The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

there is some deep psychological voodoo going on about facial cgi, and directors and everyone involved with a movie apparently thinking it is good enough. when sean young shows up in this, as her younger self, it's breathtaking. she moves closer, to the middle ground. still breathtaking. is this some unused footage, melded into the new movie? what witchcraft is this?? then we move closer. she starts talking. and it's LIKE WATCHING RED DEAD REDEMPTION. clearly there are extremely high standards at work in this movie. the design, the sets, the makeup, it's all stunning. so what blinds producers and directors to this? grand moff tarkin in rogue one was just the same way. and even leia to an extent - they were smart enough to hold the close shot on her for just a second or two but it was enough to feel the plasticky vibe, the gray film over the teeth, the curiously rigid mouth. just bizarre. (it's not so different maybe from the collective delusion that plastic surgery on the lips and chin etc actually makes hollywood actors look better rather than clownish losers)

like there has to be this deep, deep desire to unsee or look past the deficiencies of the representation, deficiencies which are immediately apparent to anyone not involved in the production

Whether the uncanny valley can be crossed poses an interesting challenge.

I find the CGI in the Star Wars prequels much worse. No surprise there but it's just stuff like robots and scenery; there's a curious lack of scale. Not relative scale, just a sense of scale at all.

some of the look very much reminded me of manufactured landscapes, the documentary of edward burtynsky's work: ppl like salvage-ants crawling over mountains of detritus and abandoned ship-hulks

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5915c70e59cc6830f44a9d74/59627dfa44024329a4dc59e9/59627dfa03596e1794b5c2d6/1499627003167/Manufactured_Landscapes_Cover.jpg

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5915c70e59cc6830f44a9d74/59651f7ce3df28f61fda1911/59651fbd17bffc9f07d41720/1499799744898/SHB_9A_00_big.jpg

uncanny valley easier to swallow in a movie where they're bioengineering fake people

i saw it with tracer: i think our shared opinion on exit was "that was good not bad but we have QUESTIONS"

re LUV: it's a very bold commitment to style when your job that day is likely to included assassination via close-up knife and/or noggin smashed like a prawn cracker so you decide yet again to dress in STARTLING VIRGIN WHITE, well done her

her boss was plainly a complete blethering idiot and she just as plainly recognised this, hence her tremendous sinister rage at all times after the very first encounter with her (she was the best if not the only character)

actually the memories woman was good too, i liked the super-weird way she brushed away her tears

yes!! the first time she did it i thought "the director has told her she must brush away some tears but she hates him so she's doing it in the most perfunctory way possible" basically writing my own making-of fan-fic in my head while the movie is going on (possibly why i missed so many plot points)

am i right that LUV and WALLACE both are pining for the secret of babby-forming

clones

lol sorry i meant that to be strikethrough not blockquote

love those scraggled detritus landscape photos mark, i was keen to see them after having them described to me

the burtynsky documentary is def worth checking out: the book collection suffers a bit from the fact the photos work best in galleries, really really large; the shipbreaking location is chittagong beach in bangladesh

i also liked the sigh of "fuck you then you idiot" the giant naked sex-vid bot gave when jared wasn't enticed

Totally agree with Tracer re: the face-masking CGI, except that I'd say it bothered me much, much less in this than in Rogue One, presumably because it was meant to be a not-that-accurate copy anyway. I hope there's a out-take where Ford says "Rachel has green eyes. And doesn't talk like she's in Red Dead Redemption."

the good thing abt the little clips of the earlier film is that it reminded you how terrible harrison ford and sean young were as a "couple with chemistry"

(or at all: only ANOTHER BOT could have fallen for rachel QED, and anyway harrison ford is always terrible, he is also in fact a replicant in witness, the mosquito coast etc)

harrison ford is always terrible

he's a movie star, he doesn't have to be a good actor

tbf he is ok in anything where low-key clowning and punchy brawn are his attributes (= indy movies, star wars) (i just never watch moves like that)

he has a really weird and graceless style of running and jumping

he is very old (and a robot)

they recalled the model for a reason

actually you know where's he's really great is working girl - v charming and relaxed, and he doesn't wave his index finger in righteous indignation at anyone iirc

he's always run like he's carrying a 100lb pack tho, even in the indy days

Limmy said something a few weeks ago about Harrison Ford being unable to run - he looks like he is but he actually isn't. He does the same thing in Return of the Jedi when he's running away from the shield generator on Endor.

blade galumpher

there are so many TV shows that burrow deep into directions only hinted at here - ORPHAN BLACK for the "clones having babies" angle, HUMANS for the "are robots human, or at least human enough to hate us" angle

all of them HINT at a robot/clone/replicant revolution but none of them actually GET ON with it. i want to see the film where freysa (sp?) and luv realize they have a common enemy

http://www.antarcticajournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/339_skynet-5-things-you-didnt-know_flash.jpg

just once i wish -- when the seeker arrives unexpectedly at the hideout of the sought -- that the latter is not playing the spotify 3000 "well known classy music for guests you only just met" selection, and kicking back with stuff he prefers to play when on his own and uninterrupted, like carter the unstoppable sex machine or asia or (most likely) dave matthews

what exactly was skynet's plan once humans were wiped out btw? just a bunch of gleaming metal endoskeletons sitting around shooting the shit in the ruins of humans of civilisation for eternity?

or the sought is just cranking their hog in front of redtube or whatever, answers the door all flustered with a faint patina of perspiration on their brow and a stray tissue sticking out of their zipper xp

he's a robot

but in general, yes

actually this makes me think of something that popped into mind of when LUV was tussling with K at terrific length at the seaside: what happens when you kick a replicant in the nuts?

she never bothered doing this tho it was clearly very in her skillset to do so, so presumably nothing at all (clearly she'd shatter a mere human pelvis)

what happens when you kick a replicant in the nuts?

Pretty sure that was the working title of PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

I really liked this. I feel like this is one of the first movies to successfully challenge prestige sci-fi TV in breadth and scope. The acts really felt like separate episodes (in a good way). I did feel like there was about 10 minutes that could have been cut here and there (small things like Deckard in the water calling out "joe!" for 20 seconds), but the overall pacing was good while still allowing a lot of both space and detail.

Also, the world of '2049' has a much stronger PKD vibe - especially when it seemed under-populated (as someone mentioned above).

The part that I felt could have been severely cut was the entire San Diego sequence. It really seemed like a Walking Dead rip off and when they revealed the Morgan actor it was an eye-roller.

The only other thing i didn't like was the brightness of K's apartment and the LAPD HQ. Way too fluorescent tube color temp.

And I really liked the implication mentioned above that this future was a continuation of the world of the first film ("Soviet Happy" etc). That was also very PKD-esque touch.

many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese

this was good btw

Also just realized there are no phones in this and found an article about the choice:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/blade-runner-director-explains-lack-of-cell-phones/

Villeneuve mostly otm. There are some tv shows and movies that show computer interactions realistically now and some do a pretty good job, but nine times out of ten I'd prefer some sort of visual metaphor or technically impractical interface that looks good on screen but telegraphs what's actually going on.

There are always people who are completely pedantic and think things should be literal, but for each one of them, I can point to a friend who's insanely technically skilled but would rather watch people flying through cyberspace Hackers-style than see someone clicking away.

The score for this was awesome. I don't know how much was Hans Zimmer and how much was Ben Wallfisch but it was all the BLARRRMs that Zimmer overuses normally used perfectly

CS-80-esque Vangelis-tribute sounds were terrific

idk I was really moved

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/blade-runner-director-explains-lack-of-cell-phones/

this article angered me

primarily for its numerous unfounded assumptions/received wisdom bullshit re: sf as a genre

xpost, the score was really stunning - played wayyyy too loud, but so good the volume was mostly welcome.

Digital Trends thinks that sci-fi is about predicting digital trends, go figure.

Ppl are surmising that it has to have been mostly wallfisch since zimmer was doing his live tour during most of the time between taking over scoring duties and completion of the project. In any case, yeah I like the score a lot too. (Except the bits where it does that giant whammy bar gimmick that drives me up the wall)

Also re phones in cinema and television I am so deeply sick of detectives talking on their fkin cellphones to each other every ten seconds I know it's the way we live now but it's so fucking boring

like there has to be this deep, deep desire to unsee or look past the deficiencies of the representation, deficiencies which are immediately apparent to anyone not involved in the production

i can't work through the details rn but in light of the remembered-for-being-of-its-moment thing ryan mentioned (which seems right - lotta synthesis of the present day's cultural imaginary going on), when i heard the memory-maker say that real memories are a mess, my intuition was that this was a key for the way this movie is being positioned against the last one and somehow its official stance on its reality for its viewers. in other words its very very designed and deliberate plotting and conceptualizing (so much so that the rebel leader can say to K, that's just a piece of the puzzle, and it seems entirely accurate in multiple senses) are meant to reinforce the visual style's exploration of, i would say, a lack of uncanny-valley issues (which naturally there wouldn't be, after the technology reaches the point it's premised to have reached), so that the whole film is in a way not 'a mess', implication being that the mess is offscreen, in the theater, where memory and history are alive.

i haven't read that cellphone thing above, but i wouldn't be surprised if it said something about the prevailing lack of panopticon-style information-control in the whole film world. (i guess the bit about losing all the data in the crash is supposed to provide a pretext for that?) the authorities or the wallace corp seem to have it in certain respects, yet it's not the kind of constant-surveillance nightmare that is de rigueur in a lot of current near-future fictional imagination. there's... monitoring, but not surveillance. not control at a distance. because what's noticeable about K is his apparent privacy. a replicant, serving as a blade runner, why would they even bother? or why would they risk it, given the regular check-ins (which suggest a heightened scrutiny, a regularity of need to re-baseline for whatever reason)? and in fact the plot/characterization makes something of that, because K's relationship with joi is motivated to be slightly idiosyncratic (it costs him, it's what he's spend his pay/allowance on), and we see the 'real girl' replicant (though she may know differently, since she's a plant) play off his apparent disinterest in sexing a replicant, which suggests that his attachment to joi is in fact beyond the sad sex-chatbot pretense that is the initial suggestion for that. which would be significant, because his other earlier scenes make it clear that he's kind of a walking test case for nihilism, not because 'he's a robot' or whatever but because he has (almost) fully accepted his own unreality, his lack of original purpose, since he's walking around with roughly the same feelings and desires that everyone else is but also with the constant belief that they cannot really be his in the genuine sense of 'his'. so he has a perspective on himself that is not too different from the perspective a consumer ('we hope you enjoy our product') is to have, presumably, about any sufficiently artificial fruits of the advance of technology (where always in the background, there is the idea that there is reality in 'life' or what's 'alive'). i'm not too familiar with gosling but i thought his performance seemed good - in the first part, before he validates his memory as real, he has a constant wry smirk that seems to reflect back on everything he sees. in essence, because he more or less knows he's not real, he sees how (to what extent) everything else around him is unreal, too.

the plot beat with the memory, as it gets incorporated into his relationship with joi, and their interpretation of what the memory's supposed reality means (she stresses its secrecy, his harboring this feeling about himself), seems to say that what K is doing with joi is up to a point an effort to stake out a kind of inner life of his own, one he doesn't just accept as unreal. (later, after he fails the baseline check-in, his boss's accusation is something like, you're not the same as you were inside.) i suppose the plot causes this to be undercut as fundamentally narcissistic, for all that he seems to be a genuine romantic about her as opposed to his attitude toward the outside world (which, though, would make sense of his being a batty-like figure: wasn't roy hella narcissistic too?), except insofar as K does seem crushed by the loss of joi and afterward does eventually seem to make choices which are not directly narcissistic, so i guess it would depend on how we are to understand his motives after joi is destroyed.

i thought it was nice that the memory-maker essentially sounded like a mechanical turker as far as her working conditions.

the san diego scene does seem like the worst one, presumably the real need they felt for it was as an opportunity to show the underclass scrounging a living out of child enslavement, as some kind of counterpoint to the faith of the revolting replicants in their more-than-human dignity, which it takes belief in their (potential) natality, realized in a born-free replicant child, to maintain. if K's arc is to be read as always-already failed in some way but redeemed by what he does in the final act, then it would seem to be for the seemingly ultra-standard-sounding reasons involving deckard's genuine possibility of seeing himself (but not-himself) in another, escaping a narcissistic fantasy for a reality that only comes in time, through the extension of biological life into (family) history, etc.

in deckard's scene with wallace, are we supposed to take him as being sincere when he says rachel's eyes were green? (so that wallace just botched the reconstruction from, presumably, rachel's dna?) in other words, that he refuses to accept anything less than the reality of his memories (his desires etc)?

one thing i was not clear on, and seemed to be deliberately not made clear, is by what means humanity effected the obedience of the latest replicants. the whole premise leads one to be willing to accept some technobabble magical voila, but my impression of the fringes of the details that accrue in the plot is that it's just the same old combination of power, social coercion, and control over belief that has always been used to enslave human beings. (not even a matter e.g. of some substance dependency, as is common in this kind of story.)

that would perhaps explain the notes in luv's performance, the enthusiastic pursuit of wallace's mission combined with abject terror at wallace himself combined with seething rage for others. those aren't the feelings of someone whose obedience is a solved technical problem.