Reviews of the Bosch

“It’s showtime folks!” Doing this series, it isn’t often that I wind up disliking a classic movie I review. Most of the time these films are classics for a reason and they stand up well to scrutiny. However one of the joys of doing Back to the Feature, and indeed a reason behind it, is when I discover something that truly astounds me, a film that proves profoundly more affecting than I expected it to be and almost instantaneously joins my personal list of Great Movies. All That Jazz  I’m pretty sure is one of those films. I shouldn’t be surprised -it’s a favourite of a lot of other movie nerds I respect. A self-indulgent yet breathtakingly stylish and exciting musical comedy-drama about the deterioration of a charismatic bastard of a Broadway director, Bob Fosse’s 1979 pseudo-biographical masterpiece is generally considered to be his version of Fellini’s 8 ½ . That clearly seems to have been a model, given both films share a lot of the same themes and basically the same structure o...

I knew of The Red Shoes  long before I actually saw it. It’s one of those movies highly talked about in certain artsy film circles and in cinema studies classes. It’s one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite movies, he’s talked at length about it on numerous occasions. In fact that’s probably where I first heard of it, this unusual movie about a ballerina made by a directing duo in the U.K. with little studio interference and with no major stars of the era. And yet a film that has appeared near the top of many lists of the best British films. This only adds to its’ already enticing appeal; certainly the title is evocative, as is its’ Criterion cover which is a close-up image of a womans’ face serenely lit, hand to her head and sweat on her brow with a tantalizingly fearful or shocked expression on her face. What does that have to do with the Hans Christian Andersen story? Collectively known as the Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger first came to my attention not through The R...

You could probably make the argument that 1969 was the most important year of the twentieth century. It was a year full of dramatic social upheavals, at least in the United States, a grand cultural shift, and of course monument events like the Moon Landing and the Stonewall Riots that have in many ways changed our world -to say nothing of the break-up of the Beatles or the definitive rise of the counter-culture in American film and music. On the topic of that music though, the summer of ‘69 became iconic for it, owing mostly to Woodstock. But while that was going on, not too far south in New York City there was another significant musical event occurring, the Harlem Cultural Festival -a gathering with as much significance to the contemporary popular music scene, but that has faded from popular memory. Around forty hours of footage was filmed at the Harlem Cultural Festival by one of its’ producers Hal Tulchin. But he couldn’t sell it to any studio or network, and eventually had to give...

Nicolas Cage is no longer the joke he once was. Some might not believe this statement because he does still seem to choose niche projects with very strange creatives that allow him to play to a certain bigness such as Mandy  and Color Out of  Space . But he’s not the same Cage we had endless fun with in Face/Off , Snake Eyes , The Wicker Man , or Ghost Rider  -and indeed that wasn’t the same Cage of Moonstruck , Raising Arizona , or Leaving Las Vegas . The truth is that he’s an actor with a lot more range than he gets credit for, and yet he’s been defined by eras of his career that have tended to hone in on one aspect -the most popular being the over-the-top expressionistic performance style prominent through his late 90s/2000s work that has made him a meme (and yet this era also saw him give his best performance in Adaptation  that has sadly been forgotten amidst all the jokes about the bees). He’s had fun with it alongside us, and perhaps that is part of what has t...

When I heard what the subtitles were for each of the Fear Street  movies, Part Three was the one I was most interested in. 90s and 70s nostalgia has been done, but to then forsake that crutch and go as far back as 1666, a whopping three centuries, is an ambitious move. It completely redefines the environment of the piece, places it outside of any relatable context, and presumably reorients the series into more folk-heavy connotations, which I personally am more compelled by than the traditional slasher. But a proper folk horror film doesn’t fit so easily within the aesthetic architecture this series has crafted for itself in its’ campy world and teen themed drama, and so it’s no wonder Leigh Janiak abandons the setting prematurely for an extended final act in 1994. It’s disappointing but also inevitable. Given how much these films function as serialized television, there was no real reason Fear Street  had to be a trilogy -beyond just the general obsession we as a culture hav...

Space Jam  was not a good movie. Before diving into its’ horrible horrible sequel, I feel like that has to be reiterated.The 1996 hour and a half commercial about Michael Jordan teaming up with the Looney Tunes for a basketball game against aliens stuck around in the nostalgia of a lot of folks my age because it was frankly too weird not to. But it was a shameless corporate product, excessively cynical in both design and execution, blatantly pandering, and it willfully misunderstood both the popularity of Michael Jordan and especially of the Looney Tunes  -who are unrecognizable to anyone who loved  their cartoons. I want to emphasize this to show that the mere existence of Space Jam: A New Legacy is not an affront to any unimpeachable classic. The original was bad, and its’ sequel is even worse. Though Space Jam: A New Legacy  might also be the best thing to happen to the original in the twenty-five years since -because it manages to make that film actually look app...