Reviews of the Bosch

It’s kind of nuts that Universal was able to pull anything salvageable out of that “Dark Universe” idea. And they did so by turning one of those iconic intellectual properties into something barely resembling either the original source novel or the classic monster movie interpretation. But make no mistake,  The Invisible Man , a Blumhouse production (sold to them and distributed by Universal) written and directed by Leigh Whannell, is a monster movie. It’s just one about a more conventional and frighteningly realistic kind of monster. The Griffin of this film (Adrian Griffin, re-styled a tech entrepreneur played with appropriate bubbling violence and faux charm by Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is not a dapper Claude Rains; he’s much more akin to Alan Moore’s amoral psychopath of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , but given a much greater possessiveness and obsession with controlling women; making the film so much more socially relevant than any other version of the story. ...

The last episode ended with the Master telling the Doctor “everything is about to change forever”, which I cynically noted the Doctor has heard before. But in “The Timeless Children”, at least as far as the Doctor is concerned, everything does change forever. Much of the characters’ personal mythology is thrown into disarray, some that has as far as we believed, been established canon going back decades. It’s an extraordinarily bold move for a show with such a longevity, legacy, and being a sci-fi property in the twenty-first century, a legion of fans worldwide, many of whom are dismayed by change. There can be good reason for this. Sometimes a major continuity alteration or adjustment can be made for poor reasons: the contriving of the Eleventh Doctor to be the last of the initial twelve regeneration cycle purely as a lazy way of giving his exit extra weight comes to mind. And there are a couple assertions brought up in this episode I don’t think Chris Chibnall quite thought t...

I’ll be honest, I chose this one at random, so what are the chances I’d be talking about the Titanic  two months in a row. Of course where the Titanic  was the major plot point of A Flight to Remember , here it’s seen but briefly as a darkly ironic twist, the macabre punctuation to a young and promising romance. It’s brought up suddenly, and is just so suddenly dropped with the inference that these two significant characters died in its sinking. It would certainly make for a curious entry in a study of cultural depictions of the Titanic  disaster, a la Lindsay Ellis’ old “Loose Canon” series , but it’s otherwise a historical event largely irrelevant to the story of Cavalcade , the 1933 Frank Lloyd adaptation of Nöel Coward’s play. It’s a minor backdrop, an excuse to get rid of a couple characters (who just so happen to be talking about their bright future moments before the reveal), and another in a series of historical shout-outs made by this early twentieth century...

One of the first movies I saw at last years’ Regina International Film Festival was Wolves Unleashed: Against All Odds , a fascinating documentary about the process of rearing and training wolves for movies. And it left me with a deeper appreciation for animal trainers and the roles of animals in cinema. Though often overlooked, they can be great actors in their own right, like Pal the Collie, Keiko the Killer Whale, and Bart the Bear. These kind of animal performers were on my mind while watching The Call of the Wild , the latest envisioning of the Jack London classic, the first adaptation made without a real dog. And from the start that glaring absence gives the film a pervading emptiness. The animals, with their askew physiology, comic (though completely unfunny) dexterity, and humanistic expressions (not to mention very emotive eyes) are so obviously digital and completely separate in their reality from that of the humans that it’s difficult to connect with them on any mean...

There is no shortage of mediocre to bad Oscar winners in the ninety-two years of the institution –in fact each decade seems to have at least one inexplicable offering that won Best Picture, whether it be Out of Africa , Driving Miss Daisy , Shakespeare in Love , Crash , or Green Book  -and a handful of others that no one is too crazy about either. This past decades’ banal Oscar heavyweights included The King’s Speech  and Argo , but one film I regularly see getting lumped in with them is 2012’s Academy frontrunner The Artist . More than that, I see it often labeled a bad movie and one of the worst Oscar winners in recent years. I really liked The Artist  when it initially came out, and I wasn’t alone. From what I could tell its’ critics’ ratings were very good, the reviews I read overwhelmingly positive, even a cynical youtube channel like “How It Should Have Ended” couldn’t help praising it. But the further away from its win we’ve gotten and the more it’s reced...

With villains as old as the Cybermen and the Daleks, it can be difficult to come up with new stories for them after fifty-seven years. The Doctor has beaten them so many times and in so many different contexts that it can be hard to come up with new ways to make them a threat. During the classic series this problem led to a few extended hiatuses for these enemies. The Daleks, after having emphatically been wiped out forever in “The Evil of the Daleks” in 1967 didn’t show up again until “Day of the Daleks” in 1972; and the Cybermen, after their grandest appearance during the early years of Doctor Who  in 1968’s “The Invasion” weren’t brought back until 1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen” without making a single appearance during the entirety of the Third Doctors’ run. Of course now these villains are too much a staple of the show that the BBC will never allow them to disappear for more than a couple years, and yet there has to be some way to keep them an engaging and intimidat...