and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Chappie (2015), Blomkamp’s bizarre mash-up of RoboCop (1987) and Short Circuit (1986) and every other sf cliché he could ineptly execute, is not that the Asian scientist actually gets to be played by an Asian actor (Dev Patel), although that is a vast improvement on having Fisher Stevens in brown face, nor is it the decision to subtitle only Brandon Auret’s heavily accented but comprehensible English rather than whatever heavily accented (Aussie? South African?) language it was Huge Jackass was alternately mumbling and shouting, nor is it that even after this disastrous mess of a movie the internet still kept on whingeing about Blomkamp not getting to make an Alien movie, but the fact that, at absolutely no point in the production, did anyone involved turn around to Blomkamp and ask him how much did José Padilha pay to make the RoboCop remake look less bad than it is? or even, less cynically, you do realise what a fucking bloated, idiotic, self-important, tone-deaf mess this is? …
Tag: José Padilha
RoboCop (José Padilha 2014)
and so anyway it turns out the best thing about RoboCop (2014) is not its astonishing commitment to the lipogrammatic principles of the Oulipo group, going far beyond Georges Perec, for example, who wrote the 300-page novel La Disparition (1969) without using the letter ‘e’, in order to gather together the few surviving remains of a franchise blown apart by lame film sequels, not to mention insipid live-action and animated television incarnations, and from them to build a whole new 117-minute film without using the letters ‘wit’, ‘intelligence’ or ‘decent action choreography’; no, the very best thing is that in the tagline at the top of the poster, very first word, they spelt ‘cinema’ wrong…
Mark Bould 