Reviews of the Bosch

I’ll be honest, I chose this one at random, so what are the chances I’d be talking about the Titanic  two months in a row. Of course where the Titanic  was the major plot point of A Flight to Remember , here it’s seen but briefly as a darkly ironic twist, the macabre punctuation to a young and promising romance. It’s brought up suddenly, and is just so suddenly dropped with the inference that these two significant characters died in its sinking. It would certainly make for a curious entry in a study of cultural depictions of the Titanic  disaster, a la Lindsay Ellis’ old “Loose Canon” series , but it’s otherwise a historical event largely irrelevant to the story of Cavalcade , the 1933 Frank Lloyd adaptation of Nöel Coward’s play. It’s a minor backdrop, an excuse to get rid of a couple characters (who just so happen to be talking about their bright future moments before the reveal), and another in a series of historical shout-outs made by this early twentieth century...

One of the first movies I saw at last years’ Regina International Film Festival was Wolves Unleashed: Against All Odds , a fascinating documentary about the process of rearing and training wolves for movies. And it left me with a deeper appreciation for animal trainers and the roles of animals in cinema. Though often overlooked, they can be great actors in their own right, like Pal the Collie, Keiko the Killer Whale, and Bart the Bear. These kind of animal performers were on my mind while watching The Call of the Wild , the latest envisioning of the Jack London classic, the first adaptation made without a real dog. And from the start that glaring absence gives the film a pervading emptiness. The animals, with their askew physiology, comic (though completely unfunny) dexterity, and humanistic expressions (not to mention very emotive eyes) are so obviously digital and completely separate in their reality from that of the humans that it’s difficult to connect with them on any mean...

There is no shortage of mediocre to bad Oscar winners in the ninety-two years of the institution –in fact each decade seems to have at least one inexplicable offering that won Best Picture, whether it be Out of Africa , Driving Miss Daisy , Shakespeare in Love , Crash , or Green Book  -and a handful of others that no one is too crazy about either. This past decades’ banal Oscar heavyweights included The King’s Speech  and Argo , but one film I regularly see getting lumped in with them is 2012’s Academy frontrunner The Artist . More than that, I see it often labeled a bad movie and one of the worst Oscar winners in recent years. I really liked The Artist  when it initially came out, and I wasn’t alone. From what I could tell its’ critics’ ratings were very good, the reviews I read overwhelmingly positive, even a cynical youtube channel like “How It Should Have Ended” couldn’t help praising it. But the further away from its win we’ve gotten and the more it’s reced...

With villains as old as the Cybermen and the Daleks, it can be difficult to come up with new stories for them after fifty-seven years. The Doctor has beaten them so many times and in so many different contexts that it can be hard to come up with new ways to make them a threat. During the classic series this problem led to a few extended hiatuses for these enemies. The Daleks, after having emphatically been wiped out forever in “The Evil of the Daleks” in 1967 didn’t show up again until “Day of the Daleks” in 1972; and the Cybermen, after their grandest appearance during the early years of Doctor Who  in 1968’s “The Invasion” weren’t brought back until 1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen” without making a single appearance during the entirety of the Third Doctors’ run. Of course now these villains are too much a staple of the show that the BBC will never allow them to disappear for more than a couple years, and yet there has to be some way to keep them an engaging and intimidat...

For a hook that seemed to suggest we’d be seeing the conception of Frankenstein  this week, “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” never actually gets around to the writing of that iconic novel. More than that, it never even really gives Mary Shelley (Lili Miller) the kind of esteem that Doctor Who  episodes of late have been known to do for important historical women. Instead, it opts to take the setting of the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva, where during that harsh summer of 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont held their famous ghost story contest that ultimately produced Frankenstein  (also Polidori’s “The Vampyre”) -and just throw its characters into a ghostly mystery of their own. And that’s honestly not a bad premise for an episode of Doctor Who , providing writer Maxine Alderton with easy access to a handful of historical figures to play with and an environment that off the bat has a gothic atmosphere due to that very compa...