Netflix pick for 9/22/14 – ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’

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In this late 1980’s comedy sci-fi classic, “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is the story of two “slackers” (that’s 80’s movie code for stoners) who have to fulfill their destiny of becoming the most influential artists in history, so influential they bring peace throughout the world and even the cosmos maybe, but in order to do so they need to history class by giving a presentation in front of the entire school for some unexplained reason so to pass this test they are given a time traveling phone booth with which they kidnap people like Socrate, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid and Joan of Arc and bring them all back to contemporary California to participate in their presentation. Along the way there are some princesses and George Carlin and Napoleon Bonaparte at a water park.

Suffice to say, this movie is INSANE. And yet somehow this movie was a hit both critically and commercially and we all fell in love with Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan (Keanu Reeves) and their crazy antics across time. The movie is full of weird jokes, as well as history based jokes and a couple of time travel based gags, and the story really is kind of sweet when it’s all said and done, since it is about how art can bring people together in peace and Bill and Ted’s love story with the princesses and each other just makes it all so much sweeter, you know what I mean? Plus this makes for the real debut of Keanu Reeves, who had been working for a little while at that point but hadn’t done anything as big as this. He was still a few years away from Special Agent Johnny Utah, a good decade away from Neo, a baby faced, enthusiastic dude just giving it his all, and he’s kind of great.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 9/15/14 – ‘Return of the Dragon’ a.k.a. ‘The Way of the Dragon’

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“Return of the Dragon” is Bruce Lee’s final complete film and hey guess what it is awesome because Bruce Lee was a cinematic perfect storm of charisma and uniqueness which made him one of the most interesting movie stars of all time and this movie does well to feature much of his most excellent talents. It also builds up to an epic showdown at the Coliseum against a fella played by Chuck Norris, so if Bruce Lee vs Chuck Norris doesn’t sell you on this movie, I don’t know what will.

Written and directed by Bruce Lee after the mega success of “Enter the Dragon,” this is a movie in which Lee plays a simple Chinese fella who stays with a relative in Rome to help them deal with the local mafia, as they have been putting the pinch on the family’s restaurant business. But when Bruce Lee’s Chen character shows up, everything goes wrong for the mafia, as despite seeming to be very naive and innocent, this guy is really a world class fighting machine, easily dispatching practically all challengers no matter how many there are or what weapons they have. That’s the worth of Chinese boxing, or else this movie would have you believe.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 9/8/14 – ‘Bloodsport’

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“Bloodsport” is the Netflix Instant Pick of the Week, and really I shouldn’t have to go into any explanation as to why this could possibly be a recommendation from me. But I guess I will. By hook or by crook, despite sitting on a shelf for two years and going through huge edits, “Bloodsport” is probably Jean Claude Van Damme’s most endearing and fun movie from his 1980’s/1990’s hey day. It is fun, has cool fighting sequences featuring multiple fighting styles, and the bad guy is played by the legendary Bolo Yeung.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 9/1/14 – ‘Clue’

CluePoster“Clue” is a delightfully strange movie which exists as proof that making movies out things like board games is not a new fad or recent phenomenon, no sir, they have been trying this crap since 1985 at the least, and you know? Thirty years later, you can’t tell me that movies like “Battleship” or the upcoming Ouija movie are going to be any better than this whodunnit featuring the guitarist from Spinal Tap and the devil from “Legend.”

This is one of this movies, like so many others, that got kinda panned when it came out and didn’t make much money and was pretty much a failure critically and financially, only to have found new life on home video. It is definitely a cult type of movie, lots of fun and featuring three different endings (endings which were split up among different theaters around the country, a ballsy move only an executive out of his mind on cocaine would green light), with good actors embracing the spirit of the Agatha Christie style murder mystery story that they are obviously pulling from for this movie, and really they could have done a whole of a hell of a lot worse than try to emulate that 50’s gothic mystery sort of movie. Have fun watching this movie and trying to figure out who did it. And with the three different endings, your odds are pretty good!Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/25/14 – ‘The African Queen’

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From 1951, “The African Queen” starts as a movie about a couple of uptight missionaries and the boarish sea captain who ferries them around East Africa, and it ends up being a movie about a mission to torpedo a German warship to allow for a British naval counter attack, and it is kind of crazy how quickly this story escalates, or it would be crazy if it doesn’t happen so naturally.

With the great Humphrey Bogart winning his only Best Actor Oscar for his work in this movie and Katharine Hepburn playing the missionary who finds herself suddenly with both a vendetta against the World War I era Germans and a means by which to hurt them, and all directed by one of the manliest and toughest film makers ever in the form of the one and only John Huston, “The African Queen” is surprising in how well it holds up after all these years, as the story just sucks you in and the constant sense of danger just makes the whole thing fly by. This movie is considered a classic for a reason, folks.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/18/14 – ‘Escape From Tomorrow’

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“Escape From Tomorrow” is an astounding film in that it was made almost entirely within the confines of Walt Disney World, shot with small digital cameras over the course of several days, with the crew being kept very small and their movements and actions clandestine, and most importantly, without being caught or stopped by anyone in the park. This is pure guerrilla film making, the current indie film movement encapsulated beautifully in black and white, and it truly is something beautiful to behold.

So it is a bit of a shame that the story itself really doesn’t hold up over the course of the movie. Sure things start really promising, with a family arriving at the Magic Kingdom for the final day of their vacation and with the father in the group hiding the fact from his wife and kids that he was just fired from his job, and as the day wears on he appears to be losing his mind in some sort of bad acid trip, which is not something one wants to experience in a theme park like this. And he starts getting eyes for some really young girls and finds himself constantly close to them, sometimes by accident, sometimes not. But the movie can’t really keep the story going for an hour and half without it feeling like it is spinning its wheels a little, and really the surreal park imagery doesn’t add up to much. You can hear my original full review of “Escape From Tomorrow” in this episode of Cinema Crespodiso.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/11/14 – ‘The Return’

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From 2003, “The Return” is a Russian drama which is great because of how simple the movie is and how compelling the drama becomes throughout. Told with confident direction, devoid of overt stylistic flourishes or any sort of reliance on gimmicky cinematic tricks, the movie works because it is all in service of an interesting story, small in scale yet resonate with emotional depth.

In this story, two young brothers are surprised to find that their father has returned home after a 12-year absence, and the oldest of the two boys is suspicious of their father while the youngest is anxious to have him back in their lives. And when ole daddy-o decides to take both kids with him on a trip, with no explanation and without telling anyone a damned thing, the oldest kid’s suspicion only intensifies, as they try to gain as much insight as possible as to whom their father is and what he wants. And when dad decides he doesn’t like his son’s wary attitude? Oh boy.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 8/4/14 – ‘Tetro’

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Francis Ford Coppola, he of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” and “The Conversation” and “Apocalypse Now,” after spending some time not making movies and out of the business, instead manufacturing wine to the delight of the masses, found that he could tell some crazy stories that he always wanted to tell thanks to the new age of digital cinema, a liberating time in which anyone with a few bucks and a proper digital camera and make an entire movie easier than ever. And with this new found digital freedom, Coppola made “Tetro,” an operatic family drama about reunited brothers and the weird past which unites them.

Vincent Gallo (yes, VINCENT GALLO) plays the eponymous Tetro, an artist who suffers for his work and has some serious baggage that he is trying to sort through, and Alden Ehrenreich plays his younger brother who arrives unannounced, looking to reunite with his big bro after a decade apart. Shot in black and white (and looking gorgeous), Coppola is an old school filmmaker, one who not only knows his film history but also contributed to it already, and here he is definitely throwing it back to the black and white noirs of the 1940 and 1950s, with lots of very strong shadows and scenes swathed in intense blacks and extreme lighting. And the family drama is very operatic, building up to a pretty explosive final ten minutes or so, making the admittedly somewhat uneven though still interesting journey fully worthwhile.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 7/28/2014 – ‘Assault on Precinct 13’

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When John Carpenter wanted to make a Western but didn’t have the money for the period appropriate props and locations, he instead wrote a story about a siege on a police station, set in modern day Los Angeles (well 1976 Los Angeles, anyway) and featuring a shadowy, Satan-worshiping gang out on a cholo blood quest, and the movie ended up being “Assault on Precinct 13.”

This is a lean, mean movie, with an efficient set up in both character and story, and things get crazy as a small group of people try to keep a very large number of gang members from breaking into their building and killing them all. And since this is a John Carpenter movie, it has the typical, awesome John Carpenter score, lots of electronics and bass heavy and full of doom and dread, punctuating the menace established outside of the walls of Precinct (9, in division) 13.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 7/21/14 – ‘Night of the Living Dead’

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This zombie craze had to start somewhere. And it can be traced, cinematically speaking, to George Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the very first movie to portray zombies as flesh-consuming reanimated corpses who can only be taken down by head shots and destroying their brains. Inspired by Richard Metheson’s vampire classic “I Am Legend” (itself made into THREE movies), Romero literally wrote the rules of the zombie genre, and with minor variations here and there, these rules have remained firmly intact, to the point of becoming cultural canon. Now that is a cultural feat to behold.Continue Reading …