Reviews of the Bosch

It’s a common and facile excuse when talking about racism in art from previous decades or centuries that it was “another time”, that people “didn’t know any better”, or worst of all it “was accepted back then”. This is almost never the case. Every art that marginalized, offended, excluded, or mocked a minority group was at the time it was made criticized by that minority group -their voice just wasn’t amplified over the din of the white male cultural elite. The Taming of the Shrew  was condemned by Jewish audiences and critics for centuries, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” was criticized for its racism and imperialism (to the point Mark Twain even wrote a parody of it), and D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation  was denounced and protested by African-Americans across the United States on its release in 1915. Hate has always been hate. And it’s because of that last example that we have Within Our Gates , a rebuttal to Birth of a Nation  that is also appropria...

There’s something inherently cynical about A Whisker Away . And it has to do with the adorable kitten running around through most of it. Cuteness can often be a crutch, a device to easily pander to audiences who just want something to gawk at, and in pet films and animated films especially, one that is all too tempting to resort to -and A Whisker Away  is both. Junichi Sato and Tomotaka Shibayama are definitely guilty of exploiting the cute design of their lead character and the fluff of the entire concept, but their film is not A Dog’s Way Home . It’s not wholly shameless or even banal formula anime -it’s got some surprising claws (sorry). The frustratingly obligatory teen romance element of  A Whisker Away  is as trite and disposable as any other, but the real life of this movie is in the areas where it unabashedly embraces its own silliness. Down to its basics, it is the story of a girl who’s already pretty obsessive and eccentric, gaining the power to turn into...

There’s been a shift in the last decade in American comedies. Where once it was the big, brash, and outrageous studio hits like There’s Something About Mary , Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy , and Superbad  that dominated the genre, the 2010s saw an increasing move away from the broad sensibilities that had characterized the mainstream output of the genre during the Bush years, and more an inclination towards softer humble dramedies, with more focus on writing and character than catchphrases and absurdism. Comedy superstars were no longer being made by films like Zoolander and Old School , but by subtler fare like The Big Sick  and Booksmart  that paired comic tastes with a sincere heart in a way reminiscent of James L. Brooks, Penny Marshall, or Woody Allen. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the career trajectory of arguably the biggest name in movie comedy of the twenty-first century, Judd Apatow. His latest film, The King of Staten Island , is a fa...

On May 26 th , 2020, a Minneapolis black man, George Floyd was murdered by police officers in broad daylight. The incident, captured on film was the catalyst for a mass protest movement across the United States and around the world against institutional racism and decrying police brutality. This was of course met with more police brutality, hundreds of incidents caught on video (even more that weren’t), and a series of riots from New York to Atlanta. Donald Tump called in the National Guard and teargassed civilians for a photo op, sparking even more outrage and a widespread conversation about the public function of the police, with calls to defund in favour of diverting more resources to public housing, social work, education, etc. Most of all though it has shone a spotlight on systemic racism far more difficult to ignore than it has been in the past. Even in a small Canadian city such as mine, numerous accounts are coming out of police profiling and disgusting acts of racism towa...

Sometimes when everything is terrible, you’ve just got to watch some dumb action movies. That was my thought when I decided to marathon the  John Wick  trilogy, which I’d mostly ignored before now. The 2014 Keanu Reeves fronted action vehicle just seemed to me like another lame direct-to-VOD action movie starring a washed-up actor, that just happened to get a theatrical release. Like Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage, and John Travolta before him, Reeves in 2014 was no longer the big star he’d been at the height of his Speed  or Matrix years, so this seemed like him finally succumbing to that same wasteland of steady but largely unseen and disliked work. That and the title “John Wick” just seemed so incredibly bland to me. I barely gave it a thought even when critics raved about it being exactly not this after its release. Eventually I came to assume they were right, but didn’t bother to go back and watch it or see either of the two sequels when they came out, despite the e...

I was warned. I’ll give Disney this, they know when they’ve got a commercial disaster on their hands and given the circumstances, what to do with it. Artemis Fowl , incomprehensibly directed by Kenneth Branagh based on the 2001 childrens’ fantasy novel by Eoin Colfer, was never going to make much money. With nearly twenty years on it, a lot of the fanbase has withered away, its’ brand of Harry Potter -esque youth fantasy is no longer relevant, and nobody was really asking for it. So while COVID has forced the delay of a number of other Disney titles ( Mulan  is absolutely going to be moved from its release in July), the company decided to just dump this film, which had already been moved from last year, onto their new streaming platform -itself hungering for any new content regardless of quality. In a way it’s still kind of sad though how little faith and consequent effort Disney had in this film. Nothing in it is held to any particular standard, and thus its’ high points ...

“Black G.I., is it fair to serve more than the white Americans that sent you here? Nothing is more confusing than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life, without the faintest idea of what’s going on.” Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods opens on a clip of Muhammad Ali commenting on why he won’t fight on behalf of America against the Vietnamese who have done him no harm. What follows is a collage of imagery and footage of other African-Americans doing exactly that, intercut with iconic moments of 60s and 70s American history and scenes of disenfranchised, persecuted, and murdered black people in the United States. It’s a brief timeline that illustrates with harsh reality both the world of war black soldiers were faced with and the world of hate that they were ostensibly fighting for. Unsurprisingly this bleak dichotomy is key to one of the most important films Lee has made in his over thirty year career. It is sadly appropriate that Da 5 Bloods  should hit now, in the...

The thing that needs to be understood about  Shirley  is that it is not a biopic. It is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, positing a fictional story set against a distinctly non-fictional context about Shirley Jackson and the writing of her 1951 novel Hangsaman ; set at her home in North Bennington, Vermont, while depicting her tumultuous relationship with her controlling academic husband Stanley Hyman, a critic and professor at the local college. However the core of the story concerns their relationship with a young couple who move into their house, and how these visitors, but the woman especially, become entwined in an obsessive and manipulative process of inspiration that drives Shirley’s book. This has no basis in truth, which makes it quite appropriate that the movie would frequently blur the lines of its own reality. Much like a Shirley Jackson story would. Indeed the brilliance of Shirley , stupendously directed by Josephine Decker, is that it brings Shirl...

  Just over a year ago, I began this series with a look at Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl , and now once more we have to discuss a movie about race, and an especially important one at this moment in time. Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers  is technically a short film, at just half an hour, but it conveys a lot for that run-time: namely in convictions and message. Observing the 1968 Oakland protest by the Black Panther Party of the arrest of co-founder Huey P. Newton (arrested for allegedly shooting a police officer), the film interviews or covers dozens of demonstrators, including Eldritch and Kathleen Cleaver, and Newton himself, explicitly documenting who they are and what they want. Varda, coming from a culture where the Black Panthers had no presence, is deeply fascinated by their movement and incredibly sympathetic -which she doesn’t hide at all, having her narrator make definitive statements like “the Oakland police, well known for its brutality, never misses the chanc...