Reviews of the Bosch

Apparently Disney wanted to make new installments of Fantasia every few years or so, however the financial failure of the film put a stop to those plans. In a way, Make Mine Music is an attempt to compensate for that. In as much as replacing classical music with modern songs and having some segments be only half musical is compensation. Sadly of the two, this was the one that deserved to be a failure. To be fair, Make Mine Music had a great set-up. Where in Fantasia , animation was being conducted around classical music, here various popular singers and musicians come together with the animators to make up a series of diverse segments. This film actually consists of ten segments, but few of them have had much lasting power with the exception of the longest, “Peter and the Wolf”. The visual quality as expected for a package film is significantly less than the earlier work of wonder, but that shouldn’t stand in the way if the music and tone works. In a few segments it does, b...

It’s the start of a New Year so it’s time to look ahead once again. For me that means digging up my time machine out of storage and travelling forward into the next year to see exactly how well we fared out in 2016. The results were interesting to say the least, and now I’m back with the biggest headlines of each month. What’s in store for the coming year? You may be surprised. Or you may not. Nevertheless, enjoy these snippets of 2016: -January: In the world of fashion, the mullet comes back into style. Jimmy Fallon sports one for a Tonight Show bit leading to millions of men and boys adopting it. Michael Bolton rejoices. -February: Chris Rock is replaced as Academy Awards host at the last minute by a safer Steve Harvey. The Oscar for Best Actor mistakenly goes to Leonardo DiCaprio. -March: After the Full House reunion on Netflix’s Fuller House , comedy suffers a mild stroke. On a related note, the mullet goes back out of style. -April: Climate change forces polar be...

After Saludos Amigos went over surprisingly well, a follow-up was made. The Three Caballeros keeps some focus on Latin America but also delves into Hispanic and Mexican culture. Though unlike its’ predecessor, this film focuses on the characters, the music and comedy more than the cultural appreciation. This results in the film being funnier and more entertaining in some places, where in others …it shows us cactuses turning into awkwardly dancing women? Unlike Saludos Amigos , this film actually has a framing device. It’s Donald Duck’s birthday and he’s opening presents from his friends in Latin America. First is a film reel through which we watch a couple shorts similar to the segments of the last film. One’s a pretty cute story about a penguin called Pablo who wants to leave the Antarctic for the warm tropics of the Galapagos. He tries many times before successfully shipping off and sailing around the southern coasts of South America. It’s pretty nicely animated, has som...

                Anyone who gets into a conversation with me about Doctor Who will at some point discover that I hate River Song. I’m not going to rant about it here, but suffice it to say I think Steven Moffatt took a promising one-time character and turned her into one of the most insufferable, one-note scene-hoggers I’ve ever seen on television. I know I’m in a minority and I’ve got nothing against Alex Kingston, but the idea that someone like her is this close to the Doctor depresses me and every episode with her I know isn’t going to be enjoyable. “The Name of the Doctor” seemed to put an end to her character arc, tying up loose ends and giving her fans some fitting closure. But as Moffatt proved in “Hell Bent” he doesn’t mind beating a dead horse.                 And thus we sadly see the return of River in “The Husbands of River Song” (god I hate how her name...

                It’s necessary to give some context before diving into these next six films. Disney gave a lot of money to the war effort once America entered and so the budget for features was severely reduced. They had to make concessions after all for many animators fighting overseas, and so they could produce those wonderful propaganda films where Donald Duck fights Hitler and so forth. So during this period and in the immediate post-war years (due to the length it takes to produce an animated film), Disney’s releases consisted of ‘package films’ –collections of shorts or segments with a smaller budget and generally less story. The first couple of these had specific geo-political aims, a few of them incorporated a lot of musical segments in a manner similar to Fantasia , and some even included live-action content.                 With that said, Saludos Am...

I’m going to start off a little controversially by saying Star Wars: The Force Awakens doesn’t need to exist. Return of the Jedi ended the story of Star Wars on a very satisfying note that not even the prequels could diminish. Until 2012 it didn’t look like we’d be getting any more Star Wars and that was fine. That original trilogy had already proven its timelessness and its status as one of the great motion picture sagas. Bearing that in mind, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is very welcome. J.J. Abrams you may know as the director of the recent Star Trek films, but Star Wars is much more his comfort zone. And he really is able to capture the tone and emotional resonance of Star Wars while also letting it feel fresh and new. It’s a great balance of old and new, and I think it really succeeds. This is clearly a Star Wars film and a J.J. Abrams film. However it is not without its missteps. Though a far cry from the unfortunate prequels, it isn’t quite on par with the origin...

That tagline is my feelings exactly                  Oliver! by Lionel Bart is a pretty fun show. It’s not necessarily good, but has some entertaining songs and relates adequately but certainly not exceptionally a Dickens classic. It was a big risk to make a musical of such a revered work of literature but it paid off in 1968. The very next year, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It makes sense that some studios would want to try to adapt other popular works of literature and hey, even other Dickens novels into musicals. This must have been the thinking behind 1970’s Scrooge , a musical based on A Christmas Carol which is a lovely little disaster.                 First off, the idea to do a musical based on A Christmas Carol isn’t a good idea to begin with. The only attempt that actually works is A Muppet Christmas Carol and that’s because not only...