J.D. Hansel

Two and a Half Stars

The Fellowship of the Ring Review

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It’s entirely possible that I saw this film already, many years ago, but to my memory, I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it, and I got bored and switched to something else the second time.  My third time, this most recent time, I finally made it all the way to the end.  I didn’t remember the ending, which is why I think I’d never finished the film before (and hence why I’m reviewing it now), but then again, who would?  The film leaves you with the feeling that you just watched a five-hour-long teaser trailer for the second film.  It’s simply a tease – all the great things about this franchise (namely Sméagol and Gollum) come later in the series, whereas this movie offers an introduction to this (fairly bland) fantasy world.  To be honest, I almost fell asleep again this time.

It’s just not my cup of tea.  It’s fine – this isn’t necessarily badly made – but it’s not my preferred kind of fantasy.  I like the colorful and sparkly ’80s fantasy film, which is precisely what Jackson stated he was trying not to do.  He wanted to make a series of films that feel like a grander version of historical fiction, such as Braveheart, but in the history of a fantasy world rather than ours.  That’s not my genre.  I like the kind of fantasy nonsense that he doesn’t like, which is fine.  Beyond that though, I just don’t care enough about the characters, and I don’t like how the story seems to ramble and dilly-dally without clear purpose.

The film has given me an appreciation for some of Tolkien’s writing, but I’m doubtful that Jackson’s way is the best way to adapt the strengths of Tolkien’s work to the big screen.  I love many of the motifs, icons, places, and objects presented in the film – particularly the Ring of Power, which is one of the greatest metaphorical narrative devices in the history of literature – but they’re not organized in a narrative that makes me care enough.  It’s all very Dark Crystal-ish to me.  The film also suffers from predictability, which shouldn’t happen in a film with freaking magic in it.  Again, there’s a lot here that I like, and I wouldn’t mind watching the film again sometime – Jackson seems to be a more than competent filmmaker who certainly has his strengths – but I’d rather skip ahead to the films where more interesting things happen.

Superbad Review

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At least the title is honest.

Every now and again, I watch a movie because my friend makes me, and this was that.  It’s just not my kind of thing – plain and simple.  I don’t care about these characters.  They annoy me.  They could be shot with lasers, sent back in time, elected president, probed by aliens, trained in martial arts by dinosaurs, shaven bald by a horny Mickey Mouse, abducted by a cult that worships Billy Mays, and/or eaten by the Lollipop Guild, and I would not care.  So why should I care about their less interesting lives?  And during those brief moments when I do care, the film is more painful than funny, triggering all my social anxieties and making me want to die.

The problem, unfortunately, is that it has too many redeeming qualities for me to dismiss it entirely.  The stupid police officers are amazingly rather funny at times, and Emma Stone absolutely steals the show.  Her performance near the end slays me.  Honestly, had the film been more about the girls, it would have been better by leaps and bounds.  That’s all it would take.

I’m rather confused about the presence of the 1970s.  Somehow, the film seems to take place in two decades at once, without explanation.  1970s music makes appearances in various forms – although the scene with the best use of older music features “These Eyes,” which is from the late 1960s – and there are ‘70s pop culture references on T-shirts throughout.  The opening, however, is the part that screams 1970s, and it is a brilliant opening credits sequence – one of the best I’ve ever seen.  It’s a shame the rest of the film couldn’t maintain that level of quality.

The Visitors Review

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Alternative Title: Les Visiteurs

My uncle never liked Monty Python was he was younger – he just found it too stupid to be enjoyable.  Eventually, as he got older, he kind of came around, but he attributes it to getting old and losing a few brain cells.  I have a hard time understanding that because I love Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but I found myself experiencing a similar disdain for immense stupidity while watching this film.

Les Visiteurs is a French comedy about a knight and his servant in the year 1123 who accidentally travel to France in 1992 and have to get back.  It’s a very stupid, stupid comedy, but the French people, weirdly enough, love it.  It was #1 at the French box office in its day, and it is the fifth-highest-grossing film in the country today, so the professor of my French Film and Culture class had to show it.

The professor noted that the film has some resemblance to Monty Python, but, while I can see that, I think it’s too focused on making gross, obvious, and in-your-face jokes, without the more cerebral critique of humanity’s pathetically mechanical nature that Python does so well.  The film also has many bothersome scenes showing grotesque transformations of faces, which remind me of some of the films based on the works of Roald Dahl in that the imagery is more unsettling and uncanny than entertaining.  I don’t hate the film – some parts are funny – but maybe I’ll appreciate it more if I lose a few brain cells.

National Lampoon’s Vacation Review

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I think road trip movies are among the most challenging to write.  There’s usually very little sense that the events of these films must occur, or that they must occur in the order in which they do, which tends to make everything feel arbitrary.  This, in turn, can make for a very weak movie – unless the comedy is strong.  Unfortunately, and much to my surprise, the comedy isn’t strong here.

I think I only laughed a handful of times throughout the film – maybe four – and I’m not sure how that’s possible from John Hughes.  The key difference between this film and Hughes’ better work seems to be that he usually features very likable main characters.  The characters in this film are jerks, so I don’t enjoy watching them.  I also felt throughout that much of the humor was relying on highly judgmental stereotypes of people and places, so I find the film somewhat offensive.

That being said, the best case I can make for the film is actually related to the aspects to which I take offense.  I think it has a lot of what I call “cultural utility.”  It’s a very useful film in that it can be used to understand American culture better.  It’s very rare to see a depiction of the white American middle class that so perfectly captures its hatred of white trash, its sexual tensions, its struggles to embody the ideas we have of what the white middle class should be, its racist fears, its respect for religions it doesn’t understand, and its all-around pathetic insanity.  For anyone outside the United States who wants to understand why and how Americans seems so crazy, watching this film is a good place to start.

Bonnie and Clyde Review

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Bonnie and Clyde is one of the most divisive films in the history of American cinema.  On the one hand, many critics praised it for being something entirely new.  Roger Ebert wrote, “It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful.”  By contrast,  it was called needlessly aggressive, violent, purposeless, and unfocused by a great many critics, but we’ve mostly forgotten that.  All that we remember is that it was shockingly different from Classical Hollywood, and so we’ve decided it was a great movie.  And maybe it was.

Now it’s not.

Now there is very little of interest here.  The main characters are uninteresting, the comedy isn’t very funny, the violence isn’t much of a spectacle, and the bold style of editing just isn’t striking anymore.  I do think there are a few likable things about this movie, but not enough for it to be considered one of the greatest films of all time.  It was different from other films, but not different in any ways that are really worth praising (compare to The Graduate or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner).

So why isn’t my star rating lower?  Simple: Gene Freaking Wilder.  It’s one of his best performances, and he made the whole movie well worth the watch.  To be fair, there are some other scenes I like as well – the opening credits, for example, or … well, really most of the beginning of the movie, after which it largely goes downhill – but only Gene Wilder’s part can be said to be truly great.  For the rest of the film, I’ll repeat the same old adage I’ve said time and time again: if I don’t care about the characters, I won’t care about the story.  It’s possible for a film to be good even without a great story, but this film is too dependent on a story that was done better by Trouble in Paradise and Gun Crazy for that to be possible.

Taxi Driver Review

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I’d like to talk about a French movie called La Haine.  Easily one of the most historically significant French films of the last 25 years, La Haine (or Hate) tells the story of young men of different ethnic backgrounds living in one of the poorest parts of France who are the victims of police brutality.  While the American tendency is to make all characters that the audience is expected to read as “victim type characters” very nice, sweet, and innocent, this film has a brutal realism to it – the characters are not the loveliest people.

They are very aggressive, rude, profane, and obsessed with drugs and guns.  The only jokes they know how to tell involve having sex somebody’s mother or sister.  They are wrapped up in maintaining an impossible self-image of pure masculinity, never showing weakness, always being ready to shoot anyone who stands in their way.  While I can’t relate to them much, I do feel for them: their attitudes, interests, and behaviors are all part of a persona they feel they must assume in order to stand up to unjust authorities – a persona thrust upon them by American pop culture.

While a variety of artists, films, and film genres clearly affected the film and/or the characters in it, the only movie I recall being cited explicitly as a source of self-image for these kids is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.  The famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene (in addition to the scene pictured below) is performed by a character in this film who feels like he has no power and no future – all he has is the fantasy of pulling out a gun like Robert De Niro and shooting a cop.  I think that’s because the purpose of Taxi Driver is to resonate with people who just want to be masculine, dominant men, which is why the whole film is nothing but a showcase of what masculinity looks like without the “fun parts.”  Without the fast cars, monster trucks, explosions, wild sex, rocking out, and sports games, all that’s left to make a movie manly is precisely the contents of Taxi Driver – no more, no less.

The plot concerns a retired war veteran returning to his home city in America and trying to find a way to readjust – a clever nod not only to the contents of films noir but also to the historical phenomenon that film historians/theorists propose prompted the film noir genre.  He becomes a taxi driver and sees a variety of strange characters and concerning events, which Scorsese used to show us the darkness of New York on a level that few other directors have been able to achieve.  Then he stalks a woman, so that’s not good.  Then he and that woman attempt to have a romantic relationship, but it doesn’t go very well.  Then he buys a bunch of guns and decides to become a vigilante, hoping to rescue a very, very young prostitute from her situation.

The number of events in the story are few, although they happen over the span of a rather long, slow movie, and there aren’t many engaging twists and turns in the story, so what gives?  Why is this movie considered so great?  I already mentioned the film noir references, and I think a lot of people admire the lengths to which Scorsese goes to show how awful a place New York City can be, all without losing the sense of realism.  People also surely like Scorsese’s ability to use very subtle camerawork to create a unique style of uneasy “swaying” that makes the viewer feel continuously unsettled.  It’s all apart of the idea that great filmmakers aren’t the ones who follow the Hollywood formula really well to please a large audience.  The great director, it is believed, is one who comes up with his/her own distinct ideas for specific events, moments, vignettes, and characters he/she wants the audience to see, then carefully crafts them with clever dialogue and unconventional cinematography, then packages them together in just the right order to give the audience the experience he/she wants.

That’s not quite my idea of a great film – it’s close, but it’s not quite there.  At the end of the day, film is a communication medium, and that means I can’t only look at how well the filmmaker uses the channel of communication (the channel being video) – I have to look at the value of that which is being communicated.  I think the reason why I like the show Louie more than Taxi Driver, even though Louis C. K. meets that same definition of a great director I offered in the previous paragraph in Louie, is that Louis is expressing something that speaks to my values and showing me things I would want the whole world to see.  He shows life in the rotten parts of the city from a perspective that makes sense to me.  I can’t say that for the popular Scorsese films, which seem to approach the world from the perspective of an animal rather than a rational agent.

I really don’t know how to care very much about what happens in the movie, so it’s hard for me to care about the movie.  I don’t really connect much with the characters, and based on this film I don’t think I connect much with Scorsese either.  The only people who do connect with either of them through this film, I estimate, are people who enjoy their own manliness too much.  I can greatly appreciate the interesting character studies, the fascinating exchanges between the (very different) characters, and the craftsmanship involved here – I’m really glad that Scorsese showed me so many things that so few people have ever seen before on or off the screen – but that’s not enough.  It simply doesn’t resonate with me.