Reviews of the Bosch

Power Ballad is one of those movies where you really know what you are getting and are happy to get it. It is the latest film from John Carney, a filmmaker who specializes in his own niche of movies about people who make music, who love music, or both -and there are few people better at it than him. Maybe his films can be cheesy or saccharine but they can also be tremendously warm and earnest. They will generally follow everyday characters  -amateur musicians or music admirers- who find something personally enriching in musical expression. And of course they will feature or perhaps even centre around a standout song, like the Oscar-winning “Falling Slowly” from Once , “Lost Stars” from Begin Again , and “Drive it Like You Stole It” from Sing Street (I was personally also quite fond of the less-celebrated “Meet in the Middle” from Flora and Son ). As much as those other films, these qualities are true of Power Ballad , which attaches them to a premise that is deceptively simple in ...

The primary objective of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe has always been to sell toys. That should be fairly obvious, the brand was after all invented by Mattel to capitalize on the resurgence of the sword and sorcery genre in the early 1980s, but it is also seemingly forgotten about when brought up in the context of nostalgic 80s franchises -especially given the nature of its lore and universe, intended to appear vast and multi-faceted. But it was all a fairly blatant marketing ploy the whole time -and this intrinsic shallowness is something of a key part of the legacy of this series, remembered primarily for its toy line and its cheesy Filmation cartoon show that has permeated the culture much more for its camp appeal than anything genuinely narratively or artistically compelling. Which is not to entirely discredit the thing -indeed the silliness of that cartoon’s various clichés and impressions of masculinity, not to mention the queer aspects of its characters and the villai...

There is an ethical question hanging over  Portrait of Jason , especially towards the end of the documentary. Is it justifiable to capture a man deteriorating under the influence on camera and provoking with some cruel words certain reactions out of him? It’s a level of manipulation, arguably exploitation that is especially wrong when trying to produce a work of authenticity, like documentary filmmaking is meant to be. And yet, there’s not a whole lot here that can definitively be called authentic. It might just be 105 minutes of bullshitting -we’re not meant to know. In any case, both director Shirley Clarke and subject Jason Holliday have been dead for quite some time and the 1967 movie exists as perhaps the central testament to both figures, whatever the issues and qualms about its making there may be. It is a minimalist and avant garde but still shrewd piece of filmmaking that does allow Clarke to construct a narrative out of a performance very broad and charismatic. It is esse...

You cannot convince me that Backrooms isn’t talking about A.I. Even though the aesthetic “creepypasta” on which the movie is based first surfaced on the internet in 2019, the effect of its unnerving look and feel -the ‘errors’ in reality- is remarkably similar to the creepy attributes of a lot of generative A.I. Articulating exactly what is off about the Backrooms is by a couple characters likened to describing a dog to someone who has never seen a dog before and asking them to draw a picture of it: some details will be correct but the thing as a whole will not quite resemble what a dog actually looks like. And isn’t that just what A.I. does? Generate (from a library of stolen data) an approximation of something that broadly appears correct …until you look more closely at it, and the flaws in design become starkly apparent. Kane Parsons may have considered that lens when he created his Backrooms web series while still a teenager in 2022. Four years later at the ripe old age of twenty,...

I will be honest, I’ve never really considered the role of meteorologists during war. I don’t suppose a whole lot of people have -it sounds like a fairly dull component of a battle plan: predicting the weather conditions for campaigns. One of the characters in this movie even points out how dull weathermen can be and that is true. What is the value in their contributions to something as serious as war?                                                                                                                 Well, weather is something extremely serious. And when the stakes are high enough it turns out knowing the weather is a vital part of military strat...

Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 star vehicle The Thief of Bagdad is an interesting, technically impressive, if sometimes underwhelming silent era swashbuckler. Fairbanks is charismatic in lieu of his obvious miscasting for the role, yet there is really only one other performance that stands out and gives the film some much needed colour. And that is a young Anna May Wong at the start of her career playing the fiendish slave girl to the princess who needs saving. She is striking for what the role demands of her, emanating beyond its blunt archetype. Unfortunately, this would be the pattern for Wong for much of the next decade and a half -a scene-stealer captivating audiences but kept at a distance due to the pervasive racism of the Hollywood industry at that time. Wong became a star, as much a household name as many of her white colleagues, but she was never allowed to be THE star as a Chinese-American woman. The system actively blockaded it. Leading parts weren’t being written for Asian women...