Reviews of the Bosch

If you’re a certain age and certain breed of millennial, you may remember a short film broadcast on Adult Swim in 2014 that afterwards went viral called Too Many Cooks . It was a fantastic, hilarious, deeply disturbing and surreal parody of cheesy and saccharine TV intros of the 1980s, that becomes more deranged the further along it goes. One of the notable aspects of the short is characters becoming aware that they are trapped within a rigid and (deceptively) wholesome media reality, and it is that theme that its director Casper Kelly brought with him to his feature debut Buddy , which essentially plays the same gimmick but against the context of vaguely ‘90s children’s television. Kelly is not the first person to conjure up a dark interpretation of children’s media (hell Robot Chicken was doing it on Adult Swim long before even Too Many Cooks came around). Many adult millennials have joked over the years about how freaky in retrospect things like Teletubbies , Barney & Friends ...

The clearest thing about Onslaught is that its director Adam Wingard is clearly a fan of elaborate action movies from the 1980s. His cast includes two actors closely associated with that era and genre and his film is over-the-top in its premise in a way that recalls the Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies of that time. The differences are that rather than carve his protagonist out of that mold of muscular behemoth, that is instead applied to the villains while the heroine is a gritty and competent war vet; and that the movie is considerably more violent than even the roughest of those films ever got. It is indiscriminate violence which probably accounts for a chunk of the shock (though bloody , the film isn’t actually very graphic), but it is still notable, as are the particular identities of its perpetrators. Onslaught in fact falls neatly into the sci-fi or superhero fiction mold in the central tenet of its premise, which amounts basically to a spin on the Marvel ‘Super-soldier’ id...

The vibe that underscores I Want Your Sex hasn’t really been seen in a while and it perhaps does require some context to really appreciate. In the 1990s, there arose a movement on the American indie scene that has come to be known as the New Queer Cinema -born out of a wave of LGBTQ filmmakers coming into their own in tandem with a gradually more common social visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ themes, culture, politics, and people. Some of the creatives to burst forth from this movement managed to break into the mainstream, like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. Others, like Gregg Araki, remained largely in the underground. Watching Araki’s early films it is easy to see why -he has a rambunctious sensibility, a very camp style of satire, and a cavalier attitude around sex. Hollywood wasn’t quite going to embrace his art. And it still hasn’t, elder statesman of queer cinema though he has now become. He dialed back these proclivities on some of his later films (his last, White Bird in a B...

Sergei Eisenstein made three sound films before his death in 1948 . Only one part of his duology Ivan the Terrible was released publicly in his lifetime -it’s second-half banned by Soviet censors. But his earlier film Alexander Nevsky from 1938 had no such issues -perhaps because while his take on Ivan was more complex, on Nevsky he aligned more strongly with the interests of Stalinist Russian propaganda -though this film was censored for a brief time during the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact due to its depictions of Germans. Most historical films of this era, especially those with a nationalist bent, were always more about the political climate they were made within rather than the setting much removed. Even by those standards though, Eisenstein is quite blunt in Alexander Nevsky . Not only are the somewhat anachronistic names of Russia (in lieu of Novgorod) and Germany (rather than the Holy Roman Empire) used, but the Germans are depicted with subtle swastikas in their apparel as are the ...

As much as I love Futurama for its outrageous concepts and sense of humour, the episodes that have always resonated the most for me have been the sweet ones. Silly though they may be, I really love these characters and I like seeing them in contexts that are a little more earnest, revealing, that connect you more to their humanity -even the ones who aren’t human. “Late Bloomers” does that, specifically with two characters, and while it goes down a couple strange paths, it comes for the heart. And it makes you feel good. The episode is in fact a direct follow-up to two previous shows, starting with “Planet Espresso” . That episode ended with Hermes’s father reincarnated as a coffee bean plant, and here we see he is living with the Conrads -though only speaks to Hermes. Badrick as it turns out is dying from some plant disease, and Hermes not wanting to go through the death of his parent again, especially now that they are on better terms, is desperate to save him somehow. This leads int...

“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure - Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Rawhide , episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars? That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek , the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too ) , that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow...