#610 – Merry Cresmas 2024

In episode 610, Chris and Drew do the thing and review The Substance, and Chris reviews Queer and Maria, and Drew reviews The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and they talk about the re-issues of Intersteller, Interstella 5555, and White Christmas, plus they discuss Dune: Prophecy, The Agency, Alec Baldwin’s crusade for truth, Brian Cox’s vendetta against the Oscars, trailers for 28 Years Later and Karate Kid: Legends, Luca Guadagnino’s American Psycho starring Austin Butler, an actual release date for Magazine Dreams, and much more! Plus Werner Herzog pitches a vampire Christmas movie that actually sounds do-able. Merry Cresmas and Crappy Drew Year!

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#609 – Cher’s Creature Commandos

In episode 609, Chris and Drew do the thing and review Gladiator II and Chris reviews Wicked Part One, and they talk about Skeleton Crew, The Agency, Dune: Prophecy, Creature Commandos, The Summit, David Cronenberg’s Flashdance, Alfonso Cuarón’s James Bond film, James Gunn’s hyperbolic quotes, Sam Mendes’ ambitious Beatles quadrilogy, Masters of the Universe, Voltron, Matchbox, and much more! Plus appearances from Russell Crowe, Batman, Gerard Butler, and John Cena!

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FCK’N NUTS – An Interview with Sam Fox

Last year’s Florida Film Festival had a short film called The Blood of the Dinosaurs that was a trippy children’s show gone wrong, and the same production team is back with director Sam Fox’s new surrealist comedy short film FCK’N NUTS. A 12-minute movie about a young woman’s fear of losing her boyfriend when he finally meets her family and sees her home life, this is a funny and wild movie that takes a pun and pushes it into a weird and gross direction that is quite memorable. FCK’N NUTS is a part of the Midnight Shorts program at this year’s Florida Film Festival, and the following is a quick interview with Sam Fox regarding this film, what it means to her, and what the future has in store.

Chris Crespo: You said previously in another interview that the inspiration for this short was your own upbringing, specifically, living in a home with an alcoholic and drug addicted parent and not being able to bring people over to your house without exposing your reality to them. We know art is a great way to work through our emotions, thoughts and pain, so how has it been to take FCK’N NUTS around to different cities and film festivals and have these conversations with people?

Sam Fox: I’ve noticed that the real catharsis has taken place in my press process. Between festival screening Q&A’s and the amazing press and interviews we’ve garnered, I’ve had the opportunity to expose a very dark part of myself and my upbringing. When making FCK’N NUTS, we were so deep in it, all the stress of trying to get it right and hit the beats, I didn’t have a chance to process the story I was trying to tell. I also wanted to avoid imposing too much of my own story on Vincent and Maddie as they discovered their characters during rehearsal. When releasing FCK’N NUTS to the world, I made the decision to be vulnerable and honest in all press. I’m sick of lying at my expense to protect other people. I spent so much of my life playing a character and manipulating myself to fit everyone else’s needs. I have to admit, it’s incredibly challenging for me to go against everything that was instilled in me growing up, but in the process I am learning to be open and authentic. I think as an artist that is my number one responsibility.

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#585 – Never Not Do Robots

In episode 585, Chris and Drew do the thing and Chris reviews Civil War, as well as the Florida Film Festival movies Water For Life, Secret Mall Apartment, The Way We Speak, Booger, and Paradise, plus they talk about X-Men ’97, 3 Body Problem, The Sympathizer, Fallout, Ninja Kamui, Scary Movie 6, Now You See Me 3, Sonic 3, the Chris Farley biopic, Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man, and much more!

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‘Water For Life’ – An Interview with Will Parrinello

Twelve years in the making, Water for Life features three Latin American community leaders working to protect their water and ancestral territory from multinational corporations and corrupt governments that threaten the environmental, cultural and economic survival of their communities. Narrated by Diego Luna, Water For Life will have its Orlando premiere at the Florida Film Festival on Sunday April 14, and will screen again during the festival on Friday, April 18. In this interview with producer and director Will Parrinello, he discusses how he chose these three leaders to feature in the film, the process of making this film, and his hopes for what the movie can accomplish in terms of spreading awareness of these environmental battles and the people caught up in these fights.

Chris Crespo: What was the process of choosing these three people as your main subjects to tackle this issue of water use and land rights throughout Latin America? Did you initially want to make a documentary about this problem, or did you find out about the individuals first and then learned about their cause?

Will Parrinello: As independent documentary filmmakers, director of photography Vicente Franco and I have been making short documentary profiles of Goldman Environmental Prize recipients throughout Latin America since 2009. Each year the Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the environmental world, recognizes six grassroots environmental defenders from around the world who have achieved a seemingly unachievable goal. I wanted to make this film because I found these stories to be incredibly inspiring. At a time when we face numerous environmental challenges, many which seem insurmountable, here are stories of individuals who are courageously standing up, speaking truth to power and creating positive change in the world! Continue Reading …

Best of April 2023 + Florida Film Fest Movie Reviews

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Time for your Best of April 2023 freebie episode, which of course is brought to you by Patreon.com/Crespodiso! Sign up today for full access to all shows as soon as they are released. Cheers!
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‘The Blood of the Dinosaurs’ – An Interview with Joe Badon

Joe Badon is the writer and director of the short film “The Blood of the Dinosaurs,” which is screening as part of the Midnight Shorts program at this year’s Florida Film Festival. The film is as an Adult Swim style surrealist Kids’ Show, and here is a quick interview with Joe about how he came up with this short, shooting in New Orleans, and his advice for young aspiring filmmakers.

Chris Crespo: When conceiving and writing this short, do you start with one idea and then see where you can push it in different directions, or is this a number of different ideas you already had and managed to combine them together into one short?

Joe Badon: I’ll start with one idea usually and then that springboards into 8,000 other ideas. That tornado of ideas turns into my rough draft. Then, after the rough draft, I’ll refine the chaos into something that kind of makes sense.Continue Reading …

‘With Peter Bradley’ – An Interview with Alex Rappoport

“With Peter Bradley” is an intimate portrait of 82-year old Black abstract painter Peter Bradley, who as a young artist, art dealer and curator rose to remarkable heights in the 1960s and ‘70s, before slipping gradually into obscurity beginning the 1980’s. Screening at the Florida Film Festival, this documentary is a fascinating and well made look at an artist’s process as well as his past accomplishments and current place in art history, and in this interview I ask cinematographer turned first time feature length filmmaker Alex Rappoport about his process in putting this all together, the film’s incredible jazz score, and his future ambitions.

Chris Crespo: Your production notes state you had over 20 hours of footage when you decided to start editing, so how did you manage to cut that down to a 90-minute feature? How did the overall story and feel of the documentary reveal itself to you as you assembled the film?

Alex Rappoport: I had 20 hours recorded when the Covid shutdown started in March 2020. So I did technically start editing at that point, but it was mostly organizational and a way to keep myself sane during those awful and scary weeks. We started filming again the first week of May I think, and then I shot frequently with Peter until the end of June before really sitting down to edit in earnest. At that point I had maybe 50 hours of material. And then I picked up interviews and little bits of Peter painting in the Fall, after I had a sense of what gaps needed to be filled narratively/biographically.Continue Reading …

‘Sulam’ – An Interview with Noam Argov

Noam Argov is an Israeli American filmmaker and MFA Writing/Directing Student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she is a Film Futures Scholar and BAFTA US Scholarship Program nominee. With a background in documentary filmmaking, Argov began her graduate film program to transition into original narrative film and television, and she now has a new short film, “Sulam,” which has two screenings coming up at this year’s Florida Film Festival. In this interview we talk about her own personal experiences informing this film, the casting of the film, and Noam’s first ever experience at the Enzian Theater.

Chris Crespo: The story presented in Sulam feels very specific, as it is based on a mix of your childhood memories growing up in Central Florida as an immigrant – was this a story you’ve been wanting to tell for a while, and do you plan to continue to explore the themes present in this film in your future work?Continue Reading …

‘Our Males and Females’ – An Interview with Ahmad Alyaseer

Ahmad Alyaseer is a Jordanian filmmaker with a new short film, “Our Males and Females,” which will have two screenings at this year’s Florida Film Festival. This very well made and thought-provoking short film centers on a religiously conservative couple tasked with having their deceased transgender daughter washed and prepared for burial according to local and religious customs and deals directly with identity acceptance in both life and death in a very interesting way. Here is an interview with Ahmad in which I ask him about the genesis of this film, the Jordanian film industry, and his future projects.

Chris Crespo: With trans rights being a major issue at the moment, what kind of pushback did you receive, if any, while putting together this story of a conservative couple preparing their transgender daughter for burial?

Ahmad Alyaseer: We definitely received many push backs when we were trying to get funds, grants and investors on board, many of them were really interested in the script and loved it but couldn’t attach their name to it because the topic was very controversial. This took us months to try and raise money for the film but with no luck; at the end, I ended up fully self-funding it from my own savings.Continue Reading …