Reviews of the Bosch

I and other critics like to bemoan movies that operate on pure nostalgia. But I get it, the comfort of the past is so alluring that it is easy to want to escape into -hence why it feels like such a lazy device in movies. The 2020s are awash in nostalgia in a cynical effort to cash in on fond memories and youthful feelings, and while it’s never been as prolific a characteristic it is not without some precedent. Previous decades and other generations had their own nostalgia-bait though it took on different forms and wasn’t entirely tied to pop culture. Still, it was driven by that same sensation. In the 1970s, perhaps the best nostalgia picture was George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its image of carefree California youths in the early 1960s pre-Vietnam. But an equally popular one was Summer of ‘42 . Summer of ‘42 is an interesting nostalgia film though because its nostalgia is melancholy in nature. It is reflective of a period of youth marked by innocence but also the loss of it, fe...

Dead Calm is remembered as the movie that really launched the careers of both Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane. Yet my reason for finally watching the film has to do with its third star who, despite the movie’s fairly memorable premise and execution (enough so that it has been parodied a handful of times), is often forgotten was even a part of it. But as in just about every movie he appeared in, Sam Neill is compelling and singular here, and quietly excellent in a role that demands just as much as his younger co-stars if its not as involved or sexually provocative. Neill’s recent unexpected passing is a tough pill to swallow, and I felt a compulsion to engage with some work of this internationally beloved Kiwi who may well have been one of my favourite actors. And Dead Calm , which is a great and popular story, felt like the right piece. Director Philip Noyce and screenwriter Terry Hayes came to the material after an earlier version famously failed to manifest. The book Dead Calm by Ch...

Tennessee Williams’s  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a very gay play. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , the 1958 movie adaptation by Richard Brooks tries the best it can not to be that. And yet… the gay text has a way of seeping through. In some of the context and material, there’s no way that it couldn’t. Not that it assuaged Williams very much, a gay man himself, who hated this adaptation of arguably his second most famous play in spite of its other aspects that remain loyal -such as its staging and a few of its cast members. But it was indisputably toned down in spite of what material it kept, and you wonder if it wouldn’t have been had it been made even just a few years later -this being very much one of the last movies notably touched by the Hays Code, in some respects. Certainly one might guess the censors were a touch prickled by one of the movie's signature selling points: the sex appeal of Elizabeth Taylor, emphasized in the film poster and promotional stills. It made for an enduring ima...

Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 star vehicle The Thief of Bagdad is an interesting, technically impressive, if sometimes underwhelming silent era swashbuckler. Fairbanks is charismatic in lieu of his obvious miscasting for the role, yet there is really only one other performance that stands out and gives the film some much needed colour. And that is a young Anna May Wong at the start of her career playing the fiendish slave girl to the princess who needs saving. She is striking for what the role demands of her, emanating beyond its blunt archetype. Unfortunately, this would be the pattern for Wong for much of the next decade and a half -a scene-stealer captivating audiences but kept at a distance due to the pervasive racism of the Hollywood industry at that time. Wong became a star, as much a household name as many of her white colleagues, but she was never allowed to be THE star as a Chinese-American woman. The system actively blockaded it. Leading parts weren’t being written for Asian women...

A movie about mental illness made in the 1940s is bound to not hold up to modern psychological scrutiny. Hell, even psychological scrutiny within a decade or so of its release. To watch The Snake Pit  is to get a glimpse into how mental illness was perceived and treated in a time when it was barely understood and entirely stigmatized. Often, contemporary films that would depict conditions we might now identify as schizophrenia or psychosis would cast them as markers of someone to be either feared or pitied. Rarely was the subject addressed head-on and taken seriously. It was considered uncouth to do so. But by 1948, in the aftermath of the war and new concepts arising around PTSD and other traumas, perhaps Hollywood was ready to actually go there -or rather director Anatole Litvak was, who’d personally bought the rights to the novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward and worked to make a film that would be empathetic towards people -though women especially- interred in asylums for ...

Sinclair Lewis really had his finger on the pulse of American Evangelical Christianity from early on.  Either he was a prophet or the grandiloquence and rhetorical tactics of faith charlatans has changed remarkably little in the century since he first wrote Elmer Gantry in 1927, a novel about a con man exploiting Christian fundamentalism in rural Kansas through charismatic displays of transparently false piety and intense fire and brimstone preachings. Give him access to the modern media and a megachurch pulpit and he would be no different than Billy Graham or Joel Osteen. Such a subject was a worthy if difficult thing for a film adaptation in 1960 -though the Production Code was slowly losing its influence it was still powerful enough, enforcing strict rules over the depiction of Christians and Christianity in Hollywood movies. It wasn't a deterrent for Richard Brooks though, who both wrote the script and ultimately directed the film. But while he allowed some concessions, includ...

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The line that is ubiquitous with the movie Love Story  is also perhaps the most mocked line in the romance movie genre. A line that sounds sweet and poetic -and certainly in context- but is meaningfully empty and kind of just flat-out false when applied to anything beyond a very narrow scope of subjects that comprise what we might call ‘love’. Even just two years later, Peter Bogdanovich had Ryan O’Neal (who delivers the line in its second usage in this film) respond to the quote with “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” in the film What’s Up, Doc? Bogdanovich and O’Neal had no qualms making fun of it then, because the movie’s power in spite of it was already assured. Love Story  was the first monster hit of the 1970s. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1970 and one of the highest-grossing movies of all time up to that point (it is still in the top fifty adjusted for inflation). It is said to have revived the Hollywood mel...

“It was not Hitler or Himmler who deported me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbour who were given a uniform and then believed they were the master race.” -Karl Stojka, Holocaust survivor For some reason I’ve been thinking a lot about Nuremberg lately. And it has nothing to do with the film last fall of the same name , though that of course too came to mind watching Stanley Kramer’s seminal courtroom drama about Holocaust accountability, Judgment at Nuremberg . The lessons that the world took away from that episode of history and indeed the themes relayed in this film feel only too relevant in this moment of history that with any luck will end on its own repeat of Nuremberg levels of accountability. That being said, Kramer’s film is a bit of an odd beast where the subject of Nuremberg is concerned. It is not in fact a biographical retelling of the Judges’ Trial of 1947 -the context of the war, the Holocaust, and the Nazis all remain in place, bu...