Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Swiss Army Man’

In “Swiss Army Man,” a young man, stranded on a deserted island, finds possible salvation in the form of a corpse, washed up on the shore in front of him, a lifeless body which may be imbued with specific abilities that seem hard to believe and yet can enable this young man to find a way to survive.

The absurdity of this movie is made apparent within the opening minutes, but so is the ambitious and particular vision on display, coupled with just the right amount of odd beauty, all coming together to make one of those movies – either you are along for the ride or you are not. And people who choose this ride may find themselves oddly affected by this strangely touching story of a lonely man and his multi-purpose dead body.

Hank (Paul Dano) drags around the corpse (Daniel Radcliffe), somehow finding out his name is Manny, and together they get off that deserted island and make their way through the woods, trying to find civilization before Hank dies. Along the way, Hank starts talking to Manny, and at some point Manny starts talking back to him.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Lobster’

“The Lobster” is a dark satire and a bleak romantic comedy, a movie designed to both make you laugh at the absurdities of life and also bemoan the depths of despair possible within basic human existence. Alternating between funny and sad in such a way that the two become nearly indistinguishable, this is an interesting and unique movie that will delight some and repel others, depending on whether or not you are on board with what this movie has to say.

In the world of “The Lobster,” marriage is compulsory and single people are given 45 days to find their soulmate or else they get turned into the animal of their choice and let loose in the wild. We start the movie with David (Colin Farrell), freshly single when his wife leaves him for someone else, and he is immediately sent to The Hotel, where the single folk start their Find Your Soulmate challenge. At this Hotel he meets other single people, and the first half of the movie is about them all adjusting to the weird rules of The Hotel and trying to match up with some of the other unfortunate loners checked in with them. There is also a band of loners who escaped The Hotel and live in the woods, militantly preparing for something kind of vague, and David gets wrapped up with them as well.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Money Monster’

“Money Monster” is a kind of confusing movie, though not in the way one would think initially. The plot itself is quite easy to understand and there are no major twists or turns that take any effort to understand; no, in this instance, the confusion comes from the movie’s weird vacillation between broad satirical comedy and dark, edge of your seat thriller. If there could have been a better blending together of these two styles, it could have made for a nice scathing satire, but instead it seems like they just settled for fast paced thriller featuring George Clooney occasionally doing silly dances whilst wearing goofy accessories.

Lee Gates (Clooney) is a TV show host on a cable news network, like a CNBC or FOX Business type, where he talks about the stock market and gives people advice on how to invest their money, all while smacking a big red button that cues up all sorts of dumb videos that emphasize whatever he is yelling at the camera. Sometimes some girls come out and dance with him. Subtlety and nuance are most certainly not the order of the day when it comes to this portrayal of this kind of Mad Money with Jim Cramer style of show. The day after a “glitch” in some algorithm used by an investment firm lost $800 million of their customers’ money, Lee is taken hostage on his live show by a young guy named Kyle (Jack O’Connell), who lost his meager life savings in this company’s crash and only had his money invested in them because Lee suggested it on his show a few weeks prior. So who is to blame for Kyle losing all his money?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Miles Ahead’

“Miles Ahead” is a biopic about music legend Miles Davis, but not a soup to nuts, cradle to grave type of biopic that is so common and has become so boring. Instead “Miles Ahead” is a little more like other recent biopics such as “Steve Jobs” and “Selma,” movies that don’t try to stuff all the facts in to one feature length movie and instead cherry pick certain time periods to really dig into, to use these microcosms of a person’s life as a way to tell the whole story of who they are.

In “Miles Ahead,” co-writer and director Don Cheadle (who also stars) too this approach to the next level. He decided to focus on two specific time periods in the long and storied life and Miles Davis, those being his first marriage to Frances Taylor in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, and his “silent period,” which is pretty much the back half of the 1970s, a time when he lived as a hermit in his NYC apartment, wandering around like a ghost in his own home, haunting himself, and most notably, not making any music. And while the “young Miles” section with Frances contains a number of real life incidents, the “hermit Miles” section of the movie is almost entirely fictional, an outlandish story made up to portray Miles Davis as much more of a bad ass gangster prone to firing off his pistol and making demands of people, which were often met promptly. These scenes are more about showing us his attitude, his way of life, both positive and negative, and what kind of person he was. These aspects of this movie seek to tell the truth of the person, not necessarily the truth of the actual situation.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: ‘Being Charlie’

“Being Charlie” is a teen addiction drama directed by industry vet Rob Reiner and co-written by his son Nick Reiner. In a story that deals with the struggles of addiction and the idea that one has to want help before he or she can get it, this movie actually transcends the cliches and tropes of this particular type of movie by being both completely unpretentious and very clear about the story and characters and how they progress from beginning to end. A story like this could easily fall into “after school special” territory, but here it is a fully realized and emotionally true tale of tough love, hard choices and dangerous living.Continue Reading …

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: ‘Eye In The Sky’

“Eye in the Sky” is a tight thriller about drone warfare, examining the morality of making these brutal strikes from remote locations and the collateral damage they cause, but also getting into the complexities of coordinating with so many different people to make one crucial decision in a real time situation, and making this all seem that much more immediate and relevant is the current world setting, as the movie name drops real terrorist groups and actual events, driving home the point that this is how things really happen, this is the current state of the war on stateless terror.

So while being very current and of our time, the story itself is pretty solid in how new questions and obstacles keep popping up, making this a race against the clock type of situation, and as that clock ticks away the circumstances change, things are fluid at all times, and this causes ripples through all the layers of government involved in deciding whether or not to use this one mission to make one strike on one building to kill a small handful of people.

Review: ‘Anomalisa’

In some ways, “Anomalisa” is a startling movie, with surprises and ideas that pop up along the way that can easily catch a person off guard, especially if they don’t know what they are getting themselves into at the outset. If all you know is that this movie is an animated film from the guy who wrote “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and also wrote and directed “Synecdoche, New York,” that’s enough, just see this thing as soon as you can, and then read about it afterwards. Let this story just unfold in front of you, because it does so in a very compelling way, and reading about it ahead of time would kind of spoil things.

“Anomalisa” takes place mostly during the course of a one-night stay at a hotel in Cincinnati, as Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is in town to speak at a conference centered on customer service. But from the opening scene on the incoming plane throughout the rest of the movie, people try to be nice and make small talk with Michael along the way but he’s very stand offish and just not having it, which makes every one of his social interactions awkward. He even fakes enthusiasm when talking to his annoying son on the telephone, obviously exasperated with the little demon child he has wrought upon the Earth.