Reviews of the Bosch

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Jumbled and Awkward though Modestly Spooky Debut

I’ve been in the online movie space for a long time, and so it would be impossible for me to not be at least mildly familiar with Chris Stuckmann. For well over a decade he has been among the most popular movie reviewers on YouTube, and indeed I did watch his videos back when it was a genre I was invested in (I may have even been subscribed for a time). I’d vaguely heard he was interested in making movies himself, yet it’s still a little surreal to see that come to fruition. You don’t often see people anymore make that leap from popular film critic to filmmaker. Stuckmann did, and though he’s a critic I’ve often disagreed with, I’m happy for him, and was very curious about his debut, a horror movie now released after a very long production period, called Shelby Oaks . It is a micro-budget independent feature, crowdfunded as many a YouTuber project is, and shot entirely in Stuckmann’s home state of Ohio. It was completed and saw its first festival appearances more than a year ago, b...

Springsteen Film is an Impassioned but Underwhelming Deliverance

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere has a lot in common with A Complete Unknown . Both music biopics that, rather than attempt a holistic picture of an artists’ life, hone in on a very particular period that speaks to the artist’s personality, creativity, and significance. A key difference though is that A Complete Unknown keeps Bob Dylan’s personal biography at an arm’s length where Deliver Me from Nowhere embraces it -in fact it makes it central to the movie’s story. This is in keeping with very broad music biopic tropes, especially down to the flashbacks to childhood filtered through a melancholy black-and-white lens. And even as the movie doesn’t cover the whole career of Bruce Springsteen, it does present the kind of close-ended story that the worst of this genre is known for. And yet there is something it taps at that is engaging about Bruce, much as I don’t entirely think director Scott Cooper understands his subject as well as he would like to. Je...

Why Frankenstein is Still Scary

It is a good time for the Modern Prometheus. Though I sadly wasn’t able to get in to see it while there, one of the biggest hits at this year’s Toronto Film Festival was the long-awaited Guillermo del Toro adaptation of Frankenstein . For the man whose made the theme of monsters his bread and butter and whose debut feature Cronos was very Frankenstein -esque it seems a perfect pairing of filmmaker and subject. But he’s not the only one at the moment drawn to the classic literary creature. Maggie Gyllenhaal has her own revisionist take on the story called The Bride coming out early next year, which itself in its apparent feminist themes seems to be taking up the baton of another recent film that heavily owes a debt to the work, Poor Things . More than two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote her cautionary tale about playing god, her creation -much like Victor Frankenstein’s- is still so much more powerful than she could have imagined. We are still obsessed with it today. ...

The Myth Made Flesh: A Potently Fearful and Beautiful Modern Creation

In 1993, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro made his directing debut with an interesting movie called Cronos , a tragedy about a man who is turned into a monster in his attempt to hold onto life. In my review from a few years ago , I called it ‘del Toro’s Frankenstein ’. In actuality, it was merely the first step in a decades-long journey towards the real thing. The filmmaker who has made his sympathy towards apparent monsters his signature thematic calling card has had Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a kind of north star through all of his stories of gothic fantasy, grotesque creatures, and the consequences of misunderstanding them. He has refined and perfected his formula in building to this great end, a desired magnum opus. Frankenstein is of course a towering work to tackle, though it has been more than thirty years since the last major cinematic adaptation of the original story (and that one, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , though quite loyal to the book was ...

Futurama Reviews: S10E07 -"Murderoni"

I would not have expected the “Pizzagate” episode of this season of Futurama to be the one I was most amused by, but at this stage in the show I’m very happy to be surprised. As far as direct analogues to real world culture and politics go, this is a subject I would expect the show to do better with than the pandemic or “cancel culture” -I feel like the writers actually understand its absurdity and could find a way to extrapolate on it in a warped Futurama way. The result isn’t so bold as I would like, and it gets tangled a bit in bureaucracy, but that is perfectly okay when the humour is there. “Murderoni” actually starts in a place that seems irrelevant to the main plot but ultimately won’t be: Hermes sending Dwight off for his first day in the Young Bureaucrats Club, which Dwight proceeds to ditch immediately after getting on the bus. None the wiser, Hermes takes the gang out for pizza, to Blek and Blazucchi’s (which has relocated from its former residence across the stre...