Reviews of the Bosch

The Long Goodbye  might be the most well-known hardboiled detective title if for no other reason than that variations on it have become a shorthand for the genre as a whole. Any time someone is making a pastiche of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, or James M. Cain, the words “long” or “goodbye” are almost guaranteed to turn up in there somewhere. It’s an evocative title for sure, but popularity has to account for some of that too, and as I understand it, fans of the genre often point to this book as one of the best. And yet unlike its’ predecessor, likewise a Philip Marlowe mystery, The Big Sleep , it never got an adaptation during the classic Hollywood era when noir was at its’ peak.  Instead, The Long Goodbye   didn’t hit the big screen until the 1970s’ New Hollywood boom -which did have a particular reverence for the film noirs of old. And yet director Robert Altman chose to set it in the present of 1973 -perhaps the biggest of several major departures from the...

Christopher McQuarrie is a writer first. He made his name in the industry on his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Usual Suspects and became a reliable script doctor over the next several years. In 2008 he wrote a movie I quite liked by a filmmaker I will not speak of called Valkyrie , which starred Tom Cruise. And some spark must have been lit between the two because McQuarrie subsequently made his mainstream Hollywood directing debut with Jack Reacher , and thereafter followed Cruise in some capacity or another on most of his movies, usually as a writer, though in the case of the fifth Mission: Impossible  movie, director as well. One could see this as Cruise simply playing favourites with a friend, but McQuarrie makes for a surprisingly good fit. Rogue Nation  in some ways is a perfect Mission: Impossible  amalgam that translates the core of the series’ appeal. It plays in the classic spy movie conspiracy stuff that the first film did well, while maintaining the acti...

Within a month we’ll be seeing for the first time in thirteen years a new James Cameron movie. Those Avatar  sequels he’s been working on all this time are finally ready for the world, and whatever you thought of that movie it is exciting to have one of the formative blockbuster filmmakers back in the game after so long an absence. Of course it’s not his first lengthy hiatus, Avatar  itself being separated by twelve years from Cameron’s previous feature success, the last time he made a movie not set in his world of blue aliens and space colonialism. It was twenty-five years ago next month that James Cameron first shook the movie world, breaking box office records, Academy Awards records, and racking up all kinds of acclaim -the latter at least for a little bit. Titanic  was one of the first movies I remember being popular to hate, alongside  the Star Wars prequels  and Schumacher Batman  movies. Which is weird, because unlike those examples (for what charm...

The role of the spiritual in Sebastián Lelio’s films is worth examining. It was a major aspect of Disobedience , which was set in an Orthodox Jewish community, and it plays an even more fascinating role in The Wonder , a movie about a girl in post-Famine Ireland who does not eat but for supposed “manna from heaven”. Her steadfast belief in the sanctity of her fast and the divinity keeping her alive runs counter to the scientific observation of her appointed nurse from England. It is a miracle, the community determines, but do miracles happen? How long can Anna O’Donnell continue living like this? The perplexing situation and its’ fascinating themes of faith are the products of author Emma Donoghue, who adapted her own novel with Lelio and Alice Birch -based on actual cases in the nineteenth century of so called “holy anorexia” or “fasting girls”, young girls who would go long periods without eating as a kind of religious penitence. Donoghue’s approach to the shocking practice is an int...

Someone on Twitter made the funny observation that this year has produced three movies that satirize wealthy elites by placing them on a secluded island. The first of these that I saw is interestingly the last that’s getting a wide release: Glass Onion .  Then there’s of course Triangle of Sadness , the most enthusiastic to lambaste its’ subjects of ire. And now The Menu , a movie I and several others thought we had an idea of given what the trailer gave away. It was a bad trailer that revealed too much, but one that doesn’t quite show the movie’s full hand; and in fact suggests a couple lesser things the movie doesn’t end up being. Much as the premise of a disciplined, possibly psychotic chef feeding his guests unusual, even mysterious dishes might evoke it, cannibalism plays no part in the film. Neither is it a spin on The Most Dangerous Game , as the marketing seemed to indicate by focusing on one “hunt” sequence of the movie. This is actually a relief, The Menu is cleverer and ...

I think  She Said  is on some level aware of its’ own bad optics. It really has to be. This is a movie about the New York Times  investigation into Harvey Weinstein made by the very system that enabled his abuse for so long. Worse, it’s being positioned as an Oscar contender, which is already in poor taste before you factor in the specific domineering presence Weinstein had in that institution, that his company’s biggest goal (and which it largely succeeded at) was winning Academy Awards. The problems with sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood have not gone away, or even improved all that much in spite of the efforts of the #MeToo movement. It’s an insane amount of hubris and that premature patting itself on the back which Hollywood is known for that produced this film. So it faces an uphill battle to earn its’ dignity or any degree of sincerity. It puts in more of an effort than I anticipated though. The movie can’t ever get away from the exploitative nature of its’...

Inevitably it was going to come to nukes. This whole franchise is based off a Cold War-era TV series about spies, nuclear weapons had to factor in eventually. And it also just happens to fit the aesthetic interests of the new director brought on to helm Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol , Brad Bird -an avid fan of Cold War subjects and iconography, as exemplified in his two most popular movies The Iron Giant  and The Incredibles . The fourth Mission: Impossible  film was his live-action movie debut, after back-to-back Pixar classics, and if you pay attention you can certainly find the clues to his animation background in several of his choices here. Although maybe the most beneficial, which feels to directly owe something to The Incredibles  in particular, is the expansion of the cast around Tom Cruise as major players in the action. This is the first Mission: Impossible  movie to genuinely be about a spy team, with Ethan Hunt at the centre, rather than simply a To...