Reviews of the Bosch

Ingmar Bergman is one of the classic auteur filmmakers who I haven’t really gotten around to in my study of film. I’ve seen The Seventh Seal of course, and am aware of some of his themes and style, but I haven’t experienced his work much at all to my embarrassment. And though I intend to see more of his movies, I feel like no movie speaks better to the kind of director he was than Persona , his classic bewildering psychological horror-drama about the nature of self. Approaching Persona  is no easy task. It’s one of the most talked about movies in cinephile circles, debated, re-interpreted, and analyzed so much that film historian Peter Cowie famously declared “everything that one says about  Persona  may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true”. I disagree to the point that I believe there are facts of this movie and readings that are absolute, but it’s certainly mysterious and entrancing, with a meaning that’s incredibly intentionally opaque. The plot, a...

This doesn’t need to exist. The Happytime Murders doesn’t need to exist, “Henson Alternative” doesn’t need to exist, and this whole gimmick of taking traditionally family-friendly entertainment and trying to make it adult, transgressive, and raunchy doesn’t need to exist. But it does and that’s incredibly depressing. Not quite as depressing though as the fact that The Happytime Murders , a puppet comedy crime movie ostensibly for adults (though really quite juvenile) is directed by Brian Henson, director of the charming Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island , chairman of the Henson Company, and the son of Jim Henson himself. Having the Henson name attached to this at all is embarrassing, not just because of how antithetical it is in content to his life’s work, but because for all its novelty it’s really just an empty husk of movie. It’s about a former cop turned P.I. called Phil Phillips (Bill Baretta), a puppet in a world shared with humans. When the puppet cast-...

When a movies’ release date is continually pushed back that’s usually a sign of a bad movie. Often it shows a studios’ doubt in its appeal for some reason or another, and many a time its resulted in terrible comedies or lacklustre dramas coming out years after production concluded. However there is an exception to this rule, and that exception is Alpha The historical survival flick directed by Albert Hughes (one half of the brothers who made  From Hell  and The Book of Eli ), was originally supposed to come out last fall, then last spring, before settling into its late August release date -a time usually reserved for the table scraps of summer movies. Whether it was the conventional nature of the plot or the unconventional narrative devices that made Sony worried about it, I don’t know. But I do know Alpha  is a movie that’s a lot better than its studio had faith in. Set in Palaeolithic Europe roughly 8000 B.C., the story follows Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) the son ...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade  is in a way an apology for both Temple of Doom  and 1941 :   the former in that Spielberg wants to prove that he can recapture the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark this time, and the latter in that he wants to prove he can direct comedy well, and in both respects, it… kind of works. Given the response to the violence of Temple of Doom  it was inevitable this follow-up would be by far the lightest of the series, and wanting to avoid its mistakes, Spielberg and Lucas considered a number of scripts far in advance; including a haunted mansion idea by Diane Thomas, an exotic Monkey King story by Chris Columbus, and a pilgrimage ending with a fight with a demon by The Color Purple  writer Menno Meyjes. All contributed various things that found their way into Jeffrey Boam’s ultimate script, which additionally combined Lucas’ idea of a quest for the Holy Grail with Spielberg’s interest in a father-son dynamic to ground the sto...

It’s always a crapshoot as to what you’re going to get with a Gus Van Sant film. It could be Drugstore Cowboy , Good Will Hunting , or Milk , or it could alternatively be  Psycho , Gerry , or The Sea of Trees . He’s a filmmaker whose brand of art film can be anything from amazing to overwhelmingly pompous. And Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot  definitely has a premise that’s strange enough to go either way. Luckily, this biographical film on the struggle of cartoonist John Callahan manages to avoid stylistic pitfalls for a more driven character journey. An alcoholic with a troubled past, John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) on a bar-hopping bender is severely injured in a car accident, becoming a quadriplegic. As he morosely recovers and continues to struggle with drink, he begins attending an Alcoholics Anonymous group run by a sponsor Donnie Green (Jonah Hill), eventually discovering a passion for drawing off-colour cartoons to cope with his condition. There’s not a...

Coming-of-age movies about the anxieties of being a middle-American teenager are increasingly common in recent years. To the point I was tempering my expectations for Eighth Grade , the directorial debut of comedian and musician Bo Burnham, and its ability to bring anything new to the genre. However the subject matter has rich potential. There’s been a ton of movies like this focussed on characters at the high school level and relatively few in middle school; and after all the last movie I saw written and directed by a mediocre comedian was Don’t Think Twice , one of my favourite films of 2016. Eighth Grade  isn’t that good, nor does it have the strength and soul of something like Lady Bird , but it is a cogent and honest expression of that uncomfortable period in our youth. It’s about Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), an introverted and miserable thirteen year old girl in the last week of eighth grade at her local middle school. She has a disparaging attitude towards her sing...

An all Asian cast is nothing new to fans of world cinema -some of the best movies ever made have had all Asian casts after all. But Crazy Rich Asians , the romantic-comedy based on the book by Kevin Kwan and forebodingly directed by Jon M. Chu, is not a Chinese movie, or a Korean movie, or a Japanese movie, but firmly an American movie, made by a cast and crew of largely American, British, and Australian people of Asian heritage. And that is certainly rare. It hasn’t really happened since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club . Early on in this film it dawned on me I’d never seen a mainstream Hollywood movie with two Asian romantic leads (sometimes the woman would be, scarcely would the man), which speaks to this movies’ importance. The likeability of their relationship speaks to its quality. The movie’s about Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) an NYU economics professor dating Nick Young (Henry Golding) who invites her to come back to Singapore with him where he’s to be the Best Man at a wedding. O...

The great David Lean almost directed Empire of the Sun , an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel about surviving an internment camp in Japanese-occupied China during the Second World War. Adapted by the great Tom Stoppard, it would have been Lean’s follow-up to A Passage to India  and brought his career making epics full circle ( The Bridge on the River Kwai  being also about British war prisoners of the Japanese). However ultimately he left the project, not quite convinced of its visual promise, handing it off to one of its producers, a forty year old filmmaker and lifelong fan of his. Empire of the Sun  was very clearly Steven Spielberg’s attempt to make a David Lean film. He’s an ardent admirer of Lean ( just watch him gush over Lawrence of Arabia ), who had a huge impact on his aspirations to be a director. And here was his chance to recapture a sense of the epic scale and grand storytelling that so drew audiences to those movies. His passi...

Last week I alluded to The Color Purple as being “Oscar-bait”, a term which has quite a bit of unfair stigma. Yes, it often refers to movies that are transparently trying to win awards through the seriousness of their subject matter, heaviness of the performances, or other Academy-catering devices; and sometimes they fail to make a connection. But there is something noble in films at least aiming for high quality and importance. Oscar-bait failures are typically better than summer blockbuster failures. And likewise, a lot of the best American movies have been Oscar-bait -they’ve just done it right. Steven Spielberg was hardly the first director nor the last to shift gears in this way. He’s always been a proud filmmaker, a fan of the serious cinematic legends. And as someone who’d become known for blockbusters, flights of fancy, and sensational entertainment, it made perfect sense he’d want to stretch his wings, focus on something real for a change, and yes, see if he could ...

Last year a good movie came out that nobody saw called   Goodbye Christopher Robin . It was about the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh , the relationship between A.A. Milne and his son, and how child stardom affected the young Christopher Robin psychologically and emotionally. It’s quite interesting, you should see it; especially now it’ll be overshadowed by Disney’s Christopher Robin , which has little but a title in common with it. Christopher Robin  is not about the origin of Winnie-the-Pooh , and its title characters’ connection with the biographical Christopher Robin is tenuous, picking some facts while ignoring enough others to avoid liability. Instead, it’s a sequel of sorts to the Disney Winnie the Pooh  franchise, about a grown-up Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Wood and reuniting with his old friends. And it works about as well as that plot was ever going to. After leaving his home in Sussex for a boarding school and subsequently fighting in...