Netflix pick for 11/9/15 – ‘Kickboxer’

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Who ordered the late 80s, low budget martial arts mini classic? Because here we are with the 1989 film “Kickboxer,” which is one of the better Jean Claude Van Damme action movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Featuring a simple yet effective plot, multiple training montages, a scene of drunken dancing, and a final fight good enough to be spoofed by other movies, this is a ridiculous, fun, sentimental, somewhat tone deaf and yet entirely enjoyable movie.

Jean Claude Van Damme plays Kurt Sloane, the brother of a successful kickboxer, and he gets a front row seat to see his brother get paralyzed in the ring by a hateful Thai kickboxer named Tong Po. And in order to get revenge for his bro, Kurt decides to train to become a Muay Thai fighter and take on Tong Po in the ring. After the quick set up, a majority of the movie is Kurt in the middle of the jungle going through some old school, primitive training techniques with a martial arts master who lives by himself in the middle of nowhere, which means this movie is loaded with montages. You can watch Van Damme kick trees, stands, sticks and air, do all sorts of splits, punch and kick underwater, get coconuts dropped on his stomach from trees, and much more, because we need to fill ninety minutes of run time to make this a feature length movie.Continue Reading …

#148 – The Begotten Challenge

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In episode 148, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn are joined by first-time guest Swervey Jones, host of The Swervey Jones Show (http://swerveyjones.weebly.com/).

Chris and Drew review Spectre.

Billy D reviews The Last Shift and issues The Begotten Challenge, as Drew issues the Visitor Q Challenge.

The Netflix Instant Pick of the Week is Kickboxer. Yes, Kickboxer.

The Crespodisco features the first two songs from Thomas Newman’s “Spectre” soundtrack.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Goodnight Mommy’

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As opposed to unstoppable monsters or slashers or any sort of undead situation, “Goodnight Mommy” derives its terror and tension from horrific situations which could plausibly happen. People don’t have to be possessed by demons or chased by aliens or hunted by psychopaths, they can just have problems which manifest themselves in a way that is, to say the least, not healthy for everyone involved. Thick with an atmosphere of dread and some good old fashioned Fear and Loathing, this is a movie that unnerves well before it gets to anything really shocking, but then it does a little bit of that shocking, too. Well, dependent on your exposure to these types of movies, anyway.

The movie starts with Lukas and Elias, twin boys, alone, playing in fields and woods by their isolated home. When their mother comes home, her whole face is bandaged, with only her bloodshot eyes and mouth exposed, and the twins are immediately off put by her appearance. She explains that they need to keep the house dark and quiet as she recuperates, she acts very sternly when enforcing the rules, and she only refers to one of the two boys, all of which upsets them and makes them question whether or not this woman is actually their mother. Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 11/2/15 – ‘Two Days, One Night’

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As heard in episode 147 of Cinema Crespodiso.

From 2014, “Two Days, One Night“is an interesting little character drama about what happens when a worker is fired from her job so that her co-workers could keep their yearly bonuses, and what that worker does over the course of a weekend to convince her co-workers to give up their bonuses so she can stay employed. Not making things any easier for her is her recent bout with depression, which is part of why she lost her job due to the stigma that people endure when faced with such a dilemma, and she has to fight through this to be able to go from person to person to plead her case. Marion Cotillard is excellent, as per usual, as the lead of this extremely well made film from the great Dardenne brothers, makers of top notch dramas and fully realized movies about people and the situations they find themselves, all of which contain universal truths even when done within very specific and seemingly unique stories.Continue Reading …

#147 – Re-Gift the Gift

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In episode 147, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn are joined by first-time guest Jen Vargas (www.twitter.com/JenVargas), new director of the Enzian Film Slam, board member of the Florida chapter of Women in Film and Television and managing editor at Centralfloridatop5.com.

Chris reviews Goodnight Mommy.

Billy D reviews Eden Lake and The Living and the Dead.

The Netflix Instant Pick of the Week is Two Days, One Night.

The Crespodisco features the first two songs from Alberto Iglesia’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” soundtrack.Continue Reading …

Book-to-film adaptations: 11 – ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’

TTSP_BTFAdaptations“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is a 1974 spy novel from English novelist John le Carré, at the time already world-renowned for being the author of the hugely popular novel “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” and also known for the fact that he gathered much of his insight into the world of professional government sanctioned espionage via his own employment with the British Security Service as well as the Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6). With “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carré crafted what may be his best work, a story about a Soviet mole implanted deep in British intelligence, which itself was inspired by the very real Cambridge Spy Ring. The antithesis of the typical spy story, instead of the car chases and shoot outs of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the spy novels of John le Carré are largely internal affairs, with personal relationships and ideologies doing all the heavy dramatic lifting. Instead of spies trying to stop cartoonish villains from enacting their worldwide takeovers from within their secret volcano lairs, these are tales of morally ambiguous people who justify their actions through “love of country,” and who struggle with the things they are tasked with carrying out. And when there is a conflict between people, it is almost always of the psychological nature, a war of information and of temperaments, as opposed to a war of artillery and bloodshed (though there is still usually some bloodshed). The mole hunt of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” epitomizes this, as it openly asks the question, “Who can spy on the spies?”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Steve Jobs’

203827r1We’re all sick and tired of the same old biographical picture formula, right? It’s been done for years and we have seen it time and time again, regardless of whether the film’s subject is an athlete, a businessman, an inventor, an artist, it simply does not matter, we get the same thing over and over, which is to say, a “greatest hits” package of a person’s life, tracing their steps from childhood to as far as they can go, if not all the way to death. By shoving everything that happened to a person into a two to three hour movie means we just skim the surface, we get the superficial details, with very little insight, and then before we know it, the movie is all over. Might as well have just listened to music while reading a boring, by the numbers biography. But with “Steve Jobs,” this is not the case at all, a different tack has been taken, one that is very effective and which tells us more than the “birth to death” biopic could have told us.

Written by Aaron Sorkin and based on an authorized biography of the same name, “Steve Jobs” does not start with the person’s birth and childhood and work its way through his youth all the way to the end when he became one of the most popular people in the world through his work with Apple, but instead this movie cherry picks three very specific moments in the life of Steve Jobs and these three moments are actually quite similar, giving the movie a very interesting structure with which they were able to work in, and by limiting the scope of the story, Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and actor Michael Fassbender were all able to get way more out of this character and managed to tell the story of someone’s life without getting bogged down in all the extra details.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 10/26/2015 – ‘eXistenZ’

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As heard in episode 146 of Cinema Crespodiso.

From 1999, “eXistenZ” is one of those movies that should have a much bigger audience and cult following than it already has, but hey, that just means there are more people out there ready to get sucked in to this amazing, puzzling, and unfortunately somewhat familiar world. A story about a virtual reality game designer in some unspecified near future and the violent “realist” movement trying to take her and all of gaming down, this is a weird, creepy, cool, bizarre movie, which means it is standard pre-2000s David Cronenberg, which is a great thing.

Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is the world’s foremost game designer, and the movie starts with her giving a demonstration – the first ever – of her new eXistenZ gaming system. But when an assassination attempt on her live disrupts the demo, she ends up on the run with security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law), and while on the run, they have to test out the eXistenZ game pod and ensure it still works properly, as it is the only copy in the whole world and also cost millions upon millions to develop. And when Ted logs in to the game for the first time with Allegra, things start getting really wonky, as he starts to lose concept of reality and they delve deeper and deeper into the game.

This movie gets into our relationship with technology, and while it was made over 15 years ago, it feels more relevant now than ever before. We all hear the same old complaints about people being less and less connected with each other personally because we are all too busy to connect with each other electronically, and this story explores this concept, as it is possible for people to spend so much time in the virtual world of the game that they forget about the real world and neglect it, and hence themselves.Continue Reading …

#146 – Long Live The New Flesh

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In episode 146, Chris Crespo is joined by guest co-host Steve Etchie (www.twitter.com/Etchie) and first-time guest Amy Drew Thompson (AmyDrewThompson.com).

Chris reviews Steve Jobs, and Amy reviews Crimson Peak and The Last Witch Hunter.

Billy D reviews Possession and The Entity.

Chris, Amy and Etchie all talk about their favorite Halloween movies.

The Netflix Instant Pick of the Week is David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ.

The Crespodisco features a Sammy Davis Jr. song and a Julio Iglesias song from the movie Tinker Tailor Solder Spy.Continue Reading …

Op-Ed: Will ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ break box office records?

star_wars_episode_vii__the_force_awakens_ver3In case you have not heard, there is a movie called “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” coming out on December 18, 2015, and with a full two months to go before release, all sorts of people have worked themselves up into a lather in anticipation of this sure-to-be huge movie event. As a matter of fact, this particular film will be so huge that people are having fun speculating upon the size of the movie’s financial potential. So the question is, will “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” break box office records?

Yes.

And no.

To keep things in perspective, the monster opening weekend is a relatively recent phenomenon. Thirteen years ago, in the summer of 2002, “Spider-Man” shocked the world by being the first movie to ever have a three-day opening weekend of $100 million or more ($114m, to be precise). Since then, the $100 million opening weekend has become the new barometer for a successful launch, with 31 other movies opening to that amount at a minimum, with 21 of those movies making more than $114m in just three days. It has gotten to the point where “Godzilla” can open at $93 million and somehow still be considered a disappointment. So what of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens?” How much does it have to open to in order to be considered a success?Continue Reading …