Reviews of the Bosch

“You’re cute, for an Asian.” As a white guy, I cannot fully grasp the harshness of that qualifier. But I can empathize with how the sting of it, and its casual manner would nullify any intent of compliment. It’s a sentiment that both singles one out and boxes them in, and the crisis of insecurity and identity it catalyses for the mere thirteen year old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) is as understandable as it is tragic. Adolescence in the late 2000s is already rough enough. In this time where nostalgia is a commodity, too often the entertainment industry forgets the caveats. D í di , the feature directing debut of Sean Wang, remembers them all too specifically, and from the vantage point of his experience most interestingly. As someone who was a teenager in 2008 where this film is set, I can attest to the crassness and cruelty of kids in that time, the casual racism and homophobia and immature edginess that was a cornerstone of many a personality trying to find itself amid the tumult of so ma

It is a cheap shot to make fun of Donald Trump for his weight. He is a reprehensible figure on several fronts, but his weight has nothing to do with them. It isn’t connected to his views or personality or his various bigotries. And yet, liberal satirists seemingly can’t get enough of it -their caricatures of him accentuate this feature and even some of their direct jokes hone in on it. And it begs the question if some of the vitriol is misplaced, or worse that those making such jokes see the excess vileness of character as an excuse to get away with a less respectful form of mockery. And I had this feeling watching The Front Room , an A24 horror film from Max and Sam Eggers (the brothers of Robert), about the disturbing relationship between  a manipulative yet decrepit old evangelical woman and her black non-Christian daughter-in-law. And it is a movie that at times seems to couch an utter disgust with the elderly in the veneer of criticizing a horrible old racist. And it relates a bad

Within a few minutes of his first scene in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , it occurred to me that that eponymous character is probably the greatest role of Michael Keaton’s career. Obviously, it was a major touchstone for him in the 1980s, that directly landed him the gig of a lifetime as the first serious on-screen Batman, but Beetlejuice is a much more specific creature that plays to Keaton’s unique strengths of huckster charisma. He has never been allowed to be as playfully expressive or as singularly entertaining as with this wild and manic, sleazy con man poltergeist. And because of this, his coming home in the latest studio attempt at a cash-grab legacy-sequel ultimately feels more welcome. And as Beetlejuice is wont to do, that effect has a way of ever-so-slightly raising up the movie around it. Of course, Tim Burton is more than happy to be back as well -his apparent motivation for returning to his original breakthrough hit likely wrapped up in the opportunity to expand on and showca

One of the most underrated movies by Richard Linklater is his 2017 veterans comedy-drama Last Flag Flying , about three former marine friends reuniting for a road trip to collect the body of one of their sons recently killed in Iraq. It’s a good movie, and I was aware at the time that it was a loose sequel to a movie from the 1970s; or rather it was based on a book that happened to be a sequel to the book that that 70s film was based on. So the two films are perhaps more like second cousins than siblings. It took me a while though to get around to watching The Last Detail , a far more successful and significant movie for its era, written by Robert Towne (based on the book by Darryl Ponicsan), directed by Hal Ashby, and featuring Jack Nicholson in that Goldilocks zone of his career preceding Chinatown  and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Criterion’s New Hollywood collection this month however, gave me the opportunity to see it. It’s about the relationship that forms between three U.S.

As far as coffee jokes go, Futurama can never do better than that subplot from “Three Hundred Big Boys” about Fry drinking three hundred cups of coffee, becoming increasingly more agitated, and ultimately saving the day as a Flash-like superhuman. It hit several of the biggest standard jokes about coffee and that seemed like enough. “Planet Espresso” dives more into the subject, adding onto the mountain of clichés but without coming off any funnier than that partial bit from an episode twenty years ago. And much as I discussed last week the value of the show taking on a world or industry it hadn’t before, the coffee industry -even with the ubiquity of Starbucks- feels a bit of a stretch for a full episode’s focus. It does come though with some unexplored territory. I didn’t realize until this episode that Hermes was the only main character whose parents had never shown up on screen (there was a mere reference to his “fat ugly” mother and her “zombie bones”). This episode introduces hi

The first images we see in AfrAId  are some of the scariest in the movie. Just a labyrinthine collage of AI-generated mush mutating over each other, no figment of image left unscathed while putting on a happy, progressive affect for the wonders of the technology. It’s scary not just because the imagery is horrendous (par for the course with AI), but because it represents the tangible insidiousness of AI and the ways in which it is used particularly in creative industries to steal from and mimic art. The rest of the movie though isn’t so concerned with this and it somewhat makes sense -the real horror of AI as we currently know it is not particularly cinematic. Still, a film about AI at a time when it is so topical, ought to have been a little more original than what Blumhouse and Twilight: New Moon  director Chris Weitz offer up. It’s evil Alexa essentially -or ‘more evil Alexa’- a smart home horror movie that even though it’s been done relatively rarely feels like an overused trope in

Strange Darling  is a genuinely clever movie. It’s also a movie very impressed with its own cleverness, in a manner that evokes the somewhat obnoxious vibes of Quentin Tarantino where it is very concerned with the audience being impressed by it. At the same time, it does impress, if not quite as much as it wants to, but enough still. Part of this is due to its structure that writer-director JT Mollner presents non-linearly, so as to allow for a sense of mystery and constantly reshaping contexts. But it also comes out of the film’s looks and technical aesthetics that are unusually rich and vivid. It’s quite a stunningly colourful for how grisly it can get. Mollner begins the movie -after a Texas Chainsaw Massacre -style opening text detailing the manhunt for a prolific serial killer from Colorado to Oregon, that like in that movie appears not to be real- he begins where his idea began, with the image of a woman running in slow-motion, injured and bleeding, from a man pursuing her with a

One of the best types of Futurama  episode is the one that takes a look at an environment or industry in our own world and imagine its equivalent in the year 3000 …er, 3024. Episodes like “Mars University”,  “That’s Lobstertainment!”, “A Leela of Her Own”, or “Future Stock” (season three had a lot of them). Even if they’re not among the series’ best, I always love them for their funny and interesting world-building. And “Attack of the Clothes” is one of those episodes, exploring the fashion industry and fast fashion trends through this futuristic-extrapolation-on-the-present lens. It’s not as creative or demented as such episodes past, but it is pretty curious and pointed. A densely plotted and high-paced episode though, that begins with the Professor “recycling” body parts for a science competition -essentially becoming Dr. Frankenstein as he creates a hulking body that he is eventually convinced to get a Head for and chooses from the Head Museum’s supermodel line-up Cara Delevingne.

There could be any number of Coen Brothers moments that come to mind watching Greedy People , a film directed by Potsy Ponciroli, but by the end the one that feels most appropriate is the ending of Burn After Reading  where after a resolution has been carefully averted and all parties of the elaborate plot have been neutralized in some way or another, an impartial FBI director played by J.K. Simmons just mulls over how little he can make sense of the whole affair. An inexplicable non-closure from one of the more contentious films in their oeuvre, the spirit of it seems very much alive in Greedy People , which ultimately closes out on a similar attitude of ‘well, what was the point of all that?’. Burn After Reading  only barely gets away with it, and that's from the Coens themselves with their rich grasp of character and whip-smart writing. What chance does a stock imitation have? Set in an undisclosed southern island town called Providence and centred on the vicinity of its police