Reviews of the Bosch

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...

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown  is not based on any particular run of Peanuts  strips and that is why it feels so different from the prior two movies. Charlie Brown had gone to camp before, but usually on his own -or with just as Snoopy as a companion. Charles Schulz wrote this original screenplay however based on a rafting trip he took with his family -and being written as a film it is notably less episodic than its predecessors had been, which were working in daily gags and merely expanding on certain scenes and plot beats. And it does feel a little bit like alien territory for a Peanuts  movie. Certainly it is an alien environment -the movie being set in the wilderness of what looks like Utah or Wyoming rather than the humble Minnesotan world the strip usually occupies. It’s interesting seeing these characters against watercolour backdrops of forests and mountains and deep canyons. And this context is the biggest novelty for the movie, the background of an elaborate...

Charlie Brown has always been the lead character of Peanuts , but since virtually the beginning of the strip, and especially so after the edges of his design were rounded off and he became more cute, Snoopy has been the breakout star. In the world of comics only Garfield could rival Snoopy for popularity (and Jim Davis was way more cynical about pursuing that for his character than Charles Schulz). Everybody loves Snoopy, the hyper-imaginative, romantic, intellectual, and sarcastic beagle, and it seemed only natural that for a second  Peanuts  movie, especially when A Boy Named Charlie Brown  was so fixated on its title character, the focus would be on Snoopy. Snoopy Come Home  is primarily based on a storyline from 1968 in which Snoopy receives a letter from a mysterious girl called Lila and leaves Charlie Brown without explanation -puzzling his owner and the other kids. The purpose of Snoopy’s journey we come to find is to visit his previous owner in the hospital, ...

Good grief. About a month ago, the ubiquitous comic strip Peanuts  (featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown) celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, and that is a big deal. It is rare to see a work that has had such a monumental impact on its entire form the way that  Peanuts  has. And for being such a landmark it has also held up extraordinarily well for something that began in the 1950s. Its characters and sense of humour still resonate, as much in the classic gags as in the dimmer beats reflective of its depressed kid protagonist. I still find it astonishingly deep as I read it back. Charles Schulz’s cartoon, with only him at the helm, ran for half a century before ending in the early months of 2000 just before Schulz’s own death in a bit of poetic fate. It’s legacy though has continued on, and for the moment at least, its cast of characters are still iconic. I’ve written here before of my love for the comic strip medium, and that is the format that Peanuts most purely belo...