Reviews of the Bosch

      Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise should honestly be as big a camp horror-musical-comedy hit as The Rocky Horror Picture Show . The 1974 glam rock satire is just as bewildering and eccentric, just as wild and funny and almost as queer -but it’s probably kept from that sort of notoriety due to the absence of Tim Curry’s unique personality and the music not being quite as catchy. Still, I had just as much fun with Phantom of the Paradise and its’ weird, vicious take on both the world of pop music and the classic narratives of The Phantom of the Opera and Faust , as I would watching Rocky Horror -as many are wont to do this time of year.       This was De Palma’s film coming off of Sisters , which is nuts to me, given the disturbing tone and narrative of that film compared to this one, which nonetheless has much of the same De Palma style. He’s not known for comedies, and certainly not over-the-top flashy ones despite making a few such films in...

A friend of mine went to see Candyman , and after the movie said it was one of the best films they’d seen all year, but that “it wasn’t scary”.  It was a very curious comment to me, because after all, “being scary” is one of Candyman ’s primary aims. Yet this friend still liked the movie a lot, in spite of it not meeting that criteria for them. Why? Did it still even succeed as a horror movie? Would such a person then even consider it as such? Of course what one person may find scary, another won’t. What defines something as scary is likewise up to interpretation. I’ve called many films scary that didn’t illicit any kind of physical or emotional reaction in me, but I found them harrowing enough on another deep or psychological level that I don’t mind using that term to discuss them. However, generally the word “scary” does insinuate some kind of visceral response. If something is scary it alarms you, it startles you, it catches you unawares -it suggests a tangible reaction. Jordan ...

I watched a youtube video put out a couple weeks ago by TIFF where Denis Villeneuve talks about the legacy of Lawrence of Arabia . It’s also a means for him to promote his new movie Dune , another desert-based hero’s journey, by outlining how David Leans’ seminal masterpiece influenced his work and choices. He notes the “very impressive balance between the scope, the epicness, and the intimacy of the journey of the main character.” That is indeed arguably the crux of what made Lawrence  so great and it is clearly what Villeneuve is aiming for with Dune , now the third adaption of a text deemed unadaptable for its’ denseness and narrative complexity. His film is a sweeping, grandiose spectacle of scale and ambition, a saga of imperialism in a far off future in space, of rival aristocratic feudal powers competing for a valuable resource, of an indigenous population caught in the middle, and also of magical super powers and a centuries-old prophecy. And it is a decent enough characte...

Ridley Scott began his feature film career in 1977 with a period drama called The Duellists , about two Napoleonic soldiers engaging in duels each time they meet over the course of sixteen years. Though it’s in an entirely different context and structure, it’s interesting that Scott has returned to that same topic forty-four years later, with a film titled fittingly The Last Duel . Though it’s maybe in this relation alone that the title is entirely appropriate, given the duel at hand, which was the last legally sanctioned one in France, is merely the end point of a story about systemic misogyny and sexual assault, speaking ones’ truth and pursuing accountability. The film makes no attempt at all to hide its’ allegory to the #MeToo movement, to connect the circumstances of the 14 th  century Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) with those of the countless women who have come forward with allegations against powerful men -as well as the obstacles in their way reinforced by an appara...

Halloween Kills is the fourth Halloween 2, and like every other Halloween 2, it is a disappointment. Blumhouse’s 2018 sequel/reboot of the famed slasher franchise tried to simplify things by shedding all of the mythology of the series save the 1978 original (and did so with the involvement of John Carpenter himself for the first time in almost three decades) -resulting in a relatively even, bare bones approach that generally worked. It ended in a satisfying way too, with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, together with daughter and granddaughter, subduing Michael Myers and trapping him in a burning house. A closure to a lifelong trauma, and a fitting end for that shape. But it never ends of course, Michael Myers will always find a way back in spite of how badly beaten he is. But if 2018’s Halloween maintained a certain grounded sensibility on par with the original film, it’s done away with pretty quickly and with frequency in Halloween Kills , which follows up that film to the minute...

Is James Bond relevant anymore in 2021? That question is more or less posed directly in  No Time to Die , the twenty-fifth entry in the longest running film franchise. What role exactly does the iconic British secret agent, specially skilled and with a licence to kill, have in this day and age? Certainly his character has been interrogated almost since conception, his casual alcoholism, misogyny, racism, and dubiously consensual sexual escapades discussed at length and can’t help but show him as antiquated. “A relic of the Cold War” as Judi Dench’s M identified him in 1995's  GoldenEye - which in some ways is very true. Ian Fleming wrote the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale , at the height of Western-Soviet tensions in the 1950s. The characters’ identity was very much informed by that world, and one could argue that once the wall came down, James Bond was already outdated. Yet here we are, nearly sixty years into this franchise and Bond endures, ever that power fantasy sy...

        The premise of Blue Bayou  stirred my curiosity quite raptly. I know people who were overseas adoptees, raised in Canada among white people with anglicized names and values, and I’ve wondered about the ways in which their everyday life is effected by that, and exactly what their relationship is to their country of birth. However I’ve never had to think about the possibility of them being deported, which as Blue Bayou  illustrates is a genuine risk in the United States. You can live all your life there, but still there’s a chance that because of major oversights in immigration law, you can be sent back to a country you’ve never been to and don’t even speak the language of.         Justin Chon based his film (which he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in) on accounts of people he grew up with and cases he’d heard of -which has sparked something of a legal battle over intellectual rights and possible plagiarizing in t...

There’s something serendipitous to Andy Serkis directing a movie about a man whose body is shared by two personas in constant conflict, that looks to other people like someone talking to themselves. Andy Serkis is the primary reason I decided to see Venom: Let There Be Carnage , a sequel to a movie I didn’t much like. I have high hopes for Serkis, as I do generally anyone who was a part of the Lord of the Rings  trilogy -but Serkis particularly has been proving himself a creative and visionary artist in the years since he accidentally became the poster boy for motion-capture performance (and grew to become quite passionate about it). His directing debut Breathe  garnered little attention, as did his passion project   Jungle Book  adaptation released to Netflix in 2018. So this Venom  sequel, a lower tier superhero film but a superhero film nonetheless, is instantaneously his highest profile movie behind the camera -it’s where more people are going to meet Andy ...