Reviews of the Bosch

A gothic manor house on a moor, framed behind a cemetery in the middle of the night. A screeching noise is heard, and suddenly a swarm of bats fly across your view to ominous, crescendoing music …but then a drum beat kicks in and a ghostly mist pours out of an upstairs lit window to form the words “Scooby Doo: Where Are You!” as an immediately charming theme song begins. I wonder what kids in 1969 were thinking when  Scooby-Doo  first appeared on television in this form, with such an instantly weird juxtaposition of gloomy, creepy imagery and upbeat cartoon silliness. Because that’s the whole theme song, and really, the whole show itself. Wacky cartoon antics and characters (or as wacky as William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were able to make them on a budget) against moody haunted houses, derelict carnivals, misty bayous, etc., each of them haunted by a monster or frightening apparition of some kind or another. Clearly this wasn’t like any other cartoon to have grac...

Gemini Man  is such a bizarre movie to come from director Ang Lee. Not that Lee has any one style or genre he works in, having made movies as disparate as Sense and Sensibility , Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Brokeback Mountain , and Life of Pi  -all fantastically; but that he rarely makes a movie as dull as Gemini Man , as vacant and emotionless. The concept’s been in development since the late 90’s and very much feels like it, a remnant of the era that produced Face/Off ,   but without any of the passion or flourish. And it’s an idea that nobody’s really interested in anymore, at least not since Rian Johnson’s Looper . Enter Ang Lee though and the reason I saw Gemini Man . Any movie from him should at least be interesting on some level -and this one is, albeit not for everyone, and certainly not to the degree it can sustain itself or overcome one of the most banal narratives Lee’s ever been involved with. Lee perhaps knew this, which is why his interest in the...

The grand joke of The Addams Family  for as long as they’ve been a staple of American cartoons has been how healthy a family they are. For all of their morbidness and macabre style, their indulgence in the frightful and decrepit, the gothic tastes and eccentric behaviour, they are a loving and happy family, cheerful and content despite how they are perceived by others. They’re always kind and well-intentioned, but always misunderstood as well, which of course carries tremendous allegorical weight. Thus, while initially created by Charles Addams as a satire of wealthy American families, the Addams Family has evolved into an endearing metaphor for celebrating diversity and difference. One of the easiest ways to convey this is by setting the Addams against real society, or at least a Norman Rockwell facsimile of real society to emphasize the aesthetic contrast and ensuing conflict. Yet I don’t think a previous version of The Addams Family  (or at least not in film form) ha...

Is Black Narcissus  the first Nun-sploitation movie? I mean it doesn’t have a dominatrix Mother Superior or lesbian experimentation, but it is a story about the sexual repression of nuns in a remote convent and what becomes of that. What’s perhaps most shocking is it was made in 1947 yet feels like something from the 60’s or 70’s. This no doubt is because of the incredible freedom of expression its writer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger had, both in terms of content and technique, as well as the fact the movie was produced in Britain away from the Hays Code which would have censored the films’ more overt sexual implications and suggestive imagery, its sacrilegious elements, and its subtle critiques of colonialism. The film is centred on five nuns in the Himalayas who convert a solitary seraglio near Darjeeling into a school and hospital for the local natives, focusing as well on their relationship with a nearby British official and a Bengali prince. The movie i...

Since the late Heath Ledger reinvented the Joker for The Dark Knight , there’s been a major shift in the cultural depiction of the most famous comic book villain once dubbed the Clown Prince of Crime. Focus shifted away from his charismatic personality and wicked sense of humour to exclusively hone in on his psychosis, his violent unpredictability, and his relationship to society, all part of an effort to make him feel like a more “realistic” villain. None have managed to make it work like Ledger though, missing the fact that part of what made that Oscar-winning character iconic was his uniqueness and mystique. And the attempts to copy that version of the character have gotten tiresome, hitting their apex with Todd Phillips’ Joker , a movie that conceives an origin story for a character always most compelling without one. Further , Joker is a freshman film students’ idea of a “grown up” comic book movie, driven almost solely by a need to look and feel as removed from the typical...

There are few more tragic stories in Hollywood history than that of Judy Garland. The exploitation and conditioning of the young Frances Gumm by MGM, forced into the studio-crafted “girl next door” persona of Judy Garland and all the dietary and leisure restrictions, not to mention over-work that went along with it, irrevocably damaged and ultimately shortened the life of one of the great talents the cinema has seen. It can be difficult to watch her movies now, knowing what the studio did to her, facilitating her lifelong addiction to prescription drugs and cultivating severe body image issues through constantly criticizing her appearance. But then, her charisma and screen power always shines through and wins you over; the world would undoubtedly be a poorer place without her legacy. Since her death in 1969, it’s been in somewhat questionable taste to make a movie about Judy Garland’s life, especially when such an undertaking would inevitably be profiting off of her misery a...

It’s hard competing with Disney in the animation game. It’s hard competing with Disney just in general right now, due to how much media is dangerously being consumed into the House of Mouse on a regular basis; but rivalling them at the form they invented has always been a heavy task. Which is why it was so refreshing when DreamWorks launched in the mid-90s and out of the gate became the first company to meaningfully challenge Disney since Don Bluth’s string of classics in the 80’s. And while DreamWorks has always had its share of duds (largely due to Jeffrey Katzenberg aping whatever Disney was doing whenever he could), and came to rely far too much on the Shrek  formula of pop culture-obsessed, Zeitgeist chasing obnoxiousness, it has contributed the  Kung Fu Panda  and How to Train Your Dragon  series to the great animation canon, not to mention of course its fantastic early run of traditionally animated films, including the extraordinary Prince of Egypt . But ...