Reviews of the Bosch

  “To be born is to have a soul.”                                                        -KD6-3.7 “Joe” ChatGTP has been a slightly harrowing thing in the news lately. Whether it’s the worry over the effects such a program that can generate highly sophisticated text could have over art and media and politics, or it’s drawbacks of design that can allow for the perpetuation of disinformation and discrimination, or just it’s convenience as a cheating tool in school; this latest A.I. breakthrough has come with a lot of debate and discussion over the dangers certain technologies pose. It comes on the heels of the A.I. art controversy, where artificially-generated images circulating the internet have caused a lot of dismay among working artists. Essentially it all amounts to that old until now largely theoretical fear: are we...

To watch Beau is Afraid  is to submit oneself to one of the most scattershot, often abrasive movies released on a major scale in years. It is not only unapologetically bizarre, but seems to actively aim to get under the skin of its audience as it challenges their tolerance for the surreal, their empathy for an exceedingly unfortunate protagonist, and their patience through a three-hour runtime paced in a way that almost seems determined to reach exactly that threshold (it clocks in at just one minute short). It is a dense movie as well, full of precisely tuned symbolism, subtext, and metaphor relayed through elaborate set-pieces or meta-textual devices -a lot of it tied into heavy doses of Freudianism. In short, it is a movie that demands a lot, and for that I completely understand why it is so alienating to so many; why it has already been labeled by some a “career-killer” for writer-director Ari Aster, who made it off an apparent blank check for the back-to-back successes of Here...

We never actually learn what The 39 Steps  are. I guess, spoilers for a movie that is eighty-eight years old, but it’s curious how after so much build-up, the evil organization pursuing the hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s early spy movie is defined as merely a secretive spy organization gathering intelligence on behalf of a foreign office -but before we can learn more specifics the man dispensing this information dies. We can rest easy that the apparent ringleader is apprehended, but what were the 39 Steps? And does it even matter? The movie The 39 Steps certainly does. One of the first recognizable films in the spy genre it also happens to be one of the more renowned of Alfred Hitchcock’s early British films -alongside The Lodger and The Lady Vanishes . And certainly it bears more than a few of his future signatures. It’s a beloved classic of British cinema, one that I first knew about as the basis of a play that was running popularly in London during my first visit there. Plastered at...

What choices are left when the people with power do nothing? That is the central thinking that drives most of the characters in Daniel Goldhaber’s provocatively titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline , inspired by the non-fiction book by Andreas Malm. It is a thinking not restricted to these characters or even the kind of emphatic activists that they are based on; and in fact gains more traction at least as an idea each time a government or union of powers fails to sufficiently act on the climate emergency -which is all of the time pretty much. Malm’s book, a controversial treatise on the ineffectuality of pacifist protest in regards to climate activism, argues that acts of sabotage and destruction are necessary in the fight for environmental justice. Without perhaps being quite so resolute, this is the stance of the film as well -which draws on the real and personal effects of climate inaction, especially on young people, to present a fictional story of eight frustrated individuals comi...

Is Makoto Shinkai still referred to by some as ‘the New Miyazaki’? Shinkai disputes the comparison, to his credit -perhaps understanding it seems to stem more from just the general popularity of his films (his last three of which have all been massive hits in Japan -as big as any Disney movie here), than any real connection in art, themes, or style. In fact Shinkai’s movies typically are beholden to more than a few of those conventions of modern anime that once led to Miyazaki dismissing the entire art form as “a mistake”. He’s not pushing its’ storytelling boundaries the way contemporaries like Mamoru Hosoda and Sunao Katabuchi are, exceedingly gorgeous though much of his work is. Still, he’s a curious artist with a distinct style, and his methods have worked out great for him with audiences -including on this latest movie Suzume , currently the fourth highest-grossing anime film worldwide (just behind his  own Your Name and  Spirited Away ). Like several of his previous fil...

It’s hard to tell how seriously Renfield  takes it’s own conversation on toxic relationships and codependency.  Four scenes across the ninety minute movie take place at a support group for people struggling with these very things, and there’s an ironic detachment with which it is played, Brandon Scott Jones’ aphoristic group leader especially characterized as a figure of parody. And the links drawn by the titular character, the age old familiar of Count Dracula, and his relationship with the Lord of Darkness, are especially in the early goings baked with such contextual extravagance that it seems a quaint analogy. It’s not until later in the film that the script seems to endeavour to make some genuine comment on the nature of toxic relationships, but by then it’s difficult to parse any apparent sincerity from the cheap way that idea and it’s pithy grammar has functioned through most of the movie as a mere device to drive apart master and servant. But the messy ways in which th...

Ben Affleck’s movie  Air is a commercial. A commercial for Nike, for their Air Jordan line, and maybe most of all for Michael Jordan himself (it’s not his first feature-length ad). And yet it’s a terrifically well-written commercial -nicely performed too- and with a level of sharp directorial prowess that has been forgotten in the seven years since Affleck last stepped behind the camera. There’s a conversation to be had about a movie that is so tied in to corporate product, so built around the importance of a brand and its history, and whether such a thing constitutes a devaluing of the art to mere company propaganda. But the task of a movie like this in regards to all that baggage is to justify itself as a film worth making, a story worth telling anyway. And  Air , primarily in its concerted elevation of boring subject matter, makes a pretty strong case for itself. It helps that Air  is written and cast in a way that makes its talk of branding and marketing accessible -n...