Reviews of the Bosch

You know what I said in my review of Spontaneous about our seeking out media or themes in media that relate to our pandemic situation as a means of finding meaning in it. Well, I watched The Omega Man . The Omega Man is definitely one of those movies popular enough to have left a mark on pop culture, but not so popular that it is much well-known outside of particular cinephiles or fans of 70s sci-fi/horror/apocalypse movies. The same could be said about its’ sister film from two years later, also a sci-fi thriller starring Charlton Heston and produced by Walter Seltzer, Soylent Green  -remembered for its twist of a classic final line and little else (these two films along with Planet of the Apes  form a kind of trilogy of Heston-fronted apocalypse movies). The Omega Man  though doesn’t even have the notoriety of a classic ending; the film is referenced and parodied occasionally for its plot and certain aesthetics (notably in a Simpsons   Treehouse of Horror segment...

I think the era of the 80’s throwback is coming to an end. That wave of nostalgia that kicked off early in the last decade and reached its’ nadir with Stranger Things  in 2016 is starting to fall out of popularity (I say this in the full knowledge that at least a couple more seasons of Stranger Things  are yet to come). The Thirty Year Cycle is beginning to move on to the 90’s as a focal point of reference and wistfulness, though undoubtedly there are some hangers-on. I was considering this while watching Vampires vs. the Bronx , a Netflix horror-comedy from newcomer Oz Rodriguez which, though set in contemporary times and making use of plenty of modernisms, is explicitly in the spirit of those 80s kid-fronted genre staples like Gremlins , The Goonies , and Monster Squad .  And though the movie is fun enough, it did communicate a kind of tiredness in these conventions and the signs of the 80s novelty wearing off. However there are some interesting notes and subversions to...

Every year around this time I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . It might be the best ghost story ever written, it’s certainly my favourite and of course an icon of the horror literary genre. Though the novelty of the scares has worn off a bit with repetition, the story still manages to give me chills every time, especially in the moments it gets particularly eerie and the ending. Washington Irving was just a genius wordsmith and a master of atmosphere, one of the most direct influences on my own writing, which yes, has included ghost stories. It’s also one of the first notable examples in western art of what has come to be called folk horror -a subgenre interested in horror based in rituals, history, and (usually Euro-centric) legends and myths. Often it is tied to religion, with common themes including paganism, witchcraft, the occult, and demonic possession. Iconography tends to reference the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, most popularly the age of protestant settlers in North ...

The only movie by Alfred Hitchcock to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards was his 1940 gothic romance Rebecca , adapted from the novel by Daphne du Maurier. It’s not quite one of his classics, falling somewhere in the middle of any ranking of his work, but of course it’s still an impressive film by any other measure, owing a lot to George Barnes’ cinematography and the performances from Laurence Olivier and Judith Anderson (sorry Joan Fontaine, but you were better in Suspicion ). The film remains the more remembered version of the story, but du Maurier’s novel has actually retained a level popularity separate from the film, in part due to the strength of its’ premise: an unnamed woman marries a rich aristocrat only to be psychologically haunted by the imposing memory of his late and seemingly perfect first wife. And yet it’s not a story that really warrants further adaptation -the first one was close enough to the book that’s there’s not much new to add without throwing away th...

In 1968, a mass protest took place in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention, organized by various leftist political groups demonstrating against the current government and the Vietnam War. Another target of their ire was the police force who opposed them at these protests, eventually escalating them into a riot on the night of August 28 th . The next year, Richard Nixon’s new administration brought forward a case against a random select eight of these prominent protesters for conspiring to incite the riot. Eventually, Black Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale was removed from the case given the flimsiness of the evidence against him, and the remaining defendants became known as the Chicago Seven -the case itself something of a referendum on anti-war protests, the counterculture movement, and left-wing politics itself. This I learned from wikipedia. I’m not very familiar with the Chicago Seven, it wasn’t a part of our history curriculum here in Canada, but from what I gather it...

Percy is the second underwhelming Canadian movie I saw in a single weekend. Of course it might be generous to call the movie Canadian. It’s an international co-production starring largely American actors and from a director who’s mostly worked in American T.V. The fact that a lot of it is set in Bruno, Saskatchewan is incidental -especially because it was actually shot in Manitoba due to the government of Saskatchewan hating art ( vote by October 26 th ! ). Whatever else I thought of   The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw , it did at least feel Canadian. Though a part of that was its’ cheapness, which is certainly not the case for Percy , backed up by almost a dozen production companies to ensure a quality relative to its lead star Christopher Walken. Obviously, this annoys me and speaks to a lot of heavier problems in funding in the Canadian film industry. Percy  is only better than The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw  because it was given the resources to be. The film is based on a tr...