Reviews of the Bosch

Coming to Days of Being Wild  after  In the Mood for Love and 2046  is an interesting experience. Wong Kar-wai’s trilogy featuring the characters Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan may be informal and hardly connected from one another at all, but it still works as a continuous story, first of her, then of them, then of him. So watching this first installment after seeing the second and third, it’s like a puzzle piece you didn’t quite realize was missing has been added to the larger narrative. In some way considering where it ends up it even feels like an intended prequel, the stage being seemingly set for  In the Mood for Love  ten years later. Days of Being Wild  is not quite the film that masterpiece is, but it’s got something of the same permeating melancholy in its’ portrayal of four interconnecting relationships that fall apart through largely the distracted indifference of one guy. That guy is Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a reckless playboy with severe mummy issues...

"For the head in his hand he held it up straight, towards the fairest at the table he twisted the face, ‘See thou get ready, Gawain, to go as thou vowedst, and as faithfully seek till thou find me, good sir, as thou hast promised in this place in the presence of these knights. To the Green Chapel go thou, and get thee, I charge thee, such a dint as thou hast dealt - indeed thou hast earned a nimble knock in return on New Year’s morning!’   With a rude roar and rush his reins he turned then, and hastened out through the hall-door with his head in his hand, and fire of the flint flew from the feet of his charger." -Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , from the translation by J.R.R. Tolkien   By the light of a fire in a room of a small castle, the young Gawain (Dev Patel), nearing the end of his quest to face the mysterious Green Knight, is asked by his host (Joel Edgerton), “what do you hope to gain from facing all this?” “Honour,” he answers unassured. “That is...

Back around the time Signs  came out, M. Night Shyamalan was rather infamously labeled by NewsWeek “the next Spielberg”. And this has frequently been brought up in the years since as a barometer of how far he has fallen, the general regard of his movies having sunken from intrepid, thoughtful thrillers, to awkward, mockable trainwrecks. Occasionally, a movie like The Visit or Split would resuscitate some goodwill for the once promising filmmaker, but his reputation has largely remained (since at least Lady in the Water ) that of a bad, misguided director whose movies are rife for lampooning and not much else. Shyamalan himself appeared in a short presentation ahead of Old  though, mostly to deliver a standard thank-you to audiences for coming out to the theatre and acknowledging of the importance of the theatrical experience. And he said he is thankful he’s been able to make original thrillers for twenty years. That stuck out to me. M Night Shyamalan has been making movies fo...

The Disney theme park attraction Jungle Cruise does not strike me as a particularly interesting idea for a movie. From my understanding it’s mostly a safari through an animatronic recreation of various “exotic”-themed environments. Not all that different from an actual jungle cruise -only fake. Disney’s previous efforts at turning their rides into movies have at least had something more of a hook or a baked-in premise, like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion . But of course none of their theme park-based movies have succeeded like that first Pirates flick in both critical and commercial appeal, so an offbeat idea like turning a riverboat tour into a movie is actually a relatively subversive move for a company that usually hates that sort of thing. Jungle Cruise doesn’t have the notoriety as a ride that those aforementioned ones do -all I’d ever known it for was Weird Al’s “Skipper Dan” song and the fact it apparently had a lot of racist iconography recently dialed back. A...

“It’s showtime folks!” Doing this series, it isn’t often that I wind up disliking a classic movie I review. Most of the time these films are classics for a reason and they stand up well to scrutiny. However one of the joys of doing Back to the Feature, and indeed a reason behind it, is when I discover something that truly astounds me, a film that proves profoundly more affecting than I expected it to be and almost instantaneously joins my personal list of Great Movies. All That Jazz  I’m pretty sure is one of those films. I shouldn’t be surprised -it’s a favourite of a lot of other movie nerds I respect. A self-indulgent yet breathtakingly stylish and exciting musical comedy-drama about the deterioration of a charismatic bastard of a Broadway director, Bob Fosse’s 1979 pseudo-biographical masterpiece is generally considered to be his version of Fellini’s 8 ½ . That clearly seems to have been a model, given both films share a lot of the same themes and basically the same structure o...

I knew of The Red Shoes  long before I actually saw it. It’s one of those movies highly talked about in certain artsy film circles and in cinema studies classes. It’s one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite movies, he’s talked at length about it on numerous occasions. In fact that’s probably where I first heard of it, this unusual movie about a ballerina made by a directing duo in the U.K. with little studio interference and with no major stars of the era. And yet a film that has appeared near the top of many lists of the best British films. This only adds to its’ already enticing appeal; certainly the title is evocative, as is its’ Criterion cover which is a close-up image of a womans’ face serenely lit, hand to her head and sweat on her brow with a tantalizingly fearful or shocked expression on her face. What does that have to do with the Hans Christian Andersen story? Collectively known as the Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger first came to my attention not through The R...