Blade Runner
I'm off to see Blade Runner: The Current Version this evening at the Carolina. I mentioned recently that i thought BR was the most significant event in science fiction film and TV over the past quarter century. I haven't seen any of the subsequent releases since i saw it in the theater back in 1982, so i'm really looking forward to this. Kudos to the Carolina for scoring one of only a handful of prints of this supposedly definitive edition.
For the record, i'm one of those who didn't have a problem with either the narration or the ending of the original release. I haven't heard anything about what changes have been made this time around, but i'm hoping there will be minimal eyeballs being squeezed from sockets.
(MORE)There's a little game i play when i revisit things from the past, especially cutural touchstones. From Blade Runner's initial release till now is right around 26 years. What was going on 26 years prior to that? (Besides me being born, that is.) Well, there weren't a whole lot of 26 year old movies getting theatrical re-releases, that's for sure. I spent a lot of time between 1975 and 1984 in and around universities. One very cool thing about university is the number of film geeks, and the volume of older films that are being screened in and near campus. I even managed to see a few from 1956. Hollywood was stil lproducing musicals (Anything goes, with Bing Crosby and Donald O'Connor), westerns (Ghost Town, and The Dakota Incident, two variations on a theme, for example), but was just discovering rock and roll (Rock Around the Clock, released on the very day i was born, and it's sequel Don't Knock the Rock.) Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Ballon) was released in 1956 as well, as was Bus Stop. I could happily watch any of these on TCM if i happened to catch them while channel surfing; i probably saw RAtC, Bus Stop, and Red Balloon at some Tuesday Flicks in a lecture hall at Stony Brook for 50 cents too. But a couple of genuine classics were also released in 1956, and here's where the 26 year gaps between then and then and now can be measured. Earth vs the Flying Saucers, featuring Hugh Marlowe, who had also been in the greatest SF film of all time, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Godzilla, King of the Monsters (yes, the first and best, featuring Raymond Burr, fresh from playing the murderous Lars Thorwald in Hitchcock's Rear Window, and that second greatest of 50s SF movies, Forbidden Planet.
Near future SF was not a big sub-genre in the 50s. Two of these films were set in the present, one in the far future. Forbidden Planet was not so much a speculation as to what space travel might be like, but an attempt to make a different kind of monster movie, and show off both a new generation of special effects, and Anne Francis. It succeeded on all fronts, too. The other two movies were early warnings of the new kind of things Man Should Not Fuck With films that were a response to the technoligical advances brough about by the Second World War. But they didn't attempt to make sociological speculations as to where we would end up if we did. Just that things would get very bad in a very short period of time.
Blade Runner is, to me, the first really successful attempt to extrapolate what the near future might feel like. 2001: A Space Odyssey of course milked that territory, much less successfully, partially by getting it wrong, but also by foregrounding most of the changes in the society it depicted. One of the ways that science fiction works best, is to have characters who treat the wonders of their world the same way that we treat ours, that is, we use them till they break, then we throw them away. We don't marvle on the miracle of cell phones, or GPS devices, or barcode scanners on our highway toll booths much, do we? Blade Runner got this, and also got some of the specifics right as well. (Replicants in the year 2018? Not so much). Ridley Scott caught some of the same zeitgeist that William Gibson was tapping into at the same time period; he realized that the future might actually suck, in many of the same ways that the present sucked, in addition to being as wonderful a place to live as any other point in time.
And that's why, 26 years later, i'm paying full price to go see an old movie in the theater.
For the record, i'm one of those who didn't have a problem with either the narration or the ending of the original release. I haven't heard anything about what changes have been made this time around, but i'm hoping there will be minimal eyeballs being squeezed from sockets.
(MORE)There's a little game i play when i revisit things from the past, especially cutural touchstones. From Blade Runner's initial release till now is right around 26 years. What was going on 26 years prior to that? (Besides me being born, that is.) Well, there weren't a whole lot of 26 year old movies getting theatrical re-releases, that's for sure. I spent a lot of time between 1975 and 1984 in and around universities. One very cool thing about university is the number of film geeks, and the volume of older films that are being screened in and near campus. I even managed to see a few from 1956. Hollywood was stil lproducing musicals (Anything goes, with Bing Crosby and Donald O'Connor), westerns (Ghost Town, and The Dakota Incident, two variations on a theme, for example), but was just discovering rock and roll (Rock Around the Clock, released on the very day i was born, and it's sequel Don't Knock the Rock.) Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Ballon) was released in 1956 as well, as was Bus Stop. I could happily watch any of these on TCM if i happened to catch them while channel surfing; i probably saw RAtC, Bus Stop, and Red Balloon at some Tuesday Flicks in a lecture hall at Stony Brook for 50 cents too. But a couple of genuine classics were also released in 1956, and here's where the 26 year gaps between then and then and now can be measured. Earth vs the Flying Saucers, featuring Hugh Marlowe, who had also been in the greatest SF film of all time, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Godzilla, King of the Monsters (yes, the first and best, featuring Raymond Burr, fresh from playing the murderous Lars Thorwald in Hitchcock's Rear Window, and that second greatest of 50s SF movies, Forbidden Planet.
Near future SF was not a big sub-genre in the 50s. Two of these films were set in the present, one in the far future. Forbidden Planet was not so much a speculation as to what space travel might be like, but an attempt to make a different kind of monster movie, and show off both a new generation of special effects, and Anne Francis. It succeeded on all fronts, too. The other two movies were early warnings of the new kind of things Man Should Not Fuck With films that were a response to the technoligical advances brough about by the Second World War. But they didn't attempt to make sociological speculations as to where we would end up if we did. Just that things would get very bad in a very short period of time.
Blade Runner is, to me, the first really successful attempt to extrapolate what the near future might feel like. 2001: A Space Odyssey of course milked that territory, much less successfully, partially by getting it wrong, but also by foregrounding most of the changes in the society it depicted. One of the ways that science fiction works best, is to have characters who treat the wonders of their world the same way that we treat ours, that is, we use them till they break, then we throw them away. We don't marvle on the miracle of cell phones, or GPS devices, or barcode scanners on our highway toll booths much, do we? Blade Runner got this, and also got some of the specifics right as well. (Replicants in the year 2018? Not so much). Ridley Scott caught some of the same zeitgeist that William Gibson was tapping into at the same time period; he realized that the future might actually suck, in many of the same ways that the present sucked, in addition to being as wonderful a place to live as any other point in time.
And that's why, 26 years later, i'm paying full price to go see an old movie in the theater.
Labels: pop culture
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