Book Review - "Trunk Music" (Michael Connelly) - Bosch-verse Book 6

1997

Meaningless Rating: ***1/2

A consequential entry in the Bosch canon, Trunk Music finds the LAPD detective commuting between Sin City and the City of Angels. A porno producer is found dead in the trunk of his Rolls Royce, bullet to the back of the head. All indications show it's a mob hit, but of course, if it was, we wouldn't have much of a novel. The mystery is fine, with enough of a twist of Greek tragedy to render it a cut above, and with a change to Bosch's status quo, this book rates fairly high on the list of Connelly's crime universe.

Movie Review - "Breathless" (Jean-Luc Godard)

1960

Meaningless Rating: ****

A feeling of destabilization; a creation of suspense by juxtaposing quick jump-cuts (the signature of this film - at least, one of the first things I ever heard about it) with long tracking shots (via wheelchair, I believe, though maybe that’s apocrypha) and extended moments where the camera moves in the center of the action, following nothing, like a swimmer treading water, eyeline desperately floating along the surface. 

Michel, Laszlo Kovacs, whomever, steals a car, seemingly out of boredom. On the way to Paris, he's cornered by a cop, whom he kills with a pistol that he just happens to find in the glove compartment. Is this the first, of other, examples throughout the film where the director interferes in the story to make events play out in the way in which he needs them?

An artist with so much to say but not yet any structure or discipline with which to say it, Breathless overwhelms. Though, considering the title, maybe that's the point. For Godard, what happens behind the camera melds with what's in front of it.