Reviews of the Bosch

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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...

If It Only Had the Nerve

The ‘celebrity sex pass’ is a decently fun concept to base a comedy around. A lot of couples have one -the one celebrity crush they are theoretically permitted by their partner to have sex with should the chance arrive. It is of course something highly unlikely to happen; but the notion of it happening, and for the other then to seek out their own celebrity sex pass to even the score is a funny premise. It’s not too far off a general sitcom episode formula. But what kind of mind would pair that with a pastiche of The Wizard of Oz ? David Wain apparently, whose new movie Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass does just that. It took a little while admittedly for me to pick up on the particular piece that Wain was structuring his story around, but it does become incredibly unsubtle after a time. It’s an approach worth admiring for its uniqueness, and how much fun Wain and his collaborators are clearly having with the idea, which lends itself well to the hyperbolic pseudo-parody style ...

Heated Reciprocity: A Radiant though Rudimentary Queer Coming-of-Age

By 2026, queer coming-of-age stories like Girls Like Girls are a dime a dozen. But it is easy to forget how it really has just been less than twenty years or so that queer identity in youth has not been a stigmatized subject. In 2017, Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture . And nowadays, movies like Love, Simon and Bottoms have even mainstreamed the subject, and numerous other teen movies think of nothing of casting multiple queer characters. This wasn’t the case a few decades ago when someone like Hayley Kiyoko, struggling with her sexuality while a teenage actress and singer, would have needed the positive reinforcement. If Girls Like Girls feels a bit out of the date, that’s somewhat intentional -Kiyoko made it as much for her teenage self as her audience. It is of course based on her own 2015 song which she then turned into a 2021 novel that is the direct source of her filmmaking debut here. It is Kiyoko’s baby every step of the way, a very personal story that she doesn...