J.D. Hansel

R

Watermelon Man Review

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There are three things that interest me about this film.

First, I don’t know how to categorize it.  Is it a blaxploitation film?  A dramedy?  Maybe just a comedy?  An art film?  Fantasy?  It certainly seems to be a cult film, and an unconventional comedy of some sort, but comedy’s usually aren’t as enthused with stress and anger as this seems to be.  It’s definitely a satire of some sort, but not of a usual sort, instead preferring to be its own unique work of art.

The second thing that fascinates me is that it manages to be the most intense film I’ve ever seen, and yet I’d never heard of it until I was watching it.  I’d heard of the song, which I was a little disappointed to learn was not in the film, but not the film.  While the director is recognized as a very significant and influential one, this film isn’t regarded as highly significant, in spite of its immense power.  I came out of that film more exhausted than I would have been if I’d been watching any other film while doing push-ups.  It confronts the audience with racial stereotypes and societal problems in a way that’s jarringly blunt, and it left me wanting to take a nap afterward, but that’s not a bad thing.  It never allows the spectator to be comfortable for more than a second.  It makes the viewer think, and it has shaped my view of the 1970s, and even today, more than anything else I’ve seen in a long time.  The beautiful thing about it is that it shows how intense and powerful a film can be in a meaningful way, as opposed to meaningless displays of power that are usually praised.

What’s especially fascinating about the film is that, although it’s a very engaging film, it actually puts being a film on the back-burner.  In a sense, it’s more of a cinematic essay, or maybe a cultural scrapbook.  The plot does not care to explain itself in the slightest – it knows it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t care.  It doesn’t quite feel real, but that adds to the unease.  It doesn’t resolve itself well, at least not in any conventional sense, and that’s very deliberate.  The movie doesn’t exist to satisfy an audience, but to challenge its audience, refusing to focus on anything other than its argument.  While it’s by no means a perfect film, and it’s not really my style for the most part, it’s an excellent example of how a message movie can be done in a way that’s more convincing than it is preachy.  I still don’t know just what to call it, but whatever it is, it’s something kind of special.

Oh, and it gets bonus points for the Paul Williams cameo – the best part of ’70s cinema.

Suspiria Review

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As I’ve continued my new journey through old horror movies, I’ve decided to return to the director of Phenomena/Creepers to see what is probably his most famous and acclaimed work, Suspiria.  Another of Dario Argento’s semi-Italian films with weird dubbing, this film caught my attention because I read a description of it somewhere that called it “candy-colored,” and based on what I saw in photos, that seemed to be an appropriate description.  This is, in terms of visuals, one of the top three greatest films I have ever seen in my life, and it insists on lighting and coloring its interesting sets in the most theatrical style possible with no interest in explaining why everything turns red when the lights go out or why the walls have illustrations that sing of Lewis Carroll.  When the visuals are put together with the wonderfully creepy score, it creates an eerie, powerful, and beautiful experience in nearly every scene.  That being said, this film is evidence of the fact that a series of great and interesting scenes or moments does not constitute a great story.  The plot is simply impossible to follow and hardly anything in this movie makes any sense.  It has good moments, but they do not function within a machine of set-ups and pay-offs or anything resembling quality dramatic, ironic storytelling.

I’m giving this film a big pass on the stupidity of its plot because of how fun and scary it is in all the right ways, and because I’m a sucker for old cult films with Jessica Harper, but I’m still rather upset that it hasn’t been released on Blu-Ray yet.  I know they’ve been working on it, but I can’t help but feel that my review is inevitably insufficient until I get to see all of the film’s magnificent beauty in the highest quality possible.

Mulholland Drive Review

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what effect the “Books Are Always Better” movement has had on cinema.  Just to be clear, I am referring to the notion that the novel is a superior medium, both intellectually and in terms of affect, to the medium of film.  While I intend to write more on the subject in the future, for now I’ll just say that cinema has spent the past several decades – perhaps its entire lifetime – trying to prove itself as a medium that can both have a certain kind of intelligence, elegance, and subtlety about it, addressing the first insult to its ego, and have a powerful, intimate, and subjective emotional effect like books do, addressing the second.  These are the two main marks of quality and refinement in cinema, and film critics have been striving for years to emphasize the films that display these qualities so that film, and in turn film critics, can have some dignity.  On a related note, in a class on literature I had at my previous college, the professor (and many of the students) had a fondness for a quality of interpretive ambiguity – the literature that was considered to be truly excellent and meaningful was the literature that gestured towards a variety of possible meanings, but ultimately left its meaning up to the subjective feelings of the reader.  This is seen as an intersection of intellectualism and a personally emotional effect because it seems to require thinking on the part of the audience and it relies on subjectivity, which is why so many filmmakers have foolishly bought into the idea that this ought to be the goal of all literature, including film.  Mulholland Drive is one of the films that has impressed people because of how well it manages to be entertaining and interesting as a film while staying at this intersection that is so highly regarded in literature.

I think it boils down to how people think about photogénie.  This is a term used in reference to the aspect of cinema that is essentially, distinctly, and uniquely cinematic, and it is usually associated with Jean Epstein’s theory that film is not meant to focus on characters and plot so much as its elements and powers that no other media have (e.g. its tendency to break the rules of time with editing techniques, or its ability to show large, complex movement).  The dominant view right now, from what I can tell, is that cinema is at its best when it focuses on its sheer power to emotionally overwhelm the spectator, not on the logic of its plot.  While I will write further on this later, I argue that the pure essence of cinema has more to do with simulating a logical sequence of events following from an understood set of premises for the spectator to analyze intellectually and/or emotionally.  Naturally, I find it hard to get behind a film that has complete disregard for everything I believe cinema ought to be, and I find it exceptionally lazy to set up a great story that has no conclusion or meaning.  It’s a huge disappointment, but at least it is somehow strangely captivating.

In the end though , I still think it’s just finely polished garbage.

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Creepers/Phenomena Review

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I think I’ve written before about my love for nanar, which is the French term for a movie that’s so bad that it becomes enjoyable.  I know I’ve written before about my love for movies that are nanar in some scenes and legitimately impressive in others.  Since I am finding more and more films that seem to fit this category, I’ll call this type of film a génial–nanar blend.  Usually I only note one of these kinds of films if I absolutely love it, which was the case for Masters of the Universe, but sometimes there are parts that are bad enough to be mildly enjoyable in some scenes and decent in others.  This is a bit more common and less noteworthy, so we don’t often think much of these films, but one that stands out for me is Phenomena, or as it was known in the United States, The Creepers.

Phenomena is the title I use for it because it’s the name of the original, longer version of the film, which is the version that I saw, so those who’ve seen it as Creepers may have seen a much worse film than I did.  This is an Italian film from Dario Argento, a name I didn’t recognize since I’ve never been much of a horror buff, but he seems to be a bit of a name in the field.  The star of the film, however, is not an Italian, but a young Jennifer Connelly, and seeing as how I’m obsessed with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, I had to see this movie.  She does a decent job with most scenes, but fortunately there’s some cheesy and over-the-top acting in there to make the film nice and campy.  That being said, the consequence of an American star in an Italian film is that most of the characters are dubbed, and very badly at that.  This just serves to make the film exceptionally comical, but also very odd seeing as how the moments of what seem like entirely incompetent film-making are matched with moments displaying cinematic mastery – sometimes both seem to happen at once.

I still haven’t worked out exactly how génial–nanar blends come about, or how they’re even possible, but at least I now know that their home is in classic campy horror films.  There’s something about the desire to create a strong, original, and uncomfortable (yet somehow still fun) affect that is built into the old cheesy horror films, and it seems to be exactly the kind of thing that generates the génial–nanar.  I guess there’s no nanar like nanar noir, and between this and Phantom of the Paradise, I’ve learned that I actually like the horror genre far more than I thought I did.  The trick seems to be to approach cinema with a sense of fun, whimsy, experimentation, and love for entertaining.  I’m still not a big fan of being afraid, but blood as fake as this film’s blood, music as fun as this film’s music, and a script as nutty and lovably stupid as this film’s script, I’m willing to put up with a few jumps and skipped heartbeats to enjoy an experience like this film’s camp.

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The Shining Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

One of the tasks I’ve taken up recently is familiarizing myself with more classic horror cinema.  I’m usually not the type to enjoy being anxious and afraid, so it’s taken me a while to see the classics of this genre.  Fortunately, The Shining is an easy one for me to appreciate.  While it is scary, it’s not all about jump scares and other cheap tricks – it’s classy, as one would expect from Kubrick.  It’s fun, it’s clever, it’s thought-provoking, it’s suspenseful, and it’s memorable.  Even though it may not have totally sucked me in, I must say that I was consistently impressed with the cinematography, the editing, the acting, and the fascinating story.  I think that Scatman Crothers’ character (Dick Hallorann) could have been a little less creepy, because it’s very important that the audience likes this character, but I still rooted for him at the appropriate time.  It’s not entirely clear to me what everything in the movie meant exactly – and I do think some parts are meant to be open-ended – but that doesn’t affect the story too much.

It’s not my favorite film, but it’s one of my favorite Kubrick films, and I highly recommend it come next Halloween – just don’t expect it to be anything like the book . . . .

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Blue Velvet Review

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It’s a little bit surprising to me that this was so popular.  It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen freaking Daisies.  What’s strange is that it doesn’t go all the way into the unfathomable and surreal – this is not Un Chien Andalou.  Parts of it feel like a slightly warped version of a Hollywood teen film, and parts of it feel like an artsy French film, but all of it feels like Lynch’s brand of the uncanny.  The film exists to make the spectator uncomfortable, and yet it stays grounded in something that is comfortable – a nostalgic representation of a small town that reminds me of home . . . until he turns that into something mildly unsettling as well.  The use of the fireman waving from his truck as it passes by turns from charming to creepy with virtually no change, and that’s the brand of the uncanny that Lynch does perfectly, making for a thriller experience.  At the same time, he mixes this with scenes that are more blatantly disturbing, yet kind of comedic, while ultimately ruining “In Dreams” for me.

A good example of this special style of his appears around nine minutes into his semi-concert movie Duran Duran: Unstaged, at which point a tunnel appears that leaves the viewer thinking, Is that even real?, before it clicks that it’s just a normal tunnel that everyone has driven through a million times.  He can make anything seem like something from another planet, but that’s not all there is to his style.  He also can present excellent visuals with beautiful extreme colors and throw in some neat visual effects.  He can make the viewer care about a character even if he/she seems really odd.  He uses good songs for his soundtracks and finds interesting uses for them.  He can play with psychological anxieties and Freudian symbols, thus arousing fascinating interpretation of his work.  So I suppose I can see why it was so popular now that I think about it – it’s the ideal Lynch film, never allowing the viewer to be at ease or anything but confused, and yet it tells a believable, concrete, and easy-to-follow story in a way that makes the story much more interesting than it would be in the hands of any other director.  On the other hand, I hope to high heavens I never see that lipstick-covered face of Dennis Hopper again.

Yuck.

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