J.D. Hansel

Three and a Half Stars

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Review

by

People who have an obsessive passion for and enjoyment of Terry Gilliam films – or at least his more intense and bizarre creations like Time Bandits and Brazil – scare me.   Guillermo del Toro, for example, was overjoyed to see his young daughter giggle with delight at the end of Time Bandits when (spoiler alert) the young protagonist’s parents explode.  He’s happy that she found it funny that the boy’s parents died.  It’s disgusting, but it’s all part of Gilliam – he has a sense of humor that goes for extreme intensity even if it crosses ethical lines, and some film enthusiasts really go for that.  These films are, by and large, not too violent, but it’s often the merciless infliction of wild images and editing onto the audience mixed with the heartless infliction of “comedy without relief” onto the poor characters that makes these films so difficult for some to watch.  Interestingly, upon watching Brazil again many years later for an audio commentary track, Gilliam found he wasn’t sure he liked the film very much because of how brutal its comedy and story were, but it is precisely the fact that the film is too much to handle in one sitting that draws some filmmakers to it.

Edgar Wright is one of the filmmakers who absolutely adores Brazil, and I think it really shows in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the most relentless movie ever made.  It never stops.  It just keeps blasting the viewer with more unconventional and experimental insanity that is incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around, all while retaining a formulaic story that’s perfectly easy to follow.  The only way I was able to survive the movie was by taking breaks – I had to get up and walk to another room, or talk about what I’d just experienced with the friend of mine who so kindly subjected me to this film.  I think I also could have used a snack break, and maybe a few naps.  Technically, the film shouldn’t even be that hard to swallow: it’s not gory, it’s not scary, it’s not intensely dramatic (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy), it’s not addressing sensitive topics, it’s not making me feel “naked” the way The Graduate does, and it’s not flashing wild lights and vivid colors at me like that one irritating Canadian film.  It’s simply difficult to process.

What makes it difficult is the unhinged creativity.  There are no clear rules in this movie.  When a man shows up with sexy demon hipsters singing a musical number as he flies around, you have to accept it, even though there is no setup for it.  Honestly, the movie is so strange that, when one character’s ability to read minds is explained by the fact that he’s a vegan, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.”  Relatively, that does make sense.  It’s the best explanation you’ll get for anything in the movie.  The Hollywood-trained mind isn’t ready for this.

What the film shares with Terry Gilliam is an unsettling contentment with the awkwardly terrifying conditions of its reality.  There’s something very disturbing about seeing nobody react appropriately to the death of a boy’s parents – even if they are really bad parents – and watching old men in an office giddily force their bosses to walk off a blank from a skyscraper to fall to their whimsical deaths.  When something that should alarm people is met with the wrong response, it creates an effect that just feels wrong on a moral level, and that’s all over this film.  Right from the first fight scene, the way that other characters react to the brutality of what they’re witnessing feels off – it feels inhuman – and this makes the film tough to take on its first viewing (although I think it improves over time).  However, what makes it possible for the viewer to adjust as the film progresses is the fact that the movie is largely operating on video game logic, where the impossible is often normalized in ways that would be unsettling if we thought about it, and Edgar Wright has forced us to think about it.  He’s shown us a lot of our blind-spots in regards to video games simply by adapting the aspects of video games that no one has ever thought to adapt before.

I think that’s what I respect about the film.  It tells its story in the way that it believes is the most fun, the most exciting, and the most respectful to the source, regardless of whether or not it’s what people are used to.  There’s a sense that no one on set ever said, “Hey, this is going a bit too far, let’s dial it down.”  Instead, they just followed every urge to do something fresh and exciting, and this philosophy actually paid off with a lot of really funny scenes.  In fact, by putting the viewer in such a scared and vulnerable state, a lot of the comedy is made funnier, and the story’s messages are made more powerful.  So, sure, I may have lost a significant percentage of my sanity from watching this film, but it was absolutely worth it to receive all of the joy the story brings and all of the power a filmmakers can have when he dares to be relentless.

(Still, that demon musical number is just plain stupid.  Obviously.)

Pretty Woman Review

by

Professors really like to tell their students stories about how things we mere millennials could never understand.  I remember an English professor at my first college (although I don’t remember which one) explaining that Pretty Woman was a very surprising and controversial movie upon its release – one might even say a “game-changer.”  The film was important because it presented two shifts in values: the first being acceptance of the fact that sex workers are people too, and the second being consideration of the opinion that a kiss on the mouth is more meaningful than sex.  Now that I think about it, I can see how this could have ruffled feathers at the time, but I can’t make myself feel what it must have felt like to watch this film at the time when it came out – I can’t emotionally understand the significance of the movie.  To me, it just looks like a movie that’s perfectly fine.

It does the job.  The director and cinematographer seem to have had some fun with it, the writing is generally fairly smart, the comedy is satisfactory, and the performances are good.  I’m not much of a fan of Roberts, and I might have liked her character more with a different person in the role, but I’ll grant that her performance was quite well-done.  The other characters were less impressive – particularly the male lead – but there’s only so much you can do with a character as flat as … well, most of the characters (although Héctor Elizondo as the hotel manager is a treat).  The problem is that, apart from this one twist on the rom-com genre, Pretty Woman is actually pretty generic, even to the point that a number of its scenes (the romantic montage being the best example) are unintentionally funny.  But don’t think I didn’t like this movie – Pretty Woman is one of the most charming films I’ve seen in a long time, and while its initial “wow factor” may be lost, some of its appeal, as it is with other fairy tales, is timeless.

Forrest Gump Review

by

My brother got very upset with me a few weeks ago when he found out that I, the film major in the family, hadn’t seen Forrest Gump, and understandably so – it’s one of the most famous movies ever and it’s by my favorite director.  That being said, we must remember that it’s not a film that critics praised or that academics have felt the need to seriously studied.  It’s one of those films that has actually been the subject of much study and scrutiny just from the average movie-goer, if only because of its rather biased historical revisionism.  However, now that I’ve seen it myself, I’d like to look at another strange aspect of the film: the story.

What makes this movie really stand out as a story, not just as a technical accomplishment, is that Gump himself has no ambitions in most of the film.  He doesn’t really plan on going to college, or plan on meeting the president(s), or plan on going to the army, or plan on starting his own shrimp business.  He doesn’t even try to do these things.  I know that’s related to the theme of the movie, but it shouldn’t make for a good story.  The fact that Forrest is by and large a passive character (at least emotionally) should also make the film rather boring, yet it’s entirely captivating.

I think it works well because it alternates between two interlinked stories: one being a comedy, the other being a drama.  The comedy comes from the fact that Forrest has clearly lived the most interesting life imaginable, but he has no conception of just how absolutely amazing it is.  Most scenes in this movie could easily make for movies of their own – how Elvis learned his dance, how Lennon wrote “Imagine,” etc., but instead we observe all of them briefly through the eyes of someone who can’t appreciate them, which has a funny kind of irony to it.  The audience is waiting to see how he’ll behave around the next famous person he’ll meet, and the next one, and the next one.  It’s more of a running gag than a story, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

The dramatic story is actually the story of Jenny.  She, too, lives through an unbelievable life.  Her story, however, is much clearer.  Ever since childhood, she’d rather run from her problems (or wait for them to go away) than confront them.  She’s accepted the fact that people take advantage of her and mistreat her, and she allows it, while at the same time, she runs across the country trying to escape her past and find herself.  Of course, she realizes in the end that she could have had the happy, fulfilling life she wanted if she’d just allowed Forrest to love her, but instead she insisted on running.  It’s rather tragic, but at least the last few months of her life are happy enough.

The synthesis of these two stories may reveal the Major Dramatic Question: Will Forrest and Jenny ever tie the knot?  I do think that’s the main pull of the story, but it’s not used the way most narrative scholars and writers would say it should be.  Only a few scenes are focused on moving the characters towards the climax, and they’re all scattered about, mixed in with scenes that don’t push the plot forward at all.  It’s never clear that Forrest’s main goal in life – in everything he does in the film – is to resolve this particular conflict, so naturally it feels like most of the film doesn’t have much conflict.

On the other hand, every now and again, a story is written about a character with such a strong personality and such an interesting life that an audience is willing to be with that character through anything, even if there’s virtually no conflict.  At the end of the day, I’d gladly sit on that bench next to Forrest and listen to him telling his stories just because he’s (perhaps paradoxically) so interesting to listen to, which makes for a good movie.  Would it work well as a play?  Probably not.  It might not even work well with any other actor, writer, director, etc., but somehow, as it is, Forrest Gump makes for one heck of a movie.  And that’s about all I have to say about that.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

by

When I was a kid, I remember feeling torn about old movies – and by that I mean Classical Hollywood-era movies.  I liked a fair amount of the musicals and family films, but for the most part, I just found old movies to be too boring.  When I tried watching Casablanca, I wasn’t just bored – I was terribly confused.  I couldn’t keep track of the politics, I didn’t understand the history, and I struggled to discern what the characters were really communicating through all their ’40s slang and discreet language.  It took me many years of watching many films from different time periods before I got to the point that I could easily follow the story of the average classic movie, but by now I really feel like I speak the language . . . and then there’s The Maltese Falcon.

When I watched this movie, I had to repeat certain parts of it (particularly in the early scenes) in order to make sure I was picking up on everything.  That’s unusual for me.  I can stay ahead of most other viewers when I watch an episode of Sherlock, but this movie is, for the first third or so, quite difficult to follow.  Even once it gets going, it’s a little bit boring, and it doesn’t help that the ending can be predicted from a mile away, taking away the dramatic suspense.  What makes up for all this is the characters.  Not only does Maltese Falcon offer a classic Bogart performance, but it features Peter Lorre in one of his funniest roles and Sydney Greenstreet as one of the most fun (and best written) antagonists I’ve seen in film.  Because none of the characters are all that likable or relatable in the sense one would expect from Hollywood, I’m not too inclined to root for anyone to “win,” which hurts this particular story, but there’s still plenty of intrigue to keep the viewer interested.  It’s not entirely my kind of thing, but I can always appreciate a movie that’s simply good at being film noir, and this film is just that.

An American Tail Review

by

MINOR SPOILER WARNING

Sometimes the union of two great artists makes for a film with twice the power of a regular film, whereas other times something just isn’t quite working.  We get a little bit of both here with An American Tail, which is a Don Bluth film that Steven Spielberg commissioned.  I haven’t done enough research on the film to say what exactly the conflicts were between them, but I think some of them may be revealed by the parts of the film that seem a little off.  The choice to go with a child actor with no singing ability for the lead vocalist in a musical seems fine if you’re going for a certain sentiment, but the audience certainly pays the price for that sentimentality when he tries to hit the high notes.  Parts of it are a bit dark and/or adult for a G-rated children’s film, even for the ‘80s – I’m always surprised by how much smoking and profanity makes its way into these films.  I’m very confused about how an animal four times the size of a rat manages to disguise itself as a rat without anyone noticing, and the animators’ answer to this puzzle seems to be just making the size really inconsistent from scene to scene, but what’s more confusing here is the nature of the story.

In this film, characters are introduced only to be abandoned until another scene.  Our protagonist may make a friend and, with little warning, immediately break into song about how they’re best friends.  Everything seems to come out of the blue, making the film feel clunky.  Everything seems rushed, taking away the weight of each scene.  In terms of plot, the story is mostly fine, apart from its mild sense of arbitrarity  – it’s just the way it’s written that doesn’t work right.  The one big problem with the plot is how little the protagonist does to successfully accomplish his goal.  That being said, other aspects of the story are really quite smart, like the irony that comes from how easily Fievel and his family could have found each other if not for slightly bad timing, or the way the mice romanticize America only to have their hopes destroyed by reality.  Between the story, the great soundtrack, and the hilarious voice cast (because everybody likes Madeline Kahn) An American Tail is a perfectly fine film for children . . . it’s just a little irritating for screenwriters.

An American in Paris Review

by

Gene Kelly was working on this legendary musical at the same time as he was working on another: Singin’ in the Rain.  Unfortunately, it’s quite clear which of these two films had the most thought and work put into it – not American in Paris.  The film toggles between one story about Gene gaining recognition for his painting, which doesn’t really go anywhere, and another story about Gene falling in love with (and creepily forcing himself upon) a beautiful dancer, which is mysteriously resolved without explanation, all with unrelated musical numbers popping up throughout.  How charming.  Of course, one might say I’ve just described the average classic musical, and that may be true, but I wanted something better than average from a film with this level of status.  I wanted something more than an excuse for another jukebox musical for Gershwin songs, and this doesn’t offer that much more.

Yet, oddly, it still is charming and delightful.  Gene Kelly’s character, as much of a creep as he may be, is still likable, and his dances are still captivating.  The character dynamics and storytelling techniques are incredibly fascinating – has anyone ever heard of another film doing an opening voiceover like this film’s?  The visual styles used in some of the musical numbers are absolutely outstanding, with sets and color palettes that are not only gorgeous, but quite creatively and intelligently used.  I’m probably giving this film too much credit for its aesthetic accomplishments, but when a film knows how to do really cool ballets, that shouldn’t go unappreciated.  I can easily give the movie a hard time for being irritatingly flawed, but when a film has a great cast, likable characters, smart dialogue, lovely production design, careful artistry, and catchy music, I can’t help but give it my approval.