TV Review - Bosch Season 2

So if you haven't checked out Amazon's original video content, you've been missing out on some good TV. It's not as vast as Netflix's array, but with Amazon recently opening up their video service to subscription instead of just an add-on to Amazon Prime, I think it's only going to get better and better. I have so much faith in them because of a couple shows, but mostly the one I'm praising today, Bosch.

I was intrigued by the pilot when it originally aired through Amazon's Pilot Program (they put out a bunch of pilots and the subscribers vote for which ones they should make into shows) in 2014, and had totally forgot about it when the first season went up last year. I might have mentioned it here once or twice in some way or another, but one of my favorite things to consume is good detective work. Anything that showcases a detective working a case, starting from the bare facts to solving the crime captures my imagination in a way many things don't. My favorite movie is Brick, and my favorite TV show is The Wire. If you have a solid piece of content with a detective solving a case from just the bare facts to figuring out who did it, I'm your guy.

While I admit that Bosch doesn't play out much differently than an episode of CSI or NCIS, it's the delivery that sets it apart. The world of Detective Harry Bosch is shown as this pulpy, noir-tinged crime center, where our lovable tough guy ace detective is showing us the seedy underbelly of LA. It's not new, none of it is, but it's delivered in this absolute, confident manner. A kind of manner you can really only have if your source material spans something as concrete as 20 novels, as Harry Bosch has. So when I went into the first season, I was immediately hooked.

A show that from minute one of episode one knows exactly what it's doing and where it's going is amazing in this day and age, and this is exactly what you get. Since the source material is derived from books and it's a TV show, the episodes are perfectly serialized like a book. Each one gives you a payoff for the one before it while setting up the next episode, often leading you to a cliffhanger. In the first season, I absolutely loved the confidence the show had with the story it was telling, as well as how the story played out. It felt like this complete experience. And then a year later, the second season came out.

I immensely enjoyed Season Two of Bosch, and honestly it's because it's very much like Season One. And I don't mean that as an insult. Often with TV shows, the seasons will vary in quality in the beginning and the end, as they struggle to find their voice while the show is airing. Often you'll see a show start a little rocky but with promise, get really awesome for two-to-four seasons, and then falter as they struggle with the moral quandary of designing the show to go on forever and ever, and somehow finding a way to end the show in a satisfying manner. This isn't even a problem just limited to broadcast television, as Netflix has been struggling with this since the beginning of House of Cards and to an even larger degree Orange is the New Black. Both of which are "adaptations" of books themselves, but have struggled to find exactly what is appealing from the source material and delivering that to the audience. With Season Two of Bosch, I think the apparent quality of it is really a testament to the creators, as their vision is so strong of what they want the show to be that they nailed it not once, but now twice on delivering the exact visual medium of what those books should be.

Now, I haven't read a single Michael Connelly book let alone one of the twenty Harry Bosch novels (believe me I will)  but I could swear up and down watching Season One and now Two that they were perfect adaptations of the books they were from. Except Season Two actually draws inspiration from three different books, but it is so seamless in the show I never would have suspected it. Much like Season One, Season Two is a slow burn, but I never found myself anything less than enthralled with the characters. It is such an enjoyable world for me to be in that I have no problem with the way the story is told, especially as a narrative it is perfectly paced episode to episode. If there was one complaint I had about Season Two, it would be without giving anything away, the way the plot connects the dots in the case. In Season One I really liked the way the plot connected the dots for Harry Bosch and thought it made a lot of sense for the world we were in. In Season Two the plot connects the dots for Harry in an equally similar manner. I still really enjoyed it, and as a stand alone season it would have worked for me just fine, but having the case start coming together in such a similar fashion feels a little too convenient when something similar came in the previous season.

I feel a little odd discussing so little about the actual material of the show, but I genuinely feel that it is so well told that I don't want to unveil anything before the show does if you were to watch it. Is this the Citizen Cane of detective stories? No. Is this on the same level as my favorite police procedural, The Wire? No it is not. But what this is is a perfect recreation of what it's like to read a well crafted detective story. The characters and performances are solid. Titus Welliver delivers this fantastic performance as the Noir detective. Wire Alumni Lance Reddick delivers an expected fantastic performance as the Deputy Chief. I think the only actor that waivers for me is the girl who plays Bosch's daughter, and I don't really blame her for it. When the majority of the cast consists of fantastic character actors, it can be difficult to just be average. The story is enthralling and the show is shot excellently. While it's not pushing any storytelling boundaries, it is decidedly so, in a way where the creators feel the material can speak for itself without trying anything flashy.

Plain and to the point, it's excellent television if you like detective procedurals. Have you enjoyed CSI, NCIS or Law and Order? Bosch is the older, more refined version of those shows. If you have seen any of those shows, nothing here will be surprising about the characters or the story, but it's a masterclass in displaying how the story should be told. No filler, no wavering, just pure pulpy entertainment about a dude solving crimes and the problems he struggles with.

Movie Review - Nightcrawler (2014)

  
    While I wish I was reviewing a movie about the X-Men character of the same name, 2014's Nightcrawler is in fact a much more disturbing tale than that of my favorite teleporting blue mutant. Nightcrawler has us following Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, as he navigates and rises through the ranks of news journalism. Specifically, Bloom wants to take on the task of a "Nightcrawler", someone who rolls around town late at night with a video camera, waiting for some sort of event to come through on the police scanner to video tape it, and then sells it to a news station for use in their broadcast. This can include car accidents, fires, murder and various other crimes.

Describing the tone of this movie is hard to exactly nail. I catch myself calling it something like charmingly disturbing. Nightcrawler is an excellent foray into the genre of thrillers, something writer/director Dan Gilroy is pretty well-versed in, having helped make two of my favorite recent thrillers, as his brother writer/director Tony Gilroy made Michael Clayton and Duplicity, and wrote the Bourne series. This family knows the thriller genre, and it shows. What we get here in Nightcrawler is an excellent turn from Jake Gyllenhaal as this...oddly likable sociopath who's goal is to start at the bottom rung and efficiently work his way to the top.

This movie lives and dies on Gyllenhaal's performance. He is in every scene of this movie, and he makes this character come alive. Someone less skillful would have teetered the movie to either too dramatic or too funny, but Gyllenhaal does an amazing job making Bloom a character who's not only amiable, but also downright terrifying. I keep stating that Bloom is charming and that he could be played too funny, and the truth is that Bloom as a character is absolutely terrifying, he's a sociopathic monster who we watch slide into increasingly dark pathways throughout the run time of this movie.

However, Bloom as a character is written in this odd, stilted way. He's this guy who presents himself as a super personable dude to the outside world, someone who is non-stop goal oriented and who endears himself to "business-like" codes of conduct in everything he says and believes. It's humorous to watch the way he talks. It comes across as incredibly uncomfortable and awkward, but the performance is so earnest, you have a hard time not believing that he believes what he says to be true. And that I think is the key to Gyllenhaal's performance. He plays Bloom so earnestly that you have a hard time not liking him on some level for being so dead-on goal oriented. Knowing exactly what he wants and figuring out exactly how to get it.

As uncomfortable and horrifying it is to see Bloom do these increasingly worse things in order to be the best Nightcrawler in town, it's also on some level hard not to respect that each calculated move he makes indeed rises him up the ladder of success to exactly where he wants to be. It seems that he learns something in every scene, and he's applying it to the next scene. It's utterly fascinating to watch. I absolutely love this movie. It's excellently shot and composed, the entire cast does a great job and the story is entirely watchable. Much like any good thriller, it's a slow burn, but at no point in time did I ever feel like turning it off, it had me hooked from the beginning with it's interesting subject matter, and watching our main character delve deeper into that world was enough to keep me on the line for the just under two hour run time.

If you like thrillers or movies that get under your skin, check out Nightcrawler.

TV Review - Fargo

I'm a little late to the game on this one, but I just finished watching FX's Fargo, the show based on the brilliant Coen Brothers movie of the same name and thought I'd give it a recommendation if anyone out there was on the fence.  You need to see this show.

The Fargo film is a personal favorite of mine. Set as a "modern" film noir, about a down on his luck man who, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up in the middle of a murder spree, and the unlikely cop who is tasked with bringing the perpetrator's to justice. The twist is that it's almost by definition the opposite of what Film Noir represents. Instead of everything looking dark and gritty, the story is told in the vast landscapes of Minnesota winter, being almost completely white. In place of everyone talking directly and with purpose, the film is filled with "Minnesota Nice" a term to describe the ridiculously and overly polite dialect people take on in the area, despite being mad, sad, angry or any other feeling, they always talk in this absurdly polite tone. It's beautiful, engaging and different from any other crime movie I had ever seen.

The Fargo tv show is much the same as the movie, borrowing the best elements and using the most of their tv series length to explore what made the movie such a hit, We start the show with Lester Nygaard, played by famous Hobbit and troubled Watson Martin Freeman. Lester is plain and simple, a loser. He's a man with no self-confidence, no ambition, just drifting through life with his unhappy wife and mediocre job of selling insurance. On the day we meet him, he has a run in with a man who bullied him in high school, who causes Lester to get his nose broken. While he's in the hospital waiting to be helped, he runs into our baddest of bad guys, Lorne Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton. Lorne is a hired gun who is at the hospital to treat some wounds he got while on a mission to kill his last target. Sitting next to each other, Lester tells Malvo about the bully, and Malvo straight up offers to kill him if Lester says yes. Though they get interuppted, and when answering a question to a nurse at the same time says yes, and never clarifies no to Malvo. The next day, the bully is found dead, and now realizing what's happened, Lester finds himself in-between the unflinching, inhuman Malvo and the cops who are trying to track down the killer.

There is so much more that happens, even in the first episode, but to give it away would be a disservice to the show. The show is pretty much split three ways, the viewpoint of Lester and him trying to distance himself from any crimes committed, Malvo and his continual murdering and debauchery and Deputy Molly Solverson, a relatively young cop on the local police force who is trying her best to figure out all the missing pieces of the puzzle. This follows pretty much the same formula the film had, of following our unfortunate man Jerry, the two hitmen he's in contact with and Marge, the pregnant police chief who is determined to put it all together. At all times, each person is just one step behind another, but which one it is is always shifting and keeps the film and the show tense, wondering who is going to get away with what or if that will be the thing that gets them caught by the cop.

One thing that I absolutely love about the show is that it isn't serialized, that is to say, it's not like a regular tv show where each week something new is happening in the town and all the characters react to it. No, Fargo plays out like a 10 hour movie, split into hour long blocks for easy tv viewing. It's one single, solid story that starts, escalates, climaxes, and resolves it's lose ends by the time it's done. It's truly a masterpiece in long-form storytelling. Much like the film, you don't go in knowing everything, and not all questions are answered at the end, but every piece of the puzzle has been put together. The immediate problem that was the reason for the show's existence has been resolved. If this was the only season this show gets, it's perfect in exactly the way it is and it stands as a shining example of what creative minds can do with a good story basis. However, this first season has been nominated for 18 Emmys, among other awards, so chances that they'll make a second season are fairly high. However, much like my other favorite newcomer show of the year, True Detective, a second season has been stated by the creator to focus on soley a new story and not the people we followed this season. One of the strongest aspects that the film and tv show share is that it's just a slice of life view. We're introduced to these characters as they are, we see them run into problems, we see those problems resolved, end of movie. Without knowing immense back stories and spending excess time in these characters lives, we just see one little chunk out of it, which adds to the believability factor of it all. Both the movie and the show run on the false premise that the events that occur actually happened, but it just reinforces what the movie makes you think, that this could happen, that this totally happened and you just never heard about it. That's part of what makes the show so special, I believe, that you can believe this has happened.

The acting in this show is phenomenal. As much as I liked Martin Freeman, it's really Billy Bob Thornton that shines in this show. He's always been an interesting actor, but he's been flying under the radar for a while now, much like Matthew Mcconaughey until not too long ago, and he's the stiffest competition he'll have for tv awards this year. They both deserve them for outstanding performances. Thornton really captures the demeanor of a sociopathic hitman, from the cold ruthlessness of the acts he commits to the calm demeanor he goes about them, to the fake personalities he adopts to get around society. While Freeman gives a fun and well done performance as our loser Lester, every scene with Thorton has him stealing the scene from whomever he's with. Allison Tolman, the woman who plays the Deputy Solverson is an absolute delight and I hope she wins every award she''s nominated for, and her chemistry with Colin Hanks is delightful and fun. Gotta shout out to Bob Odenkirk for keeping up appearances in good tv shows, as well as sketch comedians Key & Peele as two FBI agents.

Alright, I gotta stop gushing about the show, I'll just end up repeating myself. But please, if you like the movie, if you like crime dramas, check out the Fargo TV show, it'll have you shouting "Aww jeeze!" at every turn.