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Netflix pick for 8/19/13 – ‘The Ice Harvest’

“The Ice Harvest” is a little dark-comedy crime movie set during the Christmas holiday, and movies juxtaposing crimes and violence with the joy of Christmas are always fun to watch. Nothing says “reason for the season” like a seedy strip club in Kansas and a mob lawyer teaming up with a pornographer in an attempt to steal millions of dollars from a crime boss on Christmas Eve.

John Cusack plays the mob lawyer and Billy Bob Thornton plays his buddy with whom he is trying to steal some ill-gotten money from a bad dude (played by Randy Quaid), but after they get the money, they realize that their escape routes out of town are blocked due to bad weather, meaning they are forced to hide out in town while some mob enforcers look for them. Meanwhile, Cusack’s lawyer character bounces back and forth between trying to impress a good looking strip club owner (Connie Nielsen) and hanging out with his best friend (Oliver Platt), who happens to be married to Cusack’s ex-wife. So life is pretty shitty for this guy. No wonder he’s willing to risk his life to steal a couple million bucks.Continue Reading …

#32 – Getting Those Digital Pennies

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In episode 32, Chris and Drew review Kick Ass 2 and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, and they also talk about the Terminator series, the Christmas crime noir movie The Ice Harvest, and more!

Also discussed in this episode:

The box office recap includes talk about Paranoia, Jobs, We’re The Miller, Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, Captain Phillips and the works of director Lee Daniels.

New movies on DVD include the animated movie Epic, Killing Season, Amour and Scary Movie 5. New movies in theaters include The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, The World’s End, You’re Next and The Grandmaster.

The Crespodisco features music from the soundtracks for The Blues Brothers and Desperado.

Drew sees Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines for the first time.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Kick-Ass 2’

If I was some sort of stupid film critic superhero, then ambivalence would be my kryptonite, making it as difficult as possible for me to even put together enough words to actually constitute a “review” of some sort. And “Kick-Ass 2” has filled me with this ambivalence, as it doesn’t really seem to commit to anything, bounces back and forth between satire and comic book hero worship, admittedly strives to be good but really is just okay at best, and really it all comes down to an overall story that doesn’t add up to much of anything in the end and a bunch of empty action scenes with nothing behind them.

There just ain’t nothing to sink my teeth into with this movie. A lot of critics are going into fits over the movie’s violence, which is indeed over the top and in some cases done in bad taste, but really there isn’t anything in here that’s worse than what’s on primetime television. Doesn’t anyone wince at digital blood? Does that crap fool anyone? I didn’t think so. At least in “Kick-Ass 2” when someone gets stabbed or shot, there IS the blood (no matter how fake it looks), as much of this movie is about the consequences and repurcussions of the violence, which is better than a lot of PG-13 action movies that regularly feature the obvious deaths of hundreds if not thousands if not MILLIONS of people, usually in the most sanitized and bloodless manner possible. Now THAT’S offensive.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Mud’

Jeff Nichols started pretty small with the little blood feud Southern-fried drama “Shotgun Stories,” and then followed that up with “Take Shelter,” an oh so slightly bigger Southern-fried movie about a man suffering from visions of an impending apocalyptic storm. And now he’s back with something a little bigger in scope, a Southern-fried coming-of-age drama called “Mud,” which makes Jeff Nichols three-for-three in terms of well-made movies.

In “Mud,” 14-year old Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) stumble across a dude named Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a fugitive chilling on an island in the Mississippi River in the Arkansas Delta area. Not too many movies made about this region of the world (and as a matter of fact, according to the interwebz, this $2 million movie is the biggest budgeted film ever shot in Arkansas). Mud convinces Ellis and Neckbone to help him fix up a motor boat so Mud can reunite with his girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and get the hell out of dodge.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Conjuring

Okay, folks, I am a day late and a dollar short on this one, but “The Conjuring” proved to be so popular and generally well liked that I just gotta get something down, on the record, so to speak, as I have finally gotten around to seeing this supposedly “based on a true story” horror movie and there are a couple of things that might be worth noting. You know. For posterity.

So in case ya haven’t heard, “The Conjuring” is on real-life paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) and is loosely based on an investigation of a haunted home in the 1970’s in which a family was terrorized by what was deemed to be a demonic spirit. Good times. Directed by James Wan (Saw, Insidious, Death Sentence), this is a 1970’s styled horror movie, as it is mostly tension built through atmosphere and mood, but with the modern favorite of loading the whole thing with jump scares to keep things moving along, resulting in a pretty decent horror film that has a few things going for it.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/12/13 – ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

Who says you need over the top violence and gore and jump scares to make a scary movie? Why should all horror films have zombies or slashers or Rube Goldberg machine loving psychopaths? “Rosemary’s Baby” is proof that all you need is a proper atmosphere and tone, committed acting and sure handed direction to make a horror movie devoid of all the trappings one would normally expect from the genre.

Roman Polanski’s first US-made film, he came up with a doozy, adapting the thriller novel Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin into this tense, nightmarish movie about a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) suspecting her husband of making a deal to sacrifice their unborn child to an occult for his own success (a little Illuminati reference there maybe? Blood sacrifice? You know what I’m talking about…), but then eventually finding out that the truth is so much more horrifying that it’s not even comparable.Continue Reading …

#31 – Back From Vacation

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In episode 31, Chris and Drew review the movies Elysium, Mud, Admissions and The Numbers Station, they have a new Netflix Instant Pick of the Week, they recap the weekend box office, and they play another round of Drewster Cogburn vs the World.Also in this episode:

Is bad Denzel Washington better than good Mark Wahlberg?

Why did they make another Percy Jackson movie?

Are animated movies really a cash cow?

What’s the deal with We’re the Millers?

New movies on DVD include Olympus Has Fallen, Emperor, The Big Wedding and The Company You Keep.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Elysium’

Anyone looking for a dose of political allegory mixed with some intense action and a few outbursts of surprising violence? Want to see Matt Damon in a cybernetic exoskeleton suit? Do you desire an action movie that is more than just chases and gun fights but also includes thoughts and ideas? Then get thee to a movie theater and check out “Elysium,” because this flick is smarter than the average fare (see that? See what I did there?).Continue Reading …

Talking Trailers: Ridley Scott’s ‘The Counselor’

Acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy has hit novel-to-movie adaptation pay dirt lately, what with his books No Country for Old Men and The Road both being made into films, and recently someone got him to write his first straight up screenplay, an original story meant only to be made into a movie, and that movie is Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor.”

When boiled down into a log line, “The Counselor” seems very simple: a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) decides to get into the drug dealing business to make a little extra money, and of course things go wrong. But then again, a quick synopsis of either “No Country For Old Men” (a man finds a briefcase full of money) or “The Road” (a man and his son try to survive in a world destroyed by nuclear weapons) would make it seem as if those movies are very simple stories, when we all know that they both have a lot to offer, especially the fantastic NCFOM. So while the plot synopsis is simple, the below recently released trailer hints at a wild movie in which Fassbender’s lawyer character will go down the rabbit hole of danger, betrayal and who knows what else.Continue Reading …

Talking Trailers: Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’

Any year we get a new Spike Jonze movie is a good year, which means when November 20, 2013 comes around, this year will officially be “good,” because that is the scheduled release date for “Her,” Spike Jonze’s new movie about an anti-social fella who falls in love with a voice on a computer.

This anti-social fella is played by Joaquin Phoenix, who took a short break from acting so he could “retire” and focus on being a hip hop artist (all shown in the Casey Affleck-helmed mockumentary “I’m Still Here“), and now he’s back in full force it seems, especially after that incredible performance in last year’s “The Master,” and it looks like he has another one under his belt, as the below trailer for “Her” is very compelling and pretty much looks like what one would expect from the maker of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation.”Continue Reading …