Reviews of the Bosch

For its upbeat tempo and optimistic spirit, “Pennies from Heaven” is subtly a fairly depressing song. Though the lyrics are intrinsically hopeful, the circumstances implied of the singer’s fantasy suggests a real sense of misery. It is in a way the perfect song of the Great Depression, and I’ve seen it multiple times underscoring that era and a diminishing of fortunes more broadly within it. The ultimate desperate fantasy of the financially insecure: that every time it rains there will be pennies from heaven -mere pennies. It is a beautiful song, but achingly bittersweet. And its spirit is captured well in the 1981 movie of the same name -that feels a touch like something from the 1930s, but would have been positively cruel had it actually come in that era. Pennies from Heaven  was written by Dennis Potter, a legend of British television drama, adapting his own highly successful and beloved serial of the same name for the BBC (the breakout project for Bob Hoskins incidentally). For...

Garbo Talks! In 1930, that was all the promotion you needed. Greta Garbo had only been in Hollywood for five years by that point but stardom came swiftly in the silent movie era, and especially for such a mysterious evocative personality like her. She’d made such a name for herself and her distinctive melodramatic acting style, and being a European export (the first in a line of great Swedish actresses of the silver screen), it was natural that with the dawn of the talkies there was immense curiosity over how she would make the transition, especially given she had no English when she first came to America. How would she fare in this new medium, and what would she sound like? To meet this anticipation, MGM, and Irving Thalberg specifically, very shrewdly chose for her a new film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna Christie , which already had garnered a reputation for the intensity of its titular role. It had been filmed already in 1923, but a sound version ...

Nothing says summer like a middle-aged man waltzing around the neighbourhood in nothing but a bathing suit diving into backyard swimming pools and occasionally flirting with much younger women. There must have been something in the chlorine in the late 1960s, to have seen at least two movies, released a year apart and in different countries to centre thriller plots around private swimming pools in the heat of summer with characters who spend the bulk of the film unclothed. But where La Piscine , which came out in 1969 in France, is characterized by a dangerous eroticism in its crisp, sultry cinematography escalating its tensions to a fever pitch, its predecessor The Swimmer  is more picturesque and aesthetic in design, its brazenness rather delineating gradually from a place of high esteem and purpose to one of intense uncertainty and timidity. In cruder terms, La Piscine  is a film that rises to explosive climax, while The Swimmer  shrivels into impotence. Like getting o...

Spike Lee talked me into it. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song  is a difficult film. Difficult to watch and difficult to approach. And that was certainly the intention of Melvin Van Peebles, the man who just about single-handedly made the film -directing, writing, producing, editing, and composing it, all while playing the title role for good measure. It originated in his desire to break from the system he had been working in and to create a true black power movie that Hollywood would not allow; it was designed to piss off the man and make white audiences uncomfortable and alienated. Indeed that is still its effect more than fifty years on. Sweet Sweetback  was inarguably a vital film for the black community. It is of course often credited with spearheading the blacksploitation genre of the 1970s, though crucially unlike many of its imitators its chief creators were all black themselves. As such it can’t help feeling more raw, its fury and emotional themes more authentic....

“Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. And Cain went away, and dwelt in the land of Nod only east of Eden.” When this line is uttered and that Biblical parallel drawn most openly in the last ten minutes of Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s ubiquitous novel, its intention is one of ill-will -the sheriff comparing a young man to one of the famous early villains in the Bible, encouraging him to step out of the life of his family and community for good. But what this movie does, and was likely the intent of Steinbeck, is make this descendant of Cain the sympathetic figure in this story, at worst an anti-hero unfairly sidelined and stigmatized. Cain is supposed to be the ancestor of mankind, his violence, jealousy, and rage an explanation for humanity’s -the implicit theory of the story that we would have been a better, more virtuous race descended from Abel. But supposing that we’re not, it is even more necessary to find understanding with Cain, and interrogate the ...

It’s called The Crowd because it is about all of us. King Vidor is a director I’m not as familiar with as I should be given his stature in old Hollywood. He’s one of the earliest American directors singled out by the proponents of auteur theory as a significant visionary filmmaker. Probably it was because he was also a little more grounded and addressed certain audiences and issues left behind by a lot of the more escapist fare. Even one of the few early films of his I have seen, Bird of Paradise , feels like a direct challenge to the censor. But it’s been a while since I’ve looked at a silent film and The Crowd is one of Vidor’s greatest, a deeply humanist working-class odyssey released virtually on the eve of the Great Depression. It has to be one of the earlier movies, certainly on a large scale to truly challenge the lie of the American Dream and do so very vividly, both in its narrative and its intensely symbolic visuals -which were apart from that quite experimental in Hollywood ...

She is in her prime, she so frequently insists. But being in one's "prime" is overrated -certainly if this movie is anything to go by. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -both the movie and the state it refers to- is a very different beast by the end of the story than it was at the start, though it does telegraph where it is going if you are paying enough attention. In attitude and disposition, Miss Jean Brodie is perfectly pleasant -a shrewd and charismatic teacher, with the class and articulation of any of her conservative peers, yet an unconventional, romantic streak to her instructional style as well. The kind of teacher who can and has influenced many a young pupil under her wing -but in this case well beyond the bounds of education and life lessons. She is rather skilful in persuading her girls into an air of snobbish entitlement, imposing on them manipulative sexual proclivities, and passing along her ardent belief in the grandness of fascism. All rather concerning for ...

If  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance  is the last film of the classic “romantic” western genre, before it was usurped by those Italians and their more grounded and grittier view of the era and its heroes, then it is a pretty fitting send-off. Directed by a John Ford approaching seventy and starring John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart in their middle-age, it is a subtly reflective film that feels a touch wistful, but more-so thoughtful as it considers the wild west through a more critical lens. We’re used to the lawlessness of it, even of those lawful sheriffs so often played by Wayne, driven by their own moral code more than any legal framework. But what is the effect of that? What would the effect be of structured American law and order coming into that frontier town, and the emergence of its union with a larger society? Ford eschewed his usual grand vistas of Monument Valley, his epic horse or stagecoach action -returning to the sound-stage instead for the more intimate feel of a w...