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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."
This sounds like Memento. Maybe instead of a polaroid and tattoos, they will use a pda or cell phone with acamera for him to remember what happened.Or not.
Although the Uma aspect is tantalizing. :-)
HonigHere's the IMDB listing for the movie.
According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the story originally came out in 1953. (It's one of the Dick stories I haven't read yet.) Dick always was waaaaay ahead of the curve. (Anyone else notice how dead-on the youth-culture extropilations of Time Out of Joint were?)
Maybe we can hope for John Woo to return to his previous form of Hard Boiled and The Killer.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The thing I like about Philip K Dick is his ability to take _really_ far-fetched stories and still make all the pieces fit. Of course, this is mostly true for his stories in written form, the movies based on them mostly lack the depth found in his writing. OTOH, I have yet to see a PKD-based movie that is boring. I find Blade Runner to be by far the best, but the others (Total Recall, Screamers and Minority Report) are at least entertaining.
The stars that shine and the stars that shrink
in the face of stagnation the water runs before your eyes
I was about to say "It sounds nice at first, but what's the point of making a movie if half a viewers know it in detail before it's 20% complete? It doesn't seem to fit the open development model of 'start a cool project and let the customer base finish it.'", but then thought of something
One could, of course, produce software under a modified GPL that says that all media produced under it be free (as in speech), which would require that all imported media must have been free in the same respect. 3D models like people, cars, helicopters, building, office equipment, and such would be free to anyone who wanted to make open movies, greatly reducing the development costs to "film and plop in some premade special effects". You might occasionally see two movies with similar scenes, but as this grows, it will become less frequent.
PKD has been dead 21 years, doomed in life to being treated like a hack and in death to having his work mutilated by hacks. Hollywood has a knack for picking up only the most superficial details and missing the creepy paranoid subtleties that make the fiction so memorable. Of the half-dozen efforts to date, only "Screamers" (relatively obscure low-budget effort) and parts of "Blade Runner" are even modest approximations of the works upon which they are based. I have low expectations for "Paycheck": one of his earliest short stories, too long and clumsily plotted compared his masterpieces of the 60's and 70's. I fantasize about what a first-rate director could do with "Martian Time Slip", "Man in the High Castle", or especially "A Scanner Darkly". As long as crap star vehicles with the likes of bozos like Affleck continue to get greenlighted, fantasy it will remain.
Gigli has, to date, raked in an amazing $5,600,000. (It cost $54,000,000 to make, not including marketing).
Freddy Got Fingered, however, has grossed $14,249,005 to date, and cost $15,000,000 to make.
Let's hope that Gigli doesn't get close.
It's sad to think that for $15,000 (give or take), I can make a 35 minute short which will be much more entertaining than this (the script is ready, it's nearly completely cast, all we need is a location and financing). Yet I'm having trouble getting the money to do my short, while crap like this has no trouble getting cash.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra