Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

“Inside Llewyn Davis” may be the Coen Brothers most character-driven and intimate movie yet, and that says quite a bit coming from the fellas that brought us “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Barton Fink” and “A Serious Man.” Taking inspiration from a memoir by a 1960’s folk singer, “Inside Llewyn Davis” shows us one week in the life of a folk singer struggling to make it while simultaneously painting a portrait of the 60’s New York City folk scene, all centered on one guy who is pretty talented but also kind of an ass. Ahh the Coens.

Llewyn Davis (Oscar Issac) is indeed talented and throughout the movie we get a few glimpses of that talent when he performs, and during these moments we can see an idealized Llewyn Davis, using his skills to try to reach his full potential, and he’s actually bringing joy and pleasure to those around him through his folk singing and guitar playing.

This all stands in stark contrast to the rest of his waking life, in which he goes around couch surfing on different friends’ sofas night after night, he curses in front of his sister’s kid and insults her and their own father when he suggests that a life working a “normal job” would be merely “existing,” he constantly judges the musical output of others (obviously seeing himself as superior to everyone around him), he gets drunk and becomes loud and belligerent, and he’s also a bit of a sourpuss, which makes him even less pleasant to be around.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Grudge Match’

It’s “Rocky Balboa” meets old “Raging Bull.” Surely that was the entire pitch to whoever decided to green light this movie because this is pretty much what we got here. Two retired boxers get together for one last fight, and everyone laughs at them until they see the fight itself and realize these guys are for real. Meanwhile both old men recapture some of their lost youths while also finally moving their stalled out lives forward, and everyone lives happily ever after. The end.

No, really, that’s about it. Rocky Balboa himself Sylvester Stallone plays retired Pittsburgh-area boxer Henry “Razor” Sharp, and Robert De Niro plays his old rival Billy “The Kid” McDonnen, and there is a little mystery about why Razor retired early from boxing, robbing The Kid and the boxing world of the rubber match that everyone wanted to see, but that gets cleared up halfway through. Otherwise, we have a typical movie about older men being both nostalgic for a bygone era and also regretting past mistakes while still being very slow to actually learn from them.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’

Welcome to the wonderful world of 1990’s stock trading, a world juiced to the gills with money, sex and drugs, a world in which the strong are made stronger thanks to their unbridled greed and ambition, a world in which even the righteous are envious of the spoils of the wicked, a world in which money can pretty much buy just about anything, a world in which a stockbroker rewards his loyal staff with airplane sex orgies, a world directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and named “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is a movie based on a memoir by a stock broker turned convicted felon turned motivational surprise (shock!), so to say that the world portrayed in this film is actually several steps away from reality would be an understatement. But of course, this IS a movie, and should we be expecting reality in any way? Nope. Even though some things portrayed in this film did happen and still do happen in the real world, it’s still a compendium of made up shit, meant to paint a bigger picture. Facts are not necessary to convey universal truths. So what “truths” are in “The Wolf of Wall Street?”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘American Hustle’

So now David O. Russell has gone three-for-three in terms of putting out movies that are both crowd-pleasing and critically praised, no small feat for a guy who had his Jessica Biel political sex comedy taken away from him by an insurance company due to production troubles, leaving Russell with no movie and no prospects at the time.

After recovering nicely with the well made “The Fighter” and then following that up with the award-winning “Silver Linings Playbook,” here we have his version of a rollicking 1990’s Martin Scorsese movie, as “American Hustle” is filled with knowing voice overs, astute period details, great performances from an array of great actors, great musical choices blasting on the soundtrack, and features a fantastic juggling act of different characters and storylines that all come together so nicely.

Loosely based on the Abscam FBI stings of the 1970s and 1980s, “American Hustle” is about a pair of con artists (Christian Bale, Amy Adams) avoiding federal prison time by agreeing to work with an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) to take down a series of people on federal charges, starting with a well meaning New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner) and working outwards from there. But really it is not so much about the actual sting operations than it is about the characters and people involved in this whole thing. And of course just about all the character names have been changed, allowing for more creative license so they can have these characters say and do whatever they need them to say and do in order to tell their story, without having to worry about the real life people getting upset at the perceived misrepresentations of this fictional retelling of a real story.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Out Of The Furnace’

“Out of the Furnace” is a good movie, though it does fall short of greatness because of over familiarity. With elements of revenge films, movies about depressed blue collar towns in America, and stories about struggling families, there is little that feels new or fresh or original with “Out of the Furnace“. But there’s nothing new about chicken parmigiana yet if it is made well, it can’t be beat, right? So “Out of the Furnace” is like a meal you’ve had plenty of times before, and while it may not excite you, you still appreciate that it’s well made and with the highest quality of ingredients.

This is a story about a couple of brothers, Russell Baze (Christian Bale) and his younger bro Rodney (Casey Affleck). They live in Braddock, PA, which is a dying little town on its last legs, as rumors of the mill being shut down looms over everyone like the Sword of Damocles, and tragedy hits the Baze family pretty hard early on, and then gets compounded thanks to some unfortunate circumstances mixed with bad decisions. Soon enough, Russell has to deal with his girlfriend leaving him (Zoe Saldana) and his brother getting mixed up in a bad way with a local bookie (Willem Dafoe) and a violent criminal New Jersey hillbilly (Woody Harrelson). Round out the cast with always reliable actors Sam Shepard and Forest Whitaker and you got a movie that hums with life and meaning, even if its not saying anything original or deeply profound.

Because there is some stuff in here about the depressed American economy, thanks to both the setting and the very specific 2008 pre-presidential election setting, but nothing is really SAID about this state of the economy, it is just the setting for the story. Likewise, Rodney is a soldier with four tours of duty in Iraq under his belt, and he’s got both PTSD from the tours and he’s struggling to find work back in the States, but again, there is not much to distinguish this war veteran from other war veterans from other movies featuring characters like this.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Oldboy’

Well Spike Lee’s “Oldboy” is not necessarily an easy movie to review (hence the small delay in writing this), as the 2003 South Korean thriller of the same name and which Spike Lee and screenwriter Mark Protosevich remade (or “reinterpreted,” as Mr. Lee insists) has become one of the more popular non-American films to storm the U.S. in the last decade, and more personally, remains fairly high on my own list of awesome movies which everyone else should watch and appreciate. So how can I look at this new “Oldboy” as its own thing? It does not exist in a vacuum.

But is it really fair to compare the two movies? To be honest, I am pretty much unable to imagine this movie existing on its own, which means I can not imagine what other people would think when they see this movie for the first time without having seen the South Korean original. Would they be baffled by this movie? How would the ending hit them? Does the movie even make sense?

This last question is kind of important, as Spike Lee recently confirmed that this movie was taken out of his hands after he turned in a cut of the film that ran for two hours and twenty minutes and it was cut down to 105 minutes without any of his input or blessing (Lee also shot down the rumor that the film at one point had a three-hour runtime). No movie can survive a 35 minute trim to the story without suffering, and I really want to know what was cut, although I do have my suspicions based on what was actually screened for audiences. Will people understand the motivations behind the different characters? Will they be confused when people are angry at each other in one scene and then they are helping each other in the next scene without any rhyme or reason or connection to what came before?Continue Reading …

Review: ’12 Years A Slave’

Look, no one said this was going to be fun for anyone involved, okay? This is a fairly remarkable story about human endurance and the atrocities of mankind, and while it may not be “enjoyable” or “entertaining,” it still may be essential viewing for many people, whether they be cinephiles or people who just need a quick reminder of where we’ve come from, as that helps see where we need to go. No, no one said “12 Years A Slave” was going to be a cinematic walk in the park. But then again, maybe that’s the very reason why it should be seen.

This is based on the very true story of Solomon Northup, a man from New York in pre-Civil War America who was drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South, where he spent the subsequent twelve years of his life living as a slave named Platt. This is the story of his survival and the horrors he saw while in this horrible position. Being a free and educated man at the time of his kidnapping, he had the skills necessary to relate his story when it was all said it done, get it down in writing in the form of his memoir, one which was subsequently fact checked and deemed as accurate by scholars over one hundred years later, so what we have here is a first person account of one of the most troubling and disturbing chapters of our American history.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kon-Tiki’

“Kon-Tiki” is a great Norwegian historical drama about explorer and scientist Thor Heyerdahl, who set out on a journey in 1947 with five men on a raft made of balsa wood from Peru all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia, in an attempt to help prove his theory that Polynesia was populated by migrants coming from the east, as opposed to the prevailing theory at the time that the settlers came from the west. But really it is a story about how this fella Thor had an idea and was determined to see it through, even if that meant absorbing tons of rejection from all sorts of people and eventually heading out on this dangerous mission just to prove his point.

This is a pretty spectacular movie regardless of whether the story is real or what was fabricated to enhance the drama of the movie (apparently there was some beef with one of the characters being portrayed very differently from his real life counterpart, resulting in the filmmakers even coming out and apologizing to the family members of this misrepresented person). It is a pretty simple set up, in that these six guys agreed to set out on this mission, and the 101-day, 5,000 mile journey pretty much changed them all forever (but then again, how could it NOT?). But while the mission and goal are easy to understand, it is obvious that the trip was not going to be a piece of cake.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Counselor’

What on Earth happened to this movie? How did so many extremely talented people get together to make such a muddled movie? How come no one saw this coming? Why should we have? A ton of money was given to Oscar winning filmmakers and a Pulitzer Prize winning author to make whatever they wanted to make, and what should have been something great and worthwhile is instead, well, instead we got “The Counselor.” What a shame. What a crying out loud god damned shame.

There is a plot to “The Counselor” but the movie does not focus on it so much as it does the emotional and psychological ramifications on the different characters in the film. You see, there’s some sort of drug deal set up that involves shipping cocaine from Mexico to America, and somehow a lawyer only referred to as Counselor (Michael Fassbender) gets himself involved with this transaction, though it is not explained in any way, shape or form how he is involved with this deal. And then when the deal goes wrong, it is somehow linked to him tangentially, which is apparently enough for the Mexican Cartel behind this particular deal to come after him and everything he holds dear, which is personified in his new fiancée Laura (Penelope Cruz).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Don Jon’

This Joseph Gordon-Levitt guy, who does he think he is, what with the writing and the directing and the starring and what not. Know what I mean? This was the long hair doofy kid on “3rd Rock From the Sun” slash that orphan kid that saw Doc Brown as an angel in “Angels in the Outfield,” and now here he is writing and directing and starring in “Don Jon,” his own movie in which he gets to write his character having sex with many women, Scarlett Johansson being chief among them, and this guy even admits he wrote this with Johansson in mind! He set out to make a movie in which he beds ScarJo, and he succeeded! Like I said! Who does he think he is?!

Well he’s a damn genius that’s what he is, at least in that department. But surely the reason she even did the movie was because ot its strong, character-centric story which tries to break the typical rom-com mold, being much more upfront and real about sex and people’s sexual wants versus their sexual needs, with the added spin of internet pornography (and porn in general) being an obstacle for a character to get over and not just the source for some cheap “American Pie” style humor.

Instead it is a pretty focused story about a guy named Jon who makes it ABUNDANTLY clear that the only things he cares about are his body, his pad, his ride, his family, his church, his boys, his girls and his porn.Continue Reading …