Omni Consumer Products is helping to ensure that the city of Detroit will always have a Robocop to watch over them. In lieu of an active cyborg patrolman, they are settling for erecting a statue of Robocop in Detroit. Omni Consumer Products is a real company, which takes its name from a company of the same name featured in the Robocop franchise. When Pete Hottelet, owner of OCP, discovered there was a fund-raising effort in the works to build the statue in Detroit, he matched the $25,000 already raised, bringing the grand total of funds to in excess of $50,000.
“I’m in an interracial marriage, which was illegal not that long ago.”
-Chris Gorham
At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there were two films in which a religious fundamentalist threatened the lives of gay or gay sympathetic characters. Kevin Smith’s Red State got the most attention with a full on religious protest out side the screening. However, The Ledge also explored a similar idea.
In The Ledge, Gavin (Charlie Hunnam) crosses paths with his neighbor Joe (Patrick Wilson), a Christian who vocally fights against a gay lifestyle. Gavin is an atheist and lives with a gay roommate, so he gets in Joe’s face. Joe ends up forcing Gavin to climb onto a ledge and jump, providing the tension in writer/director Matthew Chapman’s film.
Zen Master Genpo Roshi has announced that he is disrobing. To “disrobe” as a Buddhist monk means that you formally quit the Buddhist order and give up your status as a priest and/or monk. Ironically, it was disrobing that got him into trouble in the first place. It seems that Genpo, who is married, had an affair with the woman he was grooming to be his successor.
I never even knew or cared about any of Genpo’s sex scandals (this is not his first) until this one broke. But I have been highly critical of a scam he’s been running for a number of years called Big Mind(r).
“It’s been made more like a work of art than it has a movie.”
-Simon Boswell
Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio “Goyo” Cárdenas Hernández, has been praised as “a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions,” and derided as “a massive clearance sale of leftover psychedelia.” It’s story and imagery has been dismissed as “a series of banal Freudianisms involving a circus family” and celebrated as “a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini.” But love it or hate it, you’ll never forget it, since with Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky firmly straddles the line where madness becomes genius.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m a massive Doctor Who fan. The longest running science fiction series in the world, it was first broadcast in 1964. It’s an idiosyncratically British institution, whose longevity is cleverly assured by one of the fundamental principals of our protagonist, the Doctor. He is able to ‘regenerate’ his physical form to cheat death – and to keep the show fresh and give writers wiggle-space, allowing the character to develop and change.
The program went on hiatus between 1989 and 2005 (with the exception of a movie, released in 1996), and when Russell T Davis revived it (with Christopher Eccleston and then David Tennant in the role of the Doctor), he was quick to say that it was the enduring affection of fans that helped convince the BBC to give it another shot.
Current writer Steven Moffat, who produced some of the most memorable shows of the Tennant era, has gone one further; he has actively sought to bring the fans into the experience with somewhat of a stylistic flourish. Late last year we were treated to Doctor Who Live, a stage-show big on audience participation, where monsters such as the Scarecrows, clockwork androids and Cybermen roamed the floors of the O2 Arena in London, terrifying small children and delighting older Who fans in equal measure.
The Doctor Who Experience, currently showing at London’s Olympia, is another gift to fans young and old; the audience become the story, and who was I to resist? I grabbed my Tom Baker scarf and my faithful companion, and prepared to indulge in some hardcore Who-dom (if you’re planning on seeing the show and are sensitive to spoilers, I’d discourage you from reading any further).
