Reviews of the Bosch

          Well shit. After the preview of 2020 that I got last year, I had no idea the laws of the universe in order to prevent a paradox would overcorrect so drastically that it would contrive an even worse version of 2020 than I had foreseen! Turns out I may be responsible for this past year… Sorry! But before the mobs come after me to burn and eat my flesh as a potential COVID cure, I feel I should share that I found a way (I won’t divulge how but it involved a blood ritual with Mephistopheles) to visit the future again and see what 2021 has in store for us and if we indeed have anything to look forward to post-Year of Hell: January –Joe Biden is inaugurated the 46 th  President of the United States on the 20 th . Loser Donald Trump leads a march of his supporters on the Washington Capitol Building in one last attempt at a coup, only to find they changed venues without telling him. In the middle of a subsequent furious tirade, the failed oligarch s...

Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman  was one of the first movies I was looking forward to seeing in 2020. And it was only about a week away from opening when the theatres were forced to shut down. Unlike so many other movies, for months on end there was no new release date announced for it and I assumed it would drop on streaming in a manner similar to Palm Springs . But it retained its exclusive theatrical window, now at the end of December -which is clearly not the time of year it was meant for. I kinda wish it could have struck an on-demand deal though. People in luckier areas may still get to see it, but for the vast majority of its audience, that option is not open to them for safety reasons. What’s most unfortunate about this is that Promising Young Woman  is a movie a lot of people should be seeing, and especially men who are perhaps not so self-aware of their actions and attitudes towards women. It’s a thrilling revenge fantasy yes, about a woman catching sexual pre...

Every Pixar movie has its moment where it tries to make you cry. It’s become essentially a part of Pixar’s brand at this point, that no matter the movie, it will build to a big emotional peak with regards to its’ storytelling or character arcs that will tug at your heart in just the right way to make it burst. It’s a talent that almost seems unique to that studio and we always anticipate it. The big emotional moment in Soul though is subtler perhaps than any I can recall. It’s a silent, personal moment of clarity without a level of high emotion on-screen or grandiose sentiment (not that there’s anything wrong with either). But it’s packed with some of the richest meaning Pixar has ever put into any of their films. And it worked as well for me as any from director and Pixar CCO Pete Docter, who having overseen the opening sequence of Up  and the devastatingly bittersweet emotional climax of Inside Out , can fairly be considered an expert at this. Not long before this scene and the g...

The Christmas movie that Jimmy Stewart will forever be associated with is  It’s a Wonderful Life . There’s no denying that, it’s one of the most beloved movies of all time, and Stewart is a key factor in that -it’s one of his very best performances (which is saying a lot given his career). But what’s funny about that is that Christmas itself doesn’t factor into the movie very much. It’s not until the third act that the holiday becomes the primary setting and the only bearing that Christmas has on the plot then is in its functional similarity to another classic Christmas story about a man whose life is put into perspective as he undergoes a moral and emotional transformation on Christmas Eve. It’s more the movies’ themes that designate it a Christmas movie than any overarching presence of the holiday. Six years earlier though, Stewart had made a movie set at Christmas for a much longer portion of its run-time, in which Christmas is a backdrop for an unconventional romance. The Shop ...

At the beginning of the third act  of Elf , a 2003 Christmas comedy directed by Jon Favreau, the titular character Buddy, played by Will Ferrell, condescends to and eggs on a little person, played by Peter Dinklage, by insistently calling him an elf in spite of repeated cue s of how brazenly offensive that is –ultimately resulting in a fight. Despite the beating he takes, Buddy doesn’t take anything away from this exchange, still calling him an elf after the fact. And the sequence is shot and staged so as to emphasize Dinklage’s proportions for comedic effect: long takes of him at the end of a conference table literally dwarfed by everyone around him, then standing up and charging at Buddy on top of the  table framed at a low angle to better evoke the child-like nature of this action. It is pretty uncomfortable to watch, the general attitude towards Dinklage’s dwarfism not more than a step above just pointing and gawking at him. And this in a movie that is a beloved holiday cl...

For as long as black people have been making music, white people have been stealing and appropriating it. Country, Blues, Jazz, Rock ‘n Roll, Hip-Hop -the black architects of each of these have been popularly forgotten in favour of the white artists who came in their succession, incorporating (consciously or not) the styles and techniques innovated by black creatives. And the reason for this is because while these genres were built by and for black people, they were (and still largely are) sold to white people, and had to be if ever the artists were to make a profit -at least according to the white men who governed the American music industry. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom  opens on a scene of the titular singer, nicknamed the “Mother of the Blues” (Viola Davis) performing in 1927 in a rural field somewhere in the American South to an audience of enthusiastic black spectators, clearly in-tune with the culture and parlance being expressed through her song. It’s not a spoiler to say that ...

There actually was a real story that inspired the 2018 Broadway musical The Prom  by Chad Beguelin, Bob Martin, and Matthew Sklar. A girl in Mississippi wanted to bring her girlfriend to the senior prom and was banned by the local school board. She challenged this, resulting in the prom itself being canceled -all the while various celebrities came out in support of her. Ultimately she won a court case, though the prom still didn’t go forward. So the musical became something of a wish fulfillment on this idea -to give a girl in a similar situation the prom she deserved, orchestrated by stars from ostensibly the most queer-friendly entertainment industry: Broadway. It’s a cute premise, if a little parochial (the whole idea of proms being a critical aspect of high school culture that every teen “deserves” is a uniquely American phenomenon that doesn’t really resonate with me at all). I could see it making for a decent Broadway show, even as self-congratulatory as it is. And then Ryan ...