Thriller - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘No Good Deed’

If you go over to the Rotten Tomatoes or the Metacritic or any other sort of review aggregator, you would see that the newest psychological battle-of-the-sexes thriller “No Good Deed” is just getting shit on left and right by pretty much everybody. Calling it things like “boring” and “derivative” and even trotting out “offensive” and “troubling” here and there, it would seem that this is one of the worst movies of the year. So am I here to throw additional dirt on the grave of this Idris Elba starring movie? Is this film really as bad as everyone is saying?

I will tell you what, I have seen movies worse than “No Good Deed” in just the last few weeks. Can I interest anyone in an additional screening of “The November Man?” How about “Let’s Be Cops?” No takers? Hmm, what a shock. Trust me when I tell you that “No Good Deed” is no worse than those movies, and actually might be better than both. It knows what it is and there really are not any pretensions from the filmmakers that this was going to be a bigger or deeper movie than it actually is. This is simply a thriller featuring a charismatic yet insane Idris Elba and a solid performance from Taraji P. Henson as the mother of two who ends up on the wrong end of Elba’s character’s wrath and anger.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Purge: Anarchy’

“The Purge” was a 2013 horror movie, in which it was posited that America would have extremely low unemployment levels and crime rates if all crime was legal one night of the year. Somehow if people were allowed to do anything they wanted, including murder, for 12 hours out of 365 days, then they would be totally chill the rest of the year, due to the release of their aggression. This is a bunch of bullshit, because one does not follow the other. Aggressive people are aggressive people year round, and people with criminal tendencies can’t just sit on them for the other 8,748 hours of the year. So the premise of that movie was BS and then the movie itself didn’t do anything with this premise and instead was just a run of the mill home invasion film (albeit one with Ethan Hawke totally giving it his all and classing up the joint). So in summation, “The Purge” was bullshit through and through.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Night Moves’

Not to be confused with the 1975 Gene Hackman-starring murder mystery of the same name, “Night Moves” is the story of three idealistic environmentalists who decide that they need to make a grand statement to the world by destroying a hydroelectric dam, hence really sticking it to The Man through an act of eco-terrorism. But of course the story is about much more than just that one act, or even the particular reasons for committing said act. Instead this is a story about the characters who perpetuate this act, and what it means to them in a more existential way, as well as what the act does to them in a physical, worldly consequences kind of manner.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) are young hippie-ish folks living in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon specifically, and they seem to really care about the environment and the world they live in. They even go to private screenings of what appear to be homemade documentaries about how the Mother Earth is being destroyed by humans, projected on a poorly hung white sheet and watched by a group of dirty stoners who react to the movie with cynicism and cries of “what are we expected to do?” But while Dena sits front row and seems to take in the message of the documentary, Josh hangs back and rolls his eyes at the lack of answers and obstinate nature of the crowd. He’s obviously over these get togethers and the rhetoric. He desires action.Continue Reading …

Florida Film Festival 2014 review: ‘The Double’

“The Double” is a bleak, angst-ridden surreal psychological thriller dark comedy about a man, in the midst of an existential crisis, who meets his physical double and at first they appear to be allies but things quickly go from bad to what the fuck. From writer/director Richard Ayoade and loosely based on the 19th century Russian lit classic of the same name, “The Double” is one of the most original and interesting movies I’ve seen in quite awhile, bursting with ideas and a deliberate energy that just makes this whole thing hum along very loudly and distinctly.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: ‘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: ‘Captain Phillips’

“Captain Phillips” is Paul Greengrass doing pretty much what he knows best, which is recreating real life events in a way that feels immediate and actual, very cinema vérité despite the fact that movie stars often pop up to remind the viewer that this is indeed just a movie. Greengrass broke out with “Bloody Sunday” and he tackled the U.S.-Iraq quagmire in “Green Zone,” and now he’s here with a story about four Somali pirates hijacking an American cargo ship and taking the captain as a hostage for insurance money.

“Captain Phillips” is very much based on the very true story of a pirate hijacking in 2009, and as it was written by Captain Richard Phillips, it tells his story and his side of the whole nasty bit of business, and now this Phillips guy must really be on top of the world now because he survived a pirate hijacking (SPOILER! Duh! He wrote the damn book!), wrote a bestselling book about it, and now he gets to see Tom Hanks play him in a movie based on the book he wrote about a portion of his own life. Oh what a world.

But what makes “Captain Phillips” really work, and this is something noted in the Captain’s own book and is also backed up with a little bit of research, is how sympathetic the Somalis are in this instance. At least in this movie, the Somali men in a small, war-torn, destroyed village are ushered to the beach with machine guns pointed at them by gang leaders and mob bosses, forcing them to “work” by being pirates, as this has become the sole source of income for the impoverished country. And there is even a bit of a throwaway line about overfishing in the area taking away the livelihood of the people actually living there, though that’s really it. There really isn’t preaching or sermonizing in this thing at all, it’s just a very interesting true story that brings up some very tricky socio-economic points and issues on a geopolitical scale about the haves and the have-nots. But really this is just a taut thriller in which at the end of the day it kind of feels like there are no winners.Continue Reading …