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The Return of Movie Club: Sleuth
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You son of a bitch!
Get him to a hospital. Fast!
Steam / Origin & Wii U: Heatwave111 / FC: 4227-1965-3206 / Battle.net: Heatwave#11356
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08
So I take it you've never seen Wait Until Dark, then?
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
Anyway, I nominate all of the above, as well as Excalibur, Como Agua para Chocolate, Chocolat (that's just a coincidence, really), Bad Lieutenant, What Dreams May Come, Fiddler on the Roof, War Games, Pleasantville, and Beetlejuice.
Is that too many?
Also, Total Recall is way better than The Running Man, but they are both good. The Running Man is Stephen King after all.
Madea's Running Woman.
A Clockwork Orange It will sharpen you up and get you ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence.
(Robocop is also all good)
If not, they should.
Yes. I also think it was made on only a $2 million budget.
Some discussion points:
Watching a pre-anamorphic 1.66 DVD on a Blu-Ray/upscaler = fail. I was getting black bars on all four sides. Putting it in the 360 and then setting the TV to Zoom, it looked quite nice.
I never realized until this time how awesome the score is. Very similar to Brad Fiedel's Terminator score, actually. In fact, certain parts almost seem totally ripped off, but w'ever.
Speaking of the music, I was a one-time Ministry fan. Turns out that in the disco scene (that has some totally random gratuitous boobage), the song being played is a rare P.T.P. (Ministry) track that was never released.
Speaking of boobage, it was almost required in 80s movies to have toplessness at some point worked into the story. Like I swear producers required that their be X number of topless scenes before they green-light. Anyway, the precinct and the night club were interesting ways of working in teh teetahs. The precinct, progressive, even.
Was the joke about
By the way, this movie is why I could never watch That 70s Show.
Also, the ending.
I love how this movie seemed both low-budget and yet cutting-edge SFX at the same time. The actors and sets were cheap but effective, while the explosions and robots and such were amazing. Heck even for now they aren't too bad.
The choice of Nancy Allen for Anne Lewis is also interesting. She's underrated.
ANd yes, the soundtrack is awesome, Robocops theme is suitable for every occasion. Going to the toilet? Dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn dun, dun dun dun dunnnnnnnn.
I can't believe I'm defending Frank Miller, but his original screenplay for both 2 and 3 were butchered with studio-demanded rewrites. The original concept for Robocop 2 was later released as a mini-series written by Miller, so there you go.
21 Grams
Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)
Casino Royale - the Woody Allen version
Hoop Dreams
Horse Feathers
Koyaanisqatsi
The Last Man On Earth - the other other movie based on I Am Legend
Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels
Night of the Living Dead - the original (of course)
Nobody's Fool
Requiem For A Dream
The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three
The Thing
The Times Of Harvey Milk
Its amazing how far the acorn can fall from the tree. Three was atrocious, even when I was a kid, fucking ninja cyborgs
From what I hear about The Spirit, less studio interference in a Frank Miller Movie does not a better movie make.
You missed, because you were watching Robocop instead of Spaceballs.
Beat me on 360: Raybies666
I remember when I had time to be good at games.
God I hate non-anamorphic movies, and I would expect much better for a Criterion release (despite its age).
The "Rocky five...thousand" joke is in Spaceballs though, not Robocop.
Mostly for the scene where they give Robocop a few hundred new prime directives.
And for the time it came out, the Criterion version did have a pretty good transfer. It's hard to criticize it, what, ten years later?
No, Robocop 2 and 3 were both written by Frank Miller.
They are both terrible.
The Man From Snowy River
Movie kicks all kinds of ass.
Awesome story, great music, and probably one of the most dangerous stunts I've ever seen in a film.
Put briefly, I think it is both an example par excellence of the 80's action film, but also manages to transcend that particular ghetto and become a purely good movie on its own rights. In fact, it's one of my personal top five films and I have received remarkably little flack for the choice over the years.
There are lots of theories floating around in film circles as to why the action film - as opposed to thrillers, or adventure films - was so ascendant in that decade. Some people ascribe it to politics - you had the jingoistic tenor of the times, the War on Drugs and the Cold War, and several cities turning into post-industrial, post-white flight urban nightmares. But who knows? One thing I can think of is that the 80s saw the zenith of practical (non-CGI) special effects - you had guys who had been working in Hollywood for decades and had turned explosions, blood squibs, matte paintings, and stop-motion effects into an art form.
Actually while the second theory explains how movies like Terminator and Robocop became possible in the 80s, the first one might explain how the movie actually came to be. Its milieu is pure 80s; someone said they could tell because it made fun of yuppies, which is partially true, but the movie is just as much informed by the prevailing vibe at the time that cities were basically human zoos full of nothing but rapists and murderers. Of course, lots of movies, TV, and video games at the time tapped into that, but Robocop went a little deeper and examined stuff like our anxiousness about what lay ahead in a postindustrial society (Detroit can't even build a giant killer robot that works), the breakdown of law at all levels, and most importantly, the fear of dehumanization at the hands of all-pervasive technology and media.
The last, of course, is what Robocop the character represents. (He also represents Jesus; just ask Paul Verhoeven. There are like three different scenes where Murphy/Robocop is supposed to be Jesus, ranging from the fatal encounter with Boddicker at the beginning, to being hunted by the SWAT team through the parking garage, to the final bit at the toxic waste dump where Robo literally walks on water.) Part of the movie's artistry is that they find ways to make us relate to and care for a lumbering, plodding robot with a grating voice. The first and most obvious way is by making him sympathetic as Murphy; his few brief scenes early on establish him as a cool, likeable guy, and then the execution scene - which I still find genuinely gut-wrenching - really seals the deal. But it doesn't stop there. I think putting the point of view inside Robo's helmet for the first five or ten minutes of his existence helps continue that identification, and even while he rises to superhero status the movie keeps dropping little things, like the way he holsters his gun, to reinforce that connection.
The film is a fucking masterclass in effective filmmaking. It's only 103 minutes long and yet it sports a reasonably complex story with a lot of different characters, locales, and events. The trick is that there's not an ounce of fat anywhere; the script makes sure every scene sets up, moves forward, or pays off at least three threads. The only thing that could be considered remotely indulgent on the part of the filmmakers are the fake commercials, but there's only a handful of those, coming up to maybe two or three minutes total.
The action is top notch - the bit in the drug factory still stirs my blood to this day - and as you guys have noted, the score is rousing (Basil Poledouris also scored Conan the Barbarian and The Hunt for Red October, two more of my favorites, and he's a big reason why). I think the acting also deserves more attention than it typically gets. Peter Weller does amazing work from inside a 100-pound, 150-degree robot suit, and he's supported really well by one of my personal favorites, Miguel Ferrer, in the role of Bob, as well as Kurtwood Smith and Ronny Cox as the bad guys. Smith in particular was just amazing, but credit also has to go to Verhoeven for coming up with the idea of giving him the rimless glasses; the effect is nothing like any other movie villain I've ever seen, somehow simultaneously intellectual and blue-collar, nerdy and fearsome.
The satire and so forth in the movie is good, and helps elevate it, but at the end of the day I really do feel like what makes Robocop great isn't what it says about the 80s but what it says about people. For something so gore-soaked and seemingly nihilistic, it's actually an intensely humane movie about a man fighting to reclaim his soul - and who in the end, against all odds, gets it back. I never fail to shed a single manly tear at
"....Murphy."
And the poster a couple pages ago is absolutely right; the reason the sequels failed is because they lacked the courage and conviction to really pick up after that perfect last scene and deal with its implications, choosing instead to retreat back to having Robocop as a goofy, ineffectual, plodding robot.
I just saw this recently. I almost nominated it actually.
I don't know what your beef with the film was but my problem was(and not spoiling anything) that nothing happened. Clearly I seem to be missing something because everyone else seems to love it.
I can say that it is 10 times the movie Ghost Dog was.
I'll second it. This was so much better than I expected, and I can tell how it inspired a whole lot of my favorite modern films, like Ronin.
I want to say I loved it but I really couldn't back it up with that much, I'm bad at that (which is more the reason I didn't nominate it). I loved for example, the lineup scene. I guess you're right, not that much as happening at certain times, but I still think they got the tension really right in that scene. I also loved the bird in his room, especially when they plant the microphone, and also the whole chase near the end.
I want to see it again for the ending because of a review I read that mentions a specific scene, but for whatever I might have missed I still thought it was pretty cool.
I guess it's debatable but I thought he basically