Reviews of the Bosch

Drink some fine eggnog to another year done and gone! It’s getting a tad repetitive that each year of the 2020s sucks, and 2022 was little better than either of its’ predecessors.  Sure it had its’ high points -the defeat of Bolsonaro, the death of the Queen; but overall was mostly another string of disappointments in politics, culture, hope for humanity -all that stuff. Still, some are looking forward to 2023 with optimism and purpose. Surely the hardships can’t persist much longer, there’s light at the end of the tunnel… Fools! I once again have been blessed (cursed?) with knowing what we will bear witness to and what will become of us in the coming twelve months. The New Years’ Oracle has shown me all, and I cannot bear that burden of knowledge alone. Plus it’s just more fun to watch the chaos -it’s all I’ve got really. Anyway, you know the drill; the most momentous stories of 2023 are:   January –Three months after ascending to the post of Prime Minister of the United Kin...

Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland  seems only barely to be a Christmas movie, the holiday appearing in the third act as merely a plot device more than an organic feature of the story, which is itself rather choppily episodic. This is in keeping of course with its’ source, the nursery rhyme-themed operetta by Victor Herbert first performed in 1903 and not necessarily designed around the holiday. Credit to Disney though, the film does feel like it comes from that turn-of-the-century era in its’ whimsical presentation -something it shares with the movie that most likely inspired it, The Wizard of Oz . The Disney Company has long wanted the rights to Oz , the only movie of the Golden Hollywood era to replicate (and in some respects exceed) Disney in the realm of fairy tale-themed family musicals. But it was done in live-action, which has always been more impressive to Hollywood types; and I suspect that as its’ iconic status grew over the years, Disney became more determined to match it i...

Damien Chazelle is not the  first to refer to the world of  silent era Hollywood as “Babylon”. Film historian Miriam Hansen used the reference in the early 1990s in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film , a likely contender for the inspiration behind the title for Chazelle’s wild and eclectic movie about the end of that era. It’s an apt comparison -what is Babylon, classically, most remembered for? Its’ decadence and its’ fall. The Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties was famously decadent, and more famous was its’ decline once the talking pictures revolution began. That whole world was snuffed away by the mid-1930s, its’ biggest stars definitively yesterdays’ news. There’s something very tragic to that. And yet Chazelle opens his movie on that world and its’ stars with an extreme journey through debauched excess; a raucous mansion party of an unrestrained, perverse hedonism and comical chaos. It says a lot that one of the more responsible fi...

“...And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.” “Under Pressure” shows up at a vital moment in Aftersun , the striking debut feature from Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells. It is unlike the other needle-drops of this late 90s period piece that reference fluke staples of the era like “Tubthumping” and of course an obligatory “Macarena”.  It’s a more timeless track that speaks perceptibly to Calum Paterson (Paul Mescal), who has been silently struggling through depression and deep mental woe for the entire movie. Perhaps he feels understood by the lyrics, relieved by them, or else it’s just a nostalgic song through which he can authentically bond with his daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio), to whom he’s been emotionally distant. It’s always been a curious song to me, dealing with heavy and sombre themes, but in such a lively, upbeat and enthusiastic cadence. That is how it works as such an effective catharsis for Calum and Sophie, and one that can only be at best b...

I would not have taken Alejandro González Iñárritu for a Fellini type. His style is typically so much more dour and cynical, far from the bombast of La Dolce Vita  or the sentiment of La Strada  or 8 ½ . But the latter especially seems to be a fundamental influence on the movie that might speak most personally for him of any in his career. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths - a title even more ostentatiously ridiculous than Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) - is not a movie much in the vein of other highly personal auteur projects this year like The Fabelmans or Armageddon Time , which create fairly obvious one-to-one parallels between artist and alter ego. Bardo  keeps more ambiguous its’ resemblance to Iñárritu’s life story as it depicts the late career anxieties and surreal visions of a documentarian returning to Mexico after decades living in the States and in the midst of receiving a prestigious American award in journalism -the first Latin-...

Thirteen years later, we are still living in the world that Avatar  built. For as much as the joke may be that James Cameron’s 2009 box office record-breaking sci-fi environmental epic has had little cultural staying power, it did change the mainstream Hollywood movie industry in a way that hasn’t yet been countered. Despite generally diminishing returns, 3D is still pushed as the principal lens through which to experience blockbuster entertainment -a format that Cameron almost single-handedly revived with Avatar . It revolutionized visual effects technology by incorporating performance capture on a level that hadn’t been attempted before -and that technique is still used frequently to render animated characters alongside live-action performers. The creation of whole worlds using this technology has also been popularized to lesser ends. Avatar  is significant, it still casts a shadow, however subtle with time, over the blockbuster industry. And at last its’ long-anticipated fi...

“They come with fire. They come with axes. Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning. Destroyers and usurpers, curse them!”                                                           -Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The fantasy genre lends itself almost unflinchingly to a love of nature. Its’ core settings tend to be forests and fields, mountains and caves, castles made in stone or lodgings of wood or clay. It is imaginative fiction that looks almost longingly to aesthetics of pre-industrial history and myth as its’ basis for wonder or heroism. Fantasy loses something when it is displaced from that, and not that there’s anything wrong with modernist or urban fantasy as a genre, but it must be understood as a subversion of an integral component of the classical fantasy make-up. And of course when I refe...