Reviews of the Bosch

It should perhaps not come as such a surprise that Bob Odenkirk is actually pretty good as the lead of an action movie. It’s been a long time since his surrealist comedy days on Mr. Show , his work with Tim and Eric  and Tenacious D . Shows like Breaking Bad  and Better Call Saul , movies like Nebraska , The Post , and Little Women  prove he has a lot more versatility than you’d expect from the guy who created Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker for Saturday Night Live . There have also been plenty of action stars before him that have come from comedy. And yet this latest attempt at rewiring his image seemed like a step too far. Shabby, midwestern, fifty-eight year old Odenkirk just cannot be an action star. Nobody  however, makes him work. The blandly titled film from John Wick  writer Derek Kolstad and director Ilya Naishuller casts him in the role of a dishevelled suburbanite whose long-suppressed rage and hidden skills bubble to the surface after a humiliating ...

   Being There   was not the last film that Peter Sellers made before he died in 1980. That was unfortunately the extremely racist   The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu , a movie that would otherwise be rightly forgotten in the great comedians’ filmography.   Being There   deserved to be that movie though, if only because it is probably Sellers’ best role and his best performance, and it would have been extremely fitting for him to go out on it. The character of Chance the Gardener, or ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ feels rather the perfect part for the man who was once described as Britain’s “greatest comic genius since Charlie Chaplin”. It is perhaps his most Chaplin-like character, if the movie itself isn’t so Chaplin-like: a dramatic satire on the world of American politics filtered through a likeable simpleton who just accidentally wandered into it. Hal Ashby directed the film, based off the novel by Jerzy Kosiński (who also wrote the script on Sellers’ request) a...

Of all the blockbuster film series that dominated the 2010s, perhaps the one that was the most interesting was 20 th  Century Fox’s rebooted Planet of the Apes  franchise -and already it seems kind of forgotten by a lot of the general public, which is a damn shame.  It began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes , a loose remake of 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes ,  helmed by British filmmaker Rupert Wyatt. It was the origin story essentially, telling of how an experimental cure for Alzheimer’s Disease accelerated the intelligence of a chimp subject called Caesar, and how he after experiencing both the kindness and cruelty of humans, brought it to a broader collective of apes, all leading to an uprising in San Francisco. On its’ own it was a decent if overly plotted film, and ending as it did with the apes making a home in the forest and an advanced variant of the drug spreading across the globe as a deadly virus, it seemed to set the stage pretty well...

“Here’s to alcohol. The cause of, and solution to all of life’s problems.”  -Homer Simpson I’ve never been much of a drinker. I mean I’ll have a good glass of wine or a beer once in a while, but alcohol just doesn’t appeal to me much, certainly not enough for me to enjoy drinking casually. And there’s a lot of pressure, especially in your twenties, to like alcohol and to define a personal palette when it comes to alcoholic beverages. That said, it never phased me and it continues to be an aspect of adult life I generally don’t participate in. What impresses me about Another Round , a new film from former Dogme 95 founder Thomas Vinterberg, is its’ objective look at that ubiquity of alcohol as recreational vice that I find immensely interesting and relatable. Vinterberg seems just as fascinated as I am by its’ role in society and its’ effects on a persons’ attitude and social life -and he explores these with fair consideration. There’s something to be said for a movie that both touc...

We’ve seen twin patterns  in Oscar races before. Plenty of times in fact. 1999 saw two prestige Elizabethan movies competing against each other in most major categories. 2008 saw a similar battle between two large scale revisionist westerns. There are a few such trends in this years’ nominations, one of the most interesting being two with in the Best Actress category for playing major influential figures in the history of black popular music. I’ve already reviewed Viola Davis’ Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , but I had to only just now seek out The United States vs. Billie Holiday  and the performance that got debut actress Andra Day such acclaimed recognition. Andra Day is not a complete unknown (though I had no familiarity with her work) -she’s been a successful recording artist for some time and has even been nominated for a Grammy and an Emmy. It was perhaps only a matter of time before she got an opportunity like this, to headline a new film about the life of Billie Holiday wi...