Reviews of the Bosch

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Her Private Hell is a Self-Satisfied, Stunning Slog

It’s difficult to say exactly what is going on at any given point in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell except that it is quite intoxicating to look at but also quite slow and obtuse. It is Refn’s first movie in ten years, his last being the equally strange arthouse horror film The Neon Demon , yet this film seems even less attached to narrative, character, or context, motivated almost entirely by mood, vibes, messy themes and messier sexuality. As a result it feels to me like a less coherent, less entertaining Lost Highway -which is not a favourite David Lynch of mine but I do have a respect for its metaphors and how it comes together. Her Private Hell does not really -I wonder how much Refn himself can make of its fragments of unfiltered psychology. But it can be called a unique and fascinating film -the preferable form of disappointing movie, for its conceptions and pretentious eccentricities. The title in any case is quite accurate, as Sophie Thatcher’s Elle seems relative...

Back to the Feature: Dead Calm (1989)

Dead Calm is remembered as the movie that really launched the careers of both Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane. Yet my reason for finally watching the film has to do with its third star who, despite the movie’s fairly memorable premise and execution (enough so that it has been parodied a handful of times), is often forgotten was even a part of it. But as in just about every movie he appeared in, Sam Neill is compelling and singular here, and quietly excellent in a role that demands just as much as his younger co-stars if its not as involved or sexually provocative. Neill’s recent unexpected passing is a tough pill to swallow, and I felt a compulsion to engage with some work of this internationally beloved Kiwi who may well have been one of my favourite actors. And Dead Calm , which is a great and popular story, felt like the right piece. Director Philip Noyce and screenwriter Terry Hayes came to the material after an earlier version famously failed to manifest. The book Dead Calm by Ch...

Nobody Actually Cares about Black Helen of Troy

Nobody is more certain of anything than conservatives are that the whole world thinks exactly as them. We’ve seen it on so many fronts of political issues and idiotic culture wars over this last decade -conservatives, or those of a like reactive mindset, declaring with confidence any outcome that suits their prejudices. The rise of Trumpism taught them that fringe positions and complaints were a lot more popular than the mainstream expected -which was true but clearly not to the extent that they believe. There are so many other factors and nuances that have little to do with broader conservative grievances and the picture painted isn’t actually as accurate as they like to claim either (remembering that Trump only won a popular vote once and by the slimmest of margins). It is exhausting, yet it is an exhaustion that has long spread to my space of interest, the movie space -an area where conservatives, for as much as they decry Hollywood’s ‘liberal elites’ at every opportunity, are despe...

A Monumental Modern Odyssey

“A new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” In promoting his new book Son of Nobody at my local literary festival, author Yann Martel noted how the works of the anonymous Greek poet(s) identified as Homer - The Iliad and especially The Odyssey - are foundational texts of western culture; works of curious fiction that carry immense weight on how the literature of western society developed. Martel observed that perhaps a part of that comes from an apparent timelessness in the themes of these stories in which the patterns of the world as we know it three thousand years later can still be found. The personalities, conflicts, and anxieties of such works are apparent in both life and fiction -they speak as much to the present as they ever did. Thus, like every custodian of the material before him, Christopher Nolan very intentionally speaks to the present, in his new adaptation of The Odyssey , in which the Homeric epic is cast as a person...

Disney's Live-Action Moana is a Predictably Lifeless and Dry Replication

I’m really just punishing myself at this point. Atoning for my sins and mistakes. It’s that little part of me that hates myself that drives me to see the live-action version of Moana rather than doing something productive like budgeting out the rest of my summer or something more entertaining like doing my laundry. There is no godly reason to be at a mostly empty theatre (a telling sign) on a Sunday night to partake in this drivel and I found myself distracted on a number of occasions pondering my life’s choices. But it is also worth pondering Disney’s. This Moana is an amazing example of the studio’s increased and out-of-touch hubris in the 2020s. Where previous live-action remakes of their animated classics came at times enough removed that the original films in question had attained that status organically over the course of multiple decades. For a lot of us millennials, Lilo & Stitch felt unusually recent when they came for it last year, the first source for such a remake t...

A Steaming Invitation

Olivia Wilde really set out to prove herself with The Invite after all of the insanity that spiraled around Don’t Worry Darling . I would argue she didn’t need to -it was the script, themes, and performance of Harry Styles that sank her last movie, which was otherwise fairly well-directed. Still, this is an industry not always kind to women behind the camera so I understand the impetus , and it is greatly fortunate that she channeled it into something of a much more drawn-back and intimate scale. Don’t Worry Darling tried to be a bigger, updated and socially-relevant variation on The Stepford Wives . The Invite traces its roots to the great domestic dramas of the same era, specifically Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -if George and Martha’s dinner guests happened to be interested swingers. It is actually an English remake of a 2020 Spanish comedy called The People Upstairs , adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Wilde herself pulls double duty, starring as one-quarter of th...