Reviews of the Bosch

Act Two of Wicked  is weaker than Act One. That is what the musical theatre community made me aware of in anticipation of the second-half of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked movie , which I am now inclined to agree should have just been consolidated as one film the whole time. The split of these movies, which were initially produced together, is quite plainly just a ploy to get a little more out of the brand -and it is neither something that would work nor be considered for any other musical without a familiar intellectual property attached. And though the context of the second act is fairly different, it does need that chemistry with the first. Sondheim pieces like  Into the Woods  or Sunday in the Park with George have much starker distinctions between their acts, but you would never think of separating them. Hell, this movie closes on a bookend that you have to recall was begun a year ago. It’s a bad idea also in terms of the quality. Wicked  is by no means the only ...

Perhaps more action movies should function also as history lessons the way that Sisu  does -at least for non-Finnish audiences largely unfamiliar with Finland and its consecutive bad relationships with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A country that has been victimized by multiple more powerful states through the ages the way that Finland has deserves a character like Aatami Korpi to enact a bit of cathartic vengeance on behalf of his people. Certainly it feels more righteous than something like Rambo II  applying the same dynamic to America and Vietnam, though Korpi has clearly taken some influence from Rambo as a character. Yet he is far more of a virtually supernatural unkillable beast than Stallone could have turned his wronged war vet into. Sisu: Road to Revenge  is just as hardcore as the first film if not quite as novel. It’s fitting that even just a real-time lapse in the movie’s setting renders the circumstance for its lead character (who again is NOT cal...

None are exempt from the dehumanization of capitalism. It has always been true but has felt supercharged in the modern era. The movements of monopolies, mergers, conglomerates leaves so many people behind, who are then forced into desperate circumstances to hang onto the comforts of their lives and livelihoods. And whatever comes of it is no guarantee. There is no job security in the modern age -not really. So few understand how close they are to the brink until they are literally looking down it. No Other Choice  is Park Chan-wook’s Parasite . Just as Bong Joon-ho’s now classic film examined the impacts of late-stage capitalism and the extremes it drives people towards, so too does his friend Park’s new movie showcase with raw anger the ramifications of an unfeeling system on everyday people forced to contend with it for their survival. Where Bong honed in on a poor and struggling family, Park centres a patriarch who is notably much better off -but the weight that is felt is much ...

Early into the  Running Man  game, Glen Powell’s Ben Richards while receiving assistance from a friend played by William H. Macy insists he had no choice in entering the game. Macy’s character responds very bluntly that he did. And indeed he wasn’t forced to enter the game, he was persuaded to by the notion of setting up his struggling family for life. It is something he has reckoned with later in the story after some devastating consequences, and he responds to an alternate statement with an affirmation of his choice. But on some level, he didn’t have that choice did he? The society he exists within did force him to the point of desperation: the tactic that feeds The Running Man  as well as other briefly glimpsed game shows where the lives of the poor and disenfranchised  -a larger (but not that much so) proportion of the population in this dystopian world- are sacrificed for the amusement of the general public as a distraction from their own woes. Stephen King’s no...

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown  is not based on any particular run of Peanuts  strips and that is why it feels so different from the prior two movies. Charlie Brown had gone to camp before, but usually on his own -or with just as Snoopy as a companion. Charles Schulz wrote this original screenplay however based on a rafting trip he took with his family -and being written as a film it is notably less episodic than its predecessors had been, which were working in daily gags and merely expanding on certain scenes and plot beats. And it does feel a little bit like alien territory for a Peanuts  movie. Certainly it is an alien environment -the movie being set in the wilderness of what looks like Utah or Wyoming rather than the humble Minnesotan world the strip usually occupies. It’s interesting seeing these characters against watercolour backdrops of forests and mountains and deep canyons. And this context is the biggest novelty for the movie, the background of an elaborate...

Keeper is a movie that was entirely written, produced, and shot in a period of about five months while production on   The Monkey  was on hold due to the 2023 Hollywood labour strikes, and it shows. Essentially it was an excuse to keep the predominantly Canadian crew working during this time, director Osgood Perkins also hiring a non-WGA Canadian writer Nick Lepard to draft the screenplay and casting the film with Canadian actors such as Tatiana Maslany -who could perform in it under her ACTRA membership while temporarily waiving her SAG-AFTRA status. A bit of a sneaky way around the labour dispute for Perkins, but it did allow his crew in Canada to not lose work -which is nice for them. It doesn’t make the movie they were working on any better though. Unsurprisingly for a film that was designed as a rush job, the premise is incredibly basic. Maslany stars as Liz, a woman celebrating her anniversary with her partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), a fairly wealthy and successful ...