Blade Runner

Blade Runner 1982 is an American dystopian film set in the near future (2019) and features robots who talk and act like humans.

The story involves an ex-blade runner, people hired to find and "retire" these robots after they staged a rebellion and were made illegal on earth. Who is forced back into this role after a Replicant is discovered.

The story also features a group of four Replicants, the leader of which is attempted to find a way to extend his life- the robots are only set to last four years.

The Blade Runner provides an excellent futuristic backdrop to an otherwise reflecting film. Remove the future and the robots and you essentially have a film-noir. The police officers and fugitives, even the romance between the protagonist and the replicant represents the sort of relationship ever present in Noir films. The term for this is Neo-Noir, a futuristic vision of the 1940’s classics.

The setting of the city is fantastically kitsch, with huge advertisements for companies like Pan-Am and Coca-Cola. The entire place has a Tokyo feeling to it with bright lights, and too many people.

The Replicants are such fantastic villains, because they seem human and to all intents and purposes are human but aren’t because they don’t have an emotion at all and have no problems killing people, however towards the end, Roy, the leader of the replicant group on earth dies, and he does so with such emotion that you seem to forget that he is not human.

Lone Ranger

The lone ranger was a box office failure because of several reasons. The film was an adaption of an old television series- and a couple of subsequent films- in the 1950’s. This means that any children or adults who enjoyed the series would now be 60 years old or more, which probably means that they are unwilling or unable to go to the cinema. They are not even close to the target audience of a film like this, and would be too old to have children who are in the target audience to take to see the film. They may buy the film later on DVD if they wish, this would reduce the box office takings.
The film may also have not appealed to the usual target audience of westerns, because it was a very gentle film, target probably towards the audience of Pirates of the Caribbean, a family film. The older western genre was mainly available circa 1950, when it dominated all cinema which focused on violence and guns scenes. These kinds of films would be marketed towards men which would make the film more unpopular toward women.
The reviews of the film on the internet were mainly negative and it didn’t achieve much more than a 2 and a half stars on many websites which rate films. This would convince people to not waste money on a film they would not enjoy. There were also several films out in the summer that people would have wanted to see, so they would have chosen to see them over a film they know nothing about.
The film itself is quite boring, it moves at a slow pace, and the plot doesn’t seem to develop. The entire film seems longer because the action moves so slowly. It is very difficult to keep your attention to a film for that long, especially if does not grab your attention, making it unsuitable to children. The slow plot probably contributed somewhat to the poor reviews it received, even if the plot was fantastic, nobody wants to sit and watch a boring film. The colours in the film were bland- blacks and whites, this may have been a reference to the original westerns when it was all in black and white, but while this seems charming, it actually makes the scenes look boring.

American Psycho

American Psycho is a disturbing film which mixs horror and comedy to create an oddly brilliant film. The main character Patrick Bateman is a psychotic killer who also has possibly the worst taste in music.