I remember being a child in the 1980s when so many commercial films could be categorized as “Spielberg movies.” I caught most of them in the theater or on HBO within a couple of years: Gremlins, The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, Explorers, Back to the…
Last time I took a look at an individual shot in Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi masterpiece Robocop. This time I’m going to look at a longer sequence, and examine it more or less shot by shot. I haven’t tracked every single cut — sometimes there are shot/reverse-shot setups that move the story forward with dialogue but don’t give us any new visual information, and I’ve glossed over a few of these.
I like Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop — always have. It’s the second R-rated movie I ever saw in a theater (following Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables), and I recall seeing it with an attitude of considerable skepticism. The TV commercials looked ridiculous — the cheesiest B-movie nonsense.
Well, to be honest, I haven’t seen anywhere near enough of 2010′s cinematic slate to offer a particularly authoritative Top 10 list. But, strictly speaking, I suppose one only needs to have seen eleven movies in a given year in order to separate out ten…
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks going through elements of the Alien Quadrilogy Blu-ray set. I haven’t dug into the extras at any length, and I’ve generally avoided Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, about which I have — at…
“You gonna see 127 Hours?” “Is that the movie where the guy has to cut off his arm?” “Yeah.” There’ve been a lot of those sorts of conversations lately in the office, as coworkers around me try to decide whether or not to see a…
I just picked up the new Criterion Blu-ray of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. There on the left is the head of the gang of rogue mercenaries, played by Takashi Shimura, whose remarkable range is swiftly comprehended when you lay his starring turn in Ikiru –…
My DVD of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits trumpets on its cover, rather poignantly, the following critical endorsement: “*** – Roger Ebert.” While I’m glad Mr. Ebert — a hero of mine and my single most valued guide through the world and history of cinema —…
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