Reviews of the Bosch

Francis Ford Coppola insists The Conversation  wasn’t inspired by Watergate. The script had been around since the mid-1960s and filming concluded before the tapes broke publicly. Nonetheless, by April 1974 they were still all anyone was talking about, America was in the midst of its’ first major impeachment process in over a century, and here came a movie by one of Hollywood’s hottest young filmmakers about uncovering secrets through surveillance. Whether or not it had anything to do with the biggest political scandal of the twentieth century was ultimately irrelevant. It struck a chord at that time that it never could have had it come any earlier or later. This may be what gave it a boost in reception and acclaim, including the Palme d’Or win at Cannes and a handful of Oscar nominations that it might have won had it not been for Coppola’s other film of 1974, The Godfather Part II . The parallels run deeper than subject matter too. According to Coppola, the very equipment portrayed...

“All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.” Jiro Horikoshi Great artists and artisans don’t always have control over what their art is used for. Did William Barton, who designed the Eye of Providence on the American one dollar bank note, have any idea it would become a symbol of unhinged conspiracies for decades? It’s certain Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson didn’t approve of the popular bootleg image of Calvin peeing that began circulating as he was drawing the strip. The guy who first made that Guy Fawkes mask would likely have been taken aback by how it became a cultural symbol of anarchy and revolution. And Jiro Horikoshi absolutely hated the war in which his Mitsubishi fighter craft were employed for aerial combat. The truth is that once a work of art is out in the world on some level it no longer belongs to the artist -it can be taken and twisted by whoever finds new meaning or value or purpose in it. There’s nothing the artist can do but hope that the art stan...

Even after seeing it, I’m not entirely sure what the impetus for the plot of Those Who Wish Me Dead actually is. As far as I can gather the super important information being carried by Owen (Jake Weber) and thereafter his son Connor (Finn Little) across some six states is evidence of a major money laundering operation by a mob boss played by Tyler Perry of all people. There’s not much specificity to what it really is and just how damning, only that they need to make it public (and adamantly not through the police) before they are dispatched by a pair of hitmen. But this vagueness isn’t a weakness for Taylor Sheridan’s new film, as its’ much more about the sheer brutality of this manhunt against the brutality of nature than the details of its plot. Taylor Sheridan is an interesting filmmaker. Having written the acclaimed screenplays for Sicario  and Hell or High Water , directed Wind River , and created the series Yellowstone , he  has carved a niche for himself as about t...

Zack Snyder is not a filmmaker I have any interest in. I skipped his extended cut of  Justice League  earlier this year because I couldn’t care less for it in light of what was destined to be excruciating discourse. I also didn’t think it had any chance of changing my opinion on the movie -from everything I’ve heard, I was probably right. But even apart from the hideously toxic cult of personality that Snyder has either knowingly or accidentally cultivated for himself among the worst kind of genre fans on the planet, he’s just not a terribly compelling director. His stylized aesthetics on movies like 300 and Watchmen  are visually distinct but substantively hollow, and while he’s certainly a competent filmmaker, beyond what his movies say about his values and his politics, there’s nothing I could deem all that worthwhile to them. Army of the Dead  however, piques my curiosity. For one thing it’s a zombie film, and Snyder’s last excursion in this genre, his 2004 remak...

I remember a film class in college in which we discussed the voyeuristic qualities of movies, principally focused on Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the seminal Laura Mulvey essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in which that film is directly referenced (it’s also the origin of the “male gaze” idea in critical feminist film theory). The thesis is that movies by their nature are inherently exercises in voyeurism and that they are centred in the male perspective, psyche, and (heteronormative) sexual desire. It’s a good read, though very Freudian, and certainly provocative even to this day. As pertaining to Rear Window , Mulvey notes its’ function as a metaphor for watching movies, Jimmy Stewarts’ inertness relative to the audience, and the erotic subtexts of his watching his girlfriend through his apartment window. We as a class also read into the variety of apartments he spied on, and how his observation of the central crime is tantamount to entertainment. The same could be said of ...

Oxygen  wasn’t nearly as tense as I expected for a movie so claustrophobic. Not that it’s always trying to be in fairness. It’s more of a mystery than a thriller for much of its’ runtime, as it follows Elizabeth (Melanie Laurent) trying to piece together who and where she is in real time while trapped in some kind of computerized medical cryo-unit no bigger than a coffin. For both her and the audience, fear gives way to desperate curiosity as twist after twist of her circumstance is revealed. Claustrophobia was a major theme of the last movie by director Alexandre Aja too, the alligator horror   Crawl , where much of the movie takes place in a flooding basement. Oxygen  though doesn’t feel quite as constrictive or urgent as those scenes in that movie do; it’s intimate, but with a kind of freedom in the filmmaking. The stakes aren’t as visceral, though they are more dramatic. Because what the movie is about goes far beyond the simplicity of escape. It’s very difficult to t...

I wonder if Guy Ritchie is in something of a mid-life crisis these days. After failing to replicate the success of Sherlock Holmes  with his horrible 2017 King Arthur reimagining, he took the easy-hit Disney job of Aladdin  which set him up financially to do whatever he wanted. Last years’ The Gentlemen  was a nostalgic return to his early British gangster film roots, only not an iota as good. Wrath of Man  though is something a little different from any movie he’s done previously, which perhaps says something about where he is as a filmmaker now. As such it’s a fascinating movie, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘good’. Certainly it’s better than anything Ritchie has made since The Man from U.N.C.L.E ; but it is often tough to digest and without the substance to back its’ philosophically provocative title. That title was changed from Cash Truck , the name of the 2004 French film that it is a remake of. Ritchie’s version is quite bleak though, to the point of r...