A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo
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In episode 110, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review Kingsman: The Secret Service (spoiler free).
Also discussed in this episode:
Spider-Man to be in Marvel movies.
Deadpool casting news.
Mission Impossible 5 to be released in IMAX theaters.
Marion Cotillard joins Assassin’s Creed.
A little talk about the in-studio cat. a
And much more!
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In this spoiler-filled BONUS episode, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn talk about Kingsman: The Secret Service in full detail, spoiling all the good stuff. s
So watch the movie and then enjoy the show.
Or just listen to the show if you don’t care about hearing all the spoilers.
Dig it!Continue Reading …
“Jupiter Ascending” feels like an accidental cousin to other recent movies featuring female leads who have been chosen to change their world. Whether it be “The Hunger Games” or “Divergent,” movies in which entire worlds are built with their own rules, in which a hero is picked seemingly at random, and for whom a greater purpose is revealed. It’s like a young adult version of “The Matrix” but with way more space travel and alien creatures.
Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an illegal Russian immigrant, having been brought over by her single mom and extended family, and she is unfortunately in the family business, which is to say, she’s a housekeeper, going around to rich peoples’ homes all around Chicago and being envious of their possessions between breaks from cleaning toilets. She misses her father, whom she never met, and she says more than once that she hates her life, which is understandable because it looks like a pretty miserable existence. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, there is a royal family in outer space known as the Abrasax family, and they are having themselves a little land rights dispute, with the argument centering around Earth and its resources. And thanks to reincarnation, they know that the true heir to Earth is actually on Earth, and they want to find this person, with each family member having their own reasons for wanting to do so. So there is a race to see who finds her first so she can be brought to the family.Continue Reading …
“The Station Agent” is almost like an American version of a Dardenne brothers movie, as the plot revolves around characters who come across as real people, and the way their relationships evolve and the way their viewpoints and ideas change throughout the movie feel very life-like and real, and the whole movie rings true, even as the story gets a little weird and different, it is still great and wonderful and truthful.
The directing debut of writer/director Thomas McCarthy, this movie shows the promise and potential that he would go on to fulfill with his follow up films “The Visitor” and “Win/Win,” and all three of these movies make for a great triple feature of humor, drama and just real people. Featuring a stellar performance from the great Peter Dinklage, years before he would become most peoples’ favorite character on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the way this movie progresses and how the story unfolds is just great to witness, and there is a confidence in the direction and storytelling that brings it all home and makes it really work. “The Station Agent” is a great movie, one you will definitely enjoy, and one you should get on sooner rather than later because it is worth it.Continue Reading …
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In episode 109, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review Jupiter Ascending and Chris reviews Black Sea.
Also in this episode:
Neighbors 2 is coming.
Lionsgate wants to make John Wick into a franchise and keep making more Hunger Games movies. h
How did the Deadpool movie come to be?
Netflix is making a Legend of Zelda series. p
Plus so much more!Continue Reading …
In “Black Sea,” we have a classic men on a mission set up, coupled with a “gold/green can change a man” story as well as some apparent anger over the haves and the have-nots, all of this done in the guise of a submarine-based thriller, which is a genre of movie making that is not nearly explored enough. The inherent tension of such a situation is already enough for drama, but then you add in a story involving gold and betrayal and murder and you have a pretty damn good movie.
“Black Sea” starts with Robinson (Jude Law) losing his job as a submarine driver for a salvage company. Getting laid off, with a meager settlement from the company and a lack of pension, leaves him reeling a little. Having already lost his family when his wife took his kids and left him because he was spending too much time on the job, the added pressure of losing his job and not being able to find another one is too much for him. So when a shady job comes around involving a downed Nazi submarine possibly filled with gold, Robinson is ready to take the risk to go get it. He gets an old shitty Russian sub and a crew of half Russians and half Brits (plus one American) and they all head into the Black Sea, in search of this buried treasure while trying to evade the Russian fleet above them.Continue Reading …
“Two Days, One Night” is a small little character drama that still manages to pack a strong emotional punch, which seems to be the modus operandi for the Dardenne Brothers, who have built careers out of making small, intimate, smart dramas about characters that come across as very real people. These aren’t movies about crime sprees or superheroes or government spies, there are no car chases, or CG-filled set pieces. Their movies lack space battles and time travel and future wars. They just make movies about people, dealing with people problems, and they are almost always great, and this movie is no exception.
Sandra (Marion Cotillard) finds out on a Friday that a ballot was taken at her place of employment, and 14 out of 16 employees voted to retain their significant bonuses at the expense of her job, as their boss explained that they could not afford to have both. This devastates Sandra because her family depends on her salary in order to not have to go back to government housing (there is a real sense of shame and despair from several characters in this movie at having to go “on the dole“), and it also makes her feel unwanted and insignificant. This is particularly bad because she is still getting over a pretty bad bout with depression and it doesn’t take much for her to want to just curl up on her bed and try to ignore the rest of the world, so right away she has to battle her depression just to deal with the idea of losing her job.Continue Reading …
What better way to celebrate the month of February than a Christmas movie from 1988? More specifically, one involving a buffoonish character born from the world of regional television commercials who then went on to have a string of movies centered around him, including this one about finding a new Santa Claus. Even more specifically, I am talking about “Ernest Saves Christmas.”
A really smart person once wrote about “Ernest Saves Christmas:”
The movie is competently made, so there is no awkward camera work, bad lighting or overly bad acting. Whether or not the humor works for you is something else all together. There is definitely comedic gold when Ernest pretends to be someone else. Worrell seems to be some sort of idiot savant when it comes to disguises, especially since they work each and every time. The rest of the Ernest humor comes from his “wacky” slapstick, some of it funny and some of it not. There are a decent number of scenes dedicated to Chuck and Bobby, the Airport storage agents, who get sufficiently freaked out by the reindeer but then oddly get adjusted to them very quickly. The final scene of the movie hints that maybe a spin off movie (or TV series) could have been made of Chuck and Bobby dealing with various holiday -related icons come to life, but alas that will forever be a dream. The movie is simple and predictable but also kind of sweet and endearing, and as far as Christmas movies go, you could do a whole helluva lot worse.
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In episode 108, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review Project Almanac.
Chris also reviews Two Days, One Night and The Loft and Drew reviews Frank.
Also in this episode:
The Wet Hot American Summer prequel mini series on Netflix.
A US version of Black Mirror.
PRAT! PRAT! PRAT!
Star Wars news.
Cowboy Ninja Viking news.
Michael Keaton making a McDonalds movie.
George Lucas hates cat videos.
And much more!
“The Loft” is a twisty, turny thriller trying to be like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma and definitely falling short. If you like movies that have multiple plot twists because 2 or 3 just aren’t enough, then this is the movie for you, if you don’t mind some hyper editing and weird camerawork and overall silliness.
Vincent (Karl Urban) is a successful architect with a doting wife, four friends and a spare loft. He tells his friends that the five of them can share the loft and they can use it for their secret extramarital trysts. One morning, they find a dead woman in their loft and no one knows how she got there. Are they being set up? If so, then by who? Or is one of them lying to the others? As the five of them stand over the body and accuse each other of stuff and yell and scream and cry, we also get flashbacks of their whole story, starting with the introduction of the loft into their lives and then the different ways these guys used the loft, and how all of that may have possibly led them to their present moment of discovering a murder.
This movie might have been okay if they took a more straight forward approach to both telling the story and the visual approach of the movie. The whole flashback structure seems unnecessary. It may have been more interesting if they just told the whole story in chronological order, so that the murder is discovered about halfway through the movie. The constantly cutting back and forth feels very 1990’s, like splitting up the timeline would somehow make the whole thing more interesting or exciting, but really it is just kind of hacky. And then there are a lot of close ups of characters and a camera that moves around a lot, with lots of quick editing, and none of it was impressive or improved the story or helped tell the story visually. It just seemed like a lot of stuff designed to make the movie seem cooler than it was.Continue Reading …