Reviews of the Bosch

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The Criterion Channel Presents: Hard Boiled (1992)

Nobody puts any real effort into making action movies look cool anymore. They still can, but incidentally so. John Woo, whatever else you might say about him, certainly cared. Are half the things that the characters in this movie do while gunning each other down practical or even all that effective? No. But the imagery is really exciting to watch regardless. Hard Boiled was Woo’s last film in Hong Kong before he formally made the transition to Hollywood and it is popularly regarded as one of his best movies (alongside his original The Killer a few years before). It is one of the defining films of the Hong Kong action genre and for good reason -its filmmaking and stunt choreography is highly inventive and extremely kinetic in a way that is palpably influential across the action film spectrum. It may be one of the earliest “gun-fu” movies and had a major role in solidifying the global star power of its two highly charismatic leads. An adequate trade-off for what is not a particularly st...

The Jackson Estate's Michael is Blatantly, Deliberately Not the Man in the Mirror

Nine times out of ten when a biopic is made with the participation of the subject’s estate or family, it is not worth very much. It is virtually guaranteed to be a hagiographic puff piece that whitewashes the less flattering, more controversial aspects of the subject’s biography. And arguably no biopic has been as blatant in this as Michael , directed by Antoine Fuqua, which bleaches its story as thoroughly as Michael Jackson did his pigment. The Jackson family power is on display so starkly and shamelessly that it is Michael’s own nephew stepping into the titular moonwalking shoes, and the structure of the film is so haphazard in order to avoid difficult topics that it becomes almost a parody. You can feel the scrapped third act very starkly, the search for some kind of conflict that doesn’t taint the image of Michael Jackson, the once-in-a-generation pop genius. Michael Jackson very much was this, but he was also something else far more complicated and it is disingenuous not to inter...

Malcolm in the Middle: A Silly, Inventive Working Class Statement on How Life is Unfair

Live-action sitcoms about kids tend to not be very good. I grew up in arguably the golden age of this genre on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon (and their awkward Canadian cousin, The Family Channel), and I certainly enjoyed my fair share of them - Drake & Josh , Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide , and even That’s So Raven being particular favourites. But their appeal was in their pre-teen to teenage representation and the sense of fun they extolled while still being somewhat relatable to the ordinary kid’s life and patterns. They were never of high mark when it came to the writing, directing, humour, and acting, and you would have to be very generous to argue that point as an adult bereft of nostalgia or cherry-picked examples to the contrary. I feel like I was somewhat aware of this at the time, but didn’t care. Kids need to see these kind of stories from their perspective on-screen. That alone matters. These shows were sequestered away on TV networks designed for a...

The Haunted Song of Mother Mary

David Lowery is really underrated when it comes to the great visual filmmakers of the modern era. Between The Green Knight and his new film Mother Mary he has brought forth some of the most striking, exquisite images I’ve ever seen at the movies (and hell, there are even a few stupendous ones in A Ghost Story ). I would honestly not be surprised if the inspiration for Mother Mary originated with the conception of its stills and pictures, and that the story itself was crafted around them. And I would not be bothered by that fact. Mother Mary is a very enigmatic film, with a hallowed reverence for its subject matter -pop stardom and aesthetics- that may in other hands feel inappropriate. And it makes a few turns that are in the moment discombobulating, and that take some time to reconcile. Yet the movie’s reality is fairly easily fluid, its shifts into psychological, spiritual corners not so alien or unwelcome as they may look on paper. A hypnotizing tone makes allowanc...

Back to the Feature: The Snake Pit (1948)

A movie about mental illness made in the 1940s is bound to not hold up to modern psychological scrutiny. Hell, even psychological scrutiny within a decade or so of its release. To watch The Snake Pit is to get a glimpse into how mental illness was perceived and treated in a time when it was barely understood and entirely stigmatized. Often, contemporary films that would depict conditions we might now identify as schizophrenia or psychosis would cast them as markers of someone to be either feared or pitied. Rarely was the subject addressed head-on and taken seriously. It was considered uncouth to do so. But by 1948, in the aftermath of the war and new concepts arising around PTSD and other traumas, perhaps Hollywood was ready to actually go there -or rather director Anatole Litvak was, who’d personally bought the rights to the novel of the same name by Mary Jane Ward and worked to make a film that would be empathetic towards people -though women especially- interred in asylums for ...

The Mistaken Identity of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

I think director Lee Cronin was way more interested in making an exorcism movie than a mummy movie, and the resulting attempt to pound a square peg into a round hole is not a very enthralling version of either. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy -a title choice it should be made clear came from the producers- seems to have a largely passive interest in mummification, ancient Egypt, and the other typical aspects of mummy horror stories -and that is by design. Cronin thought the notion of an average, relatable character being mummified was more frightening than just the mummy itself being a monster that stalks the protagonists. And that is a fair point and a curious place to come at a new version of The Mummy from. But the creativity to both the story and the horror mostly stops at that point. The titular Mummy of this film is more of a possessing spirit than an entity in its own right, sustained through generations via a sacrificial host. We first meet it in the basement of an Egyptian f...