J.D. Hansel

Two and a Half Stars

War of the Worlds (1953)

by

I usually have a pretty good idea of how I’m going to feel about a movie before I watch it – I’m just that kind of person.  Even when the trailers for a movie don’t do it justice – consider Baby Driver – I’m often able to see through the marketing and get a sense for what a film’s strengths and weaknesses are going to be.  I think that’s what made the 1953 War of the Worlds so disappointing to me.  I knew I would like elements of the visual style – the alien ships are absolutely brilliant, and some of the costumes and lighting are also notably excellent – but it actually wasn’t was colorful, dark, vivid, and theatrical as I’d hoped it would be.  It’s really rather painful to sit through thanks to its story, most of which I found fairly uninteresting.  Obviously, some of the writing is very smart – I am, of course, fully aware of the significance of H.G. Wells – but this story just doesn’t work as a movie.  The ending isn’t really satisfying, and the message is repulsively preachy and spiritual, even though it doesn’t make sense to do a “Thank God for His Gracious Ex Machina” ending after all the needless tragedy that fills the film.

In short, I can appreciate the film’s technical and creative accomplishments, but it’s far from my idea of great sci-fi.

The Last Unicorn Review

by

I think part of the reason why I watched this movie is that I was really in the mood to take a break from the Disney live-action remakes and return to an original fairy-tale movie.  I’m not sure that The Last Unicorn was a good choice though seeing as how it contains so many good and bad elements mixed together, often within the same departments, so I don’t know what to make of it.  The story is a very bizarre one – highly problematic and quite confusing – yet it contains clever little ideas and characters that make me jealous I hadn’t thought of them myself.  The storytelling through the visuals is particularly unclear at times, yet often the animation perfectly captures exactly the feeling the scene ought to have.  The visual style is particularly disjunctive, with character designs and animations that look irritatingly cheap and flat in comparison to Disney’s work, yet the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.  I’m inclined to say that the soundtrack isn’t very good, yet the film’s theme song is stuck in my head, and I have found I quite enjoy it.  The cast may boast some greats like Mia Farrow, but she is oddly overshadowed by the more memorable performances of the bad actors, whose delivery was unlike anything I have ever heard referred to as “acting.”

My problem with this movie is that, every time I think I really like it, the scene that follows always ruins it.  Some of the characters seem fun at first, but eventually get annoying.  The last half of the movie has one mediocre song after another, painfully drawing out the film (even though the run-time is only about an hour and a half).  Because of how much I like looking at the movie, and because of how much I appreciate most of the story, I kept trying to look on the bright side and only see the good in the film, but then something comes up like the tree creature with big breasts and I’m reminded that this is just a Rankin-Bass movie – I can’t expect quality.  At the very least I was hoping this would be a good film for little girls to enjoy  – a movie that’s wholesome enough to merit its “G” rating – but today it would have to cut some parts or change some lines just to get a “PG” rating, thus alienating the viewers who might as well be its target audience.  Consequently, The Last Unicorn strikes me as the kind of movie that’s very good at creating nostalgia for those who grew up with it, but doesn’t hold up for viewers who find it later.

But do you know what this movie really needs?  A Disney live-action remake.  Seriously.  This is the one child-oriented animated film that has enough negative elements to need a re-tooling, and enough positive elements to be made into a great story if it’s put in the right hands.  Most of the main issues are honestly really, really easy to fix, and the story itself isn’t that bad – it’s just the storytelling that’s poor.  Heck, the story even works well as a criticism of other fairy-tales, and it lends itself easily to feminist interpretations, so it’s the perfect subject for the Disney remake project.  Sure, Disney would have to buy the rights from another company, but the result would still be, without a doubt, the best of the live-action Disney remakes to date.

It’s a Wonderful Life Review

by

This movie is not supposed to be a classic – it happened by accident.  It was a flop at the box office (far more so than The Wizard of Oz) and only got played on TV because the studio let its copyright on the film lapse in the 1970s.  Because so many people watched it as children with how often it was on television, it became a tradition to watch the movie every Christmas, but that doesn’t mean it’s that great.  It’s one of those movies that we remember as being great from our childhood, so we can still enjoy it, much like with the Rankin-Bass specials.  The difference is that It’s a Wonderful Life feels more original with the classic, memorable, charming moral of its fable, more high-quality with its top-notch director, long run-time, and great cast, and more like it fits in stylistically with the family of Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and other films that just feel emblematic of Classical Hollywood.  At the end, however, it feels like a pretty average Classical Hollywood film to me: sometimes boring, sometimes charming, sometimes impressive, and sometimes absurdly (and dare I say stupidly) weird.

First of all, its structure is about as bizarre as that of a film noir.  While Out of the Past has its interesting part in the first act and what feels like a boring afterthought for its second, this film spends the first two acts on generally humdrum exposition, leaving its iconic fantasy story for the ending.  Consequently, the whole film seems long and drawn-out, and while I can appreciate how interesting it must have seemed when it first came out because its high concept was completely new to cinema at the time, I couldn’t really stay all that interested seeing as how I knew exactly how the story ends.  I will say that the character of Mary Hatch/Bailey (Donna Reed) kept me interested in the story for a while, but the way that George Bailey (Stewart) treats her in most scenes, and the way he behaves in general, struck me as entirely unappealing and unrelatable.  I have a very difficult time caring about what happens to Bailey in general, but I will say that the film’s ending oddly warmed my heart far more than any movie I’ve seen in a long, long time.  The strength of the ending, however, is counterbalanced with the weirdness of the scenes at the beginning with the blinking stars, which were nearly a face-palm moment for me.  This film is a mix of a great many distinct and interesting things, some positive and some negative, and while I can’t say that I like it, I do think its concept is one worth consideration, and I can appreciate the original ideas it has brought to the art of the moving image.

The Asphalt Jungle Review

by

(SPOILER ALERT)

It’s surprising to me just how much better this film is on my second viewing – how much easier it is to follow and enjoy watching it after having already seen it before.  That’s not to say I really liked it the second time I watched it – in fact I never finished watching it a second time – but it is easier to appreciate.  The film has a structure that’s hard to work out on the onset, and the first few minutes of the film give the impression that the story will follow the perspective of the police officers more than the criminals.  Without any clear protagonist, and with an ensemble cast with intricate relationships, it’s easy to get lost in the story, as I did when I first started watching it.  There’s also the fact that I generally have little interest in crime and heist films, which made me hope for better motivations behind the characters’ actions so I could have an easier time getting invested.  On the second viewing, however, it has become clear to me that this film is very careful and detailed, making it rather fascinating.  I’m particularly fascinated by the role of women in the film.

I think it is quite safe to say that the filmmakers planned on having a mostly male audience, seeing as how the main characters in the film (or at least the ones who push the plot along) are men, so the film looks at women from a few male perspectives.  There seems to be a dichotomy presented between the “good life,” represented by adhering to domestic norms, and the wrong way of living, represented by inappropriate lust (or, to a lesser extent, greed).  The professor seems to have no interest in settling down with a wife – his ideal retirement is chasing the pretty Mexican girls around in the sunshine.  The film seems adamant about making the point that greed, lust, and criminality are all in the same family of things that ought to be avoided, and it is no surprise that Doc’s lust becomes his undoing.  Similarly, Emmerich’s affair seems to be at the very least related to his unhappy ending.  When Bob Brannom suggests that Emmerich went broke because of Angela (Marilyn), Emmerich denies it, saying it was his extravagant way of living, but I argue Emmerich would have no need for his many properties if he didn’t need places to have his affair.  “Doll” tries to pull Dix into the conventional, domestic, married life, but he inexplicably resists, instead pining after the horses of his home.

Interestingly, the film only touches on the subject of how crime can hurt one’s family.  The brief memorial service scene seems to mostly serve the function of reminding the audience of the consequences of criminal behavior, which is a message the film probably needed to drive home quite severely in order to get approved.  If a big proponent of Sobchack were to try to figure out why a family would be brought into this film, it seems that the reasons would be purely functional: to raise the stakes so the drama of the heist is more interesting, and to help the film get its approval.  I can’t help but wonder how entirely different the film would be if one woman had been involved in the heist itself and how the perspective on women the film presents might completely change.

Unfortunately, a film that’s fascinating in hindsight is not the same as one that’s entertaining from the start, which is really what I was hoping to see.  Some of the characters are really good and leave a strong impression, and I think that’s largely due to the great performances from Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, and of course Marilyn, but somehow this isn’t enough to keep the film interesting.  I recognize that it’s a well-made film in many respects, but it’s not my kind of thing.  I think I’ll have to finish my second viewing sometime, or maybe even watch it a third time, because as of right now, I’m wondering if I’ll ever decide if the film’s ending is an unsatisfying bummer or a work of poetic genius.

152-the-asphalt-jungle

Burn After Reading Review

by

It’s always a little bit embarrassing for me to say that I don’t “get” a certain kind of humor.  In general, the inability to understand a joke that others find humorous is often a sign of a lack of understanding of the world as a whole – a sign of immaturity.  It usually shows that the person who does not laugh is “out of the loop” and does not have the perspective (or intelligence) to understand either the mechanics of the joke or the nature of the joke’s subjects.  This is why I have always hated to reveal that I “just don’t get it” when I watch a film by the Coen brothers.  Burn After Reading, much like the small fraction of the rest of their work that I’ve seen, simply doesn’t do it for me, and I have a hard time explaining why.

Some might think that I am making too big a deal out of a simple matter of differing tastes, but I don’t think that comedy is quite as subjective as the public believes.  I think that appreciation or depreciation of certain jokes or certain kinds of comedy can be indicative of a level of thoughtfulness or intelligence, and the comedy of the Coen brothers is generally thought of as a more sophisticated kind of comedy.  I think that this sense of sophistication comes from the fact that they do comedy that is not explicitly comedic – the actors don’t go too far over the top, don’t wink at the camera, don’t crack jokes, don’t engage in funny physical comedy, don’t release a steady stream of witty one-liners the way Woody Allen does, and don’t have the sense of “putting on a show” that is nearly always a part of the comedic aesthetic.  The comedy is in how uninteresting and pathetic these people are, but even the traditional comedy style of England, which is known for focusing on the uninteresting and pathetic people more than the fun, wisecracking comic type that America has celebrated, tends to “play up” the comedy much more than the Coen brothers do.  I think the subdued nature of the comedy creates the sense that the comedy is a bit harder to find, perhaps to the point that someone could walk into the film mid-way and believe it was a drama for a few minutes.  This in turn creates the sense that the comedy must only be visible to those who are smart enough to see it, but I think this is illusory – I know that it’s supposed to be funny that Clooney’s character has so little control over the way he’s wired to behave that he can’t help but find a new woman to have a secret affair with the moment that his current secret lover looks like she’ll become his wife, but it’s only funny to the point of making me roll my eyes.  I’m not interested in laughing at people who are just pathetic, annoying suckers – I’m just annoyed with them because I’m surrounded by the same kind of annoying people every day, and their loss is more of a cause for a sigh of relief than for a laugh.

This film is an example of how the Coen brothers simply fail to understand how to properly walk the tiny tightrope that is the comedy narrative.  The comedy film is such a difficult thing to do well because of its inherent contradiction: cinema is, as Roger Ebert rightly noted, an empathy-generating machine, while comedy and empathy are forever at odds.  The audience can’t care too much about the characters or else it won’t be funny when something bad happens to them – it will be dramatic – but they also can’t be too apathetic about the characters or else they will have no interest in the plot.  It is finding the type of character that is amusing, interesting, and somewhat likable, without seeming so real or relatable as to be taken seriously, that makes comedic entertainment possible.  From what I’ve seen, the trick seems to be to make the characters relatable through childlike naivete, while still keeping them irrational and foolish.  Consider Cookie Monster – he is forever obsessed with cookies, and we laugh at both his inability to obtain them and his inability to see how absurd his obsession is, but we still feel happy for him when he does get a cookie.  We laugh at early Hermione Granger when she is saddened by the news that exams have been cancelled, but when she is saddened by being a disliked outcast, this is played as drama, showing the way the two kinds of misery function.  Very often, this need for a character to “straighten out her priorities” is enough to make for the “adorable loser” type of character that we enjoy in the work of Henson, Chaplin, and other comedic greats, but the work of the Coen brothers doesn’t fit into either category of misery, and doesn’t work for me.

What does work for me, however, is the ending.  The cuts to the men at the C.I.A. who are trying to figure out what on earth is wrong with all these crazy people are delightful.  While I’ve never been a huge fan of either version of The Office, I do very much agree with Rainn Wilson’s observation that the show’s awkward moments are not as funny as the reactions of the other cast members in response to those moments.  The look to the camera is funny because it relies on the other way that comedy functions in narrative – instead of enjoying the silly misery of the adorable loser, we enjoy the fun that one of the characters is having observing people being fools or losers.  Burn After Reading could have worked if it had some sane characters appearing throughout who recognized the absurdity of the other characters, but the characters are just not funny enough on their own.  They are annoying and stupid and boring and they made for a tedious film.  It took me a very long time to watch it because I couldn’t stomach it all in fewer than three sittings, and frankly I feel like it was time poorly spent.

147-burn-after-reading

Mad Max Review

by

What . . . the what?  I’m very confused about what on earth this movie is supposed to be.  The entire selling point of Mad Max – and the story synopsis on the back of the DVD case – is Max’s revenge plot.  But this plot is just the third act.  The entirety of acts one and two is spent setting up a conflict, rather than following one.  I’m not saying that every film must follow the standard Hollywood narrative format, but the best deviations from this format are the ones that deviate to saturate the conflict, not distract from it.  In comparison to my expectations, most of Mad Max just feels dull and pointless.

This film raises the usual questions that I struggle to answer when writing on a film I don’t like:

  1. Is it a good film even though it’s not my cup of tea?
  2. Can it be held accountable for not living up to its marketing if the film’s marketing is the problematic part?
  3. And is it really a bad thing when a film does not make it clear how it should be approached/read?

To answer the first question, I do think it is possible for me to recognize films that have many positive elements, even if I don’t particularly like them.  I have spent far too much time writing about Pan’s Labyrinth because I know that it is a very impressive film, yet somehow I hate it immensely.  I’m not sure that this movie is the same kind of situation.  Mad Max does not strike me as remarkably well-crafted, even for what it’s trying to be, regardless of whether or not I happen to like what it’s trying to be.  Perhaps the problem is that I cannot tell what it is that I was supposed to be getting out of it, but now that I know what the movie is about and what it spends its time focused on, I still don’t think I’d appreciate it more on my second viewing.  Its story is simply lacking.

For the second question, I don’t think I have a good answer.  If a movie’s marketing is really bad, but the film itself ends up being spectacular, I don’t think I could fault it much for the marketing.  After all, the marketing is not necessarily apart of the film itself, and is generally not really controlled (or even influenced much) by what the director and producer say.  On the other hand, if a film gives me less than what the marketing had me expecting, that’s a negative thing.  It shows that there’s potential there for a good movie, but the filmmakers didn’t make something as good as what the film could have been.  On the other other hand,  what’s especially difficult here is discerning when a film is just “different” from its marketing, but not particularly better or worse.  With Mad Max, it’s clear to me that all of the time spent “world building” in the first hour could have been spent on an exciting plot that properly mixed in the world building, sort of like The Princess Bride, and that would’ve been far more entertaining (without deviating from what was advertised or what the movie promised).

The last question is perhaps the most controversial, and what could easily make me seem like an idiot to a heck of a lot of people.  I’m going to answer this question with a yes, but I’m not sure that it’s a yes in every case.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my review of Pulp Fiction, which I have come to disagree with over time.  It seems to me that I only liked the film because I had heard Tarantino explain in an interview how to approach and/or process it.  I have come to recognize that, without an explanation of how to approach it, I couldn’t have understood it.  Not only that, but I couldn’t have understood how to understand it.  That, I think, is the key – I don’t need a filmmaker to hold my hand and explain everything to me, but I need to know what language I’m seeing before I can read it, or what game I’m playing before I can win it; the difficulty of the game is irrelevant.

I don’t really know if this review will make sense to anyone else.  I’m not even sure that it makes sense to me.  My goal has simply been to explore why I feel the way I do about this movie, and hopefully to understand myself (and cinema) better for having done so.  Mad Max is certainly a special film that has some value to it, but the vast majority of the film did not grab me, and I was left wanting much, much more.  Perhaps my problem is not so much the film as it is the glimpses it shows of what it could have been.

131-mad-max