REVIEWS - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’

“X-Men: Apocalypse” is the end of the second trilogy of X-Men centric movies, so if you are not onboard this particular train by now, this is not the movie to try to jump on, lest you don’t mind watching movies in which most of the character development has already been done in prior installments and references are constantly made to previously told stories. This is a culmination of serialized storytelling, and if you haven’t seen any other X-Men movie but watch this one for some reason, that is like just watching the season finale of the second season of a television show you’ve never seen. Sure lots of stuff happens, and it seems exciting, but does it mean anything without the years of build up?

The weird thing is that this movie is actually doing two things – it both ends this trilogy of movies (started with “X-Men: First Class” in 2011 and followed by “X-Men: Days of Future Past” in 2014), and also introduces new, younger versions of characters who will be the focus of the next X-Men movies. So certain characters (or at least certain actors playing these characters) are having their last hurrah while others are fresh faces and get to do just enough to set them up for whatever comes after this. And rest assured, there will be more of these, because why would 20th Century Fox ever stop making them? It is the only comic book franchise they do even close to right and which makes them any money (just look at how well they did with Fantastic Four and Daredevil). So get ready for high school Cyclops and Game of Thrones Jean Grey and twenty year old Nightcrawler and so on and so forth.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Nice Guys’

“The Nice Guys” is a return to the modernized film noir private detective template that writer and director Shane Black previously played with in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and like that movie, here we have a pair of men who don’t exactly get along but find themselves having to work together to unravel a conspiracy that have unwittingly stumbled upon, with wise cracks and dead bodies peppered in their wake. That is to say, for the most part. this movie is a good time.

For the most part because “The Nice Guys” isn’t afraid to get dark or a little real here and there, as both characters deal with alcohol addiction the whole time, with one abstaining and the other indulging, and this takes them down some dark paths, especially when it comes to how it affects the lives of those close to them. Also there’s some murdering, and sometimes it is played for laughs, and other times characters openly talk about how stuff like this makes them bad people, and they don’t want to be bad people, but sadly that might be the case no matter how hard they try. They want to be nice guys, but one is drunk and will take your money and the other is violent and fond of his brass knuckles.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Money Monster’

“Money Monster” is a kind of confusing movie, though not in the way one would think initially. The plot itself is quite easy to understand and there are no major twists or turns that take any effort to understand; no, in this instance, the confusion comes from the movie’s weird vacillation between broad satirical comedy and dark, edge of your seat thriller. If there could have been a better blending together of these two styles, it could have made for a nice scathing satire, but instead it seems like they just settled for fast paced thriller featuring George Clooney occasionally doing silly dances whilst wearing goofy accessories.

Lee Gates (Clooney) is a TV show host on a cable news network, like a CNBC or FOX Business type, where he talks about the stock market and gives people advice on how to invest their money, all while smacking a big red button that cues up all sorts of dumb videos that emphasize whatever he is yelling at the camera. Sometimes some girls come out and dance with him. Subtlety and nuance are most certainly not the order of the day when it comes to this portrayal of this kind of Mad Money with Jim Cramer style of show. The day after a “glitch” in some algorithm used by an investment firm lost $800 million of their customers’ money, Lee is taken hostage on his live show by a young guy named Kyle (Jack O’Connell), who lost his meager life savings in this company’s crash and only had his money invested in them because Lee suggested it on his show a few weeks prior. So who is to blame for Kyle losing all his money?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Captain America: Civil War’

The thirteenth movie in the franchise known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), “Captain America: Civil War” is most definitely a unique product of movie making in both good ways and bad. While this particular installment of this ongoing saga benefits greatly from many hours worth of character development spread over numerous movies, it also has that feeling of being not so much a complete movie but more of a big budget half step, just another episode in this hugely expensive serialized story. If you haven’t seen the other twelve Marvel movies, then just walking into this movie is very much like picking up a random comic book and just reading a story that is in media res, with characters and callbacks that just come out of nowhere and make no sense in a vacuum. In that way, this movie can not exist on its own in a meaningful capacity without the “Iron Mans” and “Captain Americas” and “Avengers” that came before it.

After a fight in a public space causes casualties, the Avengers are asked to sign an agreement, ratified by a panel representing 117 countries, that says they would be beholden to this international committee, who would decide on a case by case basis as to whether or not this group of mostly American superheroes should be deployed. Basically some official oversight to keep them in check, acknowledging that their actions in previous movies, while meant to save people, also cost many innocent lives. In their attempts to save billions, they have still killed millions. Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) feels much guilt when confronted by a grieving mother, and coupled with everything else going on in his life, sees this agreement as a decent solution to an obvious problem. Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans), still feeling burned by the government from his last movie, refuses to become beholden to some panel, no matter the intentions. This causes a rift in the group as some people agree to sign and others do not.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Green Room’

“Green Room” is quite simply not for the faint of heart. Intense and foreboding, with the constant specter of gruesome violence hanging palpably over every scene, this is a movie that gets to a point in which every move and decision can lead to something unimaginably disastrous. A simple set up leads to almost unbearable tension which eventually explodes, leaving an impressive body count in its punk rock wake. In this story, no one is safe and everything is on the line, and when it gets down and dirty, watch out.

A struggling band takes a gig somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and they take it knowing that they would be playing for a bunch of skinheads and racists. But they need the money so they accept the gig, and just try to get in, play their set and get out. Those first two parts went down just fine. Getting out becomes impossible when one of the band members (Anton Yelchin) walks into the green room moments after a murder; he sees the dead body, tries to call the police on his cell, gets stopped by the people running the club, and it is on from there. They put the whole band in the green room while they sort it out, and the band turns the green room into their holdout, knowing that these backwoods racists wouldn’t just let them walk away.

And the tension builds. And builds. And builds. Until…pop. Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Everybody Wants Some!!”

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is writer/director Richard Linklater’s return to the world of “Dazed and Confused,” his paean to his high school days in Texas in the 1970s, and here he is back with another love letter, this time to his college days in Texas in the fall of 1980. If you saw “Dazed and Confused” and thought that movie had too much drama going on and too much plot, then “Everybody Wants Some!!” is the movie for you.

Just bros hanging out doing bro stuff. That’s the essence of “Everybody Wants Some!!,” though this movie also seems to be saying “not all bros are bad, bro.” The story is mostly centered on incoming freshman and student athlete Jake (Blake Jenner) and it all takes place on the weekend leading up to the first day of classes. Jake arrives at an off-campus house set up for the school’s baseball players, where he meets his ragtag group of teammates on a team that we are told repeatedly is the best college baseball team in the state. And then Jake just spends the next three days hanging out with these guys, going to parties, cruising for chicks, drinking, smoking, playing cards, you know, just chilling, man.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Miles Ahead’

“Miles Ahead” is a biopic about music legend Miles Davis, but not a soup to nuts, cradle to grave type of biopic that is so common and has become so boring. Instead “Miles Ahead” is a little more like other recent biopics such as “Steve Jobs” and “Selma,” movies that don’t try to stuff all the facts in to one feature length movie and instead cherry pick certain time periods to really dig into, to use these microcosms of a person’s life as a way to tell the whole story of who they are.

In “Miles Ahead,” co-writer and director Don Cheadle (who also stars) too this approach to the next level. He decided to focus on two specific time periods in the long and storied life and Miles Davis, those being his first marriage to Frances Taylor in the late 1950s and through the 1960s, and his “silent period,” which is pretty much the back half of the 1970s, a time when he lived as a hermit in his NYC apartment, wandering around like a ghost in his own home, haunting himself, and most notably, not making any music. And while the “young Miles” section with Frances contains a number of real life incidents, the “hermit Miles” section of the movie is almost entirely fictional, an outlandish story made up to portray Miles Davis as much more of a bad ass gangster prone to firing off his pistol and making demands of people, which were often met promptly. These scenes are more about showing us his attitude, his way of life, both positive and negative, and what kind of person he was. These aspects of this movie seek to tell the truth of the person, not necessarily the truth of the actual situation.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Elvis & Nixon’

On December 21, 1971, Elvis Presley just showed up at the White House and asked for an emergency meeting with the President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Elvis claimed it was a matter of national security, as he told people he wanted to help fight the anti-American counterculture that had sprung up around the use of drugs in America as well as an unhealthy appreciation of the music of The Beatles. Nixon acquiesced, and twq of the most well known men of their day had a brief meeting about somehow working together. This meeting has been fictionalized and reimagined through the new film “Elvis & Nixon,” which paints an interesting portrait of a meeting very few people were privy to at the time.

Because how the hell could the renown “King of Rock and Roll” think he could help the United Stated government and why would he even want to do so in the first place? In this movie, Elvis has become frustrated with the state of his country and he sees people protesting on the streets and he thinks they are being anti-American, and he wants to help show the youth that it is important to have respect for their country and their government. And his decision to become a “Federal Agent-at-Large” plays into this, as he claims he can infiltrate underground communist groups, somehow undetected, and then he can help bust drug dealers and propagandists. All he needed, he felt, was a Federal badge from the Department of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to make him official. And he was quite insistent on this.

Review: ‘High-Rise’

“High-Rise” is an intense and dark satire about societal living, set inside a towering building that contains not only condos but stores, schools and other amenities designed to make the whole thing self sustaining, a tower which has an unforeseen effect on its many inhabitants. Remarking on the class issues that permeate almost every society but of which the British are seemingly much more acutely aware and critical, and also serving as a commentary on the societal forces that keep us from devolving into tribe-based groups of marauders and murderers, this movie uses sex, violence and comedy to show us a world which we are seemingly constantly on the brink of becoming.

Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves in to a newly built high-rise, a luxury building that is hi-tech and on the cutting edge, and he only has to leave the building to go to work. He meets some of his neighbors and the building’s architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) and he learns quickly that the people on the very top floors live a little more comfortably than the folks who make less money and live on the lower floors. As The Architect, Royal promised everyone a building that would give them a better way to live, a newly realized community of people that will engender real change in the way people behave. But when Royal thought this was going to be a positive change, it turned out to be quite negative. Things like power outages throughout the building and a poorly stocked supermarket start to get to the inhabitants, and they become more rowdy, angrier at the situation and each other, and smoothly enough the people in the building stop going out and stay inside and stay in their groups and start fighting each other. Before it is all said and done, the whole building has descended into squalor and chaos, with the poorer folks trying to get to the top of the building, and the few people already at the top indulging in pure debauchery on every conceivable level.

Review: ‘Lo and Behold, Reveries of a Connected World’

In “Lo and Behold, Reveries of a Connected World,” we have a documentary about the internet, how it was conceived, what it does now, and where it might go in the future. Not exactly an original or exciting concept, considering how much information there is about this thing that so many of us use on a constant, day to day basis, like this moment right now. But when this documentary is made by an acclaimed master filmmaker who doesn’t use the internet and can go an entire year without even turning on his cellphone, who has a tendency to look at the much more existential side of any situation and often comes up with gloomy conclusions, you end up with what is currently the best possible documentary about the internet, modern society and where this all could possibly be taking us.

Now that is not to say that “Lo and Behold” has the full history of the internet, and is an exhaustive compendium of all the key facts of the invention of this world changing creation, and it doesn’t look at every single facet of day to day life and how the internet is used in that way. Basically, not once does anyone mention Netflix, Amazon, eBay or Al Gore. Werner Herzog seems much less interested in WHO made these machines and much more interested in WHY, and more importantly, how does this change everything it comes in contact with, and is it all for better or worse or a mix of the two?

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