Reviews of the Bosch

There is a notable twinkle in the eye of Charlie Chaplin that makes the ending shot of City Lights so emotionally iconic. That same twinkle reappears a few times in Limelight , made over twenty years later. If Chaplin’s career was in potential danger in 1931 as the silent film looked to be rapidly a thing of the past, it was by and large over by 1952. He’d made only a single misfire of a movie(in which he played a serial killer) in the twelve years since his last honest hit The Great Dictator , though it is possible a part of the setback had to do with allegations of Communist sympathies -though he was never fully blacklisted he was heavily boycotted -to the degree that  Limelight , which came at the height of McCarthyism, never even played in Los Angeles. This is how it wound up being eligible for the Oscars a further two decades later in 1973, when it was at last rediscovered, reappraised, and released in that city. Chaplin was nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Original Sc...

I’ve encountered few movie titles as mean as Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) . I suppose it’s fitting as it was the last Peanuts  feature film for thirty-five years, and maybe at the time Schulz, Melendez, and Mendelsohn realized it. Because it is a very odd beast. Like the previous movie, it isn’t derived from any storyline written for the comic strip -instead drawn from a visit Schulz had taken to a French chateau where he had formerly been stationed during the war. Another very different kind of setting for a Peanuts  story -I don’t think Charlie Brown had ever left the country before- but one that is at least a little more interesting than Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown , if it does ultimately not really lead anywhere. It starts off pretty great, with some atmospheric animation that shows a little how more technically skilled these movies had gotten, and in the ominous setting of a girl in a castle in the rain -it might not even be set contemporaneousl...

About a century ago in the 1920s, the most thrilling place in the world for cinema was Weimar Germany. Sure, the United States and Hollywood had a far more robust and wide-ranging industry, a star system and concentrated studio infrastructure, but there weren't quite the same revolutionary leaps in style and tone and technique as what was going on in this part of Europe. Apart from perhaps the general filmographies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the German films of this era - Nosferatu , Metropolis , Dr. Mabuse the Gambler , The Last Laugh , The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - are the silent films most remembered today. In the 1930s however, the cinema of Germany began to change, and there was a great exodus of German filmmakers and actors. The Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and from very early on enforced a policy of propaganda on the film industry. Movies had to now subscribe to a certain image of the German culture and people; other subjects, themes, and criticisms were...

Act Two of Wicked  is weaker than Act One. That is what the musical theatre community made me aware of in anticipation of the second-half of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked movie , which I am now inclined to agree should have just been consolidated as one film the whole time. The split of these movies, which were initially produced together, is quite plainly just a ploy to get a little more out of the brand -and it is neither something that would work nor be considered for any other musical without a familiar intellectual property attached. And though the context of the second act is fairly different, it does need that chemistry with the first. Sondheim pieces like  Into the Woods  or Sunday in the Park with George have much starker distinctions between their acts, but you would never think of separating them. Hell, this movie closes on a bookend that you have to recall was begun a year ago. It’s a bad idea also in terms of the quality. Wicked  is by no means the only ...

Perhaps more action movies should function also as history lessons the way that Sisu  does -at least for non-Finnish audiences largely unfamiliar with Finland and its consecutive bad relationships with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. A country that has been victimized by multiple more powerful states through the ages the way that Finland has deserves a character like Aatami Korpi to enact a bit of cathartic vengeance on behalf of his people. Certainly it feels more righteous than something like Rambo II  applying the same dynamic to America and Vietnam, though Korpi has clearly taken some influence from Rambo as a character. Yet he is far more of a virtually supernatural unkillable beast than Stallone could have turned his wronged war vet into. Sisu: Road to Revenge  is just as hardcore as the first film if not quite as novel. It’s fitting that even just a real-time lapse in the movie’s setting renders the circumstance for its lead character (who again is NOT cal...

None are exempt from the dehumanization of capitalism. It has always been true but has felt supercharged in the modern era. The movements of monopolies, mergers, conglomerates leaves so many people behind, who are then forced into desperate circumstances to hang onto the comforts of their lives and livelihoods. And whatever comes of it is no guarantee. There is no job security in the modern age -not really. So few understand how close they are to the brink until they are literally looking down it. No Other Choice  is Park Chan-wook’s Parasite . Just as Bong Joon-ho’s now classic film examined the impacts of late-stage capitalism and the extremes it drives people towards, so too does his friend Park’s new movie showcase with raw anger the ramifications of an unfeeling system on everyday people forced to contend with it for their survival. Where Bong honed in on a poor and struggling family, Park centres a patriarch who is notably much better off -but the weight that is felt is much ...

Early into the  Running Man  game, Glen Powell’s Ben Richards while receiving assistance from a friend played by William H. Macy insists he had no choice in entering the game. Macy’s character responds very bluntly that he did. And indeed he wasn’t forced to enter the game, he was persuaded to by the notion of setting up his struggling family for life. It is something he has reckoned with later in the story after some devastating consequences, and he responds to an alternate statement with an affirmation of his choice. But on some level, he didn’t have that choice did he? The society he exists within did force him to the point of desperation: the tactic that feeds The Running Man  as well as other briefly glimpsed game shows where the lives of the poor and disenfranchised  -a larger (but not that much so) proportion of the population in this dystopian world- are sacrificed for the amusement of the general public as a distraction from their own woes. Stephen King’s no...