Reviews of the Bosch

Egads,   it happened again! Through crimes against the laws of physics so horrible I fear divulging them, I was taken to the future over the Christmas holidays to witness the world as it is at the end of 2020! And it is a terrible, chaotic, unnatural, exciting, and bewilderingly horny place. So I now feel it my duty to warn you all of what is coming in the awesome monstrosity yet spontaneous hellfire that is the coming year: January –Donald Trump’s impeachment moves to the Senate where he insists on testifying personally, during the process of which he strangles three witnesses, foams at the mouth, moons the Democratic caucus, and orders a North Korean investigation into Bernie Sanders from the witness stand. Mitch McConnell acquits him of all charges. February –In lieu of being denied Oscar consideration, the Academy strikes a deal with Tom Hooper allowing the cats of Cats to host the 92 nd  Academy Awards. They prance, twirl, and gyrate on stage for three hours and de

Earlier this year, I celebrated the twentieth anniversary of a cartoon show that was very important to me growing up and remains one of my favourite television series. But May 1999 was just when Futurama  first aired, the date much more important to the show was December 31 st  of that year: the eve of the new millennium where the series begins and from where Philip J. Fry is frozen for a thousand years. It’s also the date most often returned to in the show both thematically and literally (more than a few time travel devices turn up over its run). So on the auspicious occasion of that separate but equally important touchstone for the show, I return to pay further tribute with a list of the twenty best episodes of the series. Of course, that still leaves off a good chunk of favourites, both from the shows’ original Fox run and its’ Comedy Central revival (though the latter does have fewer). But these are what I consider to be the best of the best. 20. A Flight to Remember Se

There’s a moral conundrum that hangs over Jay Roach’s Bombshell that the movie can never quite shake off. As bad as what happens to the women at the centre of the story is and as much as they deserve to take down the men responsible, the wider context that is the elephant in the room the movie refuses to address is the fact that before the 2016 exposé of Roger Ailes’ sex crimes, these women actively participated in furthering the culture of ignorance and victim-blaming that is part of the modus operandi of Fox News, North America’s most successful propaganda machine. The knowledge of the ramifications of their words and actions outside of the scandal significantly stifles your investment in them and is at the heart of why the movie feels incredibly inauthentic. The story behind Bombshell  is juicy enough for the feature film treatment, and it gives Hollywood directors and writers a large assortment of over-the-top personalities to work with. It also has scale working for it in h

“Women, they have minds and souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, they’ve got talent as well as just beauty.” This line may not appear in Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women , but I haven’t a doubt in my mind she’d have written it if she thought of it. Because clearly Alcott deeply believed it, as does her in-novel alias Jo March. In many ways Little Women , it could be argued, was something of a reaction to the female-centric novels of her literary contemporaries. Where the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot saw fit for their independent, forthright women protagonists to marry the wealthy charming men in their lives and considered the luxury of such as an adequate and deserved resolution for their stories, Alcott instead chose art over love as the determining factor of her characters’ fate and deliberately rejects the notion of a romance for Jo with her most obvious suitor. It was pretty radical and is no doubt one of the reasons Little Wom

Early this year I covered a David Bowie movie for this series , so I think it’s fitting to do so again now, in the knowledge he has a Christmas flick in his filmography (and not The Snowman ). However, it’s also perhaps the least well-known movie I’ve discussed here, a British-Japanese co-production from director Nagisa Oshima, far from a holiday classic in any respect, not least in that the Christmas acknowledgement is mostly incidental. But Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is a movie that deserves more recognition, a film that dissects themes of war, captivity, honour, and love within a British POW camp in Japan in the later years of the Second World War.  Based on the semi-autobiographical books The Seed and the Sower and The Night of the New Moon by Laurens van der Post, the film mostly retains a novel-like subjectivity in its depiction of the individuals’ personalities and feelings (save for one extended flashback sequence), and follows an episodic structure centred around

Movies as audacious and experimental as Cats come out of Hollywood about once in a generation. And especially in a time when major studios are only concerned with safe bets, it’s a miracle that a movie like this was made. On the one hand there is the factor of the idea being a tested property: a long-running, successful musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber (based in turn on a series of poems by T.S. Eliot). And that the digital technology could be innovative on a level to attract large audiences. But on the other hand, Cats is a show so abstract and ridiculous and famously incomprehensible where the novelty and energy really can only hope to work in an intimate theatre setting, that a movie adaptation can be nothing other than an awful idea. However, I am so glad that Tom Hooper, esteemed director of The Kings’ Speech and Les Miserables decided to make the movie in spite of that. Cats is a mesmerizing anomaly, one of the few movies in recent memory that had me grinning from ear t