A weekly talk show hosted by film critic Christopher Crespo
In honor of episode 1o0 of Cinema Crespodiso, a momentous occasion indeed, we had a double pick for the Netflix Instant Pick of the Week, and this will make for a strange yet fun double feature, believe you me.
We’ll start with a based-on-a-real-story balls out action Western and then we’ll follow that with a Tim Burton Christmas movie that just happens to feature a certain Caped Crusader.Continue Reading …
This may be a twenty-plus year old network television show, but the fact remains that the TV series “Twin Peaks” is better than a lot of movies out there, and it can be easily argued that this show was a progenitor to the long form and much more cinematic television shows which are all the rage now – stuff like “The Walking Dead,” “Breaking Bad” and “American Horror Story” owe a lot, if not everything, to this landmark serial created by David Lynch and Mark Frost.
Equal parts murder mystery, soap opera and surreal horror, “Twin Peaks” has it all going for it. The acting is solid and the characters are weird and fascinating, and none may be more interesting than the series lead Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), an FBI agent who rolls into the quaint, countryside town of Twin Peaks when a popular local girl turns up murdered and a second girl is found having been beaten and raped across the border in Canada, and soon it becomes apparent that there is more going on in Twin Peaks than just some normal murder loving psycho. Otherworldly spirits, hidden alternate dimensions, hallucinated riddle-spouting giants, the Log Lady…there are enough weird characters in this thing to keep everything moving at a nice pace.Continue Reading …
“City of God” is a 2002 Brazilian crime drama that should have been called “Murderous Children,” because it is all about how crime festers and grows in the poorest neighborhood of Brazil, as little children criminals grow into older, experienced criminals, bringing death and destruction with them wherever they go.
To help make this movie feel as real as possible, much of film was shot on location in Brazil and featured non-professional actors from these impoverished areas, bringing real authenticity to their performances and to the movie as a whole. And it obviously worked because “City of God” almost feels like a documentary, like they just rolled up with cameras and filmed real people doing the things they really do. And yet some of these things are kind of crazy and intense, yet it is pretty normal for them. And since it has been released, it has been nominated for and won all sorts of awards and it has been named on 100 Best Films Ever lists and shit like that so come on, this one is a slam dunk, easy peasy one two threesy, if you haven’t seen “City of God” yet, you are missing out.Continue Reading …
“Killing Them Softly” is a great crime drama about a mob-run poker game that gets knocked over and how the mob bosses have a guy they use as their own police and also apparently prefer to communicate solely through their attorney. As this results in scenes featuring Brad Pitt conversing with Richard Jenkins, this is a win for us all.
From my original review of “Killing Them Softly:”
What if the movie going public was sold this movie honestly? Would people have turned out in any more numbers if they knew this was an angsty, arty, condemnation of the kind of business tactics that got us all in this mess in the first place, made in the grand tradition of the hard ass manly directors of yore like Sam Peckinpah and John Milius andWalter Hill? Would that have mattered at all? Maybe there would have been even fewer people. In any case, it’s all said and then, and the movie that condemns improper business tactics and which was sold with misleading commercials made for some bad box office business. But it’ll survive on, like so many well-made movies rejected in their time.
Ralph Macchio is all like “I’m a high school kid from New Joisey and these California kids are a’bustin’ my chops over here-unnh!” and Pat Morita is all like “Daniel san, I will-a teach you how to fight-a with kah-rah-tay!” and he gets him to do all the landscaping for his backyard and paint his house and fence and wax his cars and shit and then someone convinces this kid that he was training him to karate fight the whole time. And joke’s on us. Because it fucking worked.
From the director of “Rocky” and the writer of “The Transporter” comes the original “The Karate Kid,” a sweet little romantic comedy coming of age drama featuring karate training montages and a whole karate tournament. Inspiring a generation of kids to try that weird crane kick thing there while standing in waist high water in the ocean, this is a great movie, well made, finely acted and with a solid, easily relatable yet fairly unique story. It has awesome bad guys, a sweet soundtrack, and Elisabeth Shue. Elisabeth Shue, I say!Continue Reading …
“Django Unchained” is one of Quentin Tarantino’s crazier movies, and this is coming from a guy known for his cinematic flights of fancy involving quick dialogue, hard violence and clever stories. Equal parts Western and 1970’s blaxploitation, with a Southern antebellum twist, this is a crazy, fun, disgusting, thrilling, saddening, maddening and uplifting movie, all rolled into one glorious blood splatter package.
Jamie Foxx is the titular Django, a name used since 1960’s spaghetti westerns from Italy and usually reserved for the most hyperviolent westerns, and he lives up to the name when he dispenses with the righteous vengeance and furious anger which is much deserved by the nearly inhuman antagonists of this slave trade revenge fantasy tale. And for the second Tarantino movie in a row, Christoph Waltz shows up and kinda steals the show in his supporting role as the good doctor who frees Django and helps train him to become a bad ass bounty hunter. If you really want to go deep with me on this one and see what I think, you can check out my review here from when the movie originally came out in 2012. Rest assured, I only like the more now than I did then.Continue Reading …
“Robot & Frank” is a small character film about a retired cat burglar and the robotic healthcare assistant purchased to assist him with his day to day activities. So when the retired burglar decides that he can use the robot to assist him with his day to day duties of cat burglaring, he comes out of retirement for his some good old fashion heisting. Meanwhile he tries to impress a lovely librarian and also has to deal with his oft-absent yet well meaning children who have different views on the use of robotic help aids.
This is an interesting movie because it is science fiction without really having to be so different or implausible. It is sci-fi like “Her” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” movies which use their science fiction premise to tell the stories of characters and their relationships to one another. And the fact that the main character is played by someone with the gravitas and talent, specifically Frank Langella, doesn’t hurt at all. He makes the character of Frank seem real and vital and he makes us care about him even though he comes across initially as an old curmudgeonly fogey.Continue Reading …
“Grosse Pointe Blank” is a 90’s romantic comedy that centers on a freelance hitman character going through something of an existential crisis. It features a stereotypical story about a guy coming back into the life of his slighted high school sweetheart years later and how she reacts and decides whether or not to take the guy back. In this case, it’s Minnie Driver as the slighted girlfriend and John Cusack is the guy who ditched her on prom night to live a life that eventually led to professional assassin.
This is a fun movie, definitely fitting into that dark and kind of cynical comedy that was in fashion after “Pulp Fiction” exploded on to the scene a few years prior, and sure this screenplay was in development a few years before “Pulp Fiction” came out but the environment created by the release of that movie surely helped “Grosse Pointe Blank” get made a little faster than other projects at the time. Plus it has a fun and at times irreverent tone that helps the more basic romantic comedy elements seem fresher and more viable. Cusack’s Martin Blank character goes back to his home town for his high school reunion, which just happens to coincide with a job he was assigned in the same town, and he reconnects with an old friend (Jeremy Piven) and tries to get back in the good graces of Minnie Driver’s Debi, who stayed in the town since school and has since become a radio DJ. That last part is very 90s. And while Martin and Debi go to the high school reunion together and work shit out, Martin also has to deal with some dudes trying to kill him on the side. So for the ladies we have a love story and for the fellas we have a few action scenes. And Dan Akroyd as a competing hitman. Oh yea. The Akroyd.Continue Reading …
Back before “just do it with computers” became the de facto answer for solving movie special effects woes, practical effects had to be employed to be make the fantastical seem plausible in at least some manner, and a great example of this is the late 80’s adventure family comedy classic that is “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.”
The highest compliment I can sincerely give this movie is how immersive and real it felt to me when I watched it as a kid, how it seemed like something that could possibly happen, it all worked for me, and that’s because of the amazing sets and special effects work put in to making it seem as if a group of kids are shrunk down accidentally by a totally DIY laser cannon built in the attic of a house and then get stranded in the back yard, which to them becomes a jungle full of dangerous and exciting possibilities. And back to being a kid, when they came across that giant cookie in the middle of the back yard and they jump on to it and start chowing down on handfuls of the creme filling, I could not have been more jealous. And if you watch this now, it still looks like a giant cookie because they actually built that monstrosity and many other giant things like it and as opposed to digital effects that invariably age poorly as our technology advances, this top notch practical effects work will stand the test of time, as it already has for twenty-five years.Continue Reading …
“Silent Running” is a cool science fiction film from 1972, starring a young and wild-eyed Bruce Dern and directed by movie special effects maverick Douglas Trumbull, known most for his award winning work on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and he took that clout to make his own movie, this little sci-fi tale about a floating bio-dome in outer space and the botanist who defied orders so he could save the trees. Yes, this movie has a hippie message. Deal with it.
In this story, it is the future, and in this future, life on Earth has gone mostly extinct. Some plant life was saved and put into orbit via bio-domes hooked up to spacecrafts (American Airlines space freighters, actually), with the goal being to keep the plants and trees alive and then go back to Earth one day to re-plant them. But before that could happen, the people on the freighters get orders to jettison the bio-domes and blow em up because the ships themselves were needed for something else entirely. And all of the domes are blown up except for Bruce Dern’s because he’s all like “we gotta save these trees.” So most of the movie is about his corporate subordination and then his use of the on-board drones as helpers and companions.
This is a weird, crazy sci fi movie featuring some of the Saturn’s Rings special effects that Trumbull couldn’t figure out in time for “2001” but he managed to sneak them in here so huzzah for that and also featuring great early 70s special effect work via models and macrophotography that is fun to watch and way more interesting to look at then some computer rendered digital fakery.Continue Reading …