Reviews of the Bosch

Was it Alfonso Cuar ó n’s Gravity  that opened the door for the space disaster movie subgenre? There seems to have been a lot of them lately, movies that centre on a space mission, usually with some palpable degree of realism in the details and protocol, that depict the various ways things can go wrong. They often rely on that pronounced intensity that comes naturally off of the isolation and unknowable mystique of space -the quality summed up so succinctly by that famous tagline “in space no one can hear you scream”. Recently, half of Midnight Sky  was this kind of movie, and it fit in very well to the theme of “everything in space can kill you” that Gravity  most excelled at. But Stowaway , a film directed by Joe Penna, takes a different approach, centering on a different kind of life-threatening situation that is more psychologically distressing, and more human. It’s a very contained affair: three astronauts are embarking on a two-year scientific mission to Mars only to find after t

The 1970s and 80s were fixated on the dissolution of the nuclear family myth. In general life, but in culture as well. The middle-class suburban mom and pop, son and daughter and maybe a pet idea of a content family life was having the layers pulled back. In part this was due to a changing culture in general -the 1960s had opened the floodgates on just about everything -but climbing divorce rates and a palpable shift in priorities where family planning was concerned prompted a lot of re-evaluation, not least in the movies. Two Best Picture Oscar winners in a row were themed around the break-up of the American middle-class nuclear family. 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer told the story of a divorce and custody battle, more relatable to a lot of families than any movie in years. And in 1980, Robert Redford made his directing debut with a movie about a family falling apart in the wake of the tragic death of its’ oldest son. Ordinary People , in spite of its’ title, is not really about “ordinary p

                 William Jackson Harper was ready for a leading movie role like this. So was Aya Cash I assume -I haven’t seen The Boys  but I know she’s been one of its’ breakout stars. Harper absolutely was on The Good Place , the last season of which really demonstrated why, complimenting his unique comic sensibility with a shift into romantic leading man material that no doubt predicated his casting in this movie. And that kind of subject matter really seems to lend itself well to Cash’s talents too. Both Harper and Cash richly deserve spotlighting, and in fact I would like to see them utilized in romantic comedy again. Because their first round didn’t take.           We Broke Up  is a lame movie by almost every measure. In its’ script and structure down to the filming itself, it reads as exceptionally cheap and unambitious. Written and directed by Jeff Rosenberg, a TV veteran of sitcoms, it unsurprisingly is built around a very sitcom-welcome premise. A long-term couple breaks up

               That did not go according to plan.           I suppose that’s fitting, nothing in this past year has gone according to plan. It was almost directly after the last Academy Awards in early February 2020, that the pandemic hit and everything changed. This years’ Oscars had to make a lot of concessions: moving the ceremony back two months and stripping it of a lot of its glamour, cutting down on the number of people allowed to attend and thus moving it from the traditional Dolby Theatre to Grand Central Station. The Academy would have liked not to have done it this way, but they had no other choice. Even Los Angeles isn’t out of this pandemic yet.           Working within these constraints though and determined not to go as poorly as the preceding awards ceremonies this season (especially the Golden Globes), the Oscars managed to get a handle on things. They secured a good producer in Steven Soderbergh who approached the ceremony as if it were a film itself …and that really

Henry Fonda - On Golden Pond In 1982, seventy-five year old Henry Fonda became the last long overdue star of Hollywood’s Golden Age to win Best Actor for his performance in On Golden Pond . It was perhaps the last nail in the coffin of t he old Hollywood system and its’ associated Academy standards . Five years later, a still slick Paul Newman won for The Color of Money  and became the last Best Actor winner born before the Academy’s founding. A new age had dawned for the Oscars, but so too had a new barometer of relevancy. The 1980s might be the most interesting decade of the Academy Awards for me, because I think that’s where the transformation into what they are now really began. Hollywood had entered the blockbuster era, while the Academy was concerned about reasserting its’ commitment to prestige. No longer were the most successful or  imminently archetypal  movies of the time among the Oscar winning elite . Some of the winning movies were hardly even  known to the general public.

There was a Fandango post going around on Twitter a little while ago asking people to pick or rank the Oscar Best Actor-winning performances of the 2010s. Most of the responses were highly negative and critical of the overall quality of the actors and performances that the Academy had singled-out during that decade. And while this would be the response to any other decade of Oscar winners as well (everyone has their particular qualifiers and list of snubs), there is something notably disappointing in looking at that list. By my estimation it includes approximately three good performances (Jean Dujardin in The Artist , Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln , Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea ), three performances that are just fine (Colin Firth in The King’s Speech , Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour , Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody ), three that are kind of awful (Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club , Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything , Joaquin Phoenix in Joker ), and one that mi