Roger Ebert's Favorites

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Review

December 2, 2016 by JD Hansel

It’s rare for me to see a film with a plot as difficult to follow as this one. Even though I searched online for plot descriptions to help me out, I got lost during many parts of the film, which might be a sign of bad filmmaking, but might just mean part of the film is missing. Fortunately, this movie isn’t so much about plot as it is about visuals, moods, moments, characters, realizations, and experiences. It has a visual style that many films have emulated, but not nearly enough, and depending on the score that accompanies it, it can be a totally wild experience (right down to the inter-titles). I certainly have my issues with the film – it’s really rather boring at times, and I’m not wild about much of the confusing storyline – but when critics all over the world praise and hail this film as a gem of cinema, I have to agree. The reason why I have to agree is that I am forever in this film’s debt for offering cinema the kind of theatrical style that I adore, and that alone makes it one of the greatest contributions to the history of film.

In the future, though, let’s try to make German Expressionist visuals that don’t use that annoying yellow tint for half the film, okay?

Gun Crazy Review

November 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER WARNING

In my last review, I wrote a bit about how I’m currently fascinated with génial–nanar blends – films that are very impressive and enjoyable in some scenes, yet are so stupid, bizarre, or unimpressive that they become enjoyable in other scenes. One of the best examples of this type of film is unsurprisingly found in the film noir genre: Gun Crazy, also known as Deadly Is the Female. While I don’t think it’s meant to be a comedy, many scenes are so strange or absurd that they seem laughable, giving me a feeling that’s no so different from what I get when I watch Duck Soup in that it feels almost like a child’s idea of how to make a movie rather than a rational adult’s. What I think Gun Crazy demonstrates is that this group of films, in which I would include Gun Crazy, often achieves this state by trying to be completely interesting, surprising, or unique.

First, consider the strange aspects of this film. The protagonist is obviously a very odd choice for a romantic lead in a crime drama because of his tall, lanky, silly appearance, which is only made sillier by his awkward smile and his unexplained obsession with guns. Towards the beginning of the film, two characters are presented as children – Clyde Boston and Dave Alastair – who are dressed as adults and look exactly the same when they grow up. Towards the end, Annie is randomly crazy enough to steal the baby from Ruby’s house to keep herself (and Bart) from getting shot by police. The foggy, swampy environment of the ending looks nothing like the rest of the film, and wouldn’t naturally occur in that location, breaking what little sense of realism the film had maintained. Best of all is the line that was nominated for inclusion in AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes: “We go together, Laurie. I don’t know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together.”

Now consider just how much of Gun Crazy is clever and creative. The opening titles are presented over the background that becomes the first scene, meaning the cast and crew held on that shot for a few minutes before they started moving – nothing novel, but certainly something rare and interesting. As far as the storytelling goes, there is great irony in the fact that the protagonist first encounters his lover when she shoots him and their relationship ends when he shoots her. The bank robbery scene that was shot all in one take is highly impressive from a technical standpoint, not to mention how difficult it must have been for the performers to time everything properly and improvise any needed dialogue. Even some of the weirdest things can be viewed from a perspective that makes them seem clever. For example, one might see the representation of young Clyde and Dave as miniature adults as an indication that much of the film (or at least the opening scene that takes place in the past) is being presented from Bart’s perspective according to his memory.

Ultimately, all of these positive elements and bizarre elements seem to come from the same directorial approach: making the film as interesting as possible – striving to make things unique at all costs. Trying things that people have never done before in cinema can lead to the greatness of Citizen Kane or the ridiculousness of a Joel Schumacher film. In spite of its resemblance to other film noir, it clearly strives to be very much its own film, refusing to let anyone say that it is not unique. This isn’t the greatest answer to my question of how we get génial–nanar blends, and it is not my final answer – in fact one professor of mine found it very inadequate, arguing instead that it has something more to do with affect. Still, the desire to make something very different from what everyone’s seen before, something that’s very captivating and memorable at all costs, does seem to be at least a preliminary requirement for the génial–nanar. I don’t think anyone else would have thought to make a film noir with a tiny touch of the western and a big load of goofiness, but the fact that this mixture was somehow able to get produced in the height of the studio system’s panicked identity crisis is enough to make it the unique novelty that audiences never knew they wanted.

The Straight Story Review

November 19, 2016 by JD Hansel

Coincidences come up an awful lot in my experiences viewing movies, and one such experience happened not too long ago when I was watching a YouTube video by Doug Walker, “Can an Ending Ruin a Film?” I started watching the video sometime before my class on “art film” on Wednesday, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to finishing it until Thursday. Within the last five minutes or so before that class began, he decided to show The Straight Story, which is David Lynch’s Disney movie. The professor then explained for those of us who missed it, as I think I had, that the film had been subtly telling us everything about the character’s past and motivation, setting up the ending, without ever making it clear that any of the events of the first hour and a half of the film had a point. The ending is when the audience is supposed to put everything together. Interestingly, when I resumed Doug Walker’s video, I found I had apparently paused it just one second before he brought up The Straight Story, making the argument that the ending to this film turns it from a painfully boring film into a brilliant film. Some might take this as a sign of some sort, but I am not a superstitious man – I just see this as a great opportunity to explain why this film actually sucks, even with the ending.

This film is horribly, horribly boring. None of its characters are particularly interesting or likable – most of them are really quite forgettable – and the performances from the cast were not able to redeem the script in this area. There are a few interesting moments that seem a little bit clever, cheeky, or quirky, all in the way one would expect from David Lynch, but they are severely overpowered by the surprising amount of banality in the film. The plot is purposely slow and uninteresting, but as deliberate as this may have been, I have yet to understand what positive effect this was meant to have on the film as a whole. The list of moral lessons and sappy moments throughout the film is unbearably long, and the number of times that I’m supposed to tear up but don’t feel anything by annoyance is nauseatingly high. This is probably how most viewers feel about the film until the ending, but the ending doesn’t change anything for me.

The ending doesn’t tell us anything that isn’t part of a generic, cliché family separation story, so it isn’t exactly a big shock or an exceptionally moving moment. When the brothers are reunited, I’m waiting to see what happens – to get more specific information about what exactly makes their conflict unique – but the film ends with little time spent on the brother. The goal of the ending is to use the audience’s knowledge of Harry Dean Stanton (the brother, Lyle) and his previous film roles to fill in the gaps about what kind of guy his character in this story is supposed to be, ideally filling in the gaps about the conflict between the Straights. This is rather silly, because I haven’t seen any other film of his, and even if I had, that tells me nothing about who this character is supposed to be. It’s a gimmick that I doubt would work with the likes of John Wayne or Ben Stein, and it certainly doesn’t work here. I think the main problem is that Richard Farnsworth (Alvin Straight) just isn’t likable enough for me to care about the conclusion to his story, so the story entirely falls flat, and the film leaves much to be desired.

The Shining Review

November 18, 2016 by JD Hansel

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 . . . .

Singin’ in the Rain Review: Upon Further Consideration…

October 30, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

Anyone familiar with my “Upon Further Consideration…” series knows from the categorization of this article that I have already seen Singin’ in the Rain in the past. I think this most recent viewing was my third or fourth one, and I enjoyed each and every previous viewing. I’ve considered the film to be not only a must-see classic, but also one of my favorite films for many years, although in recent years I started to wonder how much of that might me my memory’s exaggeration based on my fondness for the classic musicals I watched with my family as a child. I remembered that some parts of the movie felt slow or irrelevant, like the scene that presents all of the models in bizarre dresses – which has nothing to do with the story and does not get a laugh. During this viewing, however, I was not only pleasantly surprised to see that my memories had not done the film justice, but also that this film is actually an outstanding work of absolute genius, with stunning talent and unbelievable near-perfection that frequently left me literally gaping.

Technically, this is not a perfect movie, but like most of the greats, its strength is in making the audience not care about its imperfections. The film is loaded with musical numbers that contribute little or nothing to the plot and could have been replaced by just about any other song. Fortunately, these musical numbers are, overall, so impressive and fun and entertaining as spectacles that no one could possibly complain that they interrupt the plot. I don’t even mind the needless number about the fashion too much. Even still, the plot doesn’t hold together perfectly. Towards the end, Lena essentially takes over the studio simply by lying to the press, making the studio head too concerned that their movie will bomb if one of its stars is found to be a phony. At the film’s closing, however, the studio head randomly decides that it’ll be perfectly okay to reveal Lena to be an untalented sham, which he obviously could have done sooner in a more professional manner. The trick that the film pulls here is simply a bit of misdirection – they pull the viewer’s attention to the romantic sub-plot, which has by and large taken over the movie and become the A-plot at this point, so that we do not care what the motives are for giving us the happy ending. I heard from a professor of mine that Terry Gilliam once said filmmakers could cut anything they wanted to from the last fifteen minutes of a film and not even the biggest fans of the movie would care so long as they got their happy ending, and while I’m not sure if the attribution is accurate, the principle is exemplified in Singin’ in the Rain.

There’s also a lot more cleverness to this film than I remembered. Heck, the opening shot of the film is a way of doing the credits that I haven’t seen done in any other film, and it’s one of the best beginnings a movie’s ever had. They also take great care in the film’s first act to save the reveal of Lena’s voice for just the right moment, which is all handled very “stealthily” in a way, in that they make sure the audience doesn’t suspect the whopper of a gag that the movie has planned with her. Cosmo’s dialogue is superb, and clearly set the tone for all the “comedic sidekick” characters to come. There are a few elements of the film that seem to borrow from, or perhaps pay homage to, Babes in Arms – particularly the scene showing the industry’s sudden transition from silent films to sound films. Parts of the movie are significantly more over-the-top and theatrical than I remembered, but the theatricality is at its peak during the “Broadway Melody” number, which just might be the most gorgeous scene in all of cinema – it’s sort of like expressionism on steroids. It all comes together to make for a delightful experience that no one should miss.

Barry Lyndon Review

October 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

In my recent review of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, I explained that I finally understood just how impressive a director Kubrick was, and had come to respect him much more than I had after seeing 2001. While 2001 was agony, I have found that I enjoy some of his other films, such as Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, and Killer’s Kiss isn’t all that bad either. Better yet, if I found 2001 to be so devastatingly lacking in both emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction, Paths of Glory has made up for the emotional lack in spades, and A Clockwork Orange has done the same for the intellectual lack, with both of these films being brilliant, powerful masterpieces that redeemed him in my eyes. Unfortunately, just as the Israelites of the Old Testament made right with God just before they wandered back into their sinful ways, I was bound to find another Kubrick film that brought his score back down into the negative. This film is Barry Lyndon.

Conceptually, this film is essentially a remake of 2001, only this time it’s set in the world of old paintings instead of the future. Visually, it is absolutely stunning, and his technical innovating that allowed him to create such a fascinating visual experience is evidence of the man’s genius. Once again, however, Kubrick shows his taste for making human characters less and less human in a way that does not serve his film well. His characters are, as one would expect after 2001, mechanical and uninteresting, which I think it is safe to say was his goal. Also like 2001, the run-time is far too long for a story so incoherent and pointless, and there is really only one scene in the film that is particularly good (and emotionally captivating) as far as the characters are concerned. Naturally, these reasons I give for hating the film are, as I expected, exactly the same reasons that others love it.

Clearly, making me dislike the characters is the point, and in a way, making it boring is part of the point as well, which many professional critics have conceded. “[F]or all its dry wit and visual splendor,” wrote Time Out in a recent review, “this 1975 adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel might be the great director’s least satisfying, most disconcerting film – and that’s what makes it extraordinary.” The film is considered fascinating because Kubrick uses the fact that the character has nothing that any sensible person would recognize as a “personality” (for most of the film) as his social criticism on how pathetic humans are. “Barry Lyndon isn’t a great success, and it’s not a great entertainment,” Roger Ebert adds in one of his two reviews of the film, “but it’s a great example of directorial vision: Kubrick saying he’s going to make this material function as an illustration of the way he sees the world.” I can understand and appreciate this effort, and I think I even strongly agree with Kubrick’s thesis – people really are pathetic machines with an utter lack of any devotion to living a good, reasonable life, and are hopelessly seeking a nonexistent state of total happiness; but even if I agree with his thesis, and even if I am impressed with what he’s done to achieve his goal for the film, I do not think that his goal for the film (making the audience annoyed, uncomfortable, and bored for three hours) is either a good goal for a movie or an effective goal for the purpose of supporting his thesis.

The fact of the matter is that critics do not really want what they say they want. Their desire for a blunt critique of how pathetic humans are and how meaningless their lives are, there is a well-known technique for doing that effectively while keeping the audience entertained. It’s called comedy. Comedy, when done properly, shows all intentions to be selfish, all ideas to be myopic, all peoples to be primitive, all societal conventions to be fragile, all masculinity to be non-existent, all propriety to be a joke, all nations to be powerless, all genius to be craziness, all traditions to be childish, all pride to be arrogant, wars to be inconsequential, all actions to be futile, and all humans to be stupid as swine. Yet somehow this is of no interest to critics, who are uncomfortable awarding films of this nature when they could instead award the dramas, which always pretend the feelings of one good individual can make all the difference in the world and which relentlessly hammer in the message that some people are simply bad people because they do bad things because they are bad people because they do bad things. (For more on this subject, I recommend Mladen Dolar’s essay “To Be or Not to Be? No, Thank You,” which explains this concept far better than I.) Dramas are allowed to be fatalistic or libertarian in philosophy, but the realm of determinism has always belonged to the comedy. This is why the most popular kind of film right now in critical, academic, and pseudo-intellectual circles seems to be, from what I’ve seen recently, the dramedy.

The modern dramedy attempts to make a drama film while borrowing the element of “pathetic determinism” from comedy. This offers the intellectual criticism of comedy with the sense of emotional weight and significance brought to a subject by drama. This, I argue, presents the sort of film that Barry Lyndon is – it is a predecessor to the contemporary dramedy in that it presents hopelessly pathetic, semi-mechanical humans (like characters out of a Coen brothers film) in the guise of drama, giving critics everything they say they want. I argue, however, that what they want may in fact be simply comedy: after all, it seems as though it has been much easier for a comedy to get a high score on Rotten Tomatoes recently than it has been for the dramas. I think that drama is not what they want, and it is not even necessarily what they say they want – it’s what they say they say they want. The numbers show that what they want is comedy, but have been trained by tradition to think they must want drama if they’re smart.

What critics (and perhaps most other people) truly want, or so it seems to me, is the chance to seem thoughtful while experiencing the thoughtless. This is what many dramedies do, but it is also what I think many practices in the world of “mindfulness” do. In short, people like to reach a “zen” state of hypnosis or “zoning out” in which they feel like they’re having an experience that is somehow elevated to a higher level of human consciousness. This is why critics have described it as “hypnotic” – it has a mesmerizing quality, and that is something that does not particularly appeal to me, but it appeals to a great many individuals who want to seem intelligent, wise, and/or spiritual. A hypnotic experience is not the same as experiencing genius, insight, or elevation. The problem is that people associate the significance and meaningfulness of something with emotion, and so we feel like something but be especially meaningful if it gives us a special, “higher” kind of emotional experience. For this reason, an emotionally distant comedy that’s very intellectual is often not as desirable to critics or audiences as a drama on the same subject would be or as a hypnotic film would be, simply because it is an emotional experience that makes us feel as though we are watching something important.

While I recognize that this review probably comes across to many readers as an arrogant, ignorant, and even sanctimonious display of hubris, I see no other way to write this review. Think about it: if I am to maintain my view that one’s assessment of a film is not merely a subjective feeling, as anyone who appreciates the function of the film critics ought to understand, but I am also to argue that I do not support the enormous (and almost unanimous) critical acclaim that this film has come to receive, I am logically required to explain some sort of reasoning for how it’s possible that I am right and all the professional critics are wrong. I regrettably have no other choice – without this explanation of my views, anyone could compare the number of stars I have given this film to the number that one finds in a Google search and immediately deem me a thoughtless fool. All of my above writing on the “critics’ delusion” is not to be taken as dogmatic facts from a know-it-all, but as a working thesis I have for what the many worshipers of the films I hate might be missing. At the same time, I obviously don’t mind if other people like films that I don’t, so long as I am not considered thoughtless for hating a film that the “cinema elect” has decided is perfect. I do believe that a large amount of diversity in tastes is healthy for a culture, but this notion that the dramatic and the hypnotic are (by default) artwork of a higher caliber than fun, entertaining artwork is one that I must militantly oppose.