Reviews of the Bosch

Certainly, Meyer Lansky is deserving of his own movie. In the grand infamy of American gangsters, he may not have the name recognition of Al Capone or John Dillinger or even his own close associate Lucky Luciano, but he is one of the most influential never to have his own gang himself. He was a clever guy, known as the “Mob’s Accountant”, and his history in organized crime stretches from the early days of prohibition through to the early 1980s, encompassing such episodes as the development of Las Vegas, a government conspiracy to aid the war effort, an ill-fated attempt to build a casino empire in Cuba, and being deported from Israel. He’s also been the direct inspiration behind so many figures in gangster media for decades. It’s quite a big legacy. And yet Lansky , a biographical movie directed by Eytan Rockaway, fails to communicate any of that. The film has quite a small budget for such a larger than life subject, but there are ways to work around that. Rockaway does not, choosing i...

Everybody knows the iconic shot from Gilda : Rita Hayworth popping into frame by tossing her head back, her gorgeous flowing hair flying and resting on bare shoulders as she looks alluringly just off camera in a perfect display of feminine glamour and sexuality. “Gilda, are you decent?” asks her husband -her reply is a wicked and sensual “Me?”, before noticing he’s not alone and adjusting her composure. I must have seen this shot a dozen times watching The Shawshank Redemption  over the years, its’ had an immortality, notorious both for typifying the classic Hollywood pin-up and being just an anomaly of movie sexiness at a time when that wasn’t generally permitted. Gilda  was taken to task by the censors in 1946 for more than just this shot. A black strapless gown that she wears while performing “Put the Blame on Mame” late in the film caused some consternation as well -as did many elements of the films’ plot, which sees her being -or at least acting- sexually promiscuous arou...

Every year during Pride Month it’s customary to see companies and businesses engage in a practice that’s come to be known as “rainbow capitalism”, in which they show solidarity in small and usually disingenuous ways in an effort to appeal to LGBTQ consumers. Every year the conversation is had as to whether this is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it further shows how acceptance of the queer community is becoming more and more mainstream: homophobia, biphobia, and even transphobia (as disturbingly powerful as it still is in a lot of countries) do not sell. But on the other hand these are cynical corporations that have done tangibly very little for the queer community and their support is largely performative in service of that aforementioned mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture. Alex Hirsch in his Tartan Chamber One such corporation is the most powerful Hollywood studio and ever-expanding media conglomerate, the Walt Disney Company. Like clockwork at the start of the month, their officia...

Maybe it’s a testament to Edgar Wrights’ skills as a filmmaker or to the documentary genre itself when operating at it’s best and most compelling, but after watching The Sparks Brothers , about the career of a weird musical duo I’d never heard of, I immediately wanted to learn as much more about them as I could. That’s perhaps the highest praise you could level at a documentary, and especially a music doc designed to give something of a complete impression of its artists of choice. The Sparks Brothers you leave it feeling like you know this band and know these brothers as people even if you’ve never heard of them before. And somehow the movie still leaves you wanting more. I was drawn to this project because of Edgar Wright. Like many movie nerds I think he’s one of the best, or at the very least most interesting filmmakers working in the medium, and I was particularly curious as to how he would do a documentary. The Sparks Brothers  is his first, initiated through him learning one...

Way back in the days when Pixar would attach an animated short to their feature theatrical releases, one of the best was a little film called La Luna , which released with the movie Brave . Even among the versatility of the Pixar short films, it was notably stylistically unique and intrepid. You felt the personal touch of its’ director, an Italian animator Enrico Casarosa. Ten years later he’s finally made his feature debut for Pixar, and it’s a delight to see that his artistic vision has translated largely intact from one form to the other (it’s nice too that he seems to have brought over the characters from La Luna  in a minor role).  Luca  is not quite like any Pixar movie preceding it. I said the same thing about   Soul , and I’m glad to do so again. At the very least it doesn’t look like any other Pixar movie. The character designs are rather particular, less logical in shape and expression and more visually interesting than other Pixar movies about humans. Thei...

We’re almost exactly a year out now from when  In the Heights , the much-anticipated adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first hit Broadway musical, was supposed to open on June 26 th  2020. In that reality, its’ celebration of community, socialization, and optimism would have perhaps gone undervalued, regardless of how the movie was received. It’s not a particularly original observation to note that it hits more powerfully now than it would have back then and encapsulates a catharsis we all share as the pandemic is waning down. Timing is a major factor in how this movie is being received, and welcomed with much greater enthusiasm than it could have generated a year ago. But perhaps all that timing does is reveal the importance of those values. In the Heights  would have been just as great a year ago, but the reasons for its’ greatness are more meaningful now. It’s been a long time since a musical like this came along. Not counting that filmed performance of Hamilton ...

Shortly before its’ fiftieth anniversary in 2019 it was announced that first-run episodes of Sesame Street were going to be moving permanently to HBO Max. HBO had taken over the program in 2016 in a controversial deal that saw the inter-generational staple of childrens’ television move off of its’ basic cable home of PBS to a premium television service nowadays almost exclusively associated with adult programming. It wasn’t hard to see the integrity of Sesame Street being compromised, a show originally meant to target specifically children of low-income households. You had to pay a more expensive fee to see it, and that’s even moreso the case now that it’s on a streaming service not everyone can afford. PBS still gets to air new episodes some seven or eight months after HBO Max, but it nonetheless feels wrong that such an important show is being restricted from reaching as many children as possible. I was forced to reflect on this while watching Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street...

Even for the subject matter of a dissolving relationship, The Killing of Two Lovers  is an uncomfortable movie. It certainly starts off in such a fashion, opening on a dishevelled man pointing a gun at a sleeping couple in their bedroom before backing out of a murder at the last second and jogging down the road to his home …or rather his father’s home. Because as we soon learn, the house he was in was in fact his own, and the sleeping couple his currently separated wife and her lover. And this defining moment from the start of the film casts a shadow over the next eighty minutes or so as we watch this man fail to deal with his grief over the situation in the knowledge of what he may be capable of. The Killing of Two Lovers premiered at last years’ Sundance festival courtesy of writer-director (and editor) Robert Machoian. It’s the kind of film too that Sundance was made for, and that Machoian apparently specializes in: microbudget features shot with a lot of minimalism and few name...