Reviews of the Bosch

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The Criterion Channel Presents: Portrait of Jason (1967)

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...

The Eerie Spaces and Suggestions of Backrooms

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,...

A High Pressure Environment

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...

Back to the Feature: Daughter of Shanghai (1937)

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...

This is Not the Way

I am not caught up with the series this movie is based on. I did watch the first season of Boba Fett Toy: The Show (before Disney literally made Boba Fett Toy: The Show ) and liked it fine, but never bothered to keep up with it afterwards due to the second season’s much-publicized use of extensive CGI ghoul effects and the apparently increasingly insular nature of its references tying into Dave Filoni’s various Star Wars projects, in which I had no experience with or interest in. But The Mandalorian is by a wide margin the most popular of the Star Wars shows on Disney+, enough so that it has permeated the pop culture primarily through the marketability of its very cute sidekick character Grogu (formerly informally “Baby Yoda”). If Disney were to give any of those shows the cinematic treatment, it makes sense that that is what they would go with. And for parts of this movie, I would say that impulse proves apt. For most of the movie however, it does not. The Mandalorian and Grogu...

I Love Boosters is a Messy though Thrillingly Offbeat Socialist Polemic

Boots Riley is someone with a very distinct sense of style. This is evident just from looking at the man -with his often colourful, zoot suit-inspired clothing aesthetic, his intense sideburns, and signature large hat, he’s the kind of person who stands out in a particular way -and none of these choices are accidental. He has stated openly that much of this look has come about through his relationship with boosters, i.e: people who shoplift exclusive or expensive clothing from high-end retailers to resell at a discount to those of low-income status. He has a considerable degree of respect for boosters, whom he characterizes as latter-day Robin Hoods. It inspired a song by his hip-hop group The Coup twenty years ago, that he has now translated into a movie. I Love Boosters is partly a love letter to the people who do this, but it is mostly a diatribe against the politics of the fashion industry, its bizarre excesses, and its exploitation of workers and the public. The movie argues for a...