After a whole bunch of posts about gormless celebrities unaware of their own fidiocy, I wanted to do something more positive. So here's a little shout-out to Paul Verhoeven, Ed Neumeier and everyone else involved in creating one of my favourite epics of ultraviolence. Made in 1987, RoboCop was Verhoeven's first hollywood movie, and gave audiences a sharp insight into the kind of films he intended to make - socially progressive, gut-bustingly violent and always ready to veer from horror into humour at a moment's notice.
When I look at what passes for big budget action movies nowadays, I long for a time when a glossy action thriller would feature dialogue like: "There's no better way to steal money than free enterprise." Especially in a film that was so ahead of its time in portraying venal, faceless corporations (could anyone conceive of a more generic name than Omni Comsumer Products?) bidding for public sector contracts to skim a big fat profit off human misery and urban decay. OK, so maybe they weren't able to predict the creation of the internet or the advent of LCD TVs, but in terms of corporate malfeasance, the dumbing down of TV (I'll buy that for a dollar) and its matter-of-fact treatment of gender equality, this was truly ahead of its time.
Stay out of trouble.
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