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Review: ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’

Almost since the beginning of cinema, books have been adapted for movies, easy fodder for new stories to tell on the big screen, and sometimes the results are great, and sometimes they are pretty awful. Many of these adaptations fall somewhere in the middle, wallowing in mediocrity. This particular adaptation, the one of Seth Grahame-Smith’s “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” unfortunately can only wish it was in this expansive middle ground, existing as fun yet easily disposable entertainment. No, instead “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” is a dreadful film, with a loosely strung together story and just some of the most hideous and unappealing cinematography ever for a big budget summer movie.

The story starts with very young Abraham Lincoln witnessing the death of his mother at the hands of some guy, it the long run it doesn’t really matter who this guy is, he’s just the guy that kills little Abe’s mama. So Abe grows up into a lanky young man (Benjamin Walker, Kinsey) hell bent on vengeance against this killer, and through these actions he stumbles across a countrywide vampire plot to take over the nation. So naturally some guy named Henry (Dominic Cooper) takes Abe in and trains him to become a silver-tipped axe twirling vampire hunter. And thus begins the secret monster-slaying life of our 16^th President, his personal battles against the vampire menace eventually culminating in the US Civil War.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Alex Cross’

“Alex Cross” is a boring, fairly hackneyed attempt at a crime procedural thriller, ably acted by Tyler Perry and Matthew Fox but weakly directed by Rob Cohen, who seems far too concerned with what’s cool as opposed to what’s smart and right for the story, and failing at both aspects anyway. What could essentially be an episode of any random network television crime procedural television show, “Alex Cross” really offers nothing new to the genre and doesn’t do anything fun or interesting with the old clichés, which results in a boring 101 minutes.

Detective Dr. Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) heads up a small team that apparently focuses on women killers, as the movie starts with them tracking down a kidnapper and saving a young girl, both of whom are unrelated to the rest of the story. Cross is pretty great at what he does, displaying a Sherlock Holmes level of crime scene deduction and reasoning that is always right and never is questioned, but he does come across a dangerous foe in the form of a random hired killer (Matthew Fox), who is hired to kill three people, and goes after them one at a time. Fox plays this role with a level of obvious insanity, all wide eyes and shaved head, and he definitely seemed to have fun playing this sadistic and crazy character, and he pretty much acts as the one watchable and somewhat interesting thing in this whole film. So Fox and his team try to catch this guy and the whole movie is a game of cat and mouse, with the killer taking out people close to Detective Dr. Cross, making it personal and forcing Cross to go out on a righteous search for retribution.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/8/16 – ‘Major League’

As heard in episode 187 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“Major League” is a sports comedy from 1989 about a fake version of the Cleveland Indians and following them in one season as they go from those lovable losers to a team of winners (that’s how you know this is all fiction). An old washed-up catcher has to help wrangle a team which includes an ex-con, a voodoo practitioner, a prima donna veteran already thinking of life after baseball, an old cheating pitcher, and Wesley Snipes, and they of course have problems with each other at first but then learn to get along and also winning helps, which they start doing, and if you’ve seen any sports dramas or comedies from the last few decades, then you already know where this one is going to end up.

(They can’t all have the same gumption and guts as “Little Big League.”) Continue Reading …

#187 – No More Heroes

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In episode 187, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review Suicide Squad.

The Netflix Instant Pick of the Week is Major League.

Dr. Drew gives his two cents on how to use the escalator properly.

Billy D reviews a special 35mm “preview cut” screening of Gremlins.

The Crespodisco features the main theme from the Police Academy series.Continue Reading …

Spoiler Bonus Episode – Suicide Squad

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In this SPOILER FILLED bonus episode, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn talk about the movie Suicide Squad, what they liked about it, what they did not like, whether or not Jared Leto’s Joker was good, whether or not the movie is racist and sexist and does that matter in a movie about bad guys, and so on and so forth.

So if you have already seen the movie, join us for this spoiler-tastic ride. If you have NOT seen the movie, you can still listen, but know that we will be giving away all the deets.

So here we go, enjoy the show.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Suicide Squad’

In “Suicide Squad,” a ragtag group of suicide squaders doing some suicide squadding and battle some sort of vague magic, while something close to thirty different songs get briefly played to convey some sort of feeling of I guess “fun.” Also Jared Leto is a tattooed Joker and Ben Affleck’s Batman shows up for two short scenes, one quick “dream sequence,” and a boring mid-credits after-movie scene in which no new information is conveyed beyond what fans of these films already know.

What could have been either a wild romp of a comic book movie or a brilliant anti-hero subversion of what we’ve already seen dozens of times instead turned into a movie that tried to be both at the same time, and that really just doesn’t work. You can’t have one character openly pine for his young daughter while another mugs for the camera right next to him. It’s one or the other. Serious or light. “The Dark Knight” or “Guardians of the Galaxy.” That middle ground is brutal.

Also, just to get this out of the way right now, can we please be done with the tired “energy beam shooting into the sky from a building in the middle of a city” trope? The one the heroes always have to shut down to save the city or world or universe? You know, the one used in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and again in “R.I.P.D.?” Also used in the most recent “Fantastic Four” and “The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Ghostbusters” and there are also variations of this trope used in “Man of Steel” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” just to name a few examples. There’s always a big colorful swirling vortex over the city either sucking things in or spitting things out, and terrible things are happening, and then it gets stopped by the good guys and the vortex goes away like it was never even there. We’ve seen it a lot, and if you see “Suicide Squad,” then you are going to see it again.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Abduction’

A young aspiring action star turns to a director of usually solid b-movies to help launch his karate-based, abs-and-chest-at-the-forefront career as this generation’s Jean Claude Van Damme. The result is a lousy mess of a movie with bland action, bad acting and a boring story, with the aspiring actor’s future looking a little grim.

This actor, of course, is Twilight’s Taylor Lautner, and the silver screen has not seen such an inept dramatic performer is quite a long while. He has all the charisma of a deadly black hole, reads his lines with the inflection of a robot, and makes the aforementioned Van Damme look like Daniel Day-Lewis. Meanwhile, director John Singleton burst onto the Hollywood scene with the excellent Boyz n the Hood, and while he hasn’t made anything as good as his first film, he still has a resume loaded with entertaining and well done movies. So what went wrong? What happened in his recent six-year hiatus that made him go from the perfectly fine and entertaining “Four Brothers” to this abysmal piece of malarkey?Continue Reading …

Review: ’50/50′

On the list of phrases you are not likely to hear on an average Friday or Saturday night, “Let’s go see that cancer comedy” has to be pretty close to the top. That is hard sell for many people, considering how serious cancer is and how nearly everyone has been affected one way or another by cancer. It’s not a topic that people want to ruminate on for a couple hours of entertainment. Why would anyone even want to see such a film?

Well maybe because it’s actually very well done and strikes an interesting balance between R-rated comedy and sincere drama, sometimes switching between the two very quickly and with surprising ease. This is “50/50,” the cancer comedy you never knew you wanted, but it is here and it is very good.

Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is 27 years old, works in radio, has his own place, works out regularly, and avoids driving because it is the fifth likeliest way to die. He’s a very nice guy and even puts up with the shenanigans of his hot but strangely distant girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), the douchiness of his otherwise best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), and the smothering of his overbearing but well-meaning mother (Anjelica Huston). So when he finds out that he has a rare spinal cancer, he’s definitely thrown for a loop. He’s a young, healthy guy with no vices, why would he ever expect to get cancer? But alas, that’s how it happens sometimes, and it happens to him, and he has to deal with it.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Cowboys & Aliens’

Just look at that title – “Cowboys & Aliens.” Going into this movie, everyone knew it would be a tough one to pull off. The mixing of the very grounded and dusty Western genre with the fantastic, more imaginative aspects of science fiction writing doesn’t make for a smooth pairing. Some massaging and elbow grease has to be used to make these two genres come together in an entertaining and coherent fashion. And while “Cowboys & Aliens” does come close to nailing this concept, it does fall short, and probably would have been much better without the aliens at all.

The set up is simple. The movie opens in the middle of the desert, in which a gunslinger with amnesia (Daniel Craig) wakes up injured and wanders into the nearest town. When he gets there, he finds out that he’s a stagecoach robber and murderer and the law takes him in. But before he can be processed, here comes an alien invasion, blowing up the town and lassoing away people from the streets and into their little aircrafts. So our amnesiac stagecoach robbing gunfighter hero teams up with the local dickhead cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) to form a posse and track down the aliens in an effort to save the people that were kidnapped. Oh, and Daniel Craig has some sort of ridiculous alien wrist gun the whole time.Continue Reading …