s why it resonates with so many people, and why it’s a great example of how cinema ought to function, at least in its comedies.

Oddly enough, this film struck me as being the high school equivelent to a film noir.  Perhaps it’s because of the odd, awkward dark tone matched with a bit of expressionism, or maybe it’s because of the situation the protagonist finds herself in, or maybe it’s because of the ending, but the whole thing feels like the filmmakers had been watching a lot of old films noirs when developing this story.  It particularly feels like noir when Veronica looks down at the dead body of the man she just shot, seemingly realizing that she killed him and starting to feel bad, and then she proceeds to shoot the other jock, without explanation.  I got a similar vibe when the film awkwardly tried to work in a message about how bad teen suicide is, with several references throughout to a song entitled, “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).”  This message feels clumsily shoe-horned in, and it reminds me of all the times when the police officers in movies from the 1940s and 1950s explained to the characters (and, more importantly, to the audience) that the actions of the criminals were bad.  These are just some of the ways in which Heathers is both strange and familiar for movie-lovers, and maybe that’s what makes it hit the spot for me.

Dark City Review

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READ THIS REVIEW BEFORE SEEING THE FILM

For what it’s worth, I really tried to watch this movie the right way.  I had been warned that the film has an opening voiceover (added by the studio due to concerns that humans are stupid) which gives away many of the biggest surprises, reveals, and twists.  So, I did my filmic duty and muted everything up until the opening titles, which is what everyone who sees it ought to do.  Unfortunately, I forgot that I had the closed captions turned on, so I still had something important spoiled for me, but it wasn’t much more than had already been spoiled by the guy who had informed me about the voiceover in the first place.  I think the best way to avoid this issue is to just watch the director’s cut, which does not spoil itself at the start and remains more true to what the film was meant to be.  I eagerly look forward to watching the director’s cut for myself, if only because, in spite of its problems, I actually greatly enjoy this movie – so much so that I started watching it again from the beginning almost immediately after it ended.  No matter how many times the movie explains itself (and it is a lot), it manages to stay surprising and interesting, holding my attention from start to finish.

One of the things that makes it so captivating is the editing, which is incredibly fast.  When I started watching the movie from the beginning for a second time, it felt normal to me, but during my initial viewing, it threw me off with its rather awkward speed and tight transitions, throwing out so much of the space to catch one’s breath between cuts/scenes that other films offer.  It’s obviously visually outstanding – that’s arguably the point of the film – but I think there’s more to it than that.  Yes, it’s about getting lost in another world and exploring a strange, anxiety-inducing place, but it also makes an argument for how the human mind/soul works, and it makes it well.  Its story may be nothing remarkable, but that doesn’t matter – It’s still one of the most thrilling films I’ve ever seen.  If not for the film’s inability to keep its mouth shut and let me figure it out for myself, and if not for the film’s disinterest in making me feel emotion, I would be hailing it as practically perfect and as one of the all-time greatest movies ever made.

Rocky Horror Picture Show Review

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This movie is often compared to Phantom of the Paradise, with fans of each film arguing about which is better.  While I would certainly put myself on “Team Phantom” in this debate, I’m not sure that this is a fair comparison seeing as how they are so incredibly different.  Phantom is careful and thoughtful, setting up a story that manages to be simple, yet detailed, derivative, yet surprising.  Rocky Horror just happens.  While it can be said that each film is something wild that happens to the viewer, Rocky Horror isn’t as focused on a story, a causal chain, a logic, a message, or an argument – it’s just things happening.

The kinds of things that happen are a mix.  Some of the music is great and memorable, but a lot of it is completely forgettable.  The soundtrack is largely just average ’70s pop, without much to make it stand out, so after a while it all runs together, and it becomes a little bit annoying when one song ends only for another to begin.  In a way, however, this is part of the beauty of the film.  It doesn’t really care what it is, so long as it keeps on being whatever the heck it’s supposed to be.  This ‘devil may care’ attitude empowers the film to be charmingly weird, with excellent visuals, bizarre humor, unconventional editing, random turns in the plot, inexplicable changes of character, and very memorable performances.

The structure is essentially a series of “Big-Lipped Alligator Moments.”  Generally, a movie is supposed to have two kinds of transitions: “therefore” and “but then.”  This film, on the other hand, has only one transition: “and now this is happening, and now this is happening, and now this is happening.”  While the musical upon which this film is based is clearly the result of at least one “trip,” the movie feels like a dream – it feels mostly random and spontaneous, but there are important recurring themes and logical connections between different parts of the film (such as the appearance of Tim Curry in the wedding photos).  The film offers no explanation for itself and no apologies – it just drags the viewer along for a wild ride with no questions asked, and for that I greatly appreciate it.

When Harry Met Sally Review

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For those of us who didn’t grow up in the 1980s, it can be very difficult to imagine a time when Billy Crystal was young, handsome, and a viable romantic lead.  He seems like such a comic figure that it would be impossible for him to play a character with a lot of heart, and yet he’s perfectly cast in this film.  He fits into the character type of the street-wise all-American wise-cracker who never knows when to quit and who lives for the tickle of the feathers he ruffles.  Meg Ryan, by contrast, is the Bert to his Ernie – the straight man who lives a very orderly and particular life and must see to it that everything is precisely as it ought to be.  The idea of taking this kind of duo and watching it develop into a romance may not be entirely original to When Harry Met Sally, but this film does it especially well.

Perhaps the better pairing in the film, however, is not a couple of characters, but a duo behind the camera – Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner.  By this point in his career, Reiner had demonstrated that he could do comedies that were fairly brutal (This Is Spinal Tap) and love stories that had just the right amount of heart in just the right places (The Princess Bride).  Ephron, on the other hand, seemed to be best at making films in this particular genre with this particular sentiment, saturating her scripts in nostalgia and seeking out a way to keep the magic of Classical Hollywood believable in an age of cynicism.  Consequently, the two forces put together inevitably resulted in a film that has lots of laughs and lots of heart, never going too far with either.  Roger Ebert rightly noted that it has a resemblance to Woody Allen films, which largely has to do with the excellent choices of old jazz standards.  The structure of the film is rather unconventional and artistic in a way, which I attribute to the clever craftsmanship of these two creative forces.

I’ll concede that it took me a long time to finish the movie – I frequently took breaks from it for days and I rarely felt the compulsion to find out what happened next (which I blame on the story’s predictability) – but it was worth it to finish it.  It’s simply a pretty package of pure charm.

Network Review

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The first part of this film I ever saw was the famous scene with everyone shouting from their windows.  It was in a film history course I took a few years ago, and ever since I saw the clip, I’d been really wanting to see the whole film.  That scene really moved me when I first saw it – it spoke to me in a way that the most touching and emotional of scenes from other classic movies don’t – but I had to wait to watch it until I was in the right mood.  Since that course was back in early 2014, it seemed like late 2016 was a good time, ensuring that the scene wouldn’t be so fresh in my memory that it would be spoiled.  For this most recent viewing, once I could tell the scene was coming, I turned off the lights, sat up close to the screen, and let it overpower me.  Because the scene is so greatly enhanced by its context in the plot, I found myself quivering as tears fell down my face, and all I could do was remark at the beauty of what I was experiencing.  I’ve found myself tearing up while writing this review just at the thought of it, and this is a very unusual sort of experience for me.  This is exactly what cinema should be doing, and in a time when artsy drivel like 2001 is seen as the kind of thing the elite film critics want from Hollywood, it’s nice to know that a film with true meaning and power is still regarded as a great cinematic achievement.

As for the rest of the film, it’s not bad.  It can be a little boring at times, but most of it is pretty satisfying in its comedy, its irony, or at the very least its brutal honesty.  The film shows us exactly what we would like to think the evil overlords behind our television programming would be saying and doing behind closed doors.  The balance between comedy and drama is pretty good, particularly with the way the lines between the two are blurred.  I will say that I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of names and faces, but the story kept me interested.  The writing is smart, the characters are what they ought to be, and the ending is just perfect (and it merits comparison to the ending of another of my favorite ’70s movies, Phantom of the Paradise, to gain an appreciation of the cinema of the Vietnam-era and the years that followed).  What’s most impressive about the story is that it manages to be very dramatic, very absurd, and very believable all at the same time, such that the ridiculous solution proposed at the end of the film leaves the viewer gaping and thinking, “By gosh, at this point that actually seems plausible!”

Essentially, the movie is an interesting analysis of the normalization of madness, and it raises the question of just how sane a species we truly are.