Slashdot Mirror
Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style
MankyD writes "Just saw the trailer to a new John Woo film over at apple.com called PayCheck. Written by Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report, its a story about a top notch reverse engineer (Ben Affleck) who, after a quick memory wipe, finds trying to piece together the mystery of his past. It's also got Uma Thurman as the female lead. Unfortunately the website isn't up and running yet, and the premise of the movie seems a little far fetched, but this still ought to be a fun one."
That was Dogma.
Also, Kevin Smith has pretty much sucked ass since then.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
here is a direct link to the full size vid:1 a1a1aaa2198c627970773d80669d84574a8d80d3cb12453c02 589f25382f668c9329e0375e81787e85abb28970c7aee1d8de e67ca3297fa65/paycheck_m480.mov
http://a772.g.akamai.net/5/772/51/30378f1c0dfafa/
-=20
me doesn't live for do [DEPRECATED]
Been a little while since I read it, too, but here's the gist of it:
A guy works for a large company for a period of time. When he leaves the company, his memory of the entire experience is wiped and he gets the pay he negotiated for himself prior to starting the job. He was expecting a large sum of money, but instead gets a handful of objects. He then proceeds to get into multiple situations where one of the objects is exactly what he needs to get him out of a jam, and eventually he pieces together what he was doing during the period of time that was wiped from his memory.
It's in Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, featuring "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford."
~Philly
Doves flying in slow motion through flame-engulfed doorways.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I think he played Ben Affleck in that one ...
What a long, strange trip it's been.
For reference to other movies, Minority Report was published in 1954, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Total Recall) published 1965, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) published 1968, Second Variety (Screamers) published 1953, Impostor published 1953.
Personally i really enjoy the cheesy wit that most of his short stories are innundated with, and am looking forward to Paycheck, despite my apprehension with Ben Affleck (god, that jaw!).
If you want to read PKD, i think his best stuff was from the late 60's early 70's. The short stories from the 50's and early 60's feel like quick thoughts that PKD was shooting out on the fly, stuff he was thinking through on his way to later full thoughts. His stories after the mid-70's (there aren't many) are too ethereal and "out there", almost to the point of being unreadable. And for a very different sort of work by PKD, read Confessions of a Crap Artist.
Disclaimer: I've read a substantial amount of PKD, but as he was such a prolific writer, i've read nowhere near all or even most of his work.
As for John Woo, I've enjoyed his style in Face/Off and Broken Arrow, and in both he had to overcome the Actor Wraith John Travolta (lately seems to act so bad that he sucks the acting ability out of others). Hell, Hard Target even had some style thanks to John Woo, and it's a Van Damme movie. Presumably he'll be able to work through Ben's jaw as well.
It's too bad the rumours of John Woo doing a TMNT movie aren't true.
-f
www.blackant.net
IIRC, this engineer (don't think he was a reverse engineer) gets into a contract with a highly secretive corporation. The deal is that he works for them for like 2 years, gets paid a truckload of cash but gets his entire memory of the experience wiped out.
The story starts as he wakes up with this 2 years memory blank. He's told that he opted for a handful of trinkets as paycheck instead of the $$ just before undergoing the memory wipe. At first he's pretty pissed off against his former self. But he quickly realizes that some of these trinkets (wire, bus stub, poker chip...) prove incredibly useful.
It dawns on him that his former self had a master plan in order to (i) survive and (ii) (re)discover a truth worth far more than the $.
All in all, it's a pretty nice story. The unnerving feeling that he is remote controlled is mitigated by the fact that he is the remote controller. One of the good short stories by Dick. I hope Hollywood doesn't destroy the best ideas like Spielberg did in Minority Report.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
I've just (coincidentally) finished this story, from the first (very excellent) collection of P.K.D. short stories, "Beyond Lies The Wub". I've ordered the remaining 4 books in the series on the strength of that.
The book concentrates on the individual's loss of power in the face of the tension between omnipresent government and big business.
Our hero, Jennings, an electronics engineer signs a two year contract with Rethrick Industries - a catch being that all knowledge of his two years with them will be surgically removed on leaving. This is pretty much where the story starts.
On attempting to collect payment at the end of his mysterious contract he is presented instead with a bag of apparently "trinkets": bits of wire, tickets, a broken poker chip etc. He is told that he (before his memory was wiped) supplied the items to be given back instead of the money. He's obviously not pleased.
However as the story progresses these "trinkets" become far more valuable than money ever could...
And there I shall stop.
I enjoyed the story. I'm 3/4 of the way through "Beyond Lies The Wub" and at the end of almost every story I end up thinking "Ooh, XYZ really ripped off some of these ideas for this film or that book".
What amazes me about Dick is how stories written in the 50's haven't dated, either socially or (often) technologically.
In "Wub" there is a very interesting preface by Dick himself and some extra context set in a posthumous introduction by Roger Zelanzy a friend of his.
If you haven't read any of his stuff before (I hadn't) then this collection is a great place to start.