Reviews of the Bosch

I was very surprised to find that the new Shaun the Sheep movie was getting a theatrical release this side of the Atlantic. The last one, Farmageddon , didn’t get much play out here and Shaun the Sheep is far from ubiquitous as a brand. But there were a few children in my audience who laughed at the right moments and seemed genuinely engaged with the cute claymation farm animals. And that’s good, because it’s an endearing, intriguing art that only Aardman Animation seems to be doing anymore. And Shaun the Sheep , which is still producing new episodes, is the main thing keeping the lights on at that company. The Beast of Mossy Bottom is certainly a daring choice of title for a movie that otherwise taps into a Halloween theme fairly well. There’s been a shortage in the last decade or so of Halloween movies for kids, perhaps due to a lack of an audience in a young generation more desensitized and attuned to adult horror or an absence of imagination or impetus from the movie industry -...

Though some of the writers on the Hulu run of Futurama have been necessarily younger, let it be remembered that the show is primarily staffed by b oomers and the oldest of Gen-X. An episode like “Oceans Three”, with a demographic audience age of about seventy-five, is a reminder of that. None of its trilogy of parodies are very culturally understood among people under forty, even the one that is only about thirty years old. I’m aware of them because I’m a nerd for movie and TV history, yet some referential jokes even flew over my head. And maybe this genre of sixty-year-old pop culture pastiches would work fine if they didn't come boxed in another lame anthology episode. After last season didn't include one I believed the Futurama writers had realized the gimmick had run its course, but apparently no t . "Oceans Three", as its title implies, is a collection of stories set out on the sea . A particular thing that does distinguish this one is that each narrative ...

The most cardinal sin that an extension to a popular media franchise can make is to be different. Formula, aesthetics, tone, canon -these mean everything and fresh ideas mean little. A lot of the homogeneity in our current mainstream media landscape has a lot to do with the fact that such brands refuse to take risks, adopt more provocative themes, or challenge existing norms within that brand. We've seen the intensity of the backlash when Star Wars does it, and we've seen it also when Star Trek has done it. 'Boldly going' apparently only means so much. And yet, going a different route and taking new chances has often resulted in better art, art that has elevated the brand it is created within. Case in point: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Granted, when the third live-action Star Trek show first debuted in January 1993, it was not greeted with immediate positivity for these same reasons. The internet was not ubiquitous at the time but there were certainly voices objecti...