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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."
its a story about a top notch reverse engineer who, after a quick memory wipe, finds trying to piece together the mystery of his past... Unfortunately the website isn't up and running yet
Duh! They wiped his memory and his website too.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Did anyone else see "Ben Afleck" and stop reading?
Stop! You had me at "Uma Thurman as the female lead."
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
It's "Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted by Ridley Scott into the brilliant sci-fi movie Blade Runner, and whose short story Minority Report was turned into a steaming pile of crap by Steven Spielberg."
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
...Ben Affleck is a master at reverse engineering??? I'm sorry I can't stop laughing. I can picture him "thinking really hard", "staring at the screen", "putting the pieces together", etc. God, this should be a good one, I can't wait.
Can he reverse engineer JoLo's booty?
Philip K. Dick is awesome, but I've always kind of been on the fence about John Woo and Ben Affleck. I'll probably bow down to the hollywood Gods and go see it. However, I'll go hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
That was Dogma.
Also, Kevin Smith has pretty much sucked ass since then.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
...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.
After seeing Gigli, I wished for a quick memory wipe.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I've come to expect nothing but crap from Hollywood.
:)
In the spirit of the Open Source community, why don't you make your own movies ? Sounds like you have an itch to scratch (and i'm not talking about your crabs).
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
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/
C'mon guys, I can see the ad for this movie if I go to the Apple trailers site, a site dedicated to advertising. I don't need to see ads posted as news on this putatively news site. Given the size and interests of /.'s readership, I understand why studios and production companies want to start phoney "grassroots" buzz about their films here, but do the editors really have to accept the story submissions?
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
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]
At the end he figures out he was the male lead in Gigli and re-wipes his brain.
four-oh-four
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.
Alas, as far as I can tell, Woo has left that all behind. But I always hope he'll feel a nostalgic urge...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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
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?
Doves flying in slow motion through flame-engulfed doorways.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
"...I blame Slashdot, I blame ThinkGeek, and I blame everyone and anyone who's ever dramatized actors or rockstars or athletes..."
./ headlines that dramatized actors, rock stars and athletes. Let me see if I can guess them:
I must've missed the
RMS: Rock, Music, Sex!
Darl McBride Wins Oscar for Best Actor
Linus Torvalds Takes Up Jogging
I can see why you're upset. I'll wait til the dupe before I pass judgement myself.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Of course it's going to be less than 5 minutes. If any actual reverse engineering were done and if it were any longer they'd get charged with violating the DMCA.
Actually, that sounds like a cool idea. There is of course the machinima genre, but it would be cool to hava a GNU/Movie tool or development environment rather than using game engines, which seem to be a little too limited to really make advanced movies. Does anyone know of any ongoing projects in this direction?
The stars that shine and the stars that shrink
in the face of stagnation the water runs before your eyes
But I lost all faith in hollywood when I saw keanu reaves restart some chick's heart in the matrix reloaded,
How did you feel in "The Matrix" when the chick restarted his heart?
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
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?
What's wrong with letting us know what movies to pirate off the kazzalite?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A more realistic trailer would involve something like this:
(*) actual trailer quote
>|<*:=
"Anybody else picture carbon copy-esque remakes of Star Wars with great effects but no acting?"
Yeah, but that was more of a flashback than a prediction of the future.
maybe Ben Stiller can work as Ben Affleck's stunt double!
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.
Simple, Keanu is not human. That part was easily believable.
and in the article: "Written by Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report"
And where does the "reviewer" get off saying "written by" PKD? He's been dead almost 20 years. "Based very loosely on". If you're going to mention Dick, how about listing some books he actually DID write?
Yeah, I mean there's L Ron Hubbard too...
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
But you're right, once American producers get ahold of something, it goes thru the comittee process and get's vanillified/homogenized and made into visual wallpaper/mush. That's why you have to avoid the big name releases and see smaller films that have much more character/personality...
..........FULL STOP.
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
After returning to comfirm the facts of the story, we learned that the shooting, were in fact, not what the people who saw the movie wanted to happen to J.Lo and Bens characters, but to J.lo and Ben.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh sure, I vaguely remember the interview he said it in. Something to the effect of "everyone will see Matrix whether or not Jet Li is in it, so I might as well contribute to my own projects. What would be better, seeing a movie that you were already going to see that has me in it, and that's it, or seeing a movie you were already going to see PLUS a movie with me in it?"
I mean, he wasn't arrogant about it or anything, but matter of fact. Let's face it, although it would have been cool to see Li as Seraph, would people who weren't going to see the movie suddenly wanted to see it because Li was in it? Li realizes that and figures that if a movie's going to be a draw because he's in it it may as well be a project that isn't already highly anticipated.
However, the role of Seraph was fucking embarassing, a real Charlie Chan character. Seraph's good at Kung-Fu, he talks like a fortune-cookie, he hangs around in traditional clothes, and that's about it. The crowd where I saw the movie was maybe 50% Chinese, and the movie got roundly hissed at that point...
I remember reading, Jet Li was approached, and wasn't happy with the role, so he asked for something like $9 million, which was turned down. Supposedly, he didn't want the role if he was just going to be a small side-character. Michelle Yeoh went through the same negotiations, with the same results.
I think we're avoiding the deeper issue, that "Matrix Reloaded" was a sorry movie.
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