Blade Runner

Lovely Holden.

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"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" - Howard Beale

Check it out, I've returned to it time and time again for some of the background on the movie, it's a great book!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...08858?v=glance

Blade Runner was tremendous.

I saw an interview with Harrison Ford last week where he said he fought with Scott because he wanted his character to be human. He lost the argument and I think that is why Ford never supported the movie, although now he is finally coming around (probably because he has been in 4 or 5 straight dogs).

The one thing I spotted in the movie that I have never seen in discussion is why Roy Batty saves Deckard from falling. Did anyone else see it?

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"Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others."- Groucho Marx

Well, in the original versions of the film, Deckard muses in voice-over, "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last few moments he loved life more than he ever had before? And not just his life, anybody's life. My life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us wanted: where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die."

So there's that. Also, I think Batty wanted somebody to share those last moments with as his batteries finally ran down for good.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

If you watch closely just as Batty is about to drop Deckard, Deckard spits at him. Batty gets an incredulous look in his face and saves him. Perhaps he admired a machine more perfect than himself (capable of real emotion) or maybe he didn't know he was a machine and was incredulous of this last act of irrational human defiance.

Yeah, he admired Deckard's refusal to give up or ask for help. Sure. But there's more to it than that. Remember what he said before he grabbed him: "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave." He's referring most plainly to his forced role as a machine offworld that he and the other Replicants rebelled against, but I think also more abstractly it's about being a slave to mortality. In that instant, Batty decided to become the benevolent enxtender of life to Deckard that Tyrell could not be to him, and in that action came closer to being human than divine. His immortality, he finally sees (too late), is not about his body continuing to function indefinitely, but rather having done and seen wonderful things that might last with those who knew and loved him. Because he chose to fight against his death rather than embrace and celebrate his life, ultimately he has nobody to share these memories with except his hunter, Deckard, and all those moments will be lost in time...like tears in rain.

I think (therefore I type).

Wow. I wish I could think that deeply about film.

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"Today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

Well, I've only seen it a couple hundred times. And it's definitely one of those films working on more than just one or two simple levels. Pauline Kael rather dismissively critized BladeRunner for being "all subtext and no text", and while that's a great line (she was a witty old broad), I disagree very much. There is MUCH going on in BladeRunner, textually and subtextually. It's a frippin' brilliant flick.

Leonard Maltin also says in his movie book that it a movie with very little plot.

What movie did he see?

Blade Runner is a movie you could see a hundred times and have it get better with each viewing. Sometimes masterpieces are created almost by accident, like Casablanca, and I think this was another instance of that.

Yep.

I knew there were a zillion reasons why this is my favorite film ever, and Holden just added a couple more (well done, btw). Batty's soliloquy is one of the most amazing scenes in film, ever, IMO. I am moved every time, without fail, and although I can't top Mr. Pike's screen time on this one, I have seen it over 100 times, and will watch it again tonight, as it has been a few weeks.

Thanks for reminding me it was time to watch BladeRunner again.

Cheers

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Sometimes.

But I wouldn't put BladeRunner in that class. The film is so strong and indelible because of Ridley Scott's vision, coupled with the source material and very good screenplay drafts, and most crucially because he was aided in bringing that to life by some amazing artists and technicians. Scott was apparently pretty hard on the crew, but judging from what's there on the screen, I'd say he was justified in his mania and drive to get it done exactly his way. The only real "accident" of it all comes in the rift between director and star during filming, that in spite of disgreeing with Ridley, Harrison Ford gives a great performance in a film that is deeper than I think he appreciated at the time (or that he can still even acknowledge today).

But it was no "accident" the ways Casablanca was.

I have come to some of the same conclusions about how exceptional films get made. As I posted in the X2 thread (X2 is no BladeRunner, but I like it quite a bit), Mr. Singer had stated how something special had happened to elevate the film above what it could have been. A certain chemical reaction, so to speak, in which all the people involved (crew included) added something extra, be it vision, technical skill, script ideas, or set changes. This concept, again coupled with a director of extrordinary talents, and strong source material, help the film rise a bit above, or in the case of Bladerunner, way above, what could have been.

I don't see this as an accident, just many talented people coming together to create exceptional art in film. To create something more than the sum of all parts.


EDIT

While on the subject I just read this, and it seems Mr. Philip K. Dick had some interesting ideas, and was also quite mad.

Oh, sure. It's a fairly well-known fact that P.K. Dick was insane, and fought through periods where he was barely coherent. Other than reading some of his journals - which are a dense trip through a paranoid, drug-addled and schizophrenic mind (and a section of which was published as In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis), probably the best insight into his madness is his novel Valis, which I think is one of his very best books, and is a very thinly-veiled account of one of his major delusional periods when he thought a bright light he kept experiencing was either a message from outer space, the govermnent trying to read his mind, God almighty or all some combination of all three.

He was a great writer, and sadly by the time he had more or less conquered his demons (at least for a long stretch) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was being made into a major motion picture starring Han Solo and directed by the bloke who made Alien giving him the highest profile of his long writing career, Phil Dick died of heart failure.

Bummer.

I found "How to build a Universe...." a fascinating read. Like a little window into a deranged mind (well, a different deranged mind for once, )

I must dig up some of his works you mentioned, as I have only read DADoES.

Totally agree. Here's a good quote from the beginning of the doc A Decade Under the Influence. "Cinematic success is not necessarily the result of good brainwork... but of a harmony of existing elements in ourselves that we may not have ever been conscious of... an accidental coincidence of our own preoccupations at a certain moment of life and of the publics". - Francois Truffaut, from The Films in my Life

I reckon there's as much serendipity involved in the formation of a good/meaningful film as there is conscious control over the elements by the participants. There's probably the potential for that kind of successful realisation-of-our-potentials and synchronistic collaboration in all of us, it's just a matter of making and letting it happen (and being lucky) i guess . Stop me if i'm getting too pretentious

And cheers for that Dick speech btw. I'm only three pages in and it's absolutely classic. Time i changed my sig too...

EDIT: Ok, i'm on page 6 now, and he certainly is nuts . In a fun way tho And it certainly explains some of his odder creations. (i'm hoping he moves away from the idea that reality is really and eternal Judea circa AD 50 tho, but there you go )

EDIT: Oh wow, he gets even nuttier on page seven . Shame he has to think any time anomalies/underlying-strangenesses would have to be rooted through a Holy Spirit who's best mates with Jesus. Heigh ho. Seems to have limited his options somewhat.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Ya, ya know, I just was picking up some groceries and thinking about the essay, when I got hung up on the whole religious trip. Holden mentioned a drug addled mind, and various other issues affecting his psyche, and I got to thinking what led his mind down the religion road.

-Did the dementia trigger megalomaniacal episodes, inducing divine hallucinations, and focusing the mind on religious concepts, ultimately causing him to tie his own works in with The Bible as proof he had the divine connection?

-Did he get exposed to so much information, through research and writing, that there was some sort of informational breakdown (neuro-linguistic virus or Babel effect of some sort) that ultimately caused him to see a correlation between his own works and one of the first books (mayhap THE first book, but that is a topic for another thread ), which then triggered the divine connection delusions.

-Did he actually have divine connections?

-Had decades of science fiction writing finally taken it's toll, causing a psychotic break, rendering him a paranoid conspiricy theorist with a Christ complex, lost in his own worlds and the world of the The Bible, living the fiction?

- Is there any way for myself or anyone else to every even get a slight inkling as to what goes on in the deranged mind.

And last but not least, the question Mr. Dick would ask first.

- What is a deranged mind?

Quite the shopping trip I must say.

If only mental illness were so divine.

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

Ah yes, but what IS mental illness? Some might consider sitting in traffic going to work for 40+ years, day after day, a mental illness.

Sorry for the double, but I thought some folks might be interested in the P K Dick site.....

http://www.philipkdick.com/

I think, if you meet someone who has severe schizophrenia then you know what mental illness is, sitting in a car to go to work, sometimes is a necessity, not mental illness.