“In many ways, RoboCop was ahead of its time, foreshadowing a future that is with us now. The Reagan-era gap between rich and poor has grown ever wider, with the 1% using an increasingly militarized police force to protect gentrified communities while other parts of cities have become postindustrial wastelands, abandoned to crime and drugs. RoboCop himself, a man made over into a machine by an unfeeling corporation, can be seen as a literal example of American workers being replaced by robots.” — Film scholar and Paul Verhoeven author Douglas Keesey

The Digital Bits and History, Legacy & Showmanship are pleased to present this retrospective commemorating the 30th anniversary of the release of RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven’s (Soldier of Orange, Basic Instinct) franchise-inspiring and Saturn- and Oscar-winning satirical action film starring Peter Weller (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Leviathan) and Nancy Allen (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out). [Read on here...]

All right, after several days of hard work (with lots more to go), The Bits is finally up and running on newly-updated database software. You may have noticed that The Bits looks a little different here today, and this is why. We’ve got lots more tweaking to do, and there will probably be some things that are broken around here that we’ll have to get around to fixing, but for now the basics seem to be working. Please bear with us as we dial everything in here at the site and get things buttoned up. Code and functionality updates like this are the bane of any webmaster, but you gotta get them done.

Meanwhile, here at The Bits today, we’ve got a pair of new Blu-ray reviews. Tim has checked out William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.: Collector’s Edition from Shout Select, as well as Michael Anderson’s Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze from the Warner Archive.

And I’ve got a whole mess of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray reviews coming, now that our server updates are nearly completed. Watch for those starting Monday with Denis Villeneuve’s The Arrival from Paramount first up on deck.  [Read on here…]