Reviews of the Bosch

“In the beginning the universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and has widely been regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams Creation stories are incredibly fascinating. Every religion and mythology seems to have their own; from the Abrahamic God creating the world in seven days, to Brahma in some Hindu traditions, creating the world upon hatching from the cosmic egg Hiranyagarbha, to even little known ones like the raven creating the human race by releasing them from a cockle shell in the mythology of the Haida people. Fictional stories, particularly of the fantasy genre, have yielded some interesting creation myths themselves, like the loosely Christian-based origin of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ eponymous books, to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Music of the Ainur creating Arda in the Ainulindalë, the first part of The Silmarillion . But perhaps the most intriguing creation story in a novel comes from Richard Adams’  Watership Down , which not only is original and sma...

There’s been a long history of Arthurian legend being adapted for kids. Not surprising as it’s a myth that lends itself incredibly well to imagination and adventure. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King  is probably the most renowned, having been itself adapted into Disney’s The Sword in the Stone . Other iterations targeted at young audiences have ranged from the shamelessly derivative Quest for Camelot  to the clever and imaginative T.V. series Merlin . The Kid Who Would Be King  isn’t quite like any of these. While it is one of several variants to transpose the Arthurian cast into a modern setting, and even to reimagine them as youths, it does so with its own charm and heart that reasonably sets it apart. Alex Elliott (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) is a twelve year old boy who’s often bullied at school. While evading a couple tormentors on a construction sight he happens upon a sword in a stone. Learning from an eccentric teenage Merlin (Angus Imrie) that it is in fa...

I, like a lot of people my age, don’t have a very high opinion of baby boomers right now. It’s not really fair I realize, but it’s much less fair of them to continually and consistently undermine and screw over my generation. And more than about any other living generation, baby boomers (mostly the white ones) are nostalgic for their youth and what the world was like in the 1950s and 60s. This isn’t merely a by-product of people in their twilight years traditionally resenting the younger generation, baby boomers have always had rose-tinted glasses for that time period they came of age in. The 30-Year cycle of pop culture often comes up in discussions of media trends and nostalgic culture. Just as the 1950s endured a cultural renaissance in the 80s, so too are the 80s glorified and homaged in the 2010s. It’s an interesting pattern but by no means a rule; and in fact the earliest piece of nostalgia celebration that kick-started cinema’s fascination with the 1950s during the format...

     It was a common trend in movies of the counterculture boom of 1960s and 70s to use a historical period as a backdrop on which to comment on the present, some of the most notable examples being Bonnie and Clyde , Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , and MASH . Though these movies were set in decades past they were really all about the contemporary era and its culture and politics.       Steven Spielberg’s The Post is much like those movies. Relating the 1971 exposure of the Pentagon Papers by the Washington Post, it’s really a movie all about the modern political climate in America, particularly as it pertains to government corruption and the stifling of free speech. And with both the movie and the context it was made in still very recent and relevant, it’s impossible and irresponsible to divorce the film from its message. That means, this review is going to get political.      The film portrays the disillusioned Daniel Ellsbe...

M. Night Shyamalan is not a good writer. He’s not a very good director either. But much like George Lucas, he has a lot of great ideas bubbling around in his head that he just can’t quite execute well himself. In a career spanning over twenty years, he’s made twelve movies, only four of which (if we’re being generous) have been any good. Glass  is a sequel to two of them: his 2000 deconstructionist superhero film Unbreakable  and his 2016 horror movie  Split . Unbreakable , the story of the lone survivor of a train crash gradually learning he may have superpowers, had such an intriguing set-up and characters that when Split , a film about a serial killer with disassociative identity disorder, ended with the reveal that the two films took place in the same universe, not only did it better explain the latter films unusual direction, but it actually seemed kind of exciting. So now, two years after Split  and eighteen after Unbreakable , we have Glass , and it’s ver...

     It’s both a little surprising and not at all so that Spielberg had never worked with Disney until this film. Some of his movies from the 80’s and 90’s would have fit perfectly with Disney’s brand, and in fact Disney was one of the studios touted for E.T. on which they foolishly passed (this was when Disney was in just about dire straits, hard to imagine given their current empire). At the same time Spielberg is also one of the co-founders of DreamWorks, for twenty years now Disney’s biggest competition in terms of animation; and even in 2016 it must have seemed like treason to Jeffrey Katzenberg for Spielberg to go over and a make a movie for the competition.       Of course ultimately it didn’t really matter because The BFG , adapted from the classic Roald Dahl childrens’ book, was a box office bomb, the lowest grossing movie of Spielberg’s career in fact. Already it seems to have been largely forgotten, and it shouldn’t be; not just becaus...

A Dog ’s Way Home  is a really stupid movie, but I was sold from the trailer. It’s so aggressively saccharine and glaringly manipulative that it looked like just the right kind of hilarious bad movie. So I went and saw it and was slightly disappointed it wasn’t quite as funny as I hoped. But it’s also way more insane and bizarre than even the trailer indicated making it still a fairly enjoyable experience. A pup (whose thoughts are voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard) living under a demolished house is found and adopted by a med student Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) who names her Bella. But after getting in trouble a couple times due to an extremely odd Denver law, Bella is relocated a few states away, where she proceeds to escape and attempt the long journey home, befriending a few people and nurturing a baby cougar along the way. A Dog’s Way Home  is really astoundingly badly written. It’s most obvious in the dogs’ intentionally cutesy dialogue, but also that of the human char...

       Spielberg has certainly gotten more overtly political in the last few years. It only makes sense, politics in America having gotten substantially more divisive in the 2010s (and wait till I get to The Post ). And throughout his career Spielberg has also demonstrated an American idealism that he’s often contrasted against the America he’s living through, most notably in The Terminal and Lincoln . He does so again with Bridge of Spies , the true story of a lawyer defending an accused Soviet spy before participating in a prisoner exchange in East Germany. Roger Ebert compared it to a John Le Carre thriller through the lens of a Frank Capra sensibility, which is an apt enough assessment. But Bridge of Spies isn’t quite as gripping or passionate as those men often made their work. indeed it’s one of Spielberg’s least remarkable movies.        In 1957 James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a skilled insurance lawyer tasked with defending Rudolf ...