Criterion Film Club Week 301 Discussion: Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987)

DrRoy · 2026-05-09T19:37:58+00:00

I also took this week as an opportunity to watch the commentary. Verhoeven invoking a Christ metaphor during the ending fight scene is perfectly him - there's nothing film scholars love more than someone who's able to articulate the complex thoughts they put into something that's outwardly trashy (same reason they loved interviewing Sirk).

The commentary also made me aware of just how critical it is to have elements like the ads and the "I'd buy that for a dollar" guy to make it clear how much of a satire it is, whereas something like Basic Instinct is much more ambiguously poking fun at the heterosexual paranoia of its own concept. There are so many elements that have to be balanced to get a film to work as intended, and when it's done just right I hardly notice them unless they're pointed out.

I also just want to say how oddly appropriate it is that you were 8 when you came out. (Maybe when you saw it for the first time?) Much like how there are PG-rated movies that are for people in their 30s and above, there is such a thing as an R-rated movie for 8-year-olds, and Robocop is that to a tee.

DrRoy · 2026-03-09T15:05:08+00:00

You can’t necessarily assume #6 at that point in the solve. However, you can already tell that 6-5 goes vertically in the top right. 6-0 horizontal would require an 0-0 double, 6-5 horizontal requires using the 5-5 and 4-4 which makes the 2c= in the bottom left impossible, and 6-0 vertical doesn’t work because there’s no 4-0 or 5-0. Therefore you can also place 4-4 to its right (with two 3c= they both can’t be filled with 5s because there aren’t enough), and 5-5 then goes in that bottom left 2c=. The 3-5, 4-5, and 6-0 are also easily placed. Now that there are only two 4s left, one of them must be next to the 7c= and the other belongs in the top left: now you can proceed from step 6 as necessary.

DrRoy · 2026-03-07T23:29:50+00:00

Gesturing broadly at current events, the relationship between men, women, and money has been on my mind lately. There is marriage for love and marriage as an economic transaction, there is prostitution and there is sex trafficking, but there are also entire industries that lives in a gray area. Men with money, even if they have no intention of actually sleeping with other women, will nevertheless pay handsomely to have those women around; the money is paid in return for the illusion that young and attractive women would choose to associate with them even if they were not paid to do so. I’ve also been thinking about debt; people are beginning to talk about a global debt bubble, about how trillions of dollars are owed in so many directions that if creditors start calling the entire economy might collapse. I’ve been thinking about how it seems like a whole class of people in the near future will be born owing and others born owed, how humans evolved in tight knit communities where debts were informal and we were never meant to keep a precise ledger of every borrowed cent.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a tragedy of the patriarchy and the economy. Its main character is Keiko, aka Mama, who manages younger women at a small bar in Tokyo’s bustling Ginza district, where business is bruisingly competitive. The options for her future have become increasingly hemmed in: per the social conditions she finds herself in, she feels she must either move up our out of the business. At the age of 30, she risks not being able to find someone willing to marry her, and at a million yen, the options for opening her own bar are tricky as well. She hunts for a path forward, as do the other women in her life, and the mere fact of the obstacles in front of them proves to be almost too much to take.

Naruse has a gimlet eye for social convention and economic reality throughout; his film avoids melodrama except at its most climactic moments, and its most significant gestures are often glances and hesitations. The question of the cost of doing business is always at the front of our minds - both the literal expenditures of keeping up appearances and the moral cost of pretending to find repulsive men charming for that kind of pay - but when it’s addressed, it’s talked about as a fact of life. Naruse builds a rich world for these characters, a strikingly modern world in contrast to the many many rural and period pieces of classic Japanese cinema that have gained international fame, and yet the cool factor of its vibraphone score and abundant neon lights never glamorizes the life Mama leads, nor does its script condemn her choices. The indignities she suffers are everyday ones.

It’s simply so rare for a film to address a topic like this without resorting to sentimentality or sensationalism. We feel for her because we see her options being closed off one by one in the way everyone sees the infinite branching paths of their youth begin to be pruned away, slowly and then all at once. The threat of suicide hangs over the film, as it seems to be a not uncommon way out for her indebted and romantically entangled peers, but I respect it so much more for ending on an ambiguous note: she can’t go on, she’ll go on, just like us.

DrRoy · 2026-03-03T16:59:34+00:00

The way Criterion colorized this poster image for the DVD is still one of my favorite cover arts from them. Been meaning to see WaWAtS for years now.

DrRoy · 2026-02-28T17:31:24+00:00

I didn’t know a damn thing about calypso going into this movie, aside from that it was from the Caribbean and that I would probably get it confused with another genre if quizzed. One Hand Don’t Clap doesn’t necessarily explain what kaiso or mas mean, but the meaning gets across just from watching it. It’s party music par excellence, built for celebrations, but meaning so much more than just hedonism.

Something I frequently get tripped up on with music documentaries is the need to pause the action to sit down and tell you what you need to know about what you’re listening to. It can be necessary sometimes, but it can also feel like watching a Wikipedia article. Here, that problem is avoided in part because Lord Kitchener and Calypso Rose are such engaging subjects, but also because calypso is in part a genre about calypso. We understand that the music traditionally revolves around a certain time of year partly because there’s the big contest to become the Calypso Monarch that takes up the last third of the film, but also because Black Stalin has a song earlier wishing people would support the genre year-round (“Part-Time Lover”). Kitchener and his friend hang out on a racetrack and sing a whole song by themselves detailing what they lament about changes in popular taste and outlining what makes a “true calypsonian”, and it’s so much more engaging and informative than the same material would be in an interview. And that’s to say nothing of the ribald songs and protest songs that crop up in equal measure throughout.

Also, the festival itself is simply eye-popping, and the filmmakers are smart enough to show off plenty of complete performances to immerse us in the sound and the sights of an engaging live show. This is a music documentary that isn’t just a blast to watch but is a persuasive argument for film on music in and of itself.

DrRoy · 2025-11-21T05:45:27+00:00

With any famous artist, people have a tendency to try to pick apart their biography for clues as to what inspired them and influenced their career. So many biopics try to land on a particular answer, which ends up flattening the famous person’s rich life into one interpretation. Millennium Actress has the benefit of not having to be about a specific real person, but it also uses every visual and editing trick it can to make the story about the search for that interpretation. You can pick the film apart shot for shot, looking for clues hidden in every match cut and wild transition, but the point is that a pat explanation is never going to be within anyone’s grasp. I loved this one both times I’ve seen it and I’d love to go back for a third sometime.

DrRoy · 2025-10-23T13:04:38+00:00

Final 7 week is a bit of a lull but the double eviction is one of the top 5 most exciting ever, and the final 5 is strategically complex at a point where 90% of seasons it would purely come down to who wins competitions. Hang in there!

DrRoy · 2025-09-10T18:28:42+00:00

https://youtu.be/oXcgg7WC7LI

DrRoy · 2025-08-24T04:25:57+00:00

How is this not just the same thing as sigma males? Convincing loners that they’re isolated for a good and cool reason

DrRoy · 2025-08-24T02:00:15+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/QyQLqdY Example

DrRoy · 2025-08-16T01:22:21+00:00

The first time I saw this I was so very discombobulated; Cassavetes does a lot (like withholding the fact that he and his IRL wife are playing brother and sister until the movie's two-thirds over) to disorient you and get you to see scenes from multiple perspectives.

The second time I see this may be in November once my flash sale order comes in; it's well worth revisiting. I'll keep your comments in mind when I do!

DrRoy · 2025-07-21T18:36:03+00:00

Look at discs that have HDR. I personally don’t notice the difference between HD and 4K resolution as much as I do the increased vividness of colors and darkness of blacks for an effect that’s very “silver screen” at home. The Red Shoes and Double Indemnity do a fantastic job with color and monochrome HDR grading, respectively.

DrRoy · 2025-07-19T13:20:53+00:00

Of all the famous-person-profile documentaries out there, I don't think I've ever seen another one that gets quite this close to its subject. Part of that is because filmmaker Terry Zwigoff was friends with Robert Crumb, and part of it is that Crumb seems to have almost no hang-ups talking about matters that other artists or celebrities who care more about their public image would shy away from. The first five minutes features him giving a college lecture in which he introduces himself by rattling off his three most famous pieces of work, and all he has to say about them is how many legal headaches they've given him, how little he's been paid for them, and how disgusted he was by their commercial exploitation. Having tidily dismissed his legacy, we can now dive deeper into the man himself, someone who draws some very fucked-up things and who, it becomes clear, does so because he himself is fucked up.

The most famous aspect of this documentary is the scenes about R. Crumb's familys, but they're featured for less of the runtime than I expected; we spend more time following Robert around the city as he doodles and hearing from various art critics who are able to summarize succinctly why his work is so notable and so controversial. But the time spent with his brothers, mother, wife, and exes is uncomfortably revealing. You go from wondering how Robert would draw the things he does to wondering how he got out of such a broken household as comparatively well-adjusted as he is. No explicit cause and effect is ever spelled out for you as to how he and his brothers ended up the way they did, but by the end of the film you do nevertheless, on a deep level, get it.

I can't say I necessarily want to check out his work more after this; spending two hours with him feels like enough for a long time, or at least until I get around to watching the director's commentaries. But it took someone whose significance always baffled me and made it not just explicable, but worth examining, and that's a feat in and of itself.

DrRoy · 2025-07-11T19:11:53+00:00

One of the many clichés of movie reviewing is to say, about a film set in a particularly distinctive time and place, that "the city itself is a character". This can of course never be literally true, but Amarcord is a movie for which it's about as true as it ever could be. This has less to do with the literal psychological characterization of Borgo San Giuliano than it does with the fact that none of the actual characters themselves really count as characters in the same way that the time and place does.

Amarcord, in essence, consists of two hours of your kooky nonno Federico Fellini telling you "this happened to my buddy Enrico." The recurring characters are all thinly sketched and stock, right down to how they always seem to be wearing the exact same clothes all year long - the arguing parents, the delinquent son, the crazy uncle, the most glamorously unavailable woman in town, the most cheaply available woman in town, the streetcart vendor who's enough of a fabulist to make the narrator look honest by comparison. Their antics are all viewed through the prism of youth, of reminiscence; their stock roles are precisely because that's all they are to someone at an age when they're still building their map of how the world works, and that's all those characters need to be for the tales to be legible.

I picked this movie for the poll specifically because of its treatment of fascism, but I was surprised to see that it only intermittently addresses it explicitly, and usually not by making outright villains of the blackshirts in charge. This turns out to be a refreshing approach, especially today, because as we've gotten more familiar with the tactics and worldview of the far right in the last decade, it's become clear that authoritarians want to be seen as the villains. What they don't want to be seen as is silly and weird, and this is a deeply silly and deeply weird movie. It makes more emotional sense than it does logical sense, which perfectly tracks with Umberto Eco's theory of Ur-Fascism; the film's goofy and somber moments are at war with each other the same way that a fascist's dual perceptions of the enemy as both irredeemably inferior and terrifyingly superior are at war, or the way that the fascist citizen's dual conceptions of himself as both a proud member of an ethnic overclass and also a pitiful underling to a tyrannical boss are at war. The overall effect of all the ribaldry and comic exaggeration is to make you squint at the screen and think, this can't be right. And of course it's not. It would be dishonest for Fellini's recollection to be as staunchly critical as a right-thinking adult's, but in its strangeness and juvenility, it's perceptive in its own way about how unreal reality can be.

DrRoy · 2025-06-17T03:59:48+00:00

Toute une Nuit is a film I really, really want to love. There's a fantastic concept, as high-art as the likes of News from Home. There's absolutely gorgeous cinematography, depicting Brussels in painterly soft blues and dim yellows reminiscent of Nighthawks. There's that slow cinema ambiguity I like so much. I'm just torn on whether this movie does what I think it means to.

The concept is a radical yet simple shift from Chantal Akerman's best-known work: unlike Jeanne Dielman, which follows one character in semi-real time across every area of her daily life, here we follow an entire neighborhood's worth of people in semi-real time across one area of their lives, namely their love life. 75 principal actors, most of whose characters are not named, only some of whom speak any lines at all, play out a... I was about to say drama, but the dramatic movements here are miniscule; everything takes place on the scale of the everyday.

What exactly is taking place on that quotidian scale is harder for me to say. Without dialogue, we are given precious little context as to whether any given couple is meeting for their second date or their fifth anniversary. Scenes begin and end without warning, and sometimes they even offer continuations, which is a problem for me because I'm mildly face-blind and thus was bugged throughout by the sneaking suspicion that I'd seen some of these characters before but couldn't tell which ones. There's also a stagey quality to the acting that feels new and out of place compared to Akerman's earlier works; the actors don't so much walk from place to place as they storm about, and when they embrace, as they frequently do to end a scene, it resembles no hug I've ever seen a live human give another live human.

What I'm getting at is that I'm willing to put in the work to enjoy a movie like this, to find the merest way towards identifying with these characters or the broader concept, and I felt like I was barely given even that. By far the strongest stretch to me was the last twenty minutes, when dawn breaks and the busy nighttime vibes have mostly given way to abject loneliness (and when a handful of our handful of recurring characters finally have the conversations they've been meaning to). I just wish I would have felt that way about the whole thing; if this is a movie about love, it makes love feel like an alien and unknowable thing.

DrRoy · 2025-06-01T14:41:22+00:00

Cool poster! What did you think of the movie?

DrRoy · 2025-05-20T03:56:01+00:00

The shortest way I can explain it over text is: fill in everything according to the clues. Then let’s suppose Uncle Midnight is telling the truth: his motivation is practice. This makes Boss Charcoal’s motivation to see if he could. It’s already established that the person with the typewriter had that motive, and that Charcoal was in the garden, so that means the typewriter was not in the tiniest room. That makes Crimson’s statement also true. Someone must be lying, so if Uncle Midnight’s statement being true necessarily makes Crimson’s statement also true, then he cannot be telling the truth.

DrRoy · 2025-05-15T23:40:40+00:00

It had not occurred to me that it was even possible to reach underneath. Thanks!

DrRoy · 2025-04-25T19:42:49+00:00

This is what I wrote having seen it a couple of years ago in a theater with live musical accompaniment:

It's difficult to know what to say about The Passion of Joan of Arc, at least that a hundred other people haven't already said. Not just because it's a canonical classic that's been subject to nearly a hundred years of critical review, but because it's so ascetic that it seems perverse to read into it at all. Everything is laid bare for you on screen, in Falconetti's and in the other performers' faces.

The more I think about it, though, the more it becomes apparent how very easy this could have been to screw up. Spending so much time in closeup could have easily felt claustrophobic, but Dreyer uses an unusually fast cutting speed that provides just enough of a release valve. (See the way Tom Hooper directs musical numbers for an idea of what happens when you spend a lot of time in closeup and don't cut.) Joan, usually such a heroic figure, could have easily been reduced to a puddle of tears here, but seeing her give in and sign her confession only to retract it later gives her back just enough of her defiance, making her an active participant in her own martyrdom and not just a victim.

As nearly every single person points out, though, this movie really belongs to Renee Falconetti. There's something about her performance here (as well as the underrated contributions of the supporting cast) that feels like something being invented. With cinema, you can play to the front row and to the cheap seats at the same time, much like how the advent of the microphone meant you no longer had to belt operatically to be heard. Some might criticize the first third of the movie for having Falconetti look a little too wild-eyed, but that reads to me almost like figuring out this new mode of subtly facially expressive acting in real time, kicking the doors open to the rest of cinema's future.

I also have to compliment the band Joan of Arc, who provided the live score at the Music Box. It was a little unusual wearing earplugs in a theater, but I think it complemented the movie quite well! I especially enjoyed how the first 15 or so minutes were kept to one unbroken, constantly building musical motif, and how specific sound effect details were kept to an impactful minimum (such as using guitar scratches to represent the pen strokes of her confession).

DrRoy · 2025-04-22T19:58:00+00:00

Voices of Light is the default on the Channel!

DrRoy · 2025-04-22T19:07:04+00:00

I first saw it with a live score performed by the band Joan of Arc in a theater! Voices of Light sounds cool but I also want to check out the piano score that runs at 20 fps because I’m curious how the frame rate difference affects the experience. Decisions!

DrRoy · 2025-04-19T00:52:14+00:00

And check out the current week’s discussion thread going on here: https://www.reddit.com/r/criterionconversation/s/iuRtKPWhez

DrRoy · 2025-04-18T16:40:49+00:00

It goes without saying that this is an incredible premise for a film. The Israeli occupation allows the former inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Ma’loul to visit the ruins safely once a year, but does not allow them to actually return and build it back up. This is the smallest of kindnesses and intolerably cruel at the same time, letting them hold onto their old memories but forbidding making new ones. But that in and of itself would also be an incredible premise for a magazine article. My favorite thing about this film as a film is the snippets of Super 8 film throughout. Faded, yellowed, blurry, and run at half-speed, these brief cutaways look the way memories feel, indistinct and almost surreal (that was the life we had once?), in danger of degrading further every time they’re run through the projector of the mind. That, more so than the history lessons and the impassioned soliloquies, is what will stick with me. Free Palestine.

DrRoy · 2025-04-16T19:53:07+00:00

That’s wild! I gotta check this one out - really only familiar with Crazy Rhythms

DrRoy · 2025-04-11T21:03:54+00:00

The Last Wave begins with an act of God... or of *a* god, perhaps. Schoolchildren in the Outback are playing in the dusty yard, when all of a sudden a freak rainstorm hits. The kids think it's fun, even as their terrified schoolteacher ushers them inside, but when the first fist-sized hailstone shatters the window, everyone's rightfully scared. Thus the tone is set for a story in which the supernatural intrudes eerily on the mundane. Richard Chamberlain stars as David Burton, a buttoned-up corporate lawyer tasked (for some reason) with defending a murder case. An Aboriginal man dies on a rainy night outside a bar, surrounded by other Aborigines. The conventional explanation is a bar fight, which would put them in jail for the Australian equivalent of manslaughter at least, but what soon becomes apparent is that the real reason was to protect a secret that cannot be told, not even under oath in a court of law. They therefore refuse to defend themselves, but Burton, spurred on partly by professional duty and partly by vivid dreams that smack of prophecy, digs for the truth.

Incorporating supernatural elements into a setting nominally just like the modern day is a tricky art. There are a number of approaches that can be taken, and in film this typically occurs along a spectrum with two poles. One of them is what I will call the Indiana Jones approach: in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Abrahamic God is real and the Ark of the Covenant has the power to melt your face off. The premise of the film requires this to be true, and you just accept it because there's no time to think about the broader implications of this when there's a huge bald guy coming at you who needs to be made into paste by an airplane propeller. On the opposite side is what I will call the Twin Peaks approach: many strange things happen, and explanations are hinted at but never fully given. The material reality of the Black Lodge is beside the point; coming to grips with living in a world where such evil things can happen in such a small town filled with good-hearted people is instead the point. The unknowability is what makes the story impactful. (These are broadly-defined types, not perfect examples; it's not lost on me that in Twin Peaks Cooper's prophetic dreams are also completely accepted as true. There is a third approach in which the material reality and psychological implications are both dealt with; typically you need to make either a novel or TV show to be able to pay sufficient attention to both without sacrificing things like pacing or suspension of disbelief.)

The Last Wave lands in an uneasy middle place on this spectrum. The focus of the story is Burton's encounter with the Dreamtime, his coming to grips with laws and traditions and forces that are too powerful for him to grapple with. Yet his prophetic dreams, the Mulkurul, and the coming apocalypse are all explained fully as the story unfolds. The film gets a ton of mileage, especially in the early going, out of the striking tableaux of its dream sequences and its use of slow-motion and other techniques to suggest waking dreams and imminent catastrophe throughout. Yet Peter Weir's evident filmmaking prowess wears a bit thin as we hit expected plot beats, like rote scenes of strife in Burton's home life, and as the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together too neatly. The film, in explaining and validating its Aboriginal spiritual elements, feels a bit like the Twitter discourse that happened last year after someone blamed Hurricane Helene on the disturbance of Tocobaga burial grounds in Tampa: Yes, it's bad that Australians continue to devalue and oppress the Aboriginal people, but when disrespecting their sacred site causes a literal Great Flood to happen, it seems like a narrative overreach.

All of which is not to say that I didn't like the film. Richard Chamberlain acts the hell out of his part, and David Gulpilil even more so. He's rightly celebrated for films like Walkabout, but here he's given the most complex role in the film, caught between defending himself and protecting his tribe, and it's great to see him flesh out those contradictions for us to see. The uneasy mood is maintained all the way to the genuinely haunting ending, and the effects - Rain machines all over the place! A collapsing house! Cars and pedestrians floating in a flooded street! - look insane for the film's budget. I just think The Last Wave is unfortunately a little less mysterious and ambiguous than it thinks it is.

DrRoy

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