Foreign - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Train To Busan’

To be honest I thought we had hit peak zombie interest around 2008 and 2009, as pop culture’s fascination with the stumbling, bumbling, and sometimes running, brain munching undead and that the genre would be dying down for awhile as everyone moved on to the next thing. And then the long running comic book series The Walking Dead got turned into the AMC series “The Walking Dead” in 2010 and now it seems like these damn zombies are gonna be around for much longer than I originally thought. What a shock. I was wrong about something.

Again.

So now in 2016, what makes a zombie movie worthwhile? What can be done with the genre? “Train to Busan” answers these questions by setting up its own rules for their undead, coming up with distinct characters with clearly defined motivations for what they do, and finding a new setting for this type of story, in this case, on a South Korean bullet train during the morning commute right at the very beginning of a cataclysmic outbreak.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Hunt For The Wilderpeople’

“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is the latest from Kiwi artist Taika Waititi, and it is a simultaneously irreverent and sincere movie about a lost foster child and an adrift widower coming together and helping each other out in ways that they didn’t even realize they needed helping. Hysterical and heartfelt, this is a great movie that shows how Waititi continues to grow as a filmmaker and shows so much promise for his future as a storyteller.

Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is a young teen making the rounds in New Zealand’s foster care system, and the movie opens with him getting his last shot at a home when he is introduced to the very nice Bella (Rima Te Wiata), who wants very much to take this kid in and make a nice home for him. Much less happy to see him is Bella’s rough and rugged husband Hec (Sam Neill), but he puts up with Ricky because he makes Bella happy.

Of course when things appear to be clicking and this seems to be a great situation for everyone involved, Bella dies because this is a movie and we need drama. The state wants to take Ricky back, which causes him to pack up and try running away in an attempt to just hide out in The Bush, and when Nec goes looking for him, he ends up injured and unable to walk for weeks at a time, forcing them to camp out in the thick forest until he can heal. This causes a problem when child services shows up to Nec’s farm and sees they are gone. Suspecting that he kidnapped the boy, a national manhunt begins and both Nec and Ricky find themselves on the run, neither of them wanting to have a run in with the government for their own reasons.

Review: ‘Goodnight Mommy’

As opposed to unstoppable monsters or slashers or any sort of undead situation, “Goodnight Mommy” derives its terror and tension from horrific situations which could plausibly happen. People don’t have to be possessed by demons or chased by aliens or hunted by psychopaths, they can just have problems which manifest themselves in a way that is, to say the least, not healthy for everyone involved. Thick with an atmosphere of dread and some good old fashioned Fear and Loathing, this is a movie that unnerves well before it gets to anything really shocking, but then it does a little bit of that shocking, too. Well, dependent on your exposure to these types of movies, anyway.

The movie starts with Lukas and Elias, twin boys, alone, playing in fields and woods by their isolated home. When their mother comes home, her whole face is bandaged, with only her bloodshot eyes and mouth exposed, and the twins are immediately off put by her appearance. She explains that they need to keep the house dark and quiet as she recuperates, she acts very sternly when enforcing the rules, and she only refers to one of the two boys, all of which upsets them and makes them question whether or not this woman is actually their mother. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Turbo Kid’

“Turbo Kid” is one of those throwback movies, an homage to a certain style of movie, in this case the post apocalyptic films of the 1980s, and the 1980s in general, done with the fervor of a child’s imagination set loose with gallons of fake blood, a fever dream of a movie about a “Mad Max” style wasteland ruled by a one-eyed tyrant and his insane and blood thirsty right hand man, in which a young kid all on his own tries to survive one day at a time.

The Kid (Munro Chambers) spends his days scavenging through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of 1997 (oh yeah, this movie takes place explicitly in the future…of 1997) looking for stuff to trade in for potable water. And every now and then he gets his hands on a comic book of a guy called Turbo Rider, who dispatched justice viciously with some sort of wrist-mounted laser beam. He then meets a girl named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) who at first seems insane and dangerous but they of course become friends because it’s the apocalypse, what ya gonna do, turn away a smiling face?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild Tales’

“Wild Tales” is a fun, crazy, over the top movie about six separate scenarios, short stories involving different characters, none of them related to each other at all save for the fact that each story involves some sort of revenge, usually stemming from very innocuous and seemingly simple actions, all of them building to insane crescendos of some sort of violence.

To go into details about each short story and to give away what happens in each one would do a disservice to you, so there will be a lack of deets here. Suffice to say, these stories involve a strange coincidence on an airplane, a mobster getting dinner at a deserted diner, a bit of road rage, undeserved parking tickets, a family cover-up, and lastly, a wedding party gone horribly wrong. In each story, seemingly normal well-adjusted people are pushed to the edge of civility (sometimes they are shoved, and sometimes it just takes a tiny little nudge), and that thin line that separate people from wild animals often gets blurred, if not outright erased. This is evident with the opening credits, as actors names are shown over images of wild animals, like lambs and foxes – sure we drive cars and exchange pleasantries and observe man-made laws, but in the end, we are all just as wild and unpredictable as any animal in nature.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘What We Do In The Shadows’

From Kiwi comedians (as well as writers, directors, performers, etc.) Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, “What We Do In The Shadows” is a mockumentary in the same vein as the great Christopher Guest films “Best in Show” and “For Your Consideration,” films that follow around a very specific group of people and explores their weirdness, especially in comparison to the rest of “normal” society. But instead of dog owners or bad actors, this is a movie about centuries-old vampires, who also happen to be flatmates.

“What We Do In The Shadows” centers on Viago, Vladislav (the Poker), Deacon and Petyr, who all share a flat together in Wellington, New Zealand. Most of the movie is them hanging out and building up to the masquerade ball held every year for undead folks like them, zombies and witches (though are witches really undead? Anyway…), but before we get there, it really is more like a slice of life kind of thing, what do these guys do with their time, what are they thinking, how they do coexist, and so on. So we get scenes like the one in which three of the flatmates sit together to go over the rules of the flat again, as one of them has been neglecting their chores, and obviously the humor of this kind of scene comes from the fact that they are having a very basic, standard argument among people who live together, just with the exception that they are vampires, so an argument could devolve into them flying in the air and hissing at each other.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: ‘Black Sea’

In “Black Sea,” we have a classic men on a mission set up, coupled with a “gold/green can change a man” story as well as some apparent anger over the haves and the have-nots, all of this done in the guise of a submarine-based thriller, which is a genre of movie making that is not nearly explored enough. The inherent tension of such a situation is already enough for drama, but then you add in a story involving gold and betrayal and murder and you have a pretty damn good movie.

“Black Sea” starts with Robinson (Jude Law) losing his job as a submarine driver for a salvage company. Getting laid off, with a meager settlement from the company and a lack of pension, leaves him reeling a little. Having already lost his family when his wife took his kids and left him because he was spending too much time on the job, the added pressure of losing his job and not being able to find another one is too much for him. So when a shady job comes around involving a downed Nazi submarine possibly filled with gold, Robinson is ready to take the risk to go get it. He gets an old shitty Russian sub and a crew of half Russians and half Brits (plus one American) and they all head into the Black Sea, in search of this buried treasure while trying to evade the Russian fleet above them.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 …

Review: ‘The Babadook’

“The Babadook” is the kind of horror film in which a family is tormented by some sort of supernatural being, like a haunting kind of deal, but with the added benefit of the horror being directly tied into the emotional needs of the main characters and their relationship to each other. So there is some scary stuff about monsters in the shadows, but then there are also the monsters inside of us as well, ooooooooo, get it? The real monsters?

Amelia (Essie Davis) is a single working mom, and she is single because her husband died in a car accident on their way to the hospital, which they were heading to so she could give birth to her son Sam. And as they approach Sam’s seventh birthday, Amelia is reminded again of her dead husband. What a bummer. Meanwhile, Sam has been acting out more and more, scared of possible monsters under his bed and in his closet, and feeling more and more isolated from his schoolmates, and his tantrums and seemingly paranoid fixations are just weighing down on Amelia more and more. Her personal life, what little of it she has, is a wreck, her son is off his rocker, and she struggles to even get some decent sleep. And just as all of this is going down, a mysterious book enters their lives.

Having a nightly habit of reading a book to her son before he goes to bed, one night he pulls a red book off the shelf called “Mister Babadook” and it is a short pop-up book about a ghostly creature thing trying to come into a home to be all scary and stuff and how you can’t get rid of him, and the art and the wording freaks out Amelia as well as Sam, who then starts believing that the Babadook is in their house trying to get them. Well, really trying to get Amelia, which makes Sam scared because he wants to protect her. And Amelia doesn’t believe him at first, but then weird things start happening around her, and before long, shit really starts to go crazy for her.Continue Reading …