Cinema Crespodiso

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Review: ‘Hell or High Water’

HellOrHighWater_MoviePoster“Hell or High Water” is a modern western, a story about cops and robbers, set in dusty West Texas, featuring bank robberies and shoot outs and Mexican stand offs, and the “updated setting coupled with classic motifs” gambit often pays off in artistic endeavors, this being one of those times. But additionally, this movie fits another genre, one that sprang from the murky mess of the 2007-2008 housing market crash which catapulted the world into a global recession and saw the concept of The American Dream finally popped and deflated, and that’s the genre in which honest and good people find their lives on the edge of complete ruin thanks to believing in a system that failed them, with the ultimate “bad guys” being banks or bankers or anyone callous enough to be rich and openly uncaring during a time of great strife for many other people, you know, folks inflicted with “Scrooge McDuckitis.”

In “Hell or High Water,” Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is the kind of anti-hero seen in these types of movies, the ones that explore how the American Dream turned into a Waking Nightmare. When we meet Toby, he has already crossed that line, having decided to stage a series of small bank robberies in order to raise enough money to save their family farm from mortgage foreclosure. As if that’s not enough motivation, Tony also has children with his now-divorced wife and he’s determined not to let them continue down the path of poverty that afflicted his family for generations. Toby wants to secure his home and a future for his family. He’s a good dude. That’s what we are supposed to notice when we see him walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and demand money from the frightened tellers.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Jane Got a Gun’

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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.

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Review: ‘The Hateful Eight’

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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?

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Review: ‘The Homesman’

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“The Homesman” is an interesting Western film directed by Tommy Lee Jones, which makes him two for two in directing somewhat unconventional Westerns (his other film being the sublime “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada“). An adaptation of a 1988 novel of the same name, this is a story centered on the harsh realities of living in 19th century frontier America, and the simple logistics of having to deal with people with various states of decaying mental health in a place and time in which such ailments are not very well known or treated properly. And also how much it sucks for plain looking women who couldn’t find a man and had to fend for themselves. Cause that looked like it sucked.

Mary Bee (Hillary Swank) owns her own piece of land in Nebraska and she farms it and seems to be doing pretty well, having plans to expand and plant different crops and buy more animals, so even in such a desolate looking place, she seems to be doing okay for herself. But being in her early 30s and single, she is seen as a spinster, as women were expected to have been married and have kids well before her age. And it’s not for a lack of trying, she just gets rejected mostly because she’s plain and bossy, two things she can’t seem to help much. It is obvious the loneliness is starting to get to her and it is hard not to feel kinda sorry for her situation. And then it is understandable when she volunteers for a seemingly very difficult task, that of transporting three women from Nebraska to Iowa so they could be reunited with their families back East as all three of these women for varying reasons have lost their minds and can no longer be tended to be their husbands. Early on she recruits a trouble making drifter named Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) to help her with the job, and they are off on an arduous journey.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Django Unchained’

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Originally published on Examiner.com on December 29, 2012

In the fastest cinematic 165-minutes this side of “Cloud Atlas,” Quentin Tarantino has ridden back into town with his latest explosive and (as per usual) controversial film, this time set in the old 1850s South, a grand mash up of 1960s spaghetti westerns and 1970s blaxploitation slave narratives, sprinkled with modern music and drenched with enough fake blood to fill Shamu’s biggest water tank. Equally thrilling and appalling, “Django Unchained” exists as a film unlike any other, a monumental work of art that has left a swath of ardent lovers and haters in its wake.

The story is sprawling, as Django goes from a downtrodden and beaten slave afraid to look another man in the eyes to a bad ass, gun wielding, tough as nails bounty hunter over the course of at least a long winter and the spring, finding himself empowered by a pistol and the criminal justice system (conservative Republicans should absolutely love this aspect). And of course the whole time he has his eyes set on his prize, the opportunity to retrieve his wife from the hellhole that is Candyland and to simply live happily ever after. Django isn’t trying to overthrow the whole of slavery, nor does he want to cut down every white man he sees; he just wants what any person in this world wants, the opportunity to be happy and live his life in peace with the one he loves. Of course now this seems like something many of us take for granted, but in the southern US in 1858 this was a pipe dream for many people solely because of the color of the skin, and for Django this is the ultimate prize, the ability to simply live his life without fear.

“Django Unchained” has all the hallmarks of a typical Tarantino joint. The verbose dialogue is in full effect, and outside of Samuel L. Jackson, no one delivers Tarantino’s words like Christoph Waltz, as he has the same ability as Jackson to make Tarantino’s very particular brand of cinematic speaking come across as his own words, instead of sounding like the hyper stylized dialogue that it actually is. Tarantino also has a knack for rounding out his casts with superb actors, so in addition to both Waltz and Jackson doing what they do so very well, Foxx totally nails Django and successfully portrays the transformation from a meek and beaten down man to master of his own domain, and DiCaprio plays a character far more sinister and despicable than he has every done before and does so with great aplomb, as he seems to relish the opportunity to finally play someone so outright evil and dastardly as Calvin Candie. And playing the smaller parts are people like James Remar, M.C. Gainey, Don Johnson, Jonah Hill, Walton Goggins, Tom Savini and Bruce Dern, as well as Tarantino regulars Zoe Bell and the always watchable Michael Parks. Pretty much everywhere you turn there is someone being great, like when original “Django” actor Franco Nero makes a pretty sweet cameo (one surely lost on over 90% of the audiences seeing this movie).

And then of course the entire soundtrack for this movie is just as good as it gets, as Tarantino has always been a master of re-appropriating both pop songs and songs from other film scores for his own purposes. So whereas someone else would think that a brutal spaghetti western would not benefit from Jim Croce tunes, Tarantino places one front and center. And really, how big are this guy’s balls that he actually used the live recording of Richie Havens’ “Freedom” from Woodstockfor this movie, and how amazing is it that it actually works so damn well? And while hip-hop would normally feel needlessly anachronistic for a film set in the middle of the 19th century, Rick Ross’ “100 Black Coffins,” written and produced specifically for this movie at the request of Jamie Foxx, fits so perfectly with the movie itself that it hurts.

Finally there’s Tarantino’s trademark violence, which goes back through each and every one of his films, and just when the ridiculously bloody “Kill Bill” and the insanely violent “Inglourious Basterds” seemed like the pinnacle for how far he could push cinematic violence, along comes “Django Unchained” with it’s jet-powered squibs creating the biggest explosions of blood and viscera ever seen in a movie like this. Starting with the opening scene, when someone gets shot they don’t just get shot and there isn’t just a little puff of blood mist – no, instead there are geysers of thick, viscous blood, as people literally explode when they are shot, with viscera literally coating the walls. Of course much of this violence is hard to watch, especially the recreations of what happened to slaves and how incredibly poorly they were treated, and these violent actions against the slaves don’t need exaggeration as they are horrible all ready, and there is a great possibility that this particular stuff might have even been pulled back a bit to save the audience a bit. While Tarantino definitely wants you to see that slaves faced dangers like being torn apart by vicious dogs, he mercifully only shows something like this in snippets and in tight close ups, not rubbing the audiences’ noses in this extreme violence because he knows we get it and he knows that we know it’s horrible. This entire film walks a tricky tightrope between giving the audience the cathartic violence that it wants and not going overboard with the terrible violence against slaves whose only sins were being born black and in this time period.

There are also the comedic aspects of the film, which itself would throw some people who would wonder why a movie about slavery in America would have any humor or comedy in it at all. But in this case it feels like the comedy is almost necessary, because with the story that Tarantino sets out to tell, there are a lot of gruesome and horrible things involved, and at almost three hours, is there anyone out there who wants to see such a long, brutal, hard movie with no relief in sight? So right away in the opening scene, mostly through dialogue and characters’ reactions to each other, there is humor, used to lighten the proceedings just a little. And at times the comedy was used to subvert some evil iconography that we are used to seeing, as in a scene in which a large group of pre-KKK regulators don masks in order to round up and kill Schultz and Django, only to spend five minutes bitching about said masks and how poorly they were made, rendering them blind. In this instance Tarantino used humor to undermine these racist, violent idiots, showing them to be a bunch of moronic whiners while they see themselves as superior.

This does lead us to the nationwide discussion of the point of this movie, that is to say, why did Tarantino feel the need to make this movie in the way that he did. Because while he did make a movie that prominently features the slavery system that we here in America are so quick to pretend never happened, he also made a movie that is unabashedly entertaining, and this has rubbed some people the wrong way. Most famously filmmaker Spike Lee, himself an incredible talent and a very intelligent person, has publicly boycotted the movie, insisting he would not see it because he does not appreciate Tarantino appropriating the history of his ancestors for a movie like this.

But is this fair? Setting aside the fact that Spike Lee has not actually seen the movie and insists on judging it without seeing a single frame (which is extremely silly and wrong headed), he is indeed entitled to his opinion that he does not want to see slavery turned into entertainment. But does this mean he doesn’t want to see any movies at all involving slavery? Surely there are people who would definitely prefer this, because there are people who do not want to be reminded that their great-great-great-great grandparents were despicable, racists, dehumanizing, bigoted, moronic assholes. But this can’t be preferable. There is no way Spike Lee wants filmmakers to ignore this horrible period of history, so that means the alternative is to only make movies about slavery that are deathly serious from start to finish. Basically more “Amistads” and “The Color Purples” and “Roots” because apparently slavery is that much off limits that it can only be approached from a purely intellectual standpoint, at an emotional distance, and without a trace of entertainment.

Of course this is ridiculous position for any filmmaker to take, because why does Spike Lee believe that Tarantino cannot make an entertaining movie about racism in the 1850s, but believe that he should be allowed to make entertaining movies about racism in the 1980s? “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever,” among other Spike Lee movies, are explicitly about racial tensions between different groups of people, and both movies are very entertaining while also showing some horrible stuff, so why does Lee believe that he can make a movie about racism and not Tarantino? It is because Tarantino is white and Lee thinks that only black filmmakers can make movies about black people? Because that itself is a racist idea, claiming that this time of history can only be explored by black artists. And this also ignores the fact that slavery and racial segregation is not the sole province of the American people, as this goes back to the beginning of time. For centuries and centuries, whether it be Jewish people enslaved by Egyptians or white Christians being thrown to the lions by the Romans for sport, large groups of people have been shitting on other large groups of people for superficial reasons. It is bullshit, it’s horrible, and worst of all, it’s life.

And that’s always been what movies have been about, a reflection of the human experience, as seen through the prism of the eyes of the filmmakers. And oppression is a universal experience, whether it be racially-based, economically-based, or otherwise. Since this terrible aspect of the human experience is indeed a large part of life, whether we like it or not, it needs to be reflected in our art, and this art should not be restricted to certain races or groups of people, because that itself is a prejudicial concept. So while “Django Unchained” does deal specifically with the American slavery system of the 1800s, the themes of the film extend to the terrors of human existence in general. In a movie where living black men are sold for hundreds of dollars while dead white men are sold to the criminal justice system for thousands of dollars, it is easy to see the message that to many people life is cheap and the lives of those different from us are even cheaper, and this is absolutely not relegated to this one time period.

Despite being enormously entertaining, the best thing about Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” is how it has fostered such discussions and debates such as this, not only among people like Spike Lee who haven’t seen the movie (and really whose opinions need to be taken with a big grain of salt due to their admitted lack of knowledge on the specifics of the content of the film itself), but among the many who have seen the movie, as the interwebs is now littered with both thoughtful and inane opinions of what this movie means and how it fits into the larger cultural landscape. When a daring and bold piece of art like this is unleashed and it makes people actually talk about its impact and the content of the film itself, that is a win for everyone involved. We should all be so lucky to get one movie a year like this that inspires so much debate, and in the end, love this movie or hate it, we are all the better for it because of it has inspired. That is the mark of a great film.

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Review: ‘The Rover’

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“The Rover” is an Australian western set in the future, but that doesn’t mean sci-fi in any way, as actually they go in the other direction, depicting a world totally collapsed and depressed, a harsh world with no amenities or benefits of technology, but instead a barren land of little food and less hope. This is the world in which this story exists, and it is a brutal world, one in which the rule of the land is merely survival of the fittest and nothing more.

And in a scenario like this, one must be wary of people like Eric (Guy Pearce), a man whose sole possession is his car, and who has nothing else in his life, and definitely nothing to live for. The movie starts with him sitting in his car in the heat of the desert as flies buzz around his face, and he can’t even be bothered to swipe them away, he just lets them land on his face and mouth and he doesn’t care at all. So when three dumb criminals steal his car and use it as a getaway vehicle, he sets out to find the guys and get his car back because he’s got nothing else, nothing to lose, no loved ones waiting for him, no place to go, he has all the time and hate in the world, so off he goes, looking for his car.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’

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“A Million Ways to Die in the West” is a long title for a movie that should just be called “Seth MacFarlane Slapstick Romantic Comedy Western.” I guess that’s pretty long too. How about “New Timey Jokes in Old Timey West?” Nope that one stinks too. “Old West Gross Out?” “A Million Jokes Die in the West?” “Sophomore Slump?” Eh. I guess the original title is okay enough.

So in “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” writer/director Seth MacFarlane plays Albert, a sheep farmer living just outside of a small town called Old Stump, and the movie starts with him weaseling his way out of a gunfight and then losing his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) to the local successful businessman stereotype (Neil Patrick Harris), so he’s down in the dumps when he meets Anna (Charlize Theron), a foxy stranger who befriends Albert and tries to help him turn things around. Little does Albert know that Anna is actually the wife of a feared gunfighter (Liam Neeson) and that is going to be a problem for Albert.

And the crux of the movie is Albert’s lack of self confidence and abundance of self doubt and how he gradually tips those scales in the opposite direction, again thanks to the help of super foxy Anna. So even though this is a comedy with some gross out gags and over the top humor, there is a surprising amount of tears shed in this thing by different characters, as they tried to get actual emotions and character development in there between the jokes about uncontrollable diarrhea and sloppy prostitutes.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Lone Ranger’

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Man did this thing go pretty awry. Disney’s “The Lone Ranger” was surely made with the idea that they could make a whole new billion-dollar-a-picture franchise with this old school property (because that’s how Disney and companies of their ilk sees stuff like this anyway, not as art or craft, but as property and franchises, like fast-food), and their reasoning behind giving the project to the group of guys behind the successful “Pirates of the Caribbean” films  made sense on paper. After all, if Gore Verbinski could turn a theme park ride into a well-liked movie, then imagine what he could do with something with a rich history in radio, television, movies and comic books, going all the way back to 1933. What could go wrong with this set up?Continue Reading …

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