Comedy - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘The Nice Guys’

“The Nice Guys” is a return to the modernized film noir private detective template that writer and director Shane Black previously played with in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and like that movie, here we have a pair of men who don’t exactly get along but find themselves having to work together to unravel a conspiracy that have unwittingly stumbled upon, with wise cracks and dead bodies peppered in their wake. That is to say, for the most part. this movie is a good time.

For the most part because “The Nice Guys” isn’t afraid to get dark or a little real here and there, as both characters deal with alcohol addiction the whole time, with one abstaining and the other indulging, and this takes them down some dark paths, especially when it comes to how it affects the lives of those close to them. Also there’s some murdering, and sometimes it is played for laughs, and other times characters openly talk about how stuff like this makes them bad people, and they don’t want to be bad people, but sadly that might be the case no matter how hard they try. They want to be nice guys, but one is drunk and will take your money and the other is violent and fond of his brass knuckles.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Everybody Wants Some!!”

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is writer/director Richard Linklater’s return to the world of “Dazed and Confused,” his paean to his high school days in Texas in the 1970s, and here he is back with another love letter, this time to his college days in Texas in the fall of 1980. If you saw “Dazed and Confused” and thought that movie had too much drama going on and too much plot, then “Everybody Wants Some!!” is the movie for you.

Just bros hanging out doing bro stuff. That’s the essence of “Everybody Wants Some!!,” though this movie also seems to be saying “not all bros are bad, bro.” The story is mostly centered on incoming freshman and student athlete Jake (Blake Jenner) and it all takes place on the weekend leading up to the first day of classes. Jake arrives at an off-campus house set up for the school’s baseball players, where he meets his ragtag group of teammates on a team that we are told repeatedly is the best college baseball team in the state. And then Jake just spends the next three days hanging out with these guys, going to parties, cruising for chicks, drinking, smoking, playing cards, you know, just chilling, man.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Elvis & Nixon’

On December 21, 1971, Elvis Presley just showed up at the White House and asked for an emergency meeting with the President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Elvis claimed it was a matter of national security, as he told people he wanted to help fight the anti-American counterculture that had sprung up around the use of drugs in America as well as an unhealthy appreciation of the music of The Beatles. Nixon acquiesced, and twq of the most well known men of their day had a brief meeting about somehow working together. This meeting has been fictionalized and reimagined through the new film “Elvis & Nixon,” which paints an interesting portrait of a meeting very few people were privy to at the time.

Because how the hell could the renown “King of Rock and Roll” think he could help the United Stated government and why would he even want to do so in the first place? In this movie, Elvis has become frustrated with the state of his country and he sees people protesting on the streets and he thinks they are being anti-American, and he wants to help show the youth that it is important to have respect for their country and their government. And his decision to become a “Federal Agent-at-Large” plays into this, as he claims he can infiltrate underground communist groups, somehow undetected, and then he can help bust drug dealers and propagandists. All he needed, he felt, was a Federal badge from the Department of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to make him official. And he was quite insistent on this.

Review: ‘High-Rise’

“High-Rise” is an intense and dark satire about societal living, set inside a towering building that contains not only condos but stores, schools and other amenities designed to make the whole thing self sustaining, a tower which has an unforeseen effect on its many inhabitants. Remarking on the class issues that permeate almost every society but of which the British are seemingly much more acutely aware and critical, and also serving as a commentary on the societal forces that keep us from devolving into tribe-based groups of marauders and murderers, this movie uses sex, violence and comedy to show us a world which we are seemingly constantly on the brink of becoming.

Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves in to a newly built high-rise, a luxury building that is hi-tech and on the cutting edge, and he only has to leave the building to go to work. He meets some of his neighbors and the building’s architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) and he learns quickly that the people on the very top floors live a little more comfortably than the folks who make less money and live on the lower floors. As The Architect, Royal promised everyone a building that would give them a better way to live, a newly realized community of people that will engender real change in the way people behave. But when Royal thought this was going to be a positive change, it turned out to be quite negative. Things like power outages throughout the building and a poorly stocked supermarket start to get to the inhabitants, and they become more rowdy, angrier at the situation and each other, and smoothly enough the people in the building stop going out and stay inside and stay in their groups and start fighting each other. Before it is all said and done, the whole building has descended into squalor and chaos, with the poorer folks trying to get to the top of the building, and the few people already at the top indulging in pure debauchery on every conceivable level.

Review: ‘Morris From America’

“Morris From America” is both a coming of age story as well as a fish out of water tale, which actually compliment each other quite. It is one thing to have to go through the usual rigors of adolescence, what with the hormones and the puberty and the societal pressures from your apathetic and amoral peers, but it is something entirely else to do so in an environment in which you are automatically and definitively seen as The Other, the ultimate outsider, the stranger in the pack that the rest refuse to accept. Treacherous waters, indeed.

Morris (Markees Christmas) lives with his single widower father (Craig Robinson) in a town in Germany, where he struggles on a daily basis to fit in with the culture and people. His only friend is his German tutor Inka (Carla Juri), who encourages him to join a local youth center to help him make friends his own age. But the only person who shows any interest in 13-year old Morris is a 15-year old girl named Katrin (Lina Keller), and while he likes the promising bit of attention he gets from this older, prettier, more worldly girl, he soon finds himself twisted up by her, as Katrin proves to be way more complicated than his barely adolescent mind can handle. Throw in some casual racism from some people he interacts with and some simple culture clashes and you have a coming of age story filled with drama.

Review: ‘Hunt For The Wilderpeople’

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is the latest from Kiwi artist Taika Waititi, and it is a simultaneously irreverent and sincere movie about a lost foster child and an adrift widower coming together and helping each other out in ways that they didn’t even realize they needed helping. Hysterical and heartfelt, this is a great movie that shows how Waititi continues to grow as a filmmaker and shows so much promise for his future as a storyteller.

Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is a young teen making the rounds in New Zealand’s foster care system, and the movie opens with him getting his last shot at a home when he is introduced to the very nice Bella (Rima Te Wiata), who wants very much to take this kid in and make a nice home for him. Much less happy to see him is Bella’s rough and rugged husband Hec (Sam Neill), but he puts up with Ricky because he makes Bella happy.

Of course when things appear to be clicking and this seems to be a great situation for everyone involved, Bella dies because this is a movie and we need drama. The state wants to take Ricky back, which causes him to pack up and try running away in an attempt to just hide out in The Bush, and when Nec goes looking for him, he ends up injured and unable to walk for weeks at a time, forcing them to camp out in the thick forest until he can heal. This causes a problem when child services shows up to Nec’s farm and sees they are gone. Suspecting that he kidnapped the boy, a national manhunt begins and both Nec and Ricky find themselves on the run, neither of them wanting to have a run in with the government for their own reasons.

Review: ‘Cheerleader’

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.

Review: ‘Crush The Skull’

“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.

Review: ‘The Brothers Grimsby’

“The Brothers Grimsby” ended up being one of those movies that I did not like nearly as much as I wanted to like it going in. Sacha Baron Cohen is a comedy force unto himself, and he has a specific style of using idiocy to make some great points, to use jocularity to approach difficult subjects, but unfortunately there does seem to be something in the way of diminishing returns when it comes to his movies. And at the most recent and lowest end of this spectrum is his latest, an action comedy which would have fit right in with 2015’s glut of spy-related movies.

Cohen is Nobby Butcher, a welfare cheat and soccer hooligan living with nine children and his girlfriend (Rebel Wilson) in the small town of Grimsby, where he was born and raised. For 28 years, Nobby has been separated from his younger brother Sebastian due to the foster care system, but Nobby becomes reunited with his brother (Mark Strong), who now happens to be one of MI6’s top secret agents. Nobby immediately and predictably screws things up for Sebastian, and the two of them have to go on the run from MI6 in order to clear their names and also to save the world or something. You know, generic spy movie stuff.

Review: ‘Zoolander 2’

“Zoolander 2” is unfortunately not a good movie. Whereas the first “Zoolander” had some heart and came across as a fun and funny skewering of pop culture, “Zoolander 2” feels misshapen and just cobbled together, a weird series of bad jokes and celebrity cameos which make less and less sense as the movie wears on, until the whole thing finally ends with a group cameo by some of the world’s top fashion designers, cameos which surely made not one single person laugh, because who gives a shit if Tommy Hilfiger or Anna Wintour appear in this movie? What teenager is going to be wowed by this movie having a couple of lines of dialogue for Marc Jacobs or Valentino Garavani? And which in-the-know fashionistas (who actually would recognize these people) are ardent fans of Ben Stiller and absurdist comedy? For whom exactly is this terrible movie intended? Justin Bieber fans who also want to see him killed? Folks excited for a 2016 comedy featuring fat jokes? Susan Boyle completists? People who laugh at the mere sight of Willie Nelson?

“Zoolander 2” is an insane movie, and not in a good way. It looks pretty lousy, even for a brightly-lit comedy, and the “story,” as it were, definitely feels like 2 or 3 different screenplays mashed together. Like they couldn’t decide if they wanted to make a movie about Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) being a terrible father or if they wanted to make a movie about old fashion icons staging a comeback or if they wanted to make a movie about the fashion industry’s obsession with youth and overly thin models, so they just threw it all into a blender and hit the “frappe” button and now we have this odd thing in which Derek is a widower and single father who had his son taken away from him by child services and he stages a fashion comeback so he can try to get his son back but he doesn’t realize this whole thing is somehow a set up by Mugatu (Will Ferrell) to lure Derek’s kid into a trap so he can do a blood sacrifice that will somehow give multiple people everlasting youth, and also Hansel (Owen Wilson) has to decide which orgy group he loves more or something like that, and also a bunch of celebrities and pop stars around the world have been killed and trust me when I say it only tangentially connects to the rest of this slop.

And also Penélope Cruz is in this movie as a member of Interpol’s Fashion Police because fuck you America, that’s why.