Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Aloha’

“Aloha” is a movie that is not very good at all, mostly because it can’t decide it if wants to be a story about a disgraced military contractor moving on from past mistakes, or about a guy reconnecting with an old love and coming to terms with their new lives, or about a guy meeting a gal and how they fall in love with each other, or about the militarization and annexation of Hawaii by the U.S. government, or the appreciation of Hawaiian culture and how the “white man” keeps tearing it down by making promises to the locals and then betraying them, or about coming to terms with being a parent, or about the U.S. military engaging in private contracts with multi-billionaires. This all combined somehow into one movie and made for a mess of a picture.

“Aloha” starts with Brian Gilcrest (Bradley Cooper) arriving in Hawaii, where he sees some people he hasn’t seen in years, namely before he totally sold his soul to be a contractor facilitating arms deals in the Middle East (or something like that). He sees old flame Tracy (Rachel McAdams) and meets her children for the first time, which includes a 12 year old daughter who happened to come in to this world less than a year after Brian and Tracy broke up. Hmmm, I wonder if this will come back around in some way (of course it does, it is telegraphed from the opening). Brian puts on the puppy eyes and sort of tries to get back in with Tracy, though romantic overtures don’t seem to be what he’s really after, especially since he’s kinda buddy-buddy with Tracy’s current husband Woody (John Krasinski).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter’

Based on an urban legend about a lady who froze to death looking for the money buried in the snow in the 1996 Coen Brothers’ movie “Fargo” and centered on a fantastic performance in a sweet but ultimately sad movie, “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is a great movie about loneliness, ambition and not believing everything you read or see.

Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, Pacific Rim) is a depressed 30-something year old living in Japan, working a menial job for an obnoxious boss, living by herself and generally being very unhappy. Her coworkers insult her, her mother berates her for not being married, and she just has a shit life at this point. So when she comes across an old, damaged VHS copy of “Fargo,” she watches it and takes solace from it. As a matter of fact she sees the text at the beginning of the movie claiming it was based on a true story (which it was not), so she decides that she needs to go to Fargo, North Dakota to find the suitcase of money buried in the snow by one of that film’s characters. She watches this money burying scene over and over in order to gather clues as to its exact whereabouts and so she can make a map of the area to help her find the buried loot. And finally she sets out of her conquest, hustling her way to North Dakota so she can become rich.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Imperial Dreams’

The thing that makes a piece of art resonate is truth. Whether it is wholly true or just based on a nugget of truth, art becomes important when it reflects something that is real, even if in a small way. This is why “Imperial Dreams” feels like an emotionally strong and vital movie because it is obvious that the folks who made this know exactly what they are talking about – this may be “just a movie” with a made up story and characters, but in the end it is all too real.

“Imperial Dreams” is the story of Bambi (John Boyega, Attack the Block and Star…something…Star Wars? Does that sound right?), a young man just getting out of prison, heading back home to the projects in Watts, Los Angeles. We quickly discover why he ended up in prison in the first place, as we see the home life he returns to – his mother is an addict and a drunk, and he finds her passed out on the floor, and his very young son Day is all by himself with no one looking after him. Day’s mom is in jail awaiting trial for some theft charges, and Bambi’s uncle, Uncle Shrimp (the always great Glenn Plummer) may be nice enough to allow Bambi’s mother and his son to stay with him, but as soon as he sees Bambi, he starts asking him to do jobs for him. And we aren’t talking about jobs at a company that pay an hourly wage, we are talking about highly illegal shit that could get Bambi thrown back in prison for a very, very long time.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Wildlike’

“Wildlike” is an interesting coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl, one that goes to some unexpected and tough places, and I am not just talking about the Alaskan frontier. Most movies of this ilk that try to tell the story of a young girl usually involve cliques at school, or boy problems, or dealing with a schoolyard bully, something along those lines, usually very unoriginal and not very thoughtful. But “Wildlike” takes a different approach and tells a unique story and it has a nice emotional impact because of it.

“Wildlike” starts with Mackenzie (Ella Purnell) being shipped off to Alaska to stay with her uncle for the summer while her mother checks into a rehab center. With an addict mother and a recently dead father, Mackenzie is feeling isolated and alone, and going to Alaska does not alleviate those feelings at all.

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Homeless’

Sometimes movies are made for pure escapist entertainment, involving crazy sci-fi ideas or caped and masked superheroes or bank heists or ridiculous and unbelievable love stories, and these movies are designed to pull you out of your world and to enjoy basking in a different one, an artificial one, for a couple of hours, allowing the audience to forget about their bills and their medical problems and their family issues. But then sometimes movies are made not to help you escape from the real world but instead to help bring the real world into stark focus, to show you something that you would otherwise not know about, to challenge your worldviews and to make you do the unthinkable, which is to actually empathize with someone whom you might not have anything in common.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Results’

“Results” is the kind of romantic comedy that doesn’t get made often enough, in that it doesn’t just focus on the differences between genders, it doesn’t devolve into some stupid “war of the sexes,” and it doesn’t revolve around some sort of fake tome or list of rules dictating how dating life should be or how relationships are supposed to work. This is just a story about some people and how romantic entanglements can be real and messy and can lead to some problems between otherwise well meaning people.

In this case, the well meaning people are Trevor (Guy Pearce), the upbeat trainer and gym owner who is totally business-minded at this point, one of his trainers named Kat (Cobie Smulders) and the rich client who shows up one day and kind of slowly changes their lives. That rich client is Danny (Kevin Corrigan) and the movie starts out actually centering on him, as the story starts with him being dumped by his wife, and then jump cuts to his arrival in Austin, Texas, where he rents a large house and wanders around it bored out of his mind.Continue Reading …

FFF 2015 Movie Review: ‘Uncle John’

The cop from “Beverly Hills Cop” that’s not Eddie Murphy or Judge Reinhold is “Uncle John,” a real salt of the earth kind of guy, who leads a simple life doing some carpentry work and getting coffee with the boys at the local diner out in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, and is it his fault that’s he’s also a murderer? Cause he’s a nice guy, no reason to paint him with this broad brush because of this one thing, amiright America?

The movie starts with the murder of a guy named Dutch, and we see that the murderer is John (a fantastic John Ashton). Thinking on his feet, he disposes of the body and does a pretty damn good job actually. And for the rest of the movie there’s an Edgar Allen Poe “The Tell Tale Heart” kind of vibe, as his friends speculate about the fella’s disappearance and possible death and he has to pretend that he hasn’t even seen the guy in years. And due to past history, Dutch’s grieving brother Danny (Ronnie Gene Blevins, doing his best sweaty Peter Sarsgaard) thinks (correctly) that John has something to do with Dutch’s disappearance, and that just lays a whole other layer of menace on top of everything for John.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Leviathan’

Want to experience a long and slow yet brutal kick in the ass? Have any desire to see a piece of art that is so sure-handed in its vision and ambition as to make the final result unassailable in its veracity? You want to remember why some people make movies in the first place? Then time for you to check out this new classic of Russian cinema, “Leviathan,” a film that is simultaneously enormous and intimate, and which also acts as a scathing indictment of life in Russia as well as personal relationships that can easily fall apart.

Kolya is a mechanic living in a house right off the river in a small rural Russian town with his rebellious teenage son Roma and his new wife Lilya, and everything would be okay if it wasn’t for the town’s mayor Vadim and the actions he has taken to seize the land on which Kolya’s house sits. When the movie starts, Kolya has already been fighting the local government for awhile, trying to get them first to stop the land seizure and then finally just trying to get fair compensation for the land instead of the paltry sum the government has decided is reasonable. The movie actually starts with Kolya picking up his old Army buddy Dmitri, who is now a hot shot lawyer in Moscow, and Kolya gets to work in trying to get Vadim to either a) leave the house to Kolya or b) get the right amount of money for Kolya and his family.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Maps to the Stars’

“Maps to the Stars” is a satirical dark comedy about Hollywood and its denizens, namely the psycho-babble loving, attention whoring, secret hiding folks who pop up within the movie industry all over the place. A family with multiple shameful secrets, an aging actress trying to revive her career, a limo driver with acting aspirations of his own, and a mysterious girl all come together to form this weird little tale of hidden regret, sought redemption and psychosexual revenge.

“Maps to the Stars” initially focuses mostly on Havana (Julianne Moore), an actress with a famous, very respected and very dead mother, who is on the verge of an emotional breakdown, with the root causes for this being her quickly declining stature as a working actress in Hollywood and her memories of a mother whom she felt abandoned and mistreated her. Havana’s mother made a movie called “Stolen Waters,” and a remake of this movie is being planned, so Havana wants to play the same role her mother did, with the hopes that this would be her comeback. But people really don’t want to take Havana seriously, and it is kind of hard to take her seriously when she comes across as super flakey very often, as well as emotionally needy and somewhat unpredictable. It feels like Havana, especially as she is played by Moore, is a middle-aged version of Lindsay Lohan – once promising and in demand, but now washed up and the butt of all the jokes, she spends her time smoking cigarettes in her mansion, doing yoga and wondering why no one will work with her.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Two Days, One Night’

“Two Days, One Night” is a small little character drama that still manages to pack a strong emotional punch, which seems to be the modus operandi for the Dardenne Brothers, who have built careers out of making small, intimate, smart dramas about characters that come across as very real people. These aren’t movies about crime sprees or superheroes or government spies, there are no car chases, or CG-filled set pieces. Their movies lack space battles and time travel and future wars. They just make movies about people, dealing with people problems, and they are almost always great, and this movie is no exception.

Sandra (Marion Cotillard) finds out on a Friday that a ballot was taken at her place of employment, and 14 out of 16 employees voted to retain their significant bonuses at the expense of her job, as their boss explained that they could not afford to have both. This devastates Sandra because her family depends on her salary in order to not have to go back to government housing (there is a real sense of shame and despair from several characters in this movie at having to go “on the dole“), and it also makes her feel unwanted and insignificant. This is particularly bad because she is still getting over a pretty bad bout with depression and it doesn’t take much for her to want to just curl up on her bed and try to ignore the rest of the world, so right away she has to battle her depression just to deal with the idea of losing her job.Continue Reading …

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