A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo
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In episode 149, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review The Peanuts Movie, and Chris reviews Room.
Billy D reviews The Sand.
The Netflix Instant Pick of the Week is Hellraiser.
The Crespodisco features two classic Peanuts tunes.
Does Black Panther have to have a black director?
AMC making another zombie show.
Shia LaBeouf doing Shia LaBeouf things.
Continue Reading …
Being a regular radio talk show guest and podcaster, I get occasional opportunities to spread my brand of madness to the world on other programs. In addition to Cinema Crespodiso, I also call in every Thursday to The Curtis Earth Show on 91.5 fm WPRK (WPRK.org) to talk about movies for 10-20 minutes, but that can only be heard live as it happens. But sometimes that’s not enough, and I pop up somewhere else, spewing my opinions out like a dragon spitting fire, albeit with far less damage to my surroundings. Here is where these guest appearances are documented.
A new podcast network has been birthed here in Florida called “Pfft Radio” and so far there is one episode of one new show, and I just happened to be a guest on this particular show. Started by Steve Etchie, previous guest on Cinema Crespodiso and host of the recently defunct show “Answer Pants,” this new show is called “Tidbits,” and will feature multiple guests each episode, each of them telling stories or anecdotes that can range from short to lengthy, and can be funny, smart, poignant, inspirational, depressing, or any combination of these.Continue Reading …
Here we are again, watching and reviewing yet another James Bond movie, this time in the form of “Spectre,” the follow up to the hugely successful and well liked 2012 movie “Skyfall,” and not only did we get a returning Daniel Craig as Agent 007, but director Sam Mendes came back as well, bringing with him his sense of craftsmanship and detail which has made the last two Bond movies the best looking and most technically accomplished of them all. Lush, gorgeous and epic, “Spectre” arrives as the biggest and most expensive Bond movie ever, but did that necessarily translate into a “good” Bond movie?
For some reason, there are many out there who are really down on this movie and kind of hate it. A glimpse at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic shows a very divided response, with people who didn’t like “Spectre” expressing that they really didn’t like it. Do these people not remember “Die Another Day” or “Quantum of Solace” or the entirety of the Roger Moore era, which culminated with one of the worst big budget movies of the 1980s, “A View to a Kill?” I’m not going to say that “Spectre” is the best of the entire series, and I wouldn’t even say it’s the best of the Daniel Craig Bond movies (cause it ain’t) but this movie is hardly worthy of derision. If anything, it delivers a lot of the classic Bond tropes that have been largely missing for the last few films, while maintaining the more serious edge of these post-Brosnan movies, so while the movie does indeed have a stumble or three here and there, it is mostly quite good and still nails what makes Bond movies fun as well as what makes these Craig-led movies different from the rest.Continue Reading …
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 …
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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 …
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 …
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 …
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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 …
“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 …
We’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 …