Super busy weekend, so just catching up with everything now.
As any long time MoFo knows, by favorite film of all time is
Blade Runner. It's one of the films that I can watch at pretty much any time, and I am in the mood for it. I had the pleasure of seeing the just -released Final Cut at the Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston, which is sort of an old school theater. I brought all my friends, and we all had a ball watching this fresh new cut in a theater that made it feel like it was 1982 all over again, but with better sound and video quality. This is easily my favorite and most memorable viewing of this film I have ever experienced.
Blade Runner was the first film where I found myself being moved by plight of the antagonists in a very affecting and conflicted way. While Roy Batty is monster, he is a tragic monster, and his search for meaning touches me on a almost deterministic level. He is existential dread personified, and his final scene moves me to tears every time I see it. Sometimes, it not even raining!
Blade Runner's influence cannot be denied. So many subsequent works draw inspiration from or outright steal from the film, it would take me hours to list them all. Its art direction, production design and cinematography were unmatched at the time, and the film contains several of my favorite shots in all of cinema, one of which has been my profile cover here on MoFo since the day the feature was added to the site. I get lost in the film's visuals every time I watch it.
Blade Runner is a tremendous achievement and it pretty much created the entire genre of future noir, or tech noir as it is also referred to. I of course prefer the more ambiguous Director's Cut and Final Cut to the theatrical release, but recommend that people give the theatrical a shot at some point, as it can help answer some of the questions people just seeing the films for the first time might have. Maybe shut it off just as Deckard and Rachel head into the elevator at the end, though.
So, where does this leave the film as far as my ballot? I guess it seems an obvious choice that I would have it all the way at the top, what with it being my favorite film ever, right? I had
Blade Runner at
#2. As far as total purity of essence in the neo-noir style, there is another film that supersedes
Blade Runner, and that film is usually in the second spot on my all-time favorite films list, which I will say a few words about in my next post in this thread.