[movies] ‘Blade Runner’ at 40: Why It’s Still the Greatest Sci-Fi of All-Time … ‘Working from a formula he perfected in 1979’s Alien, Scott brought his world of grimy industry and neon-lit shadows, rogue androids and put-upon protagonists to California, swapping Alien’s body horror for the police procedural. Granted, Deckard isn’t Ellen Ripley, but in its portrayal of the battered and bruised detective battling against the system, Blade Runner is a Chinatown of the future. That it was only Scott’s third film as director makes it all the more impressive.’
There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.
Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things…
[movies] Some thoughts on Blade Runner … by Nathan Jurgenson … ‘Bladerunner is also very much like the cyborg genre in other ways, for example, in its approach to sex and gender. Deckard (a cop who is finishing off the genocide of a group of sentient slave laborers who attempted to cast away their chains) becomes attracted to the Rachael replicant precisely because she is confused and vulnerable. For both Pris and Rachael, and also Samantha in Her and Ava in Ex Machina, the men in these movies are sexually attracted not to wires and circuits but childlike vulnerability. Pris and Ava are in on it, manipulating men by pretending to be childlike fantasy objects. Samantha and Rachael instead merely reflect that same desire in those making and watching the films. Deckard makes this most explicit when he has Rachael in his apartment and starts kissing her. She tries to escape, but Deckard doesn’t let her. She says no, and he says her no is really a yes, and repeats this until she complies. Deckard is attracted to telling her how to say yes, how to desire, to make decisions for her, and ultimately be her savior. Like most cyborg movies, the cyborg is a fembot, and the movies ultimately say more about sex than technology.’
[movies] Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless … a look back at Blade Runner … ‘Ford’s Deckard may or may not be as gripped by uncertainty about his job as Dick’s original blade runner. In any case, his brusque “lack of affect” provides one of the long-standing puzzles of the film: is he, too, a replicant? Certainly Ford’s perpetual grumpiness (it sometimes seems his default acting position), his curdled cynicism, put up barriers to feeling that suggest it is as disturbing for him as it is for the hunted Leon or Roy. Though some still doubt, it seems clear that Deckard is indeed a replicant, his imaginings and memories downloaded from some database, his life as transitory as that of his victims. However, as we watch Blade Runner, Deckard doesn’t feel like a replicant; he is dour and unengaged, but lacks his victims’ detached innocence, their staccato puzzlement at their own untrained feelings. The antithesis of the scowling Ford, Hauer’s Roy is a sinister smiler, or someone whose face falls at the brush of an unassimilable emotion.’
[movies] Deckard: Blade Runner, Moron … amusing analysis of how bad Rick Deckard is as a Blade Runner … ‘I’m not sure how I’ve never noticed this before, but Deckard is an idiot. He’s given all the information he needs on a plate, nothing bad happens unexpectedly, and every lead falls into his lap. He has photo ID of everyone he has to kill, he’s told about their physical strength, he has a gun, they’re all unarmed, and he’s legally allowed to shoot them dead in public. Yet in every case, he lets them get into a hand-to-hand fight with him that he can’t win, and the only way the film can even keep him alive is for his targets to suddenly stop fighting or get killed by someone else.’
[movies] The Fake Magazines Used in Blade Runner Are Still Futuristic, Awesome … the story behind the fictional magazine covers used in the background of Blade Runner which have been discovered recently by the Internet … ‘These covers are bouncing around the Internet right now (at Gawker’s io9, etc) and now it may be that they are fakes, but not in a bad way. The idea that some guy out there saw the movie and painstakingly recreated them with the vintage clipart that the original designer used is mindblowing!’
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16 January 2012
[movies] Blade Runner Sketch Book … scans of a rare out-of-print Blade Runner production sketch book. [via YMFY]
[movies] Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner … ‘As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions.’ [via @girlonetrack]
[kipple] Philip K. Dick on Kipple — brief 43 Folders post on Kipple … ‘I think kipple is the main problem with my computers. It’s not just adware (on the Windows box), but the weird little things that wind up in the nooks and crannies. Installers for demoware. Photographs of children. Zipfiles loaded with mp3s… of songs that I already have in other directories, or on other machines, or on CDs on the shelves on my walls.’
[movies] Blade Runner: Final Cut Review — nice comprehensive review of Blade Runner: Final Cut … ‘Back in 1982, actress Joanna Cassidy wasn’t allowed to do the stunt where Zhora crashes through the window panes. But if you watch the film closely, especially now in high-definition, it’s painfully obvious that it’s a stuntwoman in those shots. So Cassidy was brought back in, dressed in her original costume, and was shot on a greenscreen stage, going through the same movements as the stuntwoman. Her face and body angles were matched to those of the stuntwoman’s frame by frame. Cassidy’s head was then digitally inserted over the stuntwoman’s, and the resulting image was blended, color-corrected and matched seamlessly. So now, when you see Zhora crash through the glass, it’s actually Zhora all the way through. The result is amazing.’
[movies] What’s new in Blade Runner: The Final Cut? — contains some spoilers … ‘In the scene where Batty confronts Tyrell, the line, “I want more life, fucker” has been replaced with “I want more life, father”.’ [via linkbunnies.org]
Scott’s final cut – was painstakingly assembled from original elements, including the original 65mm negative. De Lauzirika has been working on it over a seven-year period. “And this time, Ridley approved every single thing that went into it – every single cut, every single effect,” he says. “We’re right back to square one,” Galvao says of The Final Cut elements. “We scanned the cut negative, plus the negatives we dug out of vaults in England, here at Warner Bros., and [co-executive producer] Jerry Perenchio’s vault as well. We went through and viewed every frame of every roll that we could find.” “Honestly, I got to go through 977 boxes and cans of mag, IP, INs, 65mm visual effects comps, 35mm original dailies … everything ever printed,” de Lauzirika says.
[movies] Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined — Ridley Scott on the absolutely, positively, Final Cut of Blade Runner … ‘The director’s cut removed the voice-over and that silly ending and put in the unicorn daydream, but the disc didn’t look that great. And it should look great, because Blade Runner at the time was pretty formidable – it’s pretty formidable even now, actually. A lot of people don’t notice whether they’re watching something beautifully technical or not, but it’s important to me. So that always got in the way of the director’s cut being the final version. I think it’s final now because I’ve done all the nips and tucks and tidied up one or two of the visual areas that we couldn’t do properly at the time because we didn’t have the technology.’
[kipple] More on Kipple … J.R.Isidore explaining Kipple to Pris: ‘Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.’
[wikipedia] My Wikipedia Contrail: Kipple … ‘Kipple is a term coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It refers to unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself. Some of Dick’s descriptions of it suggest an analogy to entropy. According to two characters from the book, John Isidore stated that the first law of “kipple” is that “kipple” drives out “nonkipple”;’
[film] Blade Runner Final Cut Due … ‘Warner Home Video will issue a new remastered director’s cut of the classic SF movie Blade Runner in September now that it has cleared up rights issues, followed by a theatrical release of a version promised to be truly director Ridley Scott’s final cut, Variety reported.’ [via Feeling Listless]
[film] Slashdot discusses Bladerunner. “How can slashdot embolden its readers on the one hand to boycott the movie industry because of DVD and DeCSS, and, on the other hand, encourage us to purchase the Blade Runner DVD? “
[film] Ridley Scott answers a freqeuntly asked question about his film Blade Runner — Is Deckard a Replicant?. ‘In Channel 4’s documentary On The Edge Of Blade Runner, Scott discusses the scenes and asked what they mean, he confirms with a grin: “He’s a replicant”‘.
