REVIEWS - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Hail, Caesar!’

“Hail, Caesar!” has been marketed as a high paced screwball comedy, a sort of spoof of the 1950s Hollywood studio system and the distinct genres of movies in which that system trafficked, replete with odes to Gene Kelly dance numbers, Esther Williams aquamusicals, hokey Westerns and of course prestige pictures. But being a Coen brothers movie, audiences will be getting more than just jokes, as this is not the high paced comedy advertised, but instead an alternately silly and somber reflection on faith, purpose and personal fulfillment, emphasized by scenes in which characters discuss communism or have dialectic debates on the truth of divinity in disparate theologies. The Red Scare and Catholic Guilt, both examined in a movie about the one sane person keeping the nuthouse in check.

That one sane person is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who runs the day to day operations of Capitol Pictures, which fans of the Coens’ film “Barton Fink” will recognize as the same studio for which Barton wrote in the 1940s (they even name drop Wallace Beery again), and this whole story pretty much plays out over the course of 27-28 hours, though its one of those days that just happens to be pretty pivotal for our main character. While he goes around the studio lot addressing problems and making sure everything is fine, he’s also thinking about a job offer he has to go work for Lockheed Martin, a job that would give him easier hours, better pay, and a guaranteed gig for a very long time. But…would he find it fulfilling?

Review: ‘Jane Got a Gun’

Whereas the Western was once a prominent go-to genre for movie studios from the 1920s through the 1970s, it has fallen out of favor through saturation and overuse, so that now we are lucky to get two, maybe three Western films in theaters over the course of a year. And unfortunately “Jane Got a Gun,” released in theaters now with zero fanfare or marketing from The Weinstein Company, will not be the movie to reverse this trend of get people excited about this genre again. An interesting idea of a story presented in a muddled non-linear fashion within the confines of an ultimately weightless movie, this is the kind of movie that makes for an okay watch on a rainy Tuesday night – simply a way to pass the time with some fine actors doing decent work in a film that just never comes together into something memorable.

Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman) lives with her daughter on a secluded piece of land somewhere in New Mexico, and one day her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) comes home with bullet wounds all over his back. Jane tries her best to fix him up but he’s bed ridden, paralyzed from the waist down, and for some reason his vision is all blurry (may have been from the booze he was constantly drinking to numb the pain). He also has bad news, telling her that the Bishop Gang was coming for them. This causes Jane to panic a bit, so she hands off her young daughter to a friend for safe keeping, and then goes to her former lover Dan (Joel Edgerton) asking for his help as a gunslinger. He refuses at first, being drunk and bitter, but then acquiesces and agrees to help, while still being drunk and bitter.

Review: ‘Anomalisa’

In some ways, “Anomalisa” is a startling movie, with surprises and ideas that pop up along the way that can easily catch a person off guard, especially if they don’t know what they are getting themselves into at the outset. If all you know is that this movie is an animated film from the guy who wrote “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and also wrote and directed “Synecdoche, New York,” that’s enough, just see this thing as soon as you can, and then read about it afterwards. Let this story just unfold in front of you, because it does so in a very compelling way, and reading about it ahead of time would kind of spoil things.

“Anomalisa” takes place mostly during the course of a one-night stay at a hotel in Cincinnati, as Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is in town to speak at a conference centered on customer service. But from the opening scene on the incoming plane throughout the rest of the movie, people try to be nice and make small talk with Michael along the way but he’s very stand offish and just not having it, which makes every one of his social interactions awkward. He even fakes enthusiasm when talking to his annoying son on the telephone, obviously exasperated with the little demon child he has wrought upon the Earth.

Review: ’13 Hours’

The words subtlety and nuance do not come to mind when thinking of the movies of Michael Bay; on the contrary, he has a style so bombastically singular that it has become known as Bayhem, and the application of this style of filmmaking to certain topics seems, on the surface, ridiculous. A “Michael Bay war movie” is one of these instances, and it does not help that he already bungled a World War II movie, so when it was announced that he was making the 2012 Benghazi attack film “13 Hours,” it seemed like a bad call from the start.

And lo and behold it was a bad call, because “13 Hours” is the kind of movie that your racist uncle, who never served a day of military service in his life, will insist everyone else see because it tells “the truth” about what happened, a one-sided telling of a very intense night, a confirmation of a political bias that Michael Bay never intended, and that dumb uncle of yours will ignore the seven congressional investigations and thirty-two hearings and instead will hold this up as what really happened in that land which he couldn’t find on a map (here it is, next to Egypt).

And if you think that’s an exaggeration, check out these responses from some audience members at the premiere held at a football stadium with 30,000 attendees. Because America.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Carol’

The 1950s was not that long ago, especially when you consider how old some countries and cultures are, and definitely when you consider how old the entire world is, in comparison to that the 1950s was practically yesterday. And yet the time period was so different in so many ways, with gender and sexual norms in society established in a way to maintain the hetero-male dominance of the day. “Carol” is a love story set in that time period, a tale of what happens when two people fall in love in a time and place in which their love is perceived as abhorrent and deviant behavior requiring psychotherapy and segregation from society.

Which is a shame because if it wasn’t for the dumb hang ups of the people at large and the ridiculous social mores foisted upon everyone, this would have been a nice relationship for everyone involved, but because the main characters had to deal with a bunch of bullshit outside of who they were, this relationship ends up involving a lot of anguish. Leave it to the ugly judgmental side of our culture to turn something so pure and wonderful into so difficult and painful.

Review: ‘The Revenant’

“The Revenant” is a number of different things rolled up into one. It is a grand artistic statement. It is a meditation on life and death, as well as mankind’s place in relation to nature. It is the story of a nation’s messy and violent birth. It is about revenge. It is about a father’s love for his son. And maybe above all else, it is a reminder to always play dead. At least when there’s a bear involved.

An expedition of settlers in 1820s western America gets attacked by a large group of Native Americans, and the small group of survivors has to try to trudge their way though thick forests and across mountains to make it back to their outpost alive. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is their scout and tracker and it is up to him to lead them through the land to safety. But when he’s mauled by a grizzly bear protecting her cubs and finds himself on the verge of death, he becomes a burden that the men try to carry through the wilderness, which they soon discover is impossible to do. A pair of men, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), agree to stay behind and watch over Glass, but Fitzgerald tricks Bridger into leaving Glass behind, which they do. Also Fitzgerald kills Glass’s half-Pawnee son, which gives the dying Glass something to live for – righteous vengeance.

Review: ‘Youth’

As if you couldn’t tell by the title and the cast, “Youth” is a movie about the passing of time and how we may differ in our approach to dealing with the inevitability of death that awaits us all and the possible futility of life and what we take from it while in the moment. A story about lost loves, dashed dreams and broken hearts, as well as appreciation of the past, hope for the future and a strange optimism for the present, this is the kind of movie that can affect you emotionally but only if you let it, if you allow it to wash over you, burrow into you and meld with your own psyche, so that you can see yourself reflected in at least one of its characters.

Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a retired composer and conductor enjoying a quiet and lazy vacation at a hoity-toity resort in the Swiss Alps when an emissary from the Queen of England visits him to ask if he would come out of retirement for one performance for the Queen and her grandson. Fred refuses to do so for “personal” reasons, but the invitation throws him for a bit of a loop, as he wasn’t prepared to even think about doing something like that, and now it is making him feel some emotions that he’s been stowing away for years. His past as a hugely successful conductor is closely linked to his wife, and now in this moment in this resort he is thinking about her with obvious regret as to how he lived and what became of her (something we do not learn the full extent of until the end of the film). It doesn’t help that his personal assistant is also his daughter (Rachel Weisz), and when her husband leaves her for a pop star, she has her own breakdown and vents by yelling at her father and accusing him of being a shitty husband and not the best father. Not exactly what a person wants to hear in the twilight of his or her life.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Big Short’

At this point, “The Big Short” is the closest we are ever going to get to any sort of justice or catharsis when it comes to the worldwide economic collapse of 2007-2008, a global catastrophe caused by the unbridled greed and avarice of bankers who saw money falling from the sky and thought it would never end, and who never once stopped to think about what might happen to everyone else around them. It is now possible to draw the direct line between these peoples’ actions and the ruination of millions of lives, and yet nothing has been done to either punish those responsible or ensure that something so insane doesn’t happen again. Thanks to the inaction of our government and criminal justice system, these white collar criminals continue to operate while the average citizen gets handed the bill, and now the only resort we have left is to drag these people out into the street and shame them, which would be great if they felt any shame, or remorse, or any other human emotion, but they obviously don’t. That is why “The Big Short” even exists.

Review: ‘The Hateful Eight’

It seems that Quentin Tarantino, now with his eighth film, no longer seems to want to make purely escapist entertainment, he longer wants to give you a fun movie with a dance number and some action and a bunch of witty banter about pop culture. Instead, for a few years now, Tarantino has been making movies that have also set out to push buttons, and his films have made people engage in conversations about a wide array of topics, including racism in American history as well in American cinema, the use of violence as a way to resolve conflict, the power of the medium of movies and how it can be used as a weapon, the value or lack thereof of revenge fantasies. And now “The Hateful Eight” joins that list as a movie that has people talking.

Let’s add to the noise, shall we?

Review: ‘Joy’

“Joy” is a movie about the invention of the Miracle Mop.

Okay, “Joy” is obviously about so much more than that. It is about the lady who did that, and what kind of odds she was up against when she set out to change the world one invention at a time. Sure there is nothing glamorous about a mop, but then again there wasn’t anything glamorous about this lady’s life and yet she turned shit into shinola, lemons into lemonade, resolve into opportunity, you know, that kind of thing. What happens when you make adversaries in business and you can’t even rely on your family to help you out of trouble? You make it happen by yourself, just like Joy.

Prev Page...
1
…
6
7
8
9
10
…
34
...Next Page