Reviews of the Bosch

  There are several significant time jumps in the movie Christy , some of which are hard to appreciate given how little seems to change in how the characters look and behave -a twenty-one year time span might seem like only five. But what is implicitly happening through the long interims is very important. Each leap is rough for how it emphasizes just how deep and inescapable a situation Christy Martin is in. The claustrophobia is very aptly felt. And none of it has to do with her boxing career. It is a sports biopic in which the sport is almost incidental -merely the anchor and backdrop for a harrowing story of abuse and manipulation. In fact it is treated as a downright thriller in some instances by director David Michôd -unsurprisingly for the man behind Animal Kingdom . But then it is an appropriate approach in light of the unique nature of its subject’s story -at least unique in a public sense and her particular region of celebrity. What Christy Martin went through i...

Though the Predator franchise owes a lot to its elder brother Alien , it’s titular monster could never command quite the same kind of horror. The Alien is a distinctly unrelatable creature in every facet and stage of development, while the Predator, though vicious, is much more humane in both physiology and anthropology. The Predators have technology, language, culture, and an extremely clear motivation as game hunters -they aren’t so unknowable in concept. It doesn’t mean they can’t and haven’t been scary, but it did make them the easier party to slot into a protagonist-adjacent role when the two franchises were finally brought together in Alien vs. Predator . After that, the next several movies kept them restored to formidable enemy status -most successfully so in Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey , the series’ high-point. But clearly Trachtenberg is very compelled by the Predator as more than the ruthless hunter, and in Predator: Badlands , as far-removed a follow-up in both context and focus...

I kind of wonder if writer David A. Goodman, or whoever actually conceived this episode, got the idea from the movie   Pig . Certainly the relationship that develops between Bender and his little pig Jambone feels reminiscent. “The Trouble with Truffles” is a pretty decent outing for most of its run -though the ending is quite slap-dash in a way that really doesn’t work. But it does well with its new concept and plot, a far better one for Bender than he has gotten in a while. Given he starts the episode underneath Fry and Leela as they’re making out, that alone is something. Though he tells them to get lost he winds up crashing their date anyways at a new and very exclusive Elzar restaurant where despite uncertainty at the expense (“it’s market price” says Elzar), they have some truffles with their food and the experience is orgasmic. But as always, truffles are a delicacy, and Fry is faced with a bill somewhere in the thousands that is kindly but suspiciously paid off by the Robot...

The Battle of Algiers was designed to be authentic. Gilo Pontecorvo’s influential ground-level guerrilla war film has often been called a docu-drama, which I suppose is a designation that fits. It is not a documentary, but it is a very attentive re-enactment of how the Battle of Algiers of 1957-58 shaped out on both the side of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French Army brought in to quell an uprising -which they eventually did through violence and war crimes. Four years later, Algeria was liberated. Four years after that, Pontecorvo made his film, with the experience still fresh in the minds of everyone in Algiers -several people who had experienced the fighting firsthand appeared in the film. It is one of the most modern movies to come out of the 1950s -which might be said of a lot of its contemporary works of Italian Neorealism, but there is an urgency to its presentation that transcends even those others. Pontecorvo frames it with a newsreel conceit and the r...

By the end of Óliver Laxe’s Sir ā t , the initial plot set-up that began the film has been largely forgotten -lost in a tense haze of the drug-induced, possibly apocalyptic miasma its characters find themselves in. Harrowing stuff happens and priorities shift, the outside world -its mysteries elusive in the isolated heat of the Sahara- changes dramatically. And what began the journey of a concerned father becomes a radical test of survival and endurance. Though for what purpose remains somewhat unclear. It reminds me a little bit of a Wim Wenders road movie, though not so much Paris, Texas  -which it shares certain aesthetics with- as Until the End of the World , a more obscure, challenging, and lengthy film that also resembles by the end very little what it started as.  Sirāt  though is less meditative than anything by Wenders, in fact it is rather pulse-pounding even through stretches devoid of action. The characters may even be enjoying themselves and yet there is some...

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...