A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo
Every generation has their set of coming of age movies, films about characters that ring true and which speak to certain people in very profound ways, and for some out there, “Cheerleader” could be one of those movies. A coming of age type of story about a young girl trying to figure out her own way, this is a confidently made movie which dares to be great at times, almost like a 2016 version of “Heathers” but with the emotional truths of the best of John Hughes.
“Crush The Skull” is an indie horror-comedy, which is something that is pretty hard to pull off. Comedy always works well with horror, but usually when jokes and gags are used sparingly to help alleviate some of the tension built up by the film, but making a movie that is equal parts is much harder, because how do you make something scary while constantly making fun of the situation but also how do you make something scary if you keep deflating the horror with a bunch of silly jokes? Throw on top of that the fact that this is obviously a low budget movie with a somewhat ambitious idea, and you have a recipe for something that threatens to not come together and leave the audience dissatisfied.
Somehow “Crush The Skull” does manage to find a nice middle ground between the two genres. Ollie (Chris Dinh) and Blair (Katie Savoy) are a couple and they are also burglars. A screw up in the beginning gets them in some debt that they need to get out of quickly, which forces them to make a bad decision and agree to work a job set up by Blair’s incompetent brother Connor (Chris Reidell) and his one-man crew Riley (Tim Chiou). Very shortly after starting this job, the foursome realize that they unknowingly broke in to the home of a deranged killer of some sort, the type of creepy weirdo who apparently kidnaps girls and keeps them locked up in a dingy basement of torture and murder, and they have to try to get out of this makeshift prison before they become the killer’s next victims. A simple yet effective set up that is a blend of “The Collector” and “The Ladykillers,” this movie is mostly quite solid and entertaining, though it definitely isn’t perfect.
“Embers” is thought-provoking science fiction, a mystery with no easy answers, and an accomplished film from a director making a feature-length movie debut. Everyone has lost the ability to make or retain memories, which makes you wonder how society would function in such a scenario? Would it even function? What do people do if they can’t remember anything? How can we even exist as people if we can’t remember who we are, or even why we are?
These are big questions, and “Embers” takes the best way to approach them, with small stories focused on a handful of characters. Instead of trying to portray an entire world grappling with this situation as it goes down (that would be the Roland Emmerich version of this movie), it is about a decade after it has all gone down, after a virus causes everyone to forget everything on a day to day basis, and we see how different people survive even a day in this horrible world. Because yes of course society can’t function and everything has broken down and people are forced to literally sift through the rubble.
Billy Mize is a singer-songwriter who enjoys legendary status among those in the know in the country music world, having written a number of hits for other artists and promoting people on his own television shows who would themselves go on to be gigantic stars. “Billy Mize & the Bakersfield Sound” explores the question of why the very talented Mize never became the household name that he probably should have become.
Even though everyone knows that Nashville is country music mecca, for a short while there Bakersfield, California was actually cranking out the best country music in the country. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard became hugely successful and popular by getting into this genre of country that was a little rougher and a little funkier than the slick country music from Tennessee and just cranking it out, along with a whole slew of other acts that came up in that scene and took it around the country one club at a time. And all of these musicians, along with legends like Willie Nelson, profess that their favorite artist is Billy Mize.Continue Reading …
The thing that makes a piece of art resonate is truth. Whether it is wholly true or just based on a nugget of truth, art becomes important when it reflects something that is real, even if in a small way. This is why “Imperial Dreams” feels like an emotionally strong and vital movie because it is obvious that the folks who made this know exactly what they are talking about – this may be “just a movie” with a made up story and characters, but in the end it is all too real.
“Imperial Dreams” is the story of Bambi (John Boyega, Attack the Block and Star…something…Star Wars? Does that sound right?), a young man just getting out of prison, heading back home to the projects in Watts, Los Angeles. We quickly discover why he ended up in prison in the first place, as we see the home life he returns to – his mother is an addict and a drunk, and he finds her passed out on the floor, and his very young son Day is all by himself with no one looking after him. Day’s mom is in jail awaiting trial for some theft charges, and Bambi’s uncle, Uncle Shrimp (the always great Glenn Plummer) may be nice enough to allow Bambi’s mother and his son to stay with him, but as soon as he sees Bambi, he starts asking him to do jobs for him. And we aren’t talking about jobs at a company that pay an hourly wage, we are talking about highly illegal shit that could get Bambi thrown back in prison for a very, very long time.Continue Reading …
“Wildlike” is an interesting coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl, one that goes to some unexpected and tough places, and I am not just talking about the Alaskan frontier. Most movies of this ilk that try to tell the story of a young girl usually involve cliques at school, or boy problems, or dealing with a schoolyard bully, something along those lines, usually very unoriginal and not very thoughtful. But “Wildlike” takes a different approach and tells a unique story and it has a nice emotional impact because of it.
“Wildlike” starts with Mackenzie (Ella Purnell) being shipped off to Alaska to stay with her uncle for the summer while her mother checks into a rehab center. With an addict mother and a recently dead father, Mackenzie is feeling isolated and alone, and going to Alaska does not alleviate those feelings at all.
Not all movies at film festivals need to strive for profundity or need to embrace some sort of cause. Sometimes movies are just movies and they are just supposed to be fun diversions for a short while, and “Body” is a film that fits that description. A sort of Hitchcockian thriller, “Body” is a wild little movie about an accidental death, the subsequent cover up, and what seemingly normal, every day people would be willing to do to save their own hides.
Holly, Cali and Mel (Helen Rogers, Alexandra Turshen and Lauren Molina, respectively) are three college age friends hanging out on the night before Christmas Eve (“eve eve?”), and Cali suggests a night time activity for the three of them in order to stave off boredom. So they hop into her car and drive way out of the way to an unoccupied mansion that Cali knows about, and they let themselves in and have a nice time, drinking booze, driving golf carts and just enjoying the big ole house. But then someone shows up, which results in a dead body, and the rest of the movie consists of the three ladies desperately trying to figure out how to get out of this mess.Continue Reading …
Sometimes movies are made for pure escapist entertainment, involving crazy sci-fi ideas or caped and masked superheroes or bank heists or ridiculous and unbelievable love stories, and these movies are designed to pull you out of your world and to enjoy basking in a different one, an artificial one, for a couple of hours, allowing the audience to forget about their bills and their medical problems and their family issues. But then sometimes movies are made not to help you escape from the real world but instead to help bring the real world into stark focus, to show you something that you would otherwise not know about, to challenge your worldviews and to make you do the unthinkable, which is to actually empathize with someone whom you might not have anything in common.Continue Reading …
“Results” is the kind of romantic comedy that doesn’t get made often enough, in that it doesn’t just focus on the differences between genders, it doesn’t devolve into some stupid “war of the sexes,” and it doesn’t revolve around some sort of fake tome or list of rules dictating how dating life should be or how relationships are supposed to work. This is just a story about some people and how romantic entanglements can be real and messy and can lead to some problems between otherwise well meaning people.
In this case, the well meaning people are Trevor (Guy Pearce), the upbeat trainer and gym owner who is totally business-minded at this point, one of his trainers named Kat (Cobie Smulders) and the rich client who shows up one day and kind of slowly changes their lives. That rich client is Danny (Kevin Corrigan) and the movie starts out actually centering on him, as the story starts with him being dumped by his wife, and then jump cuts to his arrival in Austin, Texas, where he rents a large house and wanders around it bored out of his mind.Continue Reading …
The cop from “Beverly Hills Cop” that’s not Eddie Murphy or Judge Reinhold is “Uncle John,” a real salt of the earth kind of guy, who leads a simple life doing some carpentry work and getting coffee with the boys at the local diner out in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and is it his fault that’s he’s also a murderer? Cause he’s a nice guy, no reason to paint him with this broad brush because of this one thing, amiright America?
The movie starts with the murder of a guy named Dutch, and we see that the murderer is John (a fantastic John Ashton). Thinking on his feet, he disposes of the body and does a pretty damn good job actually. And for the rest of the movie there’s an Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell Tale Heart” kind of vibe, as his friends speculate about the fella’s disappearance and possible death and he has to pretend that he hasn’t even seen the guy in years. And due to past history, Dutch’s grieving brother Danny (Ronnie Gene Blevins, doing his best sweaty Peter Sarsgaard) thinks (correctly) that John has something to do with Dutch’s disappearance, and that just lays a whole other layer of menace on top of everything for John.Continue Reading …