A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo
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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 …
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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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In this week’s Crespodiso Spillover bonus episode, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn talk about:
– Sicario 2
– Lockout officially ripped off Escape From New York
– Why the Robocop remake sucked
– Jeff Bridges and John Turturro are pushing for more Big Lebowski movies
– Get Shorty the tv series
– No Infinity Stones in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II
– Updates on the next two Avengers films
Continue Reading …
There are two types of crude humor usually employed in R-rated comedies these days. There’s the disgusting gross out humor, you know, the poopy-related stuff usually found in your typical Farrelly brothers film or any number of urine or toilet based Austin Powers gags. And then there’s the more sex-based crude humor, which involves jokes about oral sex and saying “tits” a lot, and the latter is where “Bad Teacher” traffics. What happens when you take a person pretty much unqualified to teach and put them in a room full of kids? Well, hilarity, for the most part.
In “Bad Teacher” we have Cameron Diaz going back to her comedy roots (lest we forget her star making roles in “The Mask” and “There’s Something About Mary“) and playing Elizabeth Halsey, a gold digger who took a teaching job only so she could skate by and focus on planning her wedding with her well off fiancé instead. But when the wedding falls through, she finds herself stuck in the school, struggling to get by and on the search for another wealthy guy to “take care of her.”Continue Reading …
It is said that there are seven basic types of stories, and all movies (and books and short films, etc.) are comprised of any mixture of these story types; basically, there’s nothing new under the sun, and we’ve seen it all before. When someone sets out to tell a strong yet simple tale, it is easy to recall all of the other similar stories we’ve already seen and heard. So what can be done to overcome this inherent problem in the millennia-old tradition of storytelling? How can a story set itself apart from the myriad of similar stories that have come before it?
How about with some confident direction and strong writing? Sounds easy enough right? But if it was easy, how come we don’t have more good movies? Movies like “A Better Life,” which tells the story of an illegal immigrant named Carlos (Demián Bichir, Che) who is raising a teenaged son all by himself in Los Angeles, and his story is one of struggle, that’s for sure. This guy just keeps his head down and works his landscaping job, but the incredibly long hours keep him from being able to do anything with his son Luis (José Julián), who is getting his life lessons from the local thugs and street gangs and is on the verge of joining up with them himself.Continue Reading …
As heard in episode 186 of Cinema Crespodiso.
“The Big Short” was one of the surprise movies of 2015, an ensemble drama with streaks of dark comedy slashed throughout it, focusing on the lead up to the big financial meltdown of 2007 and 2008 triggered by the subprime loan market and investors betting against bad mortgages, brought to life by the director of “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” and right when no one was looking, BAM, this thing came out with a wallop, making an impression by telling a complicated story in an entertaining and accessible fashion and also doing so with not only humor but a sense of righteous anger at those many people responsible for letting such a good thing turn into such a nightmarish shit show.
Of course, since we are talking about Adam McKay we should remember he also directed “The Other Guys,” a movie in which the ultimate villain was a “Too Big To Fail” bank that didn’t pay for its crimes while some fall guy took the blame, and then the final credits are used to make a presentation on the rising income and wealth inequality in America. So in hindsight the trajectory makes sense.Continue Reading …