Reviews of the Bosch

It doesn’t surprise me at all that Good Morning Vietnam  was originally pitched as a T.V. show. It has a real sitcom sensibility, like a more offbeat Vietnam War equivalent to M*A*S*H . Similar to M*A*S*H , it has a sharp, sardonic, and subversive lead character and a solid cast of supporting characters, including a couple comically obtuse antagonists clashing heads with the lead. The show was pitched by Adrian Cronauer himself, the Radio DJ it would be based on, and it is an interesting idea that might have made for a good show –but it was not to be. Instead, screenwriter Mitch Markowitz (who incidentally wrote on M*A*S*H ) revamped it as a movie script after Robin Williams became enamoured with it. Following a series of flops that began with his 1980 movie debut in Robert Altman’s Popeye , Good Morning Vietnam , directed by a fresh off of Young Sherlock Holmes  Barry Levinson, is widely considered Robin Williams’ breakout film. It was a movie that showcased both his i...

“A love letter to 1960’s Hollywood” is the phrase being touted about Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , a mosaic of a movie about the entertainment industry at the end of that decade. I don’t know if that phrase is entirely accurate though. Sure, it presents a mostly romanticized image of Tinseltown itself, but the lives entwined within it are a little more turbulent, a little more fascinating. While it doesn’t delve into the recesses of that world and focuses almost exclusively on wealthy stars, it’s not a celebration as such. I would characterize it more as a meditation on an idea of the Hollywood of fifty years ago, not too dissimilar perhaps from its spiritual precursor Once Upon a Time in America . Tarantino is a film nerd to a fault, and a very particular kind of film nerd too; so in titling his tenth and possibly final movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , he’s consciously evoking Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West  and Once Upon a Time in Am...

“I believe it was Ozu’s wish to have people feel those things that can’t be described in words.” -Shizou Yamanouchi, In Search of Ozu , 2018 Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama in   an  iconic shot from Tokyo Story I think it’s fair to say that most casual movie fans have never heard of Yasujirō Ozu, and those who have probably aren’t fans of his work. It’s not surprising, Ozu is far from an accessible filmmaker, especially for those already disinterested in world cinema. He made dozens of movies in a career over three decades, and the only ones anyone ever talks about, produced late in his career, are kind of all the same. If you’ve seen two or three of his movies, you’ve seen most of them. They’re usually centred on families, with a particular focus on the relationship between generations, there’s often an arranged marriage, always Chishū Ryū, a modern middle-class setting, commentary on contemporary social values vs. traditionalism, a s...

It’s all fun and games making jokes about alligators in Florida, until you see footage of an abnormally large one on a golf course or crossing a street, and you remember these are terrifying creatures regardless of how generally harmless most conservationists will tell you they are. Yet the same is true of sharks, but ever since Spielberg made us all afraid to go back in the water, they’ve been the go-to predator for campy schlock thrillers. Alligators haven’t gotten near that attention despite being more intimidating (unlike sharks, they can go on land), with the occasional exception like Lake Placid . And so Crawl , a claustrophobic horror-disaster film directed by Aja Alexandre about man-eating alligators terrorizing a house during an extreme hurricane stands to potentially change that -albeit with a style that’s less Jaws as much as Don’t Breathe by way of Deep Blue Sea . The set-up is simple but effective. Haley (Kaya Scodelario), a university competition swimmer in norther...

There’s a moment towards the end of The Last Black Man in San Francisco , where Jimmie Fails (played by himself) overhears a couple girls on a tram complain about how much it sucks to live in San Francisco. At this point, he’s had dreams crushed and his future thrown in jeopardy as a direct result of the city’s current socio-economic climate; however, he turns around and tells them that they aren’t allowed to hate it unless they love it. That dichotomy permeates the astonishing film debut of Joe Talbot, which is as much a love letter to the titular City by the Bay as it is a critique of it. San Francisco is represented in all its glory and grime as Talbot and Fails tell a semi-autobiographical story of a man desperately trying to reclaim a family home lost to gentrification. It’s an ornate house in the Fillmore District built by Jimmie’s grandfather during the latter years of the Second World War. He lived in it for part of his childhood, but has since been forced ...

In 1996 my mum took me to Disney’s  101 Dalmatians , a live-action remake of their earlier 1961 animated film. I didn’t much like it, the puppies weren’t as fun or cute as they had been in the original, and Glenn Close’s Cruella frightened me too much. It was also the first movie I ever saw in a theatre, so my relationship with Disney live-action remakes has spanned my whole relationship with cinema itself. And in all that time, though my critical eye has grown substantially more sophisticated, the films have not, and I have yet to see a Disney remake that justifies its own existence. The latest offering of regurgitated tripe comes courtesy of Jon Favreau, one of the few directors who dared to try something different with his Jungle Book  remake in 2015. But The Lion King  is not some fifty year old movie remembered by mostly Disney enthusiasts; it was the pinnacle of the Disney Renaissance, the most successful animated movie of all time, and though everybody knows...

Any piece of art, and particularly a piece of media, with heavy themes of and explicit ties to nostalgia has the capacity to affect us emotionally. Especially in times as turbulent and aggravating as these, it’s comforting to reminisce through art that emphatically harkens back to a simpler, seemingly more innocent time, whether through the connection to a popular brand or the depiction of certain atmosphere and environment -the former being essentially the driving force in Hollywood right now. But what I think is unique about Netflix’s Stranger Things  is how it appeals to a nostalgic sensibility completely separate from the other two despite relying heavily on both as well. I didn’t grow up in the 80’s, but I relate more to the nostalgia of Stranger Things  than to just about any other piece of media that tries to scratch at that sweet spot. Granted, as much as 80’s kids would argue to the contrary, growing up in the mid-80s wasn’t all that different from growing up i...

Cult horror, as in horror about cults is hard to do in cinema without looking like The Wicker Man . The 1973 British film about a pagan religion on an isolated island has so firmly epitomized the folk horror aesthetic, that every movie to follow in its footsteps can’t help but echo its unnerving suspense, antiquarian visual sources, claustrophobia, and ultimate nihilistic outlook. All of this can be found in Midsommar , the new film from Hereditary  director Ari Aster, who pairs the formulaic genre staples with deep themes on relationships and trauma that makes it more interesting than your conventional story of maypole dancing and ritual sacrifice. Several months after the murder-suicide of her sister and parents, Dani (Florence Pugh) is reluctantly invited by her anthropology grad student boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) to a midsummer celebration at Hårga, the commune of his friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) in Sweden, alongside classmates Josh (William Jackson Harper) and...