Reviews of the Bosch

We’re here again! End of another largely terrible year. As I accurately foretold this time last year it was indeed marginally better than the last one -though only marginally. 2021 was a dud, and only seemed to further show us the face of our doom. We’ve got a new COVID variant to worry about (wasn’t this supposed to be over by now??), and what societal, cultural progress is being made is so slow it’s likely to mean zilch anyways. Still, 2022 could be better -although I gotta tell ya honestly, it won’t. I have seen it, and I curse every day the wizard who gifted me this hideous clairvoyance. But I feel obliged to warn humanity of what is to come. Ripped from the headlines, this is the fate of our world in 2022! January –In Canada, the Conservative Party kicks out leader Erin O’Toole for not being repugnant enough, replacing him with fellow Irish-Canadian blowhard Rex Murphy to rebrand the party’s image for the 1950s. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, vacationing in Barbados bu

“Can men and women ever just be friends?” The central question at the premise of When Harry Met Sally...  could not exist past the 1980s. It’s just so blatantly, pathetically non-debatable in any kind of modern context. The notion that men and women can be platonic friends is as accepted as any other kind of social more, and it’s both misogynistic and misandrist to suggest otherwise. Obviously to entertain it, it also requires pretending non-heterosexual people don’t exist. Most of my closest friends since high school have been women, it’s not unusual in the twenty-first century. But as laughable as that conceit that drives much of the narrative is, When Harry Met Sally...  is indeed a darn good romantic comedy. I’ve been hearing as much for years, but it’s high time I found out myself. I find I’m running out of classic Christmas movies to review this time of year so I figured instead I’d seek out a New Years’ movie (of which there are fewer), and this one has two critical scenes set a

Kingsmen is a movie franchise entirely built around the amusing contradiction of unassuming posh and polite British folks being extremely capable and violent spies. And yet that gimmick did work very well for a single film in 2015 -largely off of its’ inventive action scenes and its’ characterization, launching the career of Taron Egerton. But by the sequel in 2017, that steam was already starting to run out, and by 2021 there’s very little left that can be offered. Matthew Vaughn however seems to really care about this franchise, investing so much in a prequel that nobody asked for. Obviously COVID didn’t help The King’s Man  at all, delaying the film longer than just about any originally scheduled to drop in 2020. I’ve been seeing the trailer for it at the cinema for almost two years now, it’s been exhausting and by this past summer I was convinced it was never going to drop. Of course since its’ production, Twentieth Century Studios fell into the hands of Disney, and these last few

“I know you said the story was over for you, but that’s the thing about stories… they never really end do they? We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told, just with different names, faces… I have to say I’m kind of excited. After all these years, to be going back to where it all started. Back to The Matrix!” This is perhaps more or less what was said to Lana Wachowski when Warner Bros. initially approached her about continuing the Matrix franchise.  According to her, every year since about 2015, she and sister Lilly were asked by the studio either to make a fourth movie or give their blessing for one, but they were never interested. Eventually that changed, at least for Lana, the sisters breaking up their filmmaking partnership for the first time in their careers (Lilly’s fine, she’s making a series for Showtime). Lana’s new idea for the film came in the aftermath of the deaths of her parents. Specifically she saw comfort in bringing back Neo and Trinity, characters who me

Throughout C’mon C’mon , a sensitive, naturalistic family drama from director Mike Mills, Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny interviews a few dozen kids from Detroit to Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans about their hopes and fears for the future, on both a personal and larger existential scale. These scenes are not scripted, the children not actors, they respond with all their serious thoughts and feelings about the state of the world and what their place is in it. It’s both grim and inspiring to see, and on either end, moving.  C’mon C’mon  is a film that is at its’ heart about endeavouring to understand children, and these sequences really buffet that idea as they give honest voice to the feelings, concerns, and aspirations of the next generation. Honesty is one of this movie’s great strengths, it feels so intimate and real in its’ evolution and specificity. The characters have such believable, engaging relationships, there’s nothing artificial in any of the dialogue or the personalities,

I might have mentioned it somewhere on here before but I love A Christmas Carol . Like it’s my favourite book kind of love. I read it every year during the holidays, I’ve seen it performed as both public reading and professional theatrical performance, I’ve seen most film versions of it and a good number of parodies, it’s a story that has never gotten old to me. And like many people, my introduction to it came through The   Muppet Christmas Carol , or a rather a childrens’ book version of the story illustrated through frames from the movie (it would actually be a number of years into my love of the story that I would actually see the film). I remember it well, my first image of Bob Crachit was Kermit, Fezziwig was Fozzie, the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Future were those curious looking Muppet versions. And Scrooge was this gray-haired chap I’d later come to know as Michael Caine. Some of those shots and impressions even imprinted on me when I came to the actual story years later. It

Nightmare Alley  is a title that could only belong to a Guillermo del Toro movie. And yet the movie it does belong to doesn’t really feel like the movie it should. It conjures an idea of exactly the kind of foul horror del Toro is fond of: a cornucopia of monsters and ghosts and demons. Maybe it is Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone  and Hellboy  thrown in a blender with that At the Mountains of Madness adaptation he never got to make. Nightmare Alley however, is nothing like that. It is a film noir, a thriller set in a world of carnies and con artists, about ambition and corruption and the price of deceit. It’s based on a pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham, previously adapted into a 1947 movie starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. The narrative has a great classical character arc as it interrogates the business of carnival fraudsters and grifter clairvoyants, charting the rise from penniless yokel to showman medium of one Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a man with a mysterious past

Marvel’s decision to make the multiverse a thing is not something I’m terribly interested in. It kind of seems like an intellectually lazy idea honestly, at least the way I’d expect Disney and the MCU to use it. A multiverse would either over-complicate the world of this already extremely stuffed franchise by drawing from every reality the comics have concocted for them, or it would just dispense fan service permitted to Marvel via the grander influence of Disney. Spider-Man: No Way Home , in every bit of marketing, embodied this second scenario: villains from previous iterations of Spider-Man  film series’ being brought into the folds of this universe, with every expectation that two former Spider-Men would be joining them as well. Just a big ol’ crossover event to pull in the old fans of those earlier movies -especially the Raimi ones, which remain beloved even outside the superhero movie cult ( Spider-Man 2  remains frequently and rightly cited as one of the best in the genre). It’s