who do i have to kill to find some news?

So ... it's been cheap movie week and I've doused myself in a potent mixture of Dragnet, Under Siege, True Lies, and Robocop 1 & 2 and then lit the match. The things I've learnt:

1. In the 80s it was compulsory for every cop movie to have at least one scene in a strip club. This may say something about the Reagan/Thatcher psychosocial infection (thank you Dr Bartholomew Wolper) ... or it could just be that 80s directors realised that men get painfully confused unless they see breasts are regular intervals (no, no, it's true. Would I lie to you?). Tom Hanks should go back to making fluffy comedies.
   
2. Steven Seagal unfortunately has all the acting skill and emotional range of Stephen Hawking's voice box, but by heck it's a fun film anyway. There's oodles of fighting, AND breasts. Well, just two breasts, but I never was very good at counting my oodles. And for a movie that looks like it was bought and paid for by a Republican black ops team, it has a surprisingly subversive conversation at the end ... when I get a chance I'll transcribe - no bugger seems to have put the script on the net.
3. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the creepiest goddamn husband I've ever seen. The man diverts covert intelligence resources from hunting for a terrorist who is smuggling ex-soviet MIRV nuclear warheads into the USA hidden inside 3000-year old Persian statues for some fiendish terroristic reason, and instead he devotes those resources to following his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair with a used car salesman (Bill Paxton, channelling Hudson). Said terrorists end up nuking an island in Florida. Arnie blackmails his wife into dirty dancing for what she thinks is a voyeristic spy (instead it's voyeristic Arnold, face hidden by an incredibly dark and convenient shadow, even though the rest of his body is perfectly recognisible). No wonder his daughter is a budding thief ... And, in a cruel twist of fate, we never get to see Tia Carrere's breasts. Still, the scene when the Harrier Jumpjets blow up the Florida causeway is pretty nifty.
4. Robocop is a comedy. A violent, dystoptian comedy, but half a laugh riot nonetheless. C'mon, I dare you not to laugh when, after ED209 has pumped 60 high calibre rounds into a luckless executive's twitching and mutilated body, Dick Jones (my god, they called the guy Dick Jones!!) says "I'm sure it's only a glitch. A temporary setback." Classic. Heck, every scene with ED209 is played for laughs - he's a direct descendent of every drunken falling robot from the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes Back to the ... um, AT-STs in Return of the Jedi. Which just shows you where the 3 prequels went wrong - a distinct lack of drunk, falling robots. Except in the beginning of Revenge of the Sith with the ball-bearings, but man, that was just plain silly. If you can't take your comedy seriously, you shouldn't be out playing with an inflatable bobble stick.
   
5. Speaking of The Empire Strikes Back, who the hell knew that Irvin Kershner, the man who made Lucas's script human, directed Robocop 2? Or that Frank Miller wrote the screenplay? Well, now you know.
   

You always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask:
What's the deal with stigmata?
Do copper bracelets ease pain?

Slimey Lawyer: Attempted murder? It's not like he killed someone ...

- Robocop, 1987

NB: Title of this post shamelessly stolen from Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan. When I steal, I steal from the best. AND the least likely to sue me!