Author: John D'Amico

Robocop: Times Change

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Robocop (2014)
Directed by José Padilha
Screenplay by Joshua Zetumer
117 min.

Very minor spoilers ahead.

When they rolled that screen open to 2.35:1, I knew it wasn’t going to be like Verhoeven’s. The original Robocop is a minor masterpiece, one of the most cutting satires of the 20th century. It’s dingy, clunky, sarcastic, and howling—just like the ‘80s that spawned it. Our new Robocop—which is, for all practical purposes, the second Robocop remake in recent memory, counting the spectacular Dredd—is none of those things. It’s shiny, sleek, and “tactical,” as Michael Keaton’s character says.

The memorable ultra-violence of the original is gone. In its place, there’s a smooth, sanitized finish over everything, which gives it all a sort of uncanny creepiness—a quality best exploited in one of the film’s high points, in which we learn just where Alex Murphy ends and Robocop begins.
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An Interview with Lawrence Gordon Clark, Master of Ghostly Horror

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Lawrence Gordon Clark, with one of his monsters from The Ash Tree.

Y’all ever see that movie The Signalman? About the British railwayman who sees a ghost? It’s part of a series the BBC did from 1971-1978, called A Ghost Story for Christmas. All but a handful of these films were adaptations of M. R. James stories, and all but one were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who’s directed dozens of programs and telefilms for British television from the 1970s to his retirement in the early 2000s.

Mr. Clark wrote a book called The Christmas Ghost Stories of Lawrence Gordon Clark, a collection of the original M. R. James and Charles Dickens source material alongside recollections of the productions. He also has a short story collection, Telling Stories, due out soon.

Mr. Clark was kind enough to speak to me about M. R. James, Alfred Hitchcock, and his long and fascinating career:
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John D’Amico, Greg DeLiso, and Jenna Ipcar on Philip Seymour Hoffman

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John D’Amico: 63 roles in 23 years of acting. Where do you even begin? He absolutely hummed as Lancaster Dodd in The Master, as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous. He has about a million solid movies you kinda forget about until you look at the long scroll of his filmography. How about State & Main? That was a very fun one, uplifted by his ability to be both campy and deeply believable at the same time. He elevated otherwise listless projects like Pirate Radio and Patch Adams—Jesus, he was even good in Patch fucking Adams! Watching Hoffman, even in a bad movie—hell, especially in a bad movie—you feel his talent almost as a physical presence in the room, a rush of light illuminating himself and everyone else.
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A Review of ‘Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level)’

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Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level) (2013)
Written and Directed by Tony Blahd
92 min.

Spoiler-free.

While the film community was flipping its dick over The Raid 2: Berandal and Nymphomaniac, a really cool little movie hit Park City’s neighboring Slamdance Festival, that city’s last bastion of actual independent cinema. Let me tell you about it.

My friend Tony had a church and a camera, and a wild idea for a movie about a cult that hires a videographer to tell the story of their origin, a Brigham Young-type saga of a man named Randall who’s spoken to higher beings on the planet Venus. Randall’s disciples are a handful of sad-eyed dreamers in matching Crocs, all aiming to please and anxious for their impending ascension to a murky “next level” on Venus.
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The Man Who Built R2D2 and Brought us ‘Battlefield Earth’: An Interview with Roger Christian (Part 2)

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Editor’s Note: If you haven’t read Part 1 of this interview, do so before reading on.
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