Reviews of the Bosch

One thing that can’t be denied about  Gunpowder Milkshake , an action movie produced for Netflix and directed by Navot Papushado, is that it’s got a lot of style. What kind of style and what it’s in aid of, I have no idea, but there’s a lot of it. A smattering of particular offbeat choices in the directing, the acting, and the editing that don’t seem to serve much of an artistic purpose beyond merely being noticeable –conveying an idea of what the film wants to be without living up to it. Looking cool was apparently the chief priority for this filmmaker, who directs the piece like a film student with a keen eye for visuals and a love of Tarantino, constructing a story and characters and themes rather haphazardly around the imagery in his head. To his credit, some of that imagery is effectively striking, but some is not. And either way it’s meaningless without function. Karen Gillan is the unfortunate star of this confounding exercise, inhabiting a less slick John Wick -like world o...

A few years ago, while discussing his opinions on the Oscar eligibility of streaming services such as Netflix, Steven Spielberg equated Netflix-produced movies with television, given that they are deigned for a platform that is watched on the small screen rather than the large. It was a minor controversy, brought up again relatively recently when he himself signed a deal with that same platform, perceived by some as either hypocritical or selling out. However there is a point to be made there, streaming services having now effectively replaced basic cable in many peoples’ homes. And it’s a format suited for long-form media more than traditional cinema because an ongoing series is more attractive to maintaining subscriptions. Mainstream movies themselves have become more like TV shows -you can simply look to franchises like the MCU and the  Fast and Furious series for proof of that. And in fact it’s all being blended so much now that budgets and scopes and casts and crews are n...

It’s been two years since the last Marvel movie came out and it’s actually been a nice, needed break. Avengers: Endgame  was such an event and such a “series finale” kind of movie that it made sense for the franchise to be put on pause for a bit. Of course that wasn’t the plan. The wheel was supposed to keep turning business as usual but COVID got in the way.That necessary break for the Marvel Cinematic Universe was forced on them. But now it’s over. Marvel’s been putting out shows on Disney+ that have varied wildly in quality and Black Widow now marks their return to theatres. Directed by Cate Shortland,  Black Widow  is a bit of an odd beast -a film many would say is long overdue, about the only female member of the original Avengers. It’s especially overdue now that the character has died, this film essentially being a post-mortem on someone whose story within this larger universe is over (though the movie makes pretty clear she’s got a successor). Scarlett Johansson h...

            Federico Fellini really was something, huh?        1954’s La Strada  is generally considered to be the turning point of Fellini’s career, the movie where he broke with the Neo-realists (and received quite a backlash in Italy for doing so), and began his journey of poetic and magical realism that would come to dominate his best known work. It’s a quiet movie, much in the vein of those Neo-realist pictures, translating simply as “The Road” -though it’s quite different from the Cormac McCarthy novel. Essentially it’s the story of a travelling performer and his slave. That is what Gelsomina is -we never get any sign that she’s being compensated for her work and she was sold to the brute Zampanó by her mother for 10,000 lire. He abuses her terribly as well, is callous and mean towards her -an innately physically violent man. And the movie just depicts this relationship as they travel from venue to venue.  ...

Netflix’s adaptation of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street  teen horror novels is a fascinating experiment and one uniquely suited for the streaming model -both to its’ benefit and detriment. It’s a trilogy of movies that were shot all at once last year Lord of the Rings -style by director Leigh Janiak and are releasing each one week apart to the streaming service. Furthermore, the films are structured with a reverse chronology as indicated by their subtitles, beginning in 1994 before moving back to 1978 and then finally all the way to 1666. It’s all curious and  compelling, but it could only work on Netflix, which was surprisingly not the home for these movies until recently. Originally they were slated for theatrical release, which seems like a bad idea predicated on the belief that everyone would turn out for them opening week. Most moviegoers don’t. Coupled with the space in cinemas that all three movies would take up and just how irrelevant each would be after only one week, it doe...

I haven’t kept up with Archer . Did it get bad in recent years? America: The Motion Picture  is an immeasurably dumb movie -that doesn’t have to mean it’s bad, but in this case it does. The Netflix-produced animated comedy directed by Archer executive Matt Thompson is rather appropriately as overconfident, misguided, inane, exploitative, and repellent as the nation at its’ centre. Aspects of that I’m sure are intentional -but that doesn’t excuse them. A parody on the American War for Independence as well as just the general American mythos itself, the film is a rewrite of history that pits an insecure but passionate George Washington (Channing Tatum) against the evil mastermind Benedict Arnold (Andy Samberg), who is rallying the British in a convoluted plot to literally assimilate the colonies. Also, Arnold is a werewolf. I love the idea of a satirical take on the Founding Fathers and early American history - Hamilton  really proved the material is ripe for re-contextualizatio...

I’ve missed out on the last several Steven Soderbergh movies -though in my defence I had only barely heard of a number of them and those I had I wasn’t able to see immediately -no cinemas near me were playing The Laundromat  for instance. Soderbergh is one of the most genuinely versatile filmmakers in the American industry (in that his movies vary wildly in scale as well as genre), and he is also among the most prolific. It seems like only yesterday that his Let Them All Talk  came out, and of course he just produced the 93 rd  Academy Awards (and on that subject, remember how he was nominated twice for Best Director in the same year?). He makes movies at such a rate though it’s easy to lose track of them, especially when they’re somewhat experimental or explicitly anti-Hollywood. No Sudden Move , his second feature for streaming service HBO Max, is comparatively more Hollywood-friendly but still its’ own Soderbergh-esque thing. It’s a small-time gangster movie set in 195...

The driving concept behind The Tomorrow War  is both uniquely compelling and extremely silly –in a way that is reminiscent of classic science-fiction literature. This plot about a military campaign in the future recruiting from the past could be right out of Heinlein or even Philip K. Dick. It’s just bizarrely specific yet interesting enough as an idea. And yet for as curious as that idea is I don’t know that it makes for a good movie –at least not in the way it’s used by writer Zach Dean and Lego Batman Movie  director Chris McKay. It translates oddly and in some places rather awkwardly. Indeed, The Tomorrow War  feels like a  bad  adaptation of a classic sci-fi story that was never written. Of course its’ function primarily is as a vehicle for star and producer Chris Pratt, who’s been in need of one in the downtime between Marvel and Jurassic World  movies. And he’s no stranger to poorly executed sci-fi films with interesting premises that aren’t quite re...