Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Carol’

The 1950s was not that long ago, especially when you consider how old some countries and cultures are, and definitely when you consider how old the entire world is, in comparison to that the 1950s was practically yesterday. And yet the time period was so different in so many ways, with gender and sexual norms in society established in a way to maintain the hetero-male dominance of the day. “Carol” is a love story set in that time period, a tale of what happens when two people fall in love in a time and place in which their love is perceived as abhorrent and deviant behavior requiring psychotherapy and segregation from society.

Which is a shame because if it wasn’t for the dumb hang ups of the people at large and the ridiculous social mores foisted upon everyone, this would have been a nice relationship for everyone involved, but because the main characters had to deal with a bunch of bullshit outside of who they were, this relationship ends up involving a lot of anguish. Leave it to the ugly judgmental side of our culture to turn something so pure and wonderful into so difficult and painful.

Review: ‘The Revenant’

“The Revenant” is a number of different things rolled up into one. It is a grand artistic statement. It is a meditation on life and death, as well as mankind’s place in relation to nature. It is the story of a nation’s messy and violent birth. It is about revenge. It is about a father’s love for his son. And maybe above all else, it is a reminder to always play dead. At least when there’s a bear involved.

An expedition of settlers in 1820s western America gets attacked by a large group of Native Americans, and the small group of survivors has to try to trudge their way though thick forests and across mountains to make it back to their outpost alive. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is their scout and tracker and it is up to him to lead them through the land to safety. But when he’s mauled by a grizzly bear protecting her cubs and finds himself on the verge of death, he becomes a burden that the men try to carry through the wilderness, which they soon discover is impossible to do. A pair of men, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), agree to stay behind and watch over Glass, but Fitzgerald tricks Bridger into leaving Glass behind, which they do. Also Fitzgerald kills Glass’s half-Pawnee son, which gives the dying Glass something to live for – righteous vengeance.

Review: ‘Youth’

As if you couldn’t tell by the title and the cast, “Youth” is a movie about the passing of time and how we may differ in our approach to dealing with the inevitability of death that awaits us all and the possible futility of life and what we take from it while in the moment. A story about lost loves, dashed dreams and broken hearts, as well as appreciation of the past, hope for the future and a strange optimism for the present, this is the kind of movie that can affect you emotionally but only if you let it, if you allow it to wash over you, burrow into you and meld with your own psyche, so that you can see yourself reflected in at least one of its characters.

Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a retired composer and conductor enjoying a quiet and lazy vacation at a hoity-toity resort in the Swiss Alps when an emissary from the Queen of England visits him to ask if he would come out of retirement for one performance for the Queen and her grandson. Fred refuses to do so for “personal” reasons, but the invitation throws him for a bit of a loop, as he wasn’t prepared to even think about doing something like that, and now it is making him feel some emotions that he’s been stowing away for years. His past as a hugely successful conductor is closely linked to his wife, and now in this moment in this resort he is thinking about her with obvious regret as to how he lived and what became of her (something we do not learn the full extent of until the end of the film). It doesn’t help that his personal assistant is also his daughter (Rachel Weisz), and when her husband leaves her for a pop star, she has her own breakdown and vents by yelling at her father and accusing him of being a shitty husband and not the best father. Not exactly what a person wants to hear in the twilight of his or her life.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Big Short’

At this point, “The Big Short” is the closest we are ever going to get to any sort of justice or catharsis when it comes to the worldwide economic collapse of 2007-2008, a global catastrophe caused by the unbridled greed and avarice of bankers who saw money falling from the sky and thought it would never end, and who never once stopped to think about what might happen to everyone else around them. It is now possible to draw the direct line between these peoples’ actions and the ruination of millions of lives, and yet nothing has been done to either punish those responsible or ensure that something so insane doesn’t happen again. Thanks to the inaction of our government and criminal justice system, these white collar criminals continue to operate while the average citizen gets handed the bill, and now the only resort we have left is to drag these people out into the street and shame them, which would be great if they felt any shame, or remorse, or any other human emotion, but they obviously don’t. That is why “The Big Short” even exists.

Review: ‘Joy’

“Joy” is a movie about the invention of the Miracle Mop.

Okay, “Joy” is obviously about so much more than that. It is about the lady who did that, and what kind of odds she was up against when she set out to change the world one invention at a time. Sure there is nothing glamorous about a mop, but then again there wasn’t anything glamorous about this lady’s life and yet she turned shit into shinola, lemons into lemonade, resolve into opportunity, you know, that kind of thing. What happens when you make adversaries in business and you can’t even rely on your family to help you out of trouble? You make it happen by yourself, just like Joy.

Review: ‘Brooklyn’

Did you know that the name Saoirse is pronounced “Seeir-sha?” Well, now you do.

With that out of the way, “Brooklyn” stars Saoirse Ronan as an early 1950s young Irish immigrant, heading to America in search of a life better than the one she could have at home. This is a love story, but it is more than that as well, as our main character is in a state of transition and we see her start to realize some of her potential and find her place in the world.

Eilis (Ronan) starts out living with her mother and sister in Ireland, where she can’t get a job because the economy is rubbish and for whatever reason she can’t find a decent enough fella. Her sister pulls some strings, though, and Eilis finds herself on a freighter heading for America, where a job at a department story and a room in a boarding house await her. Initially she is miserable, as she has difficulty getting along with the other girls in the house and can’t stop thinking about home and how much she misses her family. But then she meets a nice dude (Emory Cohen), and she starts to get along with the people around her, and before you know it, she’s finally making a nice life of her own.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Creed’

“Creed” is an amazing movie, if only because it is the seventh installment in a series of films that people thought should have ended over twenty years ago, and really this should have been a crappy movie, with a story thrown together by some hacks, put together all in the name of making a few extra bucks and exploiting the good will amassed by decades of previously successful movies. No one could be blamed for being cynical about this endeavor – even Sylvester Stallone was reportedly reluctant to agree to this movie because of how hard it was to make “Rocky Balboa,” a movie which itself works as a nice send off and closure to a film character and series that has been with us in pop culture since the mid 1970s. But Stallone eventually saw the potential, and he agreed, and now here we are with a sort of sequel spin off movie, featuring the son of a character that was never the main character of these stories and who died four movies in, and lo and behold, against all odds, this is not the cynical cash grab people initially feared but instead is a heartfelt, genuine, character-first drama, the kind of movie that made the original “Rocky” so popular to begin with, the kind of story that puts its characters ahead of the plotting and which gives us actual people to root for and identify with, and in the end, just flat out works.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Spotlight’

In the grand tradition of movies about journalism as well as whistleblowers, “Spotlight” is a remarkable movie not because of the salaciousness of the story details but because of how well those details and this story are handled. An even keeled and classy drama that feels right at home with similar dramas from the 1970s, we have here a movie that can be seen simply as a procedural but really does point to some more profound aspects of our day to day lives and how they are interwoven with larger institutions throughout our culture.

For years and years the idea of the child molesting Catholic priest has been around, to the point where people were fine with joking about it among themselves. And despite being “a thing,” it has persisted. This could only continue within a system that allows it to happen, discreetly of course. And as history has shown, the best way to deal with monsters is to drag them into the light. And that is exactly what happened in from 2001 through 2003, as the investigative reporting team of the Boston Globe made this their mission in regards to the Catholic Archdiocese and their consistent cover up of the sexual abuse of children in their own city.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Room’

“Room” is a tense little character drama expertly made in every way, a raw, emotional movie that tells a tough story and freely digs deep into a nightmarish scenario that we all know is far too common and which we try not to think about very much. This is the type of movie that reminds us about what kind of terrible things happen out there in our world, and how there are people going through tremendous hardships and how amazing these people can be in their very basic quest for survival. Sounds like fun, no?

And despite being heavy, “Room” is not a depressing movie, it does not beat you over the head and force you to feel bad for some people, but instead in a way it manages to reinforce our more positive feelings about humans and our will to live and what we would do for each other. Yes this is a story about a person who has been suffering terrible abuses for years, but it is also a story about motherhood and the connection between a parent and child and how this can be one of the strongest bonds in the known universe.

Ma (Brie Larson) lives inside a small windowless room, with only a skylight far above providing any natural light, and the rest of the walls and ceilings covered in sound-proofing foam. In this room she has everything – a toilet, a bathtub, a tiny kitchenette, a television, a bare minimum of supplies basically – and this is because she can never leave the room. She is locked in, an electronic keypad keeping the door shut, with supplies being brought to her by some creepy guy named Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), who tells her how lucky she is to have someone like him to bring her stuff, all while he’s taking off his pants and climbs into bed with her.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Steve Jobs’

We’re all sick and tired of the same old biographical picture formula, right? It’s been done for years and we have seen it time and time again, regardless of whether the film’s subject is an athlete, a businessman, an inventor, an artist, it simply does not matter, we get the same thing over and over, which is to say, a “greatest hits” package of a person’s life, tracing their steps from childhood to as far as they can go, if not all the way to death. By shoving everything that happened to a person into a two to three hour movie means we just skim the surface, we get the superficial details, with very little insight, and then before we know it, the movie is all over. Might as well have just listened to music while reading a boring, by the numbers biography. But with “Steve Jobs,” this is not the case at all, a different tack has been taken, one that is very effective and which tells us more than the “birth to death” biopic could have told us.

Written by Aaron Sorkin and based on an authorized biography of the same name, “Steve Jobs” does not start with the person’s birth and childhood and work its way through his youth all the way to the end when he became one of the most popular people in the world through his work with Apple, but instead this movie cherry picks three very specific moments in the life of Steve Jobs and these three moments are actually quite similar, giving the movie a very interesting structure with which they were able to work in, and by limiting the scope of the story, Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and actor Michael Fassbender were all able to get way more out of this character and managed to tell the story of someone’s life without getting bogged down in all the extra details.Continue Reading …