Chris - Cinema Crespodiso - Page 112 of 151

Review: ‘Gone Girl’

What does “Gone Girl” have in common with other movies like “Conan the Barbarian,” “Robocop,” “Starship Troopers” and “Jackie Brown?” They are all pulpy B-movies made with A-movie level commitment and talent. What could have easily been a fumbled, ridiculous attempt at a Lifetime Movie of the Week instead is a very adult, smart, twisty-turny, potboiling, corkscrew turning thriller of a movie that just manages to get crazier and crazier until the very final frames.

Based on a very popular book and adapted into a screenplay by the very author of said book, “Gone Girl” is an extremely darkly humorous look at American married life in this day and age, at least an extreme possibility of the results of such unions between people throughout the world. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) comes home one day to discover what appears to be a crime scene and his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) missing. He calls the police and the investigation starts with a couple of detectives taking a tour of his house and ends up being a nationwide media sensation involving streets filled with news vans, lawns covered with reporters, lots of shouting and yelling and television talking heads, all rising into a collection din that just puts more and more pressure on Nick, whom becomes the prime suspect more and more as the story progresses.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 9/29/14 – ‘Silent Running’

“Silent Running” is a cool science fiction film from 1972, starring a young and wild-eyed Bruce Dern and directed by movie special effects maverick Douglas Trumbull, known most for his award winning work on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and he took that clout to make his own movie, this little sci-fi tale about a floating bio-dome in outer space and the botanist who defied orders so he could save the trees. Yes, this movie has a hippie message. Deal with it.

In this story, it is the future, and in this future, life on Earth has gone mostly extinct. Some plant life was saved and put into orbit via bio-domes hooked up to spacecrafts (American Airlines space freighters, actually), with the goal being to keep the plants and trees alive and then go back to Earth one day to re-plant them. But before that could happen, the people on the freighters get orders to jettison the bio-domes and blow em up because the ships themselves were needed for something else entirely. And all of the domes are blown up except for Bruce Dern’s because he’s all like “we gotta save these trees.” So most of the movie is about his corporate subordination and then his use of the on-board drones as helpers and companions.

This is a weird, crazy sci fi movie featuring some of the Saturn’s Rings special effects that Trumbull couldn’t figure out in time for “2001” but he managed to sneak them in here so huzzah for that and also featuring great early 70s special effect work via models and macrophotography that is fun to watch and way more interesting to look at then some computer rendered digital fakery.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Equalizer’

“The Equalizer” may be the best bad movie I have seen this year and I mean that in a very particular way, in that the story is filled with these ridiculous cliches and tropes and conventions and plays heavily into them and is also filled with these absurd moments and insane side stories but meanwhile the whole thing is being done by people who know how to make films so it is technically proficient and there are a number of cool moments and beautiful shots and in the end they even tie it all together with a nice little bow, set to rock guitars and drums, so it all comes together for a good time at the theater. A dumb good time, but a goo time nonetheless.

“The Equalizer” is about The Equalizer, a gray haired man working at a Home Depot-like home improvement store. His name is Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), and despite being very friendly and full of smiles and very willing to help his coworkers with their personal goals, he also lives a very austere and simple lifestyle, one fit for a monk, and oh yeah he’s harboring a very violent past, one commissioned by the government to boot. And when the people around him get in trouble with criminals and corrupt cops and whatnot, he secretly gets involved and corrects the situation, leveling the playing field, equalizing the score, if you wil- ooooohhh I get it, I see why he’s named that, oh man these people are clever.Continue Reading …

#90 – Parachute Pants and Pacifiers

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In episode 90, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review The Equalizer.

There is a new Netflix Pick of the Week, they recap the box office weekend results and the new movies coming out on DVD and in theaters.

Discussed in this episode:

IMAX installing film projectors for Interstellar, Y The Last Man the movie, X:Men Apocalypse news, Key and Peele are dominating Hollywood, and much more!

Crespodiso Film School – Christopher Nolan

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In this BONUS episode, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn go over the entire filmography of Christopher Nolan, and Drewster Cogburn has a theory based on the trailer for Interstellar!

Enjoy and learn something!Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 9/22/14 – ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’

In this late 1980’s comedy sci-fi classic, “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is the story of two “slackers” (that’s 80’s movie code for stoners) who have to fulfill their destiny of becoming the most influential artists in history, so influential they bring peace throughout the world and even the cosmos maybe, but in order to do so they need to history class by giving a presentation in front of the entire school for some unexplained reason so to pass this test they are given a time traveling phone booth with which they kidnap people like Socrate, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid and Joan of Arc and bring them all back to contemporary California to participate in their presentation. Along the way there are some princesses and George Carlin and Napoleon Bonaparte at a water park.

Suffice to say, this movie is INSANE. And yet somehow this movie was a hit both critically and commercially and we all fell in love with Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan (Keanu Reeves) and their crazy antics across time. The movie is full of weird jokes, as well as history based jokes and a couple of time travel based gags, and the story really is kind of sweet when it’s all said and done, since it is about how art can bring people together in peace and Bill and Ted’s love story with the princesses and each other just makes it all so much sweeter, you know what I mean? Plus this makes for the real debut of Keanu Reeves, who had been working for a little while at that point but hadn’t done anything as big as this. He was still a few years away from Special Agent Johnny Utah, a good decade away from Neo, a baby faced, enthusiastic dude just giving it his all, and he’s kind of great.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’

Who ordered the grim detective noir story featuring rape, torture, mutilation, extreme blood loss, and Liam Neeson saying “Let’s get our eat ons together?” Because your order of “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is up and ready, hot and steamy and messy and in your face and not all that pleasant.

Based on a 90’s novel of some sort, part of a series of novels featuring the same character, “A Walk Among the Tombstones” is about some guy named Scudder (Neeson), an ex-NYC cop with a guilty conscious and 8 years of sobriety under his belt who works as an unlicensed private investigator. A drug trafficker hires Scudder to find out who kidnapped and killed his wife and before he knows it, Scudder finds himself sucked into a crazy plot involving other women brutally murdered in the past and possible future murders n the verge of happening unless he can do something about it.Continue Reading …

#89 – The Mystery of Drewster Cogburn

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In episode 89, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review A Walk Among The Tombstones, The Maze Runner and Blue Ruin, while Chris reviews Tusk.

Also discussed in this episode:

a new Billy D’s Death at the Movies, Chris has had a hankering for bad movies, release dates for Fantastic Four, Assassin’s Creed, Deadpool and the next James Bond movie, the Universal Studios monster movies, and more!

Enjoy the show!

Review: ‘Tusk’

A sort of body-horror movie from the director of “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy,” here we are with a film in which an obnoxious man is given the “Misery” treatment by an old Canadian weirdo with designs to turn a human into a beast. A story that involves monetized podcasting, infidelity, convenience store workers, big gulp style beverages, a play on the phrase Not See, a serial killer and a sometimes cross-eyed homicide detective from Quebec, “Tusk” is possibly the weirdest movie to come out in theaters in quite a while, which is a good thing.

Written and directed by Kevin Smith, “Tusk” centers on a guy named Wallace (Justin Long), an LA-based podcaster with a show named The Not See Party, and it appears his show is a kind of audio version of Tosh.0 or any other rip off show centered on showing internet clips of people acting stupid and/or hurting themselves. And the name comes from the show having some wacky conceit in which Wallace goes out and interviews people and then comes back and tells his supposedly hodophobic co-host Teddy (Haley Joel Osment) about the interview, hence the “Not See” part of the show.

I kind of feel like Kevin Smith is shitting on podcasters, having the show being so crass and the hosts being so disgusting and unsympathetic to their fellow man, but then it is weird that the podcast is hugely successful, bringing in over $100,000 per year, and Wallace even goes so far as to note that this figure is based on ad sales alone and that he makes even more money on t-shirt sales and live events. Considering that there are thousands upon thousands of podcasts out there (including, well, you know, this one), most of them struggling and not making a dime let alone a lucrative salary, it is kind of telling that the podcast Smith presents is so successful because he made is own podcast and success came easy because well he’s Kevin fucking Smith. Funny how from his own experience he presents podcasting as a source of income whereas in the real world it is mostly a hobby for most folks, and he also equates it to 90’s talk radio style douche baggery.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Maze Runner’

So, like, there’s this maze, right? We’ll call it The Maze. And in the middle there is this, like, open glade area with trees and shit. We’ll call that The Glade. And there are all these teenage boys forced to live in The Glade in the middle of the Maze. And they like totally call themselves Gladers. Except for the new guys. They’ll call them Greenbeans. And Greenies! So the Gladers and Greenies live in the Glade in the middle of the Maze, which has weird monsters that they will caaaaallll…let’s see…I don’t know, fuck it, they’ll just call them Grievers, for why I have no idea. Because they grieve? Anyway, the Gladers also split themselves up as Builders and Slicers and Runners, and there’s a virus that causes The Changing, in which the infected, like, uh, changes. And there you go, boom, we got a story. That was easy, let’s go get something to eat.

End Scene.

That’s how I imagine the writing session for “The Maze Runner” took place. The whole movie, based on a popular (I guess, so I’ve read on the interwebz) young adult fiction sci-fi fantasy novel, is full of these archetypes, the characters have names for everything that exists within this universe and it gets really silly really fast when every time the main character Thomas turns around, someone else is telling, “This is such and such. We call it The Something” or whatever. There were even a couple of times where it felt like they could have given things more names and identifiers but didn’t do so and all I’m saying is why not go all out. “This is the time of day we get together and eat some food. We call it The Feedening.” Or how about “This is when we all go to sleep. We call it…The Sleeping.” Just keep doing it. Everything has a name.Continue Reading …