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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."
If you like far fetched hollywood plots that have no basis in reality. Wait, this is slashdot, of course you do! Hollywood always has to sensationalize and dramatize everything to a point where it doesn't impart any knowledge or insight to the viewer.
Of course, there is the arguement that films such as this one offer an escape from reality so that the viewer can relax and forget all the day to day shit that they have to deal with. But I lost all faith in hollywood when I saw keanu reaves restart some chick's heart in the matrix reloaded, I couldn't help from bursting out in laughter in the middle of the theater.
Visualize the world of wine
Although I agree that this is sort of tenuous as far as /. news goes, my guess is that if the story really was submitted by an undercover marketer, they would have at least waited for the website to be online. At least, I'd wait until then.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Uh, the Big Hit isn't a Woo movie. He's one of the 10 or so producers, not exactly what I'd call involved in the (pseudo) artistic process.
John Woo didn't do anything good since he made it to Hollywood. I thought Broken Arrow was nice when I was 12, Face|Off had some cool gunfights, and MI2 had a few nice action scene, but overall they were all terrible.
Not that anything John Woo made back in HK was all that great, but it was still much better than the tripe he's spweing these days. Actually, I can't think of a single Chinese actor who has been doing better in the US than in HK. Although, if Jet Li stopped making movies with lame rappers he'd be faring quite good - The One was great fun
Anyway, all this to say that John Woo's name isn't as much a turn-off as much as, say, Michael Bay. Ben Affleck, however, is even worse than Keanu Reeves. How can a guy who has been in *Daredevil*, *Reindeer Games* and *Gigli* be allowed to keep making movies. He's like a failure magnet.
Here's how to recognize a good Affleck movie: Matt Damon's in it. From there it's only a small step to give all the credit to Mr Damon.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
Then again, who would want to sit there for two hours watching someone reverse engineer things...
Seeing the trailer though, it looks like a stock action escape movie, with reverse engineering as the flavor-of-the-month.
Between that and The-Rocky-of-InsertThemeHere, Hollywood never seems to run out of recycling ideas.
What are some of the best sci-fi flicks you've seen?
Regardless of how long he's doing anything technical, it'll stll be a riddled with eggregious errors.
Puking is in order.
I carefully avoid seeing any Steven Spielberg movies, but I'm not persuaded that Ridley Scott is anything brilliant either. Most of the good dialog in Blade Runner was improvised by the actors, who found Scott's klunky script unperformable.
God, where is Billy Wilder, now that we really need him?
I'd love to see someone turn the VALIS trilogy into a movie and actually make it work and stay true to the book. The only names I can think of are combinations of people such as the Warchoski bros crossed with David Lynch.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Predictably, what is most absent from both Dick adaptations is the more philosophical edge. In Minority Report in particular the whole issue of the implications of alternate possible futures devolves to a mere plot device.
And sigh, yes, where IS a director consistently interested in the speculative genre? Spielberg seems to have some designs on that mantle, which is a shame since he's such a ham-handed, cliche driven director. Where's our sci-fi Alfred Hitchcock?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Whaddaya mean, since? Hell, Dogma would have been watchable if Smith hadn't gotten incredibly full of himself and decided to leap up and down, screaming "message!" every six and a half minutes. Note to all filmmakers: entertain first and foremost, scratch your pubic "message!" itch later.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Funny, but also so very true. While after 20 years Blade Runner is still the ultimate cyberpunk film (not that someone couldn't make a better one, they just don't seem to be trying.) Minority Report - whose riffs on justice and government power were desperately needed at the exact moment the movie was released, was exactly that steaming pile of crap. By failing to address those themes in the way that Dick had at such a crucial moment in time, Spielberg committed more then the artistic sin of being a hack, (and a hack who manipulates the same three themes of children, family, and fear of the unknown over and over and over again without ever saying anything original or anything old in a new way), he also failed utterly in the responsibility of the artist to provide a mirror for society and prompt discussion and/or change.
Between Dick and Vonnegut we've got 20 or so themes that could be turned into spectacular films, and money making ones at that. Hell, even Total Recall (Dick short story) in its' better moments touched on some themes that raised it above the levels of crap scifi like "The Sixth Day".
What's really sad is that even Gibson's Johnny M. could have made an incredible movie if they had just played it straight. A friend (actually makes a living as a writer) once mapped out the short story in script form and showed that you could have filmed it without alteration and come up with an under two hour Hollywood film. You had novel chases, character development, the introduction of a world and characters that would support many sequels, some great fight scenes, and an ultra-stylish cyberpunk environment, and those fuckers still screwed it up.
Bah, why do I care.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...