Reviews of the Bosch

Arco might be the most Studio Ghibli movie that Studio Ghibli never made. Certainly, it’s among the more successful attempts to imitate that peculiar magic of Ghibli in a non-Japanese culture, in both the look and the general quaint spirit of the piece. But it is also a movie that Ghibli has never made; much as it fits their mold, it does not come off as any direct derivation. And in fact, a few of its choices do genuinely stand on their own, with a degree of maturity and severity distinct even from the poetic notes of Miyazaki’s best films, up to and including the bittersweet nature of the ending. The movie is French and directed by Ugo Bienvenu, though it comes to North America with an English dub courtesy of Natalie Portman, one of its producers. The dub is fine -very much like those latter Ghibli films- but it is sad to lose the likes of Swann Arlaud and Louis Garrel to Mark Ruffalo and America Fererra. The two children however seem to retain much of their original innocence with u...

Everybody knows that the Disney versions of fairy tales -in most cases the most popular versions in the general consciousness- are sanitized heavily from their original forms. Stories like Cinderella , which has been around for several centuries, were intended as morality tales not family entertainments. Taken in that context, as well as in the context of history and from an alternate perspective, the stories can actually be quite horrifying. There actually isn’t a lot that Emilie Blichfeldt invented out of whole cloth for The Ugly Stepsister . The Norwegian body horror film that essentially just tells the Cinderella story from the point-of-view of one of the stepsisters of the titular character, changing the story little but amplifying its tonal extremes and adapting them in visceral ways, is one of the more revealing illustrations of how bizarre and deranged those fairy tales could really be. It also opines to critique the moral coding of such tales as they relate to conventional sta...

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The line that is ubiquitous with the movie Love Story  is also perhaps the most mocked line in the romance movie genre. A line that sounds sweet and poetic -and certainly in context- but is meaningfully empty and kind of just flat-out false when applied to anything beyond a very narrow scope of subjects that comprise what we might call ‘love’. Even just two years later, Peter Bogdanovich had Ryan O’Neal (who delivers the line in its second usage in this film) respond to the quote with “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” in the film What’s Up, Doc? Bogdanovich and O’Neal had no qualms making fun of it then, because the movie’s power in spite of it was already assured. Love Story  was the first monster hit of the 1970s. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1970 and one of the highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point (it is still in the top fifty adjusted for inflation). It is said to have revived the Hollywood mel...

My favourite movie to fixate (at least in some regard) on the Japanese art of kabuki theatre is Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds , about a kabuki troupe in a seaside village. Kabuki is by its nature a very broad art form, full of zealous expressions of emotion and highly melodramatic storytelling, each epitomized in its distinct style of make-up and dance. It is a compelling thing to watch, but so is by contrast the lives of its performers and their relationship to the art -as Floating Weeds  does, following a veteran performer whose career has estranged him from his son. This character was played by Nakamura Ganjiro II, a dedicated kabuki performer himself from a family famous for it. And he appears to be represented at least symbolically in the film Kokuho , likewise about the dramatic personal life of a kabuki actor, in which the trainer and consultant was Ganjiro's own grandson and namesake. Directed by Lee Sang-il and currently the highest-grossing live-action film in Japan, ...

Some movies meet their moment effectively. John Patton Ford’s How to Make a Killing  is not one of them. Maybe if the 2020s were a little more like the 1930s its subject matter on the entitled pursuit of immense wealth would be worthy escapism for a broadly economically disadvantaged audience. Maybe it would in any case and it’s just this movie that has a hard time selling it authentically. It could be the attitude of the script or of Glen Powell’s performance, but there is something a little uncomfortably arrogant to this movie that renders its supposed virtues disingenuous. This in spite of some real energy there is to it. How to Make a Killing  is a modern remake of the classic British Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets , in which an underdog distant heir to a vast fortune systematically kills off the relatives ahead of him in the line of inheritance. A key difference though is that the earlier film is notable for having all of the eccentric relatives played by a s...

Whatever one might think of Emerald Fennel’s new Wuthering Heights , it should at least be clear that the novel by Emily Brontë is not exactly the “classy” work of literature it is often presumed to be. Though it has had that veneer impressed upon it by its era and literary quality, Wuthering Heights  was pretty scandalous for its time -certainly more so than the other books by the Brontë sisters. It dealt in direct themes of class and abuse, featured characters (or at least one) who are incredibly morally ambiguous, and had greater sexual connotations in its central romance than a lot of mainstream fiction of the time. Wuthering Heights has always been scandalous, if perhaps not to the degree that Fennel brings. It is by design not a very faithful adaptation -at least in the details. The quotation marks around the title apparently are a clue to the fact it is more inspired by the idea of Wuthering Heights  than a direct adaptation. Although that is not a p...