Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Captain Phillips’

“Captain Phillips” is Paul Greengrass doing pretty much what he knows best, which is recreating real life events in a way that feels immediate and actual, very cinema vérité despite the fact that movie stars often pop up to remind the viewer that this is indeed just a movie. Greengrass broke out with “Bloody Sunday” and he tackled the U.S.-Iraq quagmire in “Green Zone,” and now he’s here with a story about four Somali pirates hijacking an American cargo ship and taking the captain as a hostage for insurance money.

“Captain Phillips” is very much based on the very true story of a pirate hijacking in 2009, and as it was written by Captain Richard Phillips, it tells his story and his side of the whole nasty bit of business, and now this Phillips guy must really be on top of the world now because he survived a pirate hijacking (SPOILER! Duh! He wrote the damn book!), wrote a bestselling book about it, and now he gets to see Tom Hanks play him in a movie based on the book he wrote about a portion of his own life. Oh what a world.

But what makes “Captain Phillips” really work, and this is something noted in the Captain’s own book and is also backed up with a little bit of research, is how sympathetic the Somalis are in this instance. At least in this movie, the Somali men in a small, war-torn, destroyed village are ushered to the beach with machine guns pointed at them by gang leaders and mob bosses, forcing them to “work” by being pirates, as this has become the sole source of income for the impoverished country. And there is even a bit of a throwaway line about overfishing in the area taking away the livelihood of the people actually living there, though that’s really it. There really isn’t preaching or sermonizing in this thing at all, it’s just a very interesting true story that brings up some very tricky socio-economic points and issues on a geopolitical scale about the haves and the have-nots. But really this is just a taut thriller in which at the end of the day it kind of feels like there are no winners.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Rush’

Not the epic biopic featuring the three-piece Canadian rock outfit that we were all hoping for, “Rush” is the story of a pair of Formula-One racers in the 1970’s who developed one of the most intense and interesting sports rivalries ever. Directed by Ron Howard with consummate skill and featuring very good lead performances from Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds) and a tight script from Peter Morgan, “Rush” is actually better than I expected it would be, and is definitely worthwhile for people to check out.

What makes this movie work so well is that it is all based on a true story, which allows for some thinner characterization, as the real story is inherently appealing enough to carry the dramatic weight of the film. It doesn’t matter that English driver James Hunt (Hemsworth) was merely portrayed as a playboy and party animal while the German driver Niki Lauda (Brühl) was shown to be an overly serious fuddy-duddy with a penchant for pissing everyone off by being truthful to a fault; what matters is that we see these two excellent drivers push each other to the limits of their abilities in a sport that was as close to legalized Russian Roulette as any sport could get thanks to the very high death rate of drivers up to this point (the great documentary “Senna” goes into how Formula One managed to make their races much safer, but only after more tragedy hit the sport).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Spectacular Now’

Every few years, a movie comes along that reminds us how we are hearing and seeing the a certain set of stories over and over, yet these particular stories seems to work and continue to reverberate with us each time we see them, and this is because these are usually stories of universal truths, very basic emotions and feelings that just about all of us have gone through and to which we can relate, so that no matter how many times you change the characters and places and even story details, the truth of the emotions still come through. “The Spectacular Now” really doesn’t offer anything new per se, but it’s still a damn good movie and quite possibly one of those films people will be referencing in the future.

In “The Spectacular Now,” Sutter (Miles Teller) is a 17-year old high school senior who is just skating by and seems to be enjoying life to the 100% fullest. The movie starts with him talking about having a hot and fun girlfriend named Cassidy (Brie Larson), but she dumps him over a weird misunderstanding (born out of his reputation for partying hard), which sends him into a drunken downward spiral. Or was he already on that spiral? And then Sutter meets nice girl Aimee (Shailene Woodley), and they develop a friendship that starts to turn into something more, and almost doesn’t, but then it does, and then things are cool, but then there’s not cool, and then they are kinda cool again, and so on and so forth. You know how these high school dramady relationships work. It’s really all about who learns what along the way.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler’

Using this Washington Post profile of real life White House butler Eugene Allen as a way to tell the story of the United States civil rights movement, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” tells this bold story in bold strokes, but also manages to squeeze in a much more intimate look at the personal cost of said movement on the lives of the families it effected directly. This movie is both dramatic and melodramatic, in your face and reserved, both unbelievable and all too real, and at the very least the most interesting and worthwhile movie playing in theaters right now.

The Butler in this movie is a made up butler (though many of the coolest and notable things that happen to the fake butler in this movie happened to the Mr. Allen for realsies), and we start with him as a kid living and working with his family on a plantation in the 1920s, but if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought this was a plantation in the 1820s, and after this kid endures his mother being raped and his father being murdered, he gets taken into the house by the old racist lady who lives there and is taught how to serve, which he seems to excel at for some reason, like some really shitty superpower.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mud’

Jeff Nichols started pretty small with the little blood feud Southern-fried drama “Shotgun Stories,” and then followed that up with “Take Shelter,” an oh so slightly bigger Southern-fried movie about a man suffering from visions of an impending apocalyptic storm. And now he’s back with something a little bigger in scope, a Southern-fried coming-of-age drama called “Mud,” which makes Jeff Nichols three-for-three in terms of well-made movies.

In “Mud,” 14-year old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) stumble across a dude named Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive chilling on an island in the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta area. Not too many movies made about this region of the world (and as a matter of fact, according to the interwebz, this $2 million movie is the biggest budgeted film ever shot in Arkansas). Mud convinces Ellis and Neckbone to help him fix up a motor boat so Mud can reunite with his girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and get the hell out of dodge.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’

Starting out as a “slice of life” type of movie and ending as a brutal tearjerker (a two-hanky movie, they used to call ’em), “Fruitvale Station” is a small movie about a big issue, and the timing of this particular film couldn’t be any more perfect. Just as a gigantic mirror has been held up to this great nation so we can see just how racist we still are as a whole, this movie comes along and openly questions the perceived value of the life of a black youth in today’s America.

You have two choice right now: you can do a Google search on “Oscar Grant” and read about the tragic event that this movie is based on, or you can just go into the movie and let the shocking events fold right in front of you. Now, while I am sure it would be interesting to watch this movie play out without really knowing what the story is really about, I think it actually does the movie a great service to know ahead of time how the story is going to end. And since “Fruitvale Station” starts with real-life cell phone footage from a very fateful and horrendous night on a train station platform in Oakland, California in the early morning of New Year’s Day in 2009, it is apparent that writer/director Ryan Coogler knew this and wanted to make sure the audience indeed knows what this movie is going to end up.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Upstream Color’

This is going to be a rough ride, peoples. After several viewings of “Upstream Color,” I feel I have a grasp on the ins and outs of the story itself, but I’ll be honest and tell you that I am struggling with what this thing is actually about, know what I mean? So in the spirit of this film, which is a just a little experimental, I am going to try something new with this particular entry; we’re going to figure this thing out together.

First off, I’m going to need you to see “Upstream Color” for this to work. We need to be on the same wavelength. If you need a quick “review” before checking it out, I offer you this:

“Upstream Color” will surprise you. It will confuse you, and if you are paying attention and also allow it to wash over you, it will also reward you. To simply summarize the story and plot here before you see it would be a disservice, so instead I will say that this movie is about a woman meeting a man and together they help each other understand the world they live in and the forces effecting them, all subconsciously of course, and it all boils down to basic, simple human interaction, wordless even, thoughts conveyed through expressions, emotions reverberated and amplified with a look, all the things we know in our own lives, reflected in this movie that quite simply defies basic classification. Is it a romance? Science fiction? Horror? A mystery? An art film? A tone poem? A thriller?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Place Beyond The Pines’

“The Place Beyond The Pines” is the best kind of movie, the kind with a very strong, character-based story that goes to some unexpected places, populated with some great actors, backed by an excellent score, the whole time feeling like a real and lived-in time and place, and all told with the type of sure-handed direction that can’t be ignored or taken for granted. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Stoker’

Written by the star of TV’s Prison Break and directed by the guy behind “Oldboy” is not a way I thought I would ever start any review ever, yet here it is, it has come to pass, this is indeed a thing, as “Stoker” is directed by the great Chan-wook Park, based on an original screenplay by Wentworth Miller (which itself is a loving homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably his film “Shadow of a Doubt“). And you know what? It’s pretty damn good.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Dead Man Down’

Nowhere near bad enough to just hate on, but definitely too sloppy and ridiculous to actually be good, “Dead Man Down” is just a forgettable crime drama about revenge and learning how to move on with life after tragedy. From the director of the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes another middle of the road movie that has interesting touches here and there but ultimately adds up to a whole lot of nothing.Continue Reading …