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Real Men Love RoboCop

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: paul verhoeven, robocop · Comments Off

It is an indisputable fact, and I’ll tell you why.

The Killing Scene

When someone mentions RoboCop this is probably the scene most people think about. It’s surprisingly brutal, first Murphy’s hand is blown off, then his arm, and finally he gets a bullet in the head. The gore is typically Verhoeven, it’s exceptionally well done, and a great way to introduce the antagonist. You rarely see gore that explicit these days, and real men love explicit gore. Fact one.

The Transformation

This is one of the coolest introductions of a character I have ever seen in a movie. Murphy’s mutilated corpse is transferred to a hospital, we follow the events from his point-of-view, starting with him being declared dead, then the mounting of the LED on his vision, a list of commands, short bits of conversations between the scientists, and then eventually, probably many months later, his official awakening, he gets up and for a moment we see a glimpse of him in a monitor, then we follow the other officers frantically trying to get a view of him and finally we see a big shot of him, relieving the suspense that’s been build up since his arrival at the hospital. And he looks awesome, the suit is incredible, probably the best-looking cyborg after the The Terminator. As Morton says in the movie, he’s just a bad motherfucker, and to emphasize that point the transformation is followed by 15 minutes of RoboCop kicking ass. Real men love bad motherfuckers. Fact two.

The News and Commercials

Another trademark of Verhoeven, the news segments that gives us more knowledge about the world we’re watching, thus making it a lot more interesting. And the commercials, the only humorous part of the movie, work perfectly. Then there’s the ‘I’d buy that for a dollar’ line which is repeated through out the movie, by the low-life criminals as well as the big shot executives, a small thing that adds another layer to the dystopian world and makes it seem even more realistic.

The Stop-Motion

RoboCop and RoboCop 2 have some of the most incredible stop motion I have ever seen. The guy in charge of it was academy award nominated Randy Dutra, and that really shows. The ED-209 isn’t just an inanimate object, it’s got character with its small tics and curious movements. Some of that is also contributed to its dinosaur-like sounds (remember its whining when it falls down the stairs?), but in my opinion its mainly the incredible animation that gives it character. Kane, in the sequel, is even more fantastic. Effects like these are just awe-inspiring, especially now a days when everything is just made with CGI. Real men love stop motion. If you disagree go watch Army of Darkness, if you still disagree you’re not a real man.

The Soundtrack
DUDUDUDUDUUUUUUU, DUDUDUDUUUUU!

That’s all for now, I’ll write some more facts later if you’re not convinced, for now I rest my case. RoboCop – 9/10.

‘Fuck’ back in Live Free or Die Hard [UPDATE]

Posted 19 years ago · Tagged: die hard, mpaa · 7 Comments

I had to write about this, apparently there’s an unrated DVD version of Live Free or Die Hard with more than 30 uses of ‘fuck’, blood spurts, and more violent details! If you’ve been following this blog you know I’m a big Die Hard fan, and that I was very disappointed by the fourth installment. One of the reasons for this was Fox’ ridiculous PG-13 rating, which totally changed the character of McClane. This DVD release makes him a bit more than the old McClane, and that is just awesome. It’s not gonna change the fact that the movie sucks, but now I at least have a reason to buy the DVD.

I’m looking forward to actually being able to hear ‘Yippee-Ki-Yay, motherfucker’ in all Die Hard movies.

The unrated edition is released 20th of November.

[UPDATE]

Apparently there are a lot of changes, for example new segments with people getting shot, and stuff like that. Take a look at these screen shots from the unrated edition.

Secret screening & Mr. Mejer

Posted 19 years ago · 1 Comment

Just a small update in the midst of doing a lot of movie-related stuff. We had a visit by Danish director Aage Rais-Nordentoft (2 ryk og 1 aflevering, Anton) and he actually screened his upcoming, unfinished movie Buddhas Killing (not final title). It was incredible to be allowed to participate in a test screening, since its purpose is to get feedback from the audience. The movie was quite good, although very explicit with a lot of sexual content. It was a pretty good movie, but unfortunately movies like that will only be shown in a small selection of cinemas in Denmark.

Wednesdays we have lectures and today Preben Mejer visited us, he’s the creator of Innovation Lab, Vice CEO of TDC and host from the television program ‘Danmarks Bedste Ide’ (the bearded guy). He talked about innovation and the technology we’ll have in few years, for example bendable flat screens, and it was very interesting. I took some pictures, they can be seen here.

EFC: Beginning of courses

Posted 19 years ago · 11 Comments

One week of introductions, two weeks of Shooting Games, and now we're finally at the real thing, the courses. We started prioritizing the different courses last week, these first two weeks I was able to choose between camera and lighting, documentary, acting and sound, I gave documentary the highest priority and that's also what I got. I'm able to choose one more course of the four I just mentioned, and I'm going for camera and lighting, because acting and sound don't really appeal to me.

Anyway, I had my three first hours of documentary lessons today, we talked about each other (we're 10 in the class) and tried to find some interesting stories. As I've understood it we're going to make small documentary-like clips, screen them in the small cinema and then talk about them. Our teacher, British documentary maker John Burgan, is very good, he's made a lot of documentaries and he's got a lot of interesting things to say.

Monday evening is also Doc Club, which means John screens a documentary in Big Bear, tonight we're going to watch Cinemania, which is about a group of movie freaks who watch at least five movies every day; they don't have any jobs, they just watch movies.

As you can see on the EFC-section of this site I've been watching a lot of movies, so far I think it's 1,3 movies every day, in average, and that's mostly what we do when we have spare time, and it's great! There are so many movies I've wanted to watch and now I'm at a school with 109 students who's got the same desire. It's also something completely different to watch movies with someone else, and especially when they're also interested in movies. For example, this weekend we had a multi-cultural film festival here called Salaam.dk, we watched two documentaries and a feature film about refugees, all made by Michael Winterbottom, and there was a lot of discussions afterwards.

EFC: Course-introductions

Posted 19 years ago · 2 Comments

The Shooting Games are almost done, the last one is tomorrow, and from next week we'll start doing courses for two weeks at a time. Seems like I'm gonna be on 'Doc Eye 1: Visions', the course about documentaries. After those two weeks I'll hopefully be on the scriptwriting course.

As usual we've seen a lot of movies this and last week, but we've also been introduced more detailed to the courses, the presentations were more a chance for us to learn stuff about the teachers though. For instance, today we saw a documentary called Memory of Berlin, created by our documentary teacher, a Brit named John Burgan. The documentary is about his life in the UK and Berlin, and how specific things in his life fits into the social regime in East Berlin and eventually the fall of the wall. He's also adopted so there was a lot about his search for his birth parents. It was quite interesting to watch, and it was pretty cool that the creator was sitting next to us, he made the documentary in cooperation with ZDF, the German TV channel.

Earlier this week our direction teacher, Mikael Hylin, introduced his course, and he has an impressive resume. He had brought stuff from all the things he had done; he's made two feature films, opera shows, TV-shows etc. For instance he was the guy who directed and produced the first season of Expedition Robinson (Swedish) and then the first Danish season of it. For some reason he also had the storyboard for Alien: Resurrection, which was awesome! He screened one of his feature films, it's called Hassel, and it's a typical Swedish crime-story. The story was quite bad, and I was relieved to find out that he felt the same way, apparently there had been some problems with the script-writers, the movie was an adaption, and they changed a lot of things. The technical aspect of the movie was very impressive though, his budget was only about 7.000.000 DKK, but it looks like it's cost at least 50 millions, and he was also very proud of that part of the movie, ie. there are a lot of firefights, car chases and some explosions.

I also directed my first movie last Friday, it was the third installment of Shooting Games, and the first movie of all Shooting Games that I actually felt proud to show for the rest of the audience. I'll see if I can get it online. Tomorrow I'll be behind the camera, it'll be fun, I have some responsibility, but I can mostly relax and let the directors run the show.