Reviews of the Bosch

       In a 2017 interview with the Guardian , director James Cameron criticized Wonder Woman by calling its title character “an objectified icon”, comparing her unfavourably to his own famous heroines. “Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit.” [1] Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins subsequently responded by pointing out, “if women have to always be hard, tough, and troubled to be strong, and we aren’t free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven’t come very far.” [2] Camerons’ logic that a powerful woman character has to be troubled and tough, that she can’t be sexy (an insult to Linda Hamilton I think) speaks to a pervading problem in how male film culture perceives strong women. In order for a heroic woman to have value, she must be imbued with masculine t...

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is said to be the first slasher movie, and one of the best. Of course, it’s far from the only movie to claim either; various Hammer, grindhouse, splatter, and giallo titles with similar levels of violence pre-dated Tobe Hooper’s false true story about a group of students who fall victim to a family of cannibals in remote Texas; but it does establish many aspects of the formula John Carpenter would later refine with Halloween . The cast of uninteresting, expendable characters, the killer in a mask, the isolation, and the heavily misogynist undertones (in this case overtones) all appear in conjunction here for perhaps the first time and in a grislier context than even many of the more popular slashers that followed. That alone however doesn’t really mean anything. There needs to be meat on those bones. It’s the cheapness of this film that distinguishes it most obviously from the similar movies that followed. The cast is full of first-time actors from ...

The great fantasy epic of 2019 is The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance , which in addition to being a phenomenal technical feat, was an ideal demonstration of how to tell an archetypal story in a new way, how to marry richly sensational world building with intimate character development, and how to experiment with tone and dark subject matter while maintaining a singular invigorating spirit. As far as traditional high fantasy on film goes, it might be the best execution since the Lord of the Rings  trilogy. It already stood in sharp relief to the embarrassing last season of Game of Thrones  that preceded it, and continues to do so in the light of Disney’s attempt at an epic fantasy in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil , which reminded me in some of its aesthetics and ambitions of The Dark Crystal , but bad. Don’t let the title fool you though; much like its’ 2014 precursor, Maleficent, once one of the great Disney villains, isn’t evil at all -rather she’s a misunderstood anti...

By 1998, Scooby-Doo was not a “current” cultural institution. The last series had ended seven years prior and the most recognizable idea of Scooby-Doo , that of the gang of teens solving mysteries with their dog, hadn’t been the franchise’s focus in twenty years. But luckily, while the 80s iterations of the show (like so many 80s cartoons) fell out of rerun circulation, the 70s versions didn’t. And wouldn’t you know it, Scooby-Doo: Where Are You! ,  The New Scooby-Doo Movies , and The Scooby-Doo Show  found renewed popularity with kids on Cartoon Network (or in Canada, on Teletoon, where yours truly first happened upon it). Suddenly, Scooby-Doo  seemed marketable again, but Warner wasn’t quite confident enough to risk greenlighting a whole new series or something more expensive. Instead they decided to test the waters through the emerging market of direct-to-video movies, which was proving financially lucrative for Disney. Assembling a production crew from The ...