RoboCop (2014)

This blog started with a remake of the 80s movie Total Recall.  As remakes of 80s B
movies went, it was pretty good.  But as a strategy, not worth repeating.

Tell that to Hollywood which has doubled down on the strategy:  Footloose, About Last Night, Endless Love, Carrie and now RoboCop.  Perhaps there's a reason why I never saw it back in a year of otherwise good movies, 1987.

Joel Kinnaman (I know, right?) plays Detective Alex Hunter, a Man Barely Alive.  Lots of cues to The Bionic Man.  To get right into it, the human Alex is damaged by a car bomb.  He loses a leg, an arm, an eye.  But we can rebuild him.

Technology already exists for robotic fighters, but like drones, strictly forbidden on US soil.  The news hawks don't like that:  As the Samuel Jackson character, Bill O'Reilly-like asks:  "Why is America so robophobic?  [nice!]  If it weren't for that silly Dreyfus Act prohibiting it.

But the American Way demands that technology be monetized, damn the costs.  OmniCorp CEO played by a much welcomed back Michael Keaton requests that the robotic crime fighter be humanized, using all computerized technology available.  He make a good video game, first person shooter.  The consultant Maddox (Jackie Earl Haley- the best character) who believes that humanized robot is just not as good as a regular robot, tests him out in a nice shakedown scene.  Very Matrix-like.

It turns out you can make a Tin Man, but you can't take out the heart.   But this movie could use a little less tin, and a bit more heart.

*

Nebraska

Directed by Alexander Payne, this escapes the Middle-Age Loser movie to the land of Father/Son Conflicts.   With the father Woody (Bruce Dern) aging into dementia, the job of tending to him as he tries to walk to Nebraska falls to his younger son David (Will Forte) .  The older son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) is just getting some traction in his job and David is expedenable as a stereo salesman.

Did I mention Alexander Payne?  Lots of similarities to his other movies Election (backstabbing), the Descendants (family conflict) and Sideways (the Road Movie).

You'll first notice this was made in black and white, perhaps to wash out the background.  Compare to the other family drama of Mother/Daughter conflict August:  Osage County, where the cinematography was in ochre/sepia colors.  The better to focus on the character?

Woody gets a letter "Congratulations - You May Already Be a Winner" and gets it in his head that he IS the winner - he just needs to get to Lincoln, NE from Billings MT to do, conveniently along the interstates.  When he starts walking, his son says "I'll drive you".

They wind up in the small Nebraska town of Hamilton when Woody's and his family is from.  Word gets around that Woody is rich and everyone starts treating him differently, no matter what David tries to tell them to the contrary.

A good story about dividing up wealth, what might have been, and spending some time with an aging parent.
* * * of 4

Grand Budapest Hotel

Another good one from Wes Anderson starring Ralph Fiennes.  I liked Rushmore and this was similar - young man seeks to enter adult world by seeking powerful patron.

Ralph Fiennes plays Msr. Gustave who is the concierge at a Grand Hotel in Europe in the days of those hotels.  Newcomer Tony Revolori plays the aptly named Zero, the Lobby Boy.  As Zero learns the trade from Gustave, the two develop a father/son relationship

The setting in the 1930s era film has the Nazi threat ever present.  It makes light of this eve of war via its Vaudeville aspect.  You feel like you are watching a puppet show.  The puppetry aspect also adds to the Pinnochio-type storyline ... little boy becomes a man.

 My rating  * * * *

Here's a guest review of the movie by soon-to-be-famous young filmmaker Alexander Stockton.