Netflix Picks - Cinema Crespodiso

Netflix pick for 2/15/16 – ‘Hardware’

As heard in episode 162 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“Hardware” is a crazy 1990 low budget sci-fi movie about a rogue robot with a serious bloodlust, let loose within a single apartment, in which said robot inflicts a very surprising amount of bloodshed and mayhem. This is the kind of down and dirty movie that doesn’t get made often enough. Rarely is this kind of gonzo imagination put on display in a large way like this, a movie in which even the silent secondary characters are compelling and interesting.

An ex-soldier (Dylan McDermott) in a post apocalyptic wasteland comes home to his girlfriend (Stacey Travis) and gives her a robot skull, knowing she would like it because she takes old pieces of metal and combines them to make sculptures. She uses the skull in a piece she already started working on, which turns out to be a bad move because this skull is still sentient and it is able to use the rest of the metal material around it to make some sort of crazy body, and immediately it’s initial instinct to kill makes it go rampaging around this apartment. And thanks to some unannounced visits and others trying to help, this very small scale movie has a large body count. To put it lightly, this movie just goes insane.

Netflix pick for 2/8/16 – ‘Turbo Kid’

As heard in episode 161 of Cinema Crespodiso.

Mad Max on BMX bicycles. That is the essence of “Turbo Kid,” a 2015 post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie about a young man trying to survive in a horrible and dusty ruined future, where friendly faces are rare indeed and he’s more likely to run in to blood thirsty and amoral scavenging psychopaths. With a very electronic 80s style soundtrack, impressive low budget special effects (and some wonky CG effects as well), this is a cool, fun movie that is well worth checking out.

Netflix pick for 2/1/16 – ‘Nightcrawler’

As heard on episode 160 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“Nightcrawler” is five-minutes-into-the-future satire, a look at our news media culture and what that machine entails, an indictment of the “blood and guts” mentality of selling newscasts to an ever fearful public, wrapped up in the guise of a darkly comedic noir thriller. Simultaneously gorgeous and ugly, funny and cruel, hopeful and horrified, this is like a modern day “Network,” but if Howard Beale was less an angry prophet of a god and more of a purveyor of socially acceptable smut.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom will go down as one of the creepiest, most disturbing and of course fascinating characters from this era of movies, an ugly antihero for an ugly world, he of singular purpose and such incredible drive and determination, put to such horrifying use. It pays to be soulless and self serving, this sayeth “Nightcrawler.”

Netflix pick for 1/25/16 – ‘The Guest’

As heard in episode 159 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“The Guest” has been around for a minute now, here is my initial review from October 2014, so we can be a little less spoilerphobic this time. But suffice to say, if you still haven’t seen this movie, just stop what you are doing and see it already.

Because this is a fun slasher movie meets an action film, a clever and surprisingly well done genre mash up, a story that posits “what if the unstoppable bad guy was actually a government trained killer gone rogue? What if Michael Myers was really Jason Bourne?”

The slasher stuff comes from the obvious love of John Carpenter movies evident throughout “The Guest,” from the top on down, from the font used for the credits and to the electronic score to the copious amounts of jack o lanterns littered throughout, this in many ways is an homage movie to the horror classics of the late 70s and 80s. There is also a pretty chill soundtrack in terms of music picked out to play in the movie, lots of cool European industrial and rock, all of it used really well, it’ just dope.

Netflix pick for 1/18/16 – ‘Snowpiercer’

“Snowpiercer” is a 2013 science fiction movie adapted from a graphic novel about a frozen world in which the entirety of Earth’s remaining human population lives on a single perpetual motion bullet train traversing the planet. It is a ridiculous and over the top set up, which means it makes for great sci-fi.

Captain America teams up with Patient Zero from “Alien” to lead a rebellion; the poor people who barely made it on to the train to begin with are all corralled into the back, with the train cars set aside for water production and imprisonment separate the poor in the back from the wealthy in the front cars, who are living a totally different lifestyle and existence, despite them all being on the same train, living so incredibly close to each other.

An obvious allegory for classism and inequal wealth distribution, this movie just has to set up the obvious reference and then go ahead with all the action scenes and science fiction-y stuf, without ever having to overtly preach about the differences between the Haves and the Have Nots (an age old problem with there ever was one).

Netflix pick for 1/11/16 – ‘The Nightmare’

“The Nightmare” is a very solid and interesting documentary about the very real phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. You know how sleepwalking is when you fall asleep but your body still gets up and does stuff? Imagine the inverse of that – you are awake and aware but your body falls asleep, leaving you unable to move. Not only is this scary when it happens and very alarming, it is actually what is going on inside the brain that makes this condition so potentially frightening.

While you are sleeping, your brain is working, doing stuff that it wouldn’t normally do when you are awake. But if your body falls asleep and you remain alert, or if the opposite happens and you wake up before your body does, you are going to be privy to some brain happenings that you are not accustomed to seeing. This leads to people seeing all sorts of weird visions and colors, while many often experience seeing or even just feeling a malevolent being in the room, whether it be a demon sent from Hell or a faceless intruder or even aliens from outer space.

Netflix pick for 1/4/16 – ‘The Five Venoms’

“The Five Venoms,” also know as “Five Deadly Venoms” is a cult classic martial arts film from 1978, produced by the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio.

As a matter of fact, if you’ve seen any mainstream martial arts movies in the past decade or more, you would have noticed specific influences in this movies from this 1978 classic. The group of assassins in “Kill Bill“ and the Furious Five in “Kung Fu Panda“ are direct descendants of the five deadly venoms featured in “The Five Venoms.”

Who are the venoms? They are kung fu students trained in very specific and deadly kung fu styles, each one named for a different animal like toad or scorpion, and when this story starts, these five students are already out in the world, using their skills for either good or evil. The master who taught them all sends his final pupil, who has yet to complete his training, to uncover the identities of these men and recruit the good ones to help fight the bad. A basic set up loaded with mystery, and it works pretty great as the deadly venoms are revealed in turn over the course of the movie, with lots of treachery and backstabbing along the way. It is as if Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make a martial arts movie, which would have been dope. But since he never did, this is the closest we’ll ever come.Continue Reading …

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 …