Reviews of the Bosch

Given its prominence and popularity it is often forgotten that the genre of high fantasy -as in fantasy predominantly set in a fictitious magical world- has had very little representation on film that has been all that successful. Harry Potter  doesn’t really cut it -that franchise is entirely set across a secretive underworld existing within our ordinary one. Among various attempts, from adaptations to original projects to a long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons  film (that I’m sorry to remind its fans under-performed), Peter Jackson’s  Lord of the Rings  trilogy really stands alone in this respect …almost. Though it is rarely brought up now and appears largely forgotten outside of the fantasy film fandom and younger millennial nostalgia, there was one high fantasy movie to come out in the wake of the  Lord of the Rings to genuinely become a hit in its own right: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe  from 2005. Like  Lord of ...

For most of cinema history, the fantasy genre has been marginalized, often existing only in children’s films and the animated works of Walt Disney. The Wizard of Oz  was a groundbreaker, but it didn’t open the doors one would think. Because as in literature, fantasy was deemed an unserious genre -even a gargantuan figure like Tolkien was rarely uttered in the same breath as revered geniuses like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Even among the populists of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, or Truman Capote, no fantasy writer would be found -certainly not one who wrote of wholly fictional worlds and races, active magic and mystical battles. For the film industry the genre might have been deemed far too niche and far too expensive to produce to be worth the stigma. In Hollywood certainly, but also in most other national film industries, fantasy never managed to get a foothold really -until 2001 when The Lord of  the Rings trilogy broke...

About a month ago Netflix dropped a new series that caught my attention -this happens rarely anymore. It was called Man vs. Bee  and the reason it caught my attention was because it starred Rowan Atkinson, who doesn’t appear in new material very often. Outside of a couple Comic Relief reunion specials for Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love, Actually , Atkinson hasn’t appeared in anything in four years. Which has been kind of a bummer for me personally: Rowan Atkinson was a formative comedy figure for me, since I fell in love with Blackadder  as a teenager. He’s a man of immense comic talent that rarely gets put to good use anymore. Part of it is down to Atkinson himself -he is a notoriously private individual who doesn’t seem to mind drought periods of his career. He probably knows his immortality rests entirely with Mr. Bean, and is no longer motivated to go out and attempt to disentangle himself from that archetype. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it ...