Netflix 2015 - Cinema Crespodiso

Netflix pick for 12/14/15 – ‘Grandma’s Boy’

As heard in episode 153 of Cinema Crespodiso.

Every now and then you just need to sit back and chill out with a ridiculous comedy, and it doesn’t get much more ridiculous than “Grandma’s Boy.” The story of a 35-year old video game designer who finds himself forced to move in with his grandmother and her two roommates and who also meets a girl he likes and wants to impress but also he’s developing his own video game on the side that some video game prodigy genius with the video game designer version of writer’s block wants to steal and pass off as his own, this is a movie with a weird plot with strange little subplots thrown in and a meandering, we’ll-get-there-eventually kind of tone that feels very much in line with the best (and worst) movies of this kind.

If Cheech and Chong made a movie in 2006 that featured video games, a wild lion, a witch doctor, Kevin Nealon and Jonah Hill suckling at a breast for multiple scenes, “Grandma’s Boy” would be that movie.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 12/7/15 – ‘Fist Of Legend’

In 1994, Jet Li starred in a remake of a Bruce Lee movie, and that remake is known as “Fist Of Legend,” a martial arts extravaganza of a movie, the action tempered with a story of star-crossed lovers and racial tensions during the Japanese Occupation of China leading up to World War II. Featuring amazing fight choreography from industry legend Yuen Woo-ping and Jet Li at his fastest and fiercest, this is a great movie that will forever be remembered as one of Li’s absolute best.

Chen Zhen (Li) is a Chinese student studying in Japan, and some Japanese martial arts students try to get him to leave and go back to China. At the same time, Chen is involved in a relationship with a Japanese woman, but they are keeping their relationship secret because both sides would frown upon them because of the political and racial problems between the two countries at that time. And on top of all of that, Chen discovers that not only was his old teacher killed in a fight, but he was poisoned before the fight, which is why he lost in the first place, and Chen is compelled to find the murderers and clear his master’s name of any undue disgrace.

Netflix pick for 11/30/15 – ‘The Wolfpack’

As heard in episode 151 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“The Wolfpack” is an amazing documentary about the all too true tale of the Angulo Family of New York City, and how the patriarch of the home kept everyone else locked away inside their tiny apartment for most of their lives. And this documentary goes into a little of what happens when this happens to people, and specifically takes a look at the six brothers in this family and how this experience shaped their lives. And despite the dad trying to shield his kids from the big, bad outside world, he still showed them thousands of movies, making these stories the only way these kids learn about the world, and you bet this movie gets into what THAT does to a person as well.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 11/23/15 – ‘Come Drink With Me’

Long before Katniss Everdeen and Beatrix Kiddo and Ellen Ripley, there was a bad ass female protagonist in the form of Golden Swallow, featured in the 1966 martial arts Shaw Brothers classic “Come Drink With Me.” With great cinematography and epic fight scenes, this is one of the best kung fu movies to come out of the 1960’s, and definitely set a high standard for decades to come.

“Come Drink With Me” starts with a kidnapping. The governor’s son gets kidnapped, specifically, and instead of giving in to the ransom demands, the governor sends his daughter Golden Swallow to get his son back, because why send your royal guards when you have an awesome warrior for a daughter, a daughter who has a reputation that precedes her; when she sits down to eat in a tavern filled with shady folk, they start to realize who she is, and they are split between trying to be tough and trying not to look scared of her, and once the fighting breaks out and she proves to be damn near unbeatable, we can see why all these bad guys would rather hide than try to take her on.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 11/16/15 – ‘Hellraiser’

As heard in episode 149 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“Hellraiser” from 1987 stands out from the rest of the 1980’s popular horror films and icons due to its sheer brutality and intense weirdness. In a horror movie landscape that includes two masked seemingly supernatural slashers and a burn victim who kills kids in their dreams comes this group of alternate dimensional beings who are the universe’s ultimate sadomasochists. More gory, strange and involved than the other films of the era, “Hellraiser” doesn’t get the same kind of recognition and kudos as its contemporaries, and that is a shame because it is probably the scariest and most horrific of them all.

Most people think of the colloquially-named Pinhead character when thinking of this series of movies, but the initial “Hellraiser” only featured this character in a few scenes, and he was among of group of like-minded beings, all of whom were only into taking people and putting them in a terrible purgatory-like existence in which they inflict both extreme pleasure and extreme pain on these people, torturing them forever (or I guess until they get bored). But when one of these people somehow escapes back into the real world, he has to convince his ex-lover to kill people so that they can use the blood of the victims so he can reform himself and re-enter the world. Sound weird? Because it IS weird.Continue Reading …

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

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 …

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

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 …

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

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 …

Netflix pick for 10/19/2015 – ‘The Hunter’

As heard in episode 145 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“The Hunter” is one of those rarest of movies, especially these days, which is to say, this is one of the very few times we get to see the great Willem Dafoe as the lead character in a film, as opposed to be relegated to the sidelines one of the many supporting roles that he routinely knocks out of the park. But here the movie is on his shoulders and he carries it wonderfully through the forests of Tasmania.

From 2011, this Australian production is an adaptation of a novel about a fella hired by a military biotech company to hunt down an elusive animal and collect its DNA, and as if that wasn’t enough, this fella is instructed to finally kill any remaining traces of this already thought to be extinct animal so as to maintain a monopoly on what he finds.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 10/12/2015 – ‘Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau’

So most of us know that the 1996 film “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” featuring an obese and eccentric Marlon Brando and a thin and unbearable Val Kilmer, is an unmitigated disaster of a movie, an unbelievable amount of money and effort put into something that came out so utterly terrible, truly one of the rarest of movies, the big budget cinematic trainwreck. But movies this bad aren’t made in a vacuum, there is a reason for why it all went so wrong, and in “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr. Moreau,” we get an amazing detailing of the events and decisions that brought us such a poorly conceived movie.

Though poorly conceived doesn’t really quite describe what happened, because as the beginning of this documentary tells us, writer/director Richard Stanley approached this newest cinematic version of the classic novel with lofty artistic ambitions – it may have been more like a case of a person’s reach exceeding their grasp, as he spent four years developing a huge story with complex characters and intense adult themes, but when it came time to start shooting the actual movie, things just all went so horribly wrong. And Richard Stanley, father of the entire project, found himself getting fired off his own movie by the studio, and industry veteran John Frankenheimer came in to take his place, and naturally things just got worse from there.Continue Reading …

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