Cinema Crespodiso

A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo

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‘Water For Life’ – An Interview with Will Parrinello

Twelve years in the making, Water for Life features three Latin American community leaders working to protect their water and ancestral territory from multinational corporations and corrupt governments that threaten the environmental, cultural and economic survival of their communities. Narrated by Diego Luna, Water For Life will have its Orlando premiere at the Florida Film Festival on Sunday April 14, and will screen again during the festival on Friday, April 18. In this interview with producer and director Will Parrinello, he discusses how he chose these three leaders to feature in the film, the process of making this film, and his hopes for what the movie can accomplish in terms of spreading awareness of these environmental battles and the people caught up in these fights.

Chris Crespo: What was the process of choosing these three people as your main subjects to tackle this issue of water use and land rights throughout Latin America? Did you initially want to make a documentary about this problem, or did you find out about the individuals first and then learned about their cause?

Will Parrinello: As independent documentary filmmakers, director of photography Vicente Franco and I have been making short documentary profiles of Goldman Environmental Prize recipients throughout Latin America since 2009. Each year the Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the environmental world, recognizes six grassroots environmental defenders from around the world who have achieved a seemingly unachievable goal. I wanted to make this film because I found these stories to be incredibly inspiring. At a time when we face numerous environmental challenges, many which seem insurmountable, here are stories of individuals who are courageously standing up, speaking truth to power and creating positive change in the world! Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Doctor Strange’

doctorstrange_poster“Doctor Strange” stands apart from all the other superhero movies out in the last decade because the previous success of all the different Marvel movies allowed them the comfort and room to expand their visual language and open up their stories to the realm of wild ideas made possible by the metaphysical and existential quandaries and principles brought up by your typical Saturday night college dorm room toot circle or mushroom-induced nighttime forest explorations punctuated with questions such as whether or not there are alternate dimensions beyond time which can be reached via astral projections. Sure there is a guy wearing a cape and a bad guy who wants to destroy the world and a training montage and whatnot, but there are definitely aspects of “Doctor Strange” that keep it separate and unique and interesting in this world of increasingly uniform comic book movies.

Boiled down to its essence, the story of “Doctor Strange” is rather basic. A character goes through a transformation that imbues him (or her, but let’s be real, most of these movies and stories are still about dudes) with skills and/or powers that can then be used to immediately stop a villainous person from destroying a city/country/world/universe. Along the way this new hero also becomes a better person, which almost always means becoming more selfless and helpful than at the beginning of the story.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Girl on the Train’

thegirlonhetrain_poster

From the director of “The Help” and “Get On Up” comes an adaptation of yet another global worldwide bestselling phenomenon of a book featuring the word “girl” in the title. This particular girl does not have any visible tattoos, dragons or otherwise, and while there IS a girl in this story who is indeed gone, our main character is not this person. Instead this is “The Girl on the Train,” the story of a sad sack alcoholic divorcee who gets herself wrapped up in some missing person’s case in between bouts of stalking her ex-husband and his new wife and their baby.

Rachel (Emily Blunt) rides a train to and from New York City everyday, and on her route the train stops just oh so perfectly so she can always see the backyards of her old house and her neighbors’ house. It is her “old” house because her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) lives there with his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and Rachel spies them from train with drunk, watery eyes. She also watches their neighbor Megan (Haley Bennett) and HER husband (Luke Evans) snuggling and sexing it up through the windows of their house, and she becomes envious of their affection and love making. She also has a habit of stumbling drunk through this old neighborhood of hers, causing problems with people there, so when Megan goes missing and Rachel was seen in the area at the same time while black out drunk, she finds herself a person of interest in the investigation. So she decides to do her own drunk investigating. Because that’s what sensible people do.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Train To Busan’

train-to-busan-movie-poster-lgTo be honest I thought we had hit peak zombie interest around 2008 and 2009, as pop culture’s fascination with the stumbling, bumbling, and sometimes running, brain munching undead and that the genre would be dying down for awhile as everyone moved on to the next thing. And then the long running comic book series The Walking Dead got turned into the AMC series “The Walking Dead” in 2010 and now it seems like these damn zombies are gonna be around for much longer than I originally thought. What a shock. I was wrong about something.

Again.

So now in 2016, what makes a zombie movie worthwhile? What can be done with the genre? “Train to Busan” answers these questions by setting up its own rules for their undead, coming up with distinct characters with clearly defined motivations for what they do, and finding a new setting for this type of story, in this case, on a South Korean bullet train during the morning commute right at the very beginning of a cataclysmic outbreak.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Point Break’

pointbreak_poster “Point Break” is a weird movie about a straight out of the 1990’s “extreme athlete” dude bro turned FBI Agent-in-Training who uses his extreme athlete knowledge to track down and infiltrate a group of daredevil eco-terrorists. Fortunately for him these guys are also a bunch of dude bros, and they even have a pretentious faux hippie chick to round out their general awfulness as people, so he fits right in. Soon enough his allegiances are called into question and he has to decide whether or not to help his new friends or do his duty for the FBI om my god who are we kidding of course he keeps working for the FBI and tries to bring down these bad guys because they are a bunch of a mantra spouting, Earth loving, offering giving, douche bag bad guys.

The movie starts with super dope extreme athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) and one of his best bros riding dirt bikes on some perilous looking cliffs, and Johnny is all like “It’s okay, bro, follow my line” and they embrace and we’ve all seen movies before so we know right away that this bro is gonna be dead and yup there he goes off the edge of a cliff.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Blair Witch’

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“Blair Witch” is a sequel to one of the breakout horror hits of 1999, “The Blair Witch Project,” the super low budget movie that popularized the “found footage” genre, which unfortunately persists to this day. So if we are going to get another found footage horror movie set in the woods, might as well go back to the original and pay respect by just coming up with a sequel that builds off the mythology of the first in interesting albeit confounding ways.

(As “Blair Witch” chooses to totally ignore “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” then we shall as well.)

James (James Allen McCune) sees a YouTube video that claims to be more found footage from the Burkittsville, Maryland woods in which people have reported strange things for years, and which is the same woods that a trio of documentary filmmakers became lost forever, the footage of their horrors and tribulations being found by someone and coldly edited together and released as a movie (as the conceit of these films would lead you to believe if you follow them to their logical conclusions).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sully’

sully-posterBefore we get started, look at that “Sully” poster there, the one featuring Tom Hanks as Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the experienced airline pilot who successfully landed a jetliner on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009. Why is he simply adjusting his collar and looking pensively to his side while standing presumably on the wing of his plane as it sits on the river, the barely-above-freezing water up to his waist? What kind of shot is this? Who thought this was the image to sell this movie? “Look at our hero pilot, half submerged yet totally fine, barely noticing the obviously oncoming hypothermia and totally ignoring the crash landed and partially sunken plane on which he stands. Isn’t this intriguing?” No, it is perplexing. What marketing department fixed this one up and which head honcho looked at it and said “yes, this is exactly how we sell this thing, put it out there now” because this is a bunch of dumb bullshit.

Okay, I feel a little better.

Now on to “Sully.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Don’t Breathe’

DontBreathe_MoviePoster“Don’t Breathe” is a horror movie that is mostly about suspense and tension, as a group of teenage delinquents in economically depressed Detroit decide to break into a blind man’s house in order to steal some money they believe he has, but the old blind man is an Army veteran and can take care of himself, which he does when he discovers the intruders, killing one almost instantly, and spending the rest of the movie hunting down the other two within the confines of his house. The robbers soon discover that this old loner has some secrets which he is determined to keep within the house, and he can’t let any of them get out, which means they have to get out of his house before he can kill them. The stakes don’t get much higher than that.

The only real problem I had with this movie is how the lead characters all suck, as in, they are shitty people. Much like the recent “Hell or High Water” or other fairly recent movies like “99 Homes” and “The Big Short” and “Take Shelter,” this is a movie that takes place in post-recession America, with the ultimate evil forces at play being the destroyed economy and the lack of opportunity for people left in the wake of this destruction. It is a tough road when you have a lead character that sets out to hurt others in some way just so they can get ahead, even if their reasoning is ultimately righteous. In “Don’t Breathe,” one of the three robbers in the movie is given the obligatory family-member-needs-them burden, which is shown and explained in one scene, so while this is the character’s motivation, it still feels like something thrown in just to try to justify this character’s shitty decisions.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hell or High Water’

HellOrHighWater_MoviePoster“Hell or High Water” is a modern western, a story about cops and robbers, set in dusty West Texas, featuring bank robberies and shoot outs and Mexican stand offs, and the “updated setting coupled with classic motifs” gambit often pays off in artistic endeavors, this being one of those times. But additionally, this movie fits another genre, one that sprang from the murky mess of the 2007-2008 housing market crash which catapulted the world into a global recession and saw the concept of The American Dream finally popped and deflated, and that’s the genre in which honest and good people find their lives on the edge of complete ruin thanks to believing in a system that failed them, with the ultimate “bad guys” being banks or bankers or anyone callous enough to be rich and openly uncaring during a time of great strife for many other people, you know, folks inflicted with “Scrooge McDuckitis.”

In “Hell or High Water,” Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is the kind of anti-hero seen in these types of movies, the ones that explore how the American Dream turned into a Waking Nightmare. When we meet Toby, he has already crossed that line, having decided to stage a series of small bank robberies in order to raise enough money to save their family farm from mortgage foreclosure. As if that’s not enough motivation, Tony also has children with his now-divorced wife and he’s determined not to let them continue down the path of poverty that afflicted his family for generations. Toby wants to secure his home and a future for his family. He’s a good dude. That’s what we are supposed to notice when we see him walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and demand money from the frightened tellers.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘War Dogs’

WarDogs_MoviePosterAn indictment of the for-profit war machine and sloppy government pandering…from the director of “Road Trip” and “Old School” and “The Hangover” trilogy? It happened, and it is called “War Dogs,” a cinematic adaptation of this 2011 Rolling Stones article detailing how two twenty-something dudes from Miami managed to get rich off of fulfilling government contracts for military weapons and supplies. One guy was sociable and worked very hard, and the other was a sociopath with the big vision and gumption to make things happen, and they enabled each other to dream bigger than ever, which as we all know in a story like this, could only lead to ruin. But what a ride on the way there.

David (Miles Teller) is fresh out of dropping out of college and he’s trying to make ends meet while living in very expensive South Beach Miami by massaging rich men for $75 an hour and trying to sell bed linen to retirement communities. When his stupidly hot girlfriend (Ana de Armas) lets him know that she is pregnant, he finds added pressure on him to find a way to make money and be a provider to the woman he loves and the baby he is stuck with because come on it’s not like they planned that shit yo. And those very one-dimensional descriptions of her character are apt because she only exists in this movie to provide motivation for David and to try to get some sympathy from the audience. She’s not a character. She’s a plot device with ridiculous eyes.Continue Reading …

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