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 …

Spoiler Bonus Episode – ‘Crimson Peak’

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In this SPOILER-FILLED bonus episode, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn talk in depth about Crimson Peak, all the weird and wonderful things that happen in that movie, all the secrets, and that crazy last 20 minutes.

Beware of all the spoilers because Chris and Drew are gonna spoil the shit out of this, so unless you do not care about knowing all the details, watch Crimson Peak first and then listen to the show.

But hey, you can do whatever you want.

Enjoy the show.

Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Bridge of Spies’

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Based on a pretty amazing true story, “Bridge of Spies” is an old school style Cold War era thriller, a movie about spies and geopolitical tensions and the ominous specter of a full blown thermonuclear war threatening to break out at any moment, but more specifically it is about some of the hidden and secretive actions of rival governments, and also how these governments view the populace and use them to their own ends, and how the populace could in term actually find a way to use their governments.

James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a successful insurance lawyer at a large law firm in New York City, and one day he shows up to work to find that he has been elected by seemingly every other lawyer in New York to be the defense counselor for Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a man arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage and accused of being a Soviet spy. Drawing the short straw, he in convinced rather easily that this is in the best interest of the justice system itself, as it needs to appear obvious to everyone that this accused Soviet spy is still getting the full benefit of the American constitution, and Donovan sets out defend this man, all the while suffering anger and vitriol from the public at large.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Crimson Peak’

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From the director of such modern horror classics as the vampire film “Cronos” and the ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” and the wickedly dark adult fairy tale “Pan’s Labrynth,” each one creepier and spookier and more violent than the last, comes a…costume drama of manners and high society? Well, in a way, yes absolutely, this is the case, but of course Guillermo Del Toro isn’t just making a turn of the century love story in the style of “Wuthering Heights” and “Pride and Prejudice,” he takes this classic genre of storytelling and infuses it with what he knows and does best, and that is telling the tale of monsters, whether they be vampires or ghosts or the scariest type of monster of them all, humans. This movie is about a woman having to choose between two suitors but also having to survive a bad situation which she doesn’t realize is bad until it is too late.

This is “Crimson Peak.”

Continue Reading …