Neill Blomkamp 2 results

Sharlto Copley: Never a cop out

People - Interview with Sharlto Copley The recently transplanted South African talent focused on staying alive as he donned a variety of hardhats in the new, boundary-pushing action movie Hardcore Henry By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER, BC –  “Let’s not die today.”  According to Sharlto Copley, those four words were a daily mantra on the set of Hardcore Henry. “It was a big discussion: No one must die making this film. We talked about it because we were pushing the boundaries and the rules and we had very little money. On the days where there was a very high risk, we’d fly the Jolly Roger – skull and crossbones – in a prominent place to make sure everyone was on guard and alert,” says Copley, sitting down for a chat at a high end Vancouver hotel. “Everything you see in the movie happens. When you see a guy getting blown up and the van beneath him, that’s actually happening… It was by far the most risk I’ve taken as an actor, which sounds so lame ...
3.5Score

Chappie reboots best bits of Blade Runner, Robocop

Droidful! A hacked version of Robocop, Chappie takes place in the not-too-distant future, when violent crime has gone viral and police resources are too stretched to contain the chaos.   By Katherine Monk Infused with ambient paranoia, apocalyptic imagery and an overall sense of social collapse, Neil Blomkamp’s movies operate in a familiar science-fiction setting, but they feel significantly different from Hollywood spectacle. Where the likes of Lucas and Spielberg find ways of affirming all-American value systems through hero-centric stories, Blomkamp doesn’t seem at all interested in themes of god and country. If anything, the South African filmmaker (who makes his home in Vancouver) focuses on the opposite: He ignores the grand rhetoric of the visible and the valued in an effort to hear the slang of the common folk. In his brilliantly bleak feature debut, District 9, Blomkamp re-invented the alien invasion theme by weaving it into Apartheid metaphor, ...