Tag: Robocop
Unnoticed Injustice: Dirty Harry and the RoboCop reboot
What a difference 43 years makes. That is the time between the on-screen birth of Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood’s iconic protagonist in Don Siegel’s brilliantly controversial Dirty Harry (1971), and the screen rebirth of Alex Murphy, freshly minted drone-with-a-heart-of-gold in Jose Padilha’s RoboCop reboot. Harry, for those who don’t remember, was the American conservative middle…
Remembering Robocop: The smouldering dystopian wreck of 80s avarice
There has never been, so far as I can recall, a period in my life during which I have not been obsessed by the cinematic form in some way or other. And while my tastes have continued to evolve or change over time, there have been a handful of films that have travelled with me…
Robots in Cinema: Artificial Intelligence and the Moving Image
The recent release of the trailer for the new Robocop remake started me thinking about the many films that deal with notions of artificial intelligence and robotics. From Frankenstein to Transformers, the creation of consciousness (accidental or otherwise) has been a part of the popular imagination for well over a century. While many have merely…
On the Couch: Examining a cinephile
In an attempt to discover where and when I was first overtaken by that most all-encompassing and endlessly satisfying of disorders, cinephilia, I’ve recently been reflecting on my early years. I can only apologise in advance for this incredibly narcissistic post, which might well prove more interesting for me as therapy than it will for…
Cinematic Verisimilitude: Twenty great movie moments
For the cinephile, there will inevitably be moments of cinematic verisimilitude with which one will become obsessed. There will be moments when a particular filmmaker touches the cinephile in such a way that the emotive force of the experience will be beyond replication. The cinephile will certainly seek to replicate such a moment, frequently using…