REVIEWS - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘After Earth’

“After Earth” is currently being shit on by critics and audiences alike, and I have to wonder why everyone is choosing to not give this little sci-fi movie a chance. Because really there is absolutely nothing that is woeful or so terrible about this movie that it deserves any vitriol. Really, the worst response I can foresee for this movie would be that it is forgettable and will be barely a memory in ten years, but this has nothing to do with the craftsmanship displayed and more to do with the very small story that seems to be the opposite of the large-scaled adventure that was promised by all the marketing and commercials.

“After Earth” takes places 1,000 years after humans have left Earth for a more hospital home, and constant war with an alien race has forced them to establish troops of Rangers, trained soldiers who are supposed to do battle with these aliens. But none of this really, truly matters, because it only exists to set up the real story, which is that of a stranded father and son trying to get back home. While on a mission to a different planet, a spaceship crash lands on Earth, which is now full of incredibly hostile indigenous lifeforms, and the only survivors of this crashed ship are Commander Cypher (Will Smith) and his non-ranger son Kitai (Jaden Smith). Oh and some mean ole alien thing called an Ursa that the humans were transporting for training purposes, and which is now loose on the hostile planet along with Cypher and Kitai. As Cypher’s legs are both badly broken due to the crash, he has no choice but to send his cadet son on a dangerous 100-km trek to find an emergency beacon so they can signal for help. And really that’s the whole movie right there, Kitai leaves his injured father behind to find the beacon or else they are both going to die. And that’s it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Furious 6’

Following the over the top ridiculousness of “Fast Five,” the fifth installment in the increasingly popular “The Fast and the Furious” series, comes an action spectacle that veers on the edges of satire, loaded with plot holes and logic leaps and bits of human action that defy all known laws of physics, and proving that rampant disregard for human life is a hot commodity at the box office. “Furious 6” is here, and it is going to get in your face with all of its action and stupidity and you it dares you to not enjoy any of it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Hangover Part III’

To be fair there has never been a comedy sequel that improved on the original, so why did any of us expect “The Hangover Part III” to really be all that good, even after ‘The Hangover Part II” kind of let us all down after “The Hangover” kicked everyone’s asses? They ditched the tired conceit of trying to recap their lost night and replaced it with a more straight forward story, and they all ditched the concept of this movie being a comedy and replaced that with a weird thriller involving kidnappings, druggings, murder and prison breaks. Also one of the main characters going off his meds and just being unhinged and wild eyed the entire more. And I’m not talking about Bradley Cooper.

“The Hangover Part III” starts with Alan (Zach Galifianakis, The Campaign) off his meds and causing so much damage that he literally gives his father a heart attack from all the stress, which then leads to his family sending him off to an an institution of some sort to “get better.” His old wolfpack buddies Stu (Ed Helms, Cedar Rapids) and Phil (Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook) agree to accompany Alan and his brother-in-law Doug (Justin Bartha, Gigli) on the long trip to this place. But on the way they are kidnapped by henchmen and tasked with finding Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong, Pain & Gain), who stole millions of dollars from some bad guy named Marshall (John Goodman, Flight), a bad guy who blames the entrance of the cancerous Mr. Chow into his life all to a chance encounter between Alan and Doug the drug dealer (Mike Epps, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Resident Evil: Extinction) all the way back in the first movie. So the Wolfpack has to find Mr. Chow and bring him to Marshall, or else Marshall is going to kill Doug, kidnapping him, and again removing the character from the equation once again, because who wants to see Justin Bartha do anything except sit quietly at gunpoint?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’

Four years after J.J. Abrams gave us “Star Trek Babies,” he is back with the rip-roaring sequel, “Star Trek Academy: Their First Assignment,” in which the young crew has gotten oh so incrementally older and even less interesting and is forced to face their greatest adversary yet due to the rules of summer blockbuster filmmaking, which state that a second movie in a trilogy must go dark, i.e. “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and the inevitable blood letting that awaits us all in “The Smurfs 2.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Iron Man 3’

Hey, you guys hear about this “Iron Man 3” picture that just came out? Apparently it was hotly anticipated and people came out in droves opening weekend to check it out, a record setting opening weekend, mind you. But was it all worth it? Did this movie delight the world like the first “Iron Man,” or did it leave a wet fart in the collective mouth of the audience like “Iron Man 2?”

Well it is safe to say that “Iron Man 3” is certainly no wet fart in the mouth (okay, enough with that imagery). As a matter of fact, “Iron Man 3” definitely boasts the tightest and most professionally written Iron Man story to date, as the first film had a very unspectacular third act and denouement, while the second film was just a cobbled together mess of a movie. But not so with “Iron Man 3,” written and directed by Shane Black, who took the elements that gave him such success with “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout” and implemented them here with aplomb. Right from narration that opens this movie, one can feel Shane Black’s unmistakable style on this thing, as the opening voiceover feels like a leftover bit of dialogue from “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (the last Shane Black – Robert Downey Jr. collabo).Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Oblivion’

You want some Tom Cruise doing his thing where he’s always awesome and works super hard and does lots of stunts inside the confines of a gorgeous and aesthetically appealing sci-fi film with a script cobbled together by pieces of other movies? Then “Oblivion” is the movie for you because it is all of these things, and while the movie is by no means dumb, you will likely realize that in many ways this film is a grand mash up of “Wall*E,” “Moon,” “Battleshit,” “I Am Legend” and “Blade Runner,” but without actually elevating any of these borrowed elements and making them add up to something bigger.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Place Beyond The Pines’

“The Place Beyond The Pines” is the best kind of movie, the kind with a very strong, character-based story that goes to some unexpected places, populated with some great actors, backed by an excellent score, the whole time feeling like a real and lived-in time and place, and all told with the type of sure-handed direction that can’t be ignored or taken for granted. Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2013 movie review: ‘Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp’

Robert Beck a.k.a. Iceberg Slim, was a pimp turned bestselling author who used his ignoble lifestyle and career choices to help propel himself out of that same lifestyle, and at the same time provided a new, fresh, and most importantly, real voice to the landscape of Black authors of the era. According to the documentary “Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp,” this lifelong criminal and defiler of women and robber of people in general became one of the most influential and important Black authors ever. And after watching the documentary and listening to the people who share these views, it is kind of hard to argue against this point.Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2013 movie review: ‘SOMM’

“SOMM” is a documentary about four young gentlemen all in the midst of attempting to pass the Master Sommelier’s Exam, a test established in the 1960s and which only about 200 people have ever passed, a test so hard that people have lost years of their lives to the devotion of all things wine just so they can have a dream of passing it. And if they can pass it, oh boy, do those doors of opportunity swing wide open for a certified Master Sommelier.

“SOMM” is an interesting combination of a mostly no-frills, just meat and potatoes documentary, and a much flashier, artier doc. It’s all footage of these four people, all in different places in their lives, all with very different personalities, all trying to help each other do the same thing, which involves lots of studying and wine tasting and the occasional shit talking, mixed with interviews of copious amounts of people involved in the wine industry, and this is all wrapped in a warm blanket of art, as we are treated to dreamy, slow-motion photography and a wonderful, jazzy cum classical score. I guess it makes plenty of sense to couple wine with jazz. They seem to go hand in hand.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Stoker’

Written by the star of TV’s Prison Break and directed by the guy behind “Oldboy” is not a way I thought I would ever start any review ever, yet here it is, it has come to pass, this is indeed a thing, as “Stoker” is directed by the great Chan-wook Park, based on an original screenplay by Wentworth Miller (which itself is a loving homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably his film “Shadow of a Doubt“). And you know what? It’s pretty damn good.Continue Reading …