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Tears in Rain: ‘Blade Runner’ and Philip K. Dick’s Legacy in Film

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Blade Runner, and the work of Philip K. Dick, continues to find its way into our cinemas and minds. How did the visions of a paranoid loner become the most relevant science fiction of our time?

By Sean Bell

Source: PopMatters

You are an unusual man, Mr. Asher,” the cop beside him said. “Crazy or not, whatever it is that has gone wrong with you, you are one of a kind.”– Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Los Angeles, 2019. The script simply reads: “Ext. Hades – Dusk”. Chemical flame bursts into the perpetual, post-nuclear Los Angeles gloom from skyscraping smokestacks, rising out of an industrial landscape Hieronymus Bosch might have envisaged. Flying cars flit through the darkness like fireflies. The camera moves slowly over impossible architecture with the immensity and decaying grandeur of ancient Egypt; a phantasmagorical megalopolis strung with necklaces of neon. The music rises.

The last war is over and nobody won. The Earth is living on borrowed time. Science has destroyed all boundaries between the real and unreal except those we choose to impose. Policemen are murderers, androids are lovers, nobody can be trusted, and everybody dies. Welcome back to the world of Blade Runner. Every time we return, it becomes more recognisable. Perhaps we never left.

Santa Ana, 1981. By now, Philip K. Dick — author, religious visionary and possible schizophrenic, who once said “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood” — has read and approved the shooting script for Blade Runner by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, as well as viewed a test reel of the movie’s groundbreaking special effects. In an effusive letter to Jeff Walker, the man in charge of the film’s marketing. Dick makes his prophetic opinion clear.

“Let me sum it up this way,” he wrote. “Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER… It will prove invincible.” (‘Letter to Jeff Walker regarding Blade Runner“ on Philip K Dick.com)

Dick, with a writer’s knack, chose the right words. Blade Runner has survived everything that could be thrown at it, including its initial critical reception, successive unsatisfactory edits, and dilution by both the science fiction genre and the film industry, which would plagiarise its vision with varying degrees of shamelessness for the next three decades. Yet nothing has been able to replicate its unique synthesis of elements, melding equal parts noir, action, romance, cyberpunk, dystopia and a meditation on what it means to be human. Whether praised or disparaged, ignored or overexposed, it has seen off all critics and challengers. Blade Runner‘s invincibility endures.

Unfortunately, the inimitable artistic fortitude of Ridley Scott‘s best work also allowed Hollywood to practice its favourite hobby of missing the point. The novels (or rather, in the film industry netherworld, ‘properties’) of Philip K. Dick — a writer largely unappreciated in his own lifetime who, at his lowest, claimed he he could not afford the late fee for a library book and infamously sustained himself on horse meat from a local pet store — have become highly prized and sought-after by studios eager to import intelligent ideas, rather than go through the hassle of conceiving their own. In the (twisted) spirit of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale“, no need for originality, we can develop it for you wholesale.

Question the nature of identity with Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid /Hauser as he flees the futuristic gunfire in the remake of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012, an adaptation of an adaptation, as it were). Consider the limitations of free will with Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton (a well-known fan of unstable science fiction writers) in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2012) while wondering how short he really is. Watch Jon Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and wonder how much Ben Affleck is actually being paid to appear in this piece of shit.

The names change, but the formula remains the same. Each summer, there must be blockbusters, and to fill the gaps in between the explosions with the barest bones of a Phil Dick story is, to the studio mindset, to buy instant, ready-made philosophical depth and artistic worth. Just add CGI!

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

That Scott is a director second only to George Lucas in his determination to tinker with a bygone masterwork until it meets his ultimate, exacting satisfaction (at last count, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner floating around the ether, finally culminating in Scott’s so-called ‘final cut’ in 2007), when a startling new interpretation of the film appeared online this June to wild acclaim, he had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the work of the artist Anders Ramsell, who painstakingly recreated every frame of the movie’s opening 13 minutes with 3,285 gorgeous, haunting, impressionistic watercolours.

Dick, with a writer’s knack, chose the right words. Blade Runner has survived everything that could be thrown at it, including its initial critical reception, successive unsatisfactory edits, and dilution by both the science fiction genre and the film industry, which would plagiarise its vision with varying degrees of shamelessness for the next three decades. Yet nothing has been able to replicate its unique synthesis of elements, melding equal parts noir, action, romance, cyberpunk, dystopia and a meditation on what it means to be human. Whether praised or disparaged, ignored or overexposed, it has seen off all critics and challengers. Blade Runner‘s invincibility endures.

Unfortunately, the inimitable artistic fortitude of Ridley Scott‘s best work also allowed Hollywood to practice its favourite hobby of missing the point. The novels (or rather, in the film industry netherworld, ‘properties’) of Philip K. Dick — a writer largely unappreciated in his own lifetime who, at his lowest, claimed he he could not afford the late fee for a library book and infamously sustained himself on horse meat from a local pet store — have become highly prized and sought-after by studios eager to import intelligent ideas, rather than go through the hassle of conceiving their own. In the (twisted) spirit of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale“, no need for originality, we can develop it for you wholesale.

Question the nature of identity with Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid /Hauser as he flees the futuristic gunfire in the remake of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012, an adaptation of an adaptation, as it were). Consider the limitations of free will with Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton (a well-known fan of unstable science fiction writers) in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2012) while wondering how short he really is. Watch Jon Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and wonder how much Ben Affleck is actually being paid to appear in this piece of shit.

The names change, but the formula remains the same. Each summer, there must be blockbusters, and to fill the gaps in between the explosions with the barest bones of a Phil Dick story is, to the studio mindset, to buy instant, ready-made philosophical depth and artistic worth. Just add CGI!

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

That Scott is a director second only to George Lucas in his determination to tinker with a bygone masterwork until it meets his ultimate, exacting satisfaction (at last count, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner floating around the ether, finally culminating in Scott’s so-called ‘final cut’ in 2007), when a startling new interpretation of the film appeared online this June to wild acclaim, he had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the work of the artist Anders Ramsell, who painstakingly recreated every frame of the movie’s opening 13 minutes with 3,285 gorgeous, haunting, impressionistic watercolours.

The painting technique employed to create this effect is known as aquarelle, which also acts as a sly commentary on Blade Runner‘s repeatedly-rejiggered legacy: because of its transparency, with aquarelle nothing can be painted over — once a mistake has been made, it has to be lived with. But as I watched what Ramsell called his ‘paraphrase’ of the movie, the familiar scenes and faces and voices emerging from the flickering, sensuous wash of colour, it seemed all the more appropriate. Other than Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, I can think of no other film that so looks like a painting without paint — a piece of art that evokes other art, and yet remains entirely itself.

This is all a long way of saying that Blade Runner is beautiful, in almost every way possible. This has, ridiculously, sometimes been described as being to its detriment: Roger Ebert, one of the film’s more famous naysayers, wrote in a contemporary review in the Chicago Sun-Times that “It looks fabulous… but it is thin in its human story,” (11 September 1992) an oddly myopic remark to make about a parable on the nature of humanity. True, Blade Runner has an embarrassment of style, but never at the expense of substance, much like the best examples of the Cinema du look movement, which was just emerging in French cinema at the time of Blade Runner‘s release. Indeed, in appearance and atmosphere, Blade Runner is so distinct that it changed the aesthetic of science fiction, and new subgenres have since been invented simply to describe it — ‘future noir’, coined by the critic and filmmaker Paul M. Sammon, being the most enduring.

To those who have yet to experience the film, I wonder what to say that has not been said elsewhere. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner somehow manages to be simultaneously the truest adaptation of Dick’s work yet produced — in spirit, if not plot — and also the freest in its interpretation of the material.

The central premise remains in both book and film; Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), halfway between policeman and bounty hunter, makes his living by tracking and killing androids that are almost entirely indistinguishable from humans, living amongst us under false identities. The supposed test for distinguishing real from unreal humans is that of empathy, but as Deckard methodically adds to his ‘artificial’ bodycount, he begins to question who is really the unemotional machine.

Blade Runner dumps much of the novel’s narrative furniture — Scott justified this to Dick by saying: “You know you’re so dense, mate, that by page 32, there’s about 17 storylines” — in a way that, in almost any other adaptation, would be considered sacrilege. Most noticeably, in the novel, Deckard is trapped in a barely functional marriage, while in the movie, Harrison Ford’s laconic protagonist is the classic bachelor gumshoe.

Also prominent in the book are ‘Mercerism’, the religion based around its followers’ empathy for a man whom others were throwing rocks at, and the ‘Mood Organ’, the household device which stimulates any mood the user wishes to experience, and which much of the population now depends on in order to face another bleak, post-apocalyptic day — two tragicomic creations typical of Dick, but too wry to fit with the Blade Runner‘s overall tone. Despite such changes, Dick’s reading of the screenplay convinced him that this film could express his ideas in a way he had not thought possible.

The production could hardly be called smooth. Even before its release, troubling rumours had begun circulating, and as Paul M Sammon wrote ,”by the time BR (Blade Runner) officially completed principle photography in July on 1981, the gossip has become more specific — BR‘s workload had been horrendous, its shooting conditions miserable, and its director, difficult. Moreover, the whispers went, BR’s moneymen were unhappy, its leading man had clashed with his director, and the crew had been near revolt.” Some of these stories were indeed true, but one should bear in mind that movie moneymen are nearly always unhappy, and Harrison Ford will always be the man who told George Lucas that “you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”

Paranoia Runs Through Blade Runner Like a Knife Edge

When Blade Runner was first released, the reviews ran from lukewarm to underwhelmed to baffled, a fact that many critics have been doing their best to forget in the intervening years, polishing the film’s legend in a frantic effort to make up for missing the boat first time round. Considered today, in our gleaming plastic future of bad credit and worse politics, where we are reliant not on humanised robots but dehumanising gadgets, and where much of the movie’s retro-futurism appears as quaint as it does prescient, what is left to say about Blade Runner?

Should I recite the plaudits that have become ritualistic? Should I point out the Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) ‘tears in rain’ monologue is among the most moving and eloquent ever written or performed? Or that Vangelis revolutionised jazz, electronic music and film scoring simultaneously in one of the best soundtracks ever composed? Is it really necessary to highlight the acting of all involved; Harrison Ford as one of the best soulful detectives to grace noir of any kind, an understated and heartbreaking Sean Young (as Rachael), a dangerous but innocent Daryl Hannah (as Pris), or Rutger Hauer’s mixture of the psychotic and the Shakespearean? Do I need to praise the costumes, the set design, or the script which balances so many themes, so many hidden or implied meanings, with such grace and economy?

Well, yes. You want a criticism of Blade Runner? I would’ve liked more of Edward James Olmos’ Gaff. He’s cool. I also want Deckard’s coat.

But we need to be reminded of these things, every now and again, as each new generation discovers the film afresh, and especially when the next logical question becomes: how did Blade Runner get it so right, more so than any other adaptation of Dick’s work since? What did it understand that they did not? To try and answer that, we have to go back to the source.

“Phil acknowledged that his talk sometimes sounded like “religious nonsense & occult nonsense” — but somewhere in it all was the truth. And he would never find it. God himself had assured him of that.” — Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.

In 2000, at the one and only Disinfo Con — a friendly gathering of millennial deviants concerning all things ‘counterculture’ — Grant Morrison, a writer who could arguably be counted as one of Dick’s prodigious bastard literary offspring, opened his keynote speech marvelling at the fact he spent his youth reading Robert Anton Wilson and now, all these years later, “we’re standing here, we’re talking about this shit and it’s real.”

Fans of Philip K. Dick have been feeling like that since at least the ’70s, when the dark realities on the other side of the Drug Revolution and the true possibilities of an all-powerful Nixonian surveillance state were becoming painfully apparent. Then as now, we use Dick’s paranoia to express our own.

Dick once commented that, with the making of Blade Runner, what had once been a private world that only he inhabited was now open to all; they would live in its murky depths, just as he did every day. At first, one might think that a paranoid and delusional visionary — and I use the word in its most literal sense — would want nothing more than for others to see and experience what he does. But perhaps Dick didn’t want anyone in his world. Maybe he didn’t think his world should be suffered by anyone else.

The fantastic, tortured mind of Philip K. Dick has been discussed, analysed and treated like an object of supreme curiosity since his death in 1982 (a few months shy of Blade Runner‘s release) and before. He had eked out an impoverished existence writing science fiction since the ’50s, when it was less a genre than a ghetto, and could only make a living by producing at a furious pace which he fuelled with huge amounts of amphetamines, at one point producing 12 novels over the course of two years.

But Dick was ever a seeker of truth, which made him, strangely, something of an oddity in science fiction. Within these novels, beneath the aliens and spaceships, moon colonies and interstellar wars, was arguably the best satire being done in science fiction on American life outside of Kurt Vonnegut‘s oeuvre, the philosophical undertones and untrammelled, often gothic imagination of which called to mind Jorge Luis Borges more than Isaac Asimov. The uniting thread that runs through his work — and, eventually, his life — is the notion that reality, as we know it, is fundamentally untrustworthy.

As the ’60s wore on, Dick’s involvement with the drug culture increased, adding a psychedelic aspect to both his ever-evolving philosophy and his ever-present paranoia. In 1971, Dick experienced a defining moment: his home was broken into, his safe blown open, and many of his personal papers burglerized. He never discovered who was responsible, though he had many suspects — local drug addicts, Black Panthers, the police, the FBI, the Soviets, or any of these, pretending to be one of the others.

The effect it left on Dick was to give him proof, unexplained and terrifying, that his paranoia was somehow justified. There had been comfort in simply telling himself he was crazy. But after years of grappling with his mental health, someone, it seemed, truly was out to get him.

“I mean,” he told the Aquarian magazine in a 1974 interview, “it’s a very frightening thing when the head of a police department tells you that you better leave the county because you have enemies, and you don’t know who these enemies are or why you’ve incurred their wrath.”

When one is peripherally aware of one’s own tenuous psychological condition (which we must be, we tell ourselves, if we have any hope of overcoming it), the uninitiated cannot imagine the sheer anguish, the self-doubt, the fear that follows when you know you cannot trust your own mind, and you cannot trust anyone to help you. The luckiest paranoids are also egotists, or better yet, megalomaniacs; they face the lurking forces of imagined persecution with a defiant roar or a knowing smirk.

Dick, on the other hand, was a sensitive, fragile, frightened soul, as well as a possible undiagnosed schizophrenic. His subsequent religious experiences — a series of hallucinations in which a beam of pink light connected him with a “transcendentally rational mind” — may have been his brain’s attempt to soothe his paranoia, or merely the next stage of his mental instability. In either case, as always, it provided inspiration for another novel.

Critics and biographers often talk about Dick’s paranoia and delusions like they were shocking fashion statements or extreme political opinions — just another interesting aspect to the bizarro image of a literary titan. What they don’t say, although the evidence is all around us, is that Dick’s paranoia is ours, as well. Ours may not have such colourful outlets or dramatic results, but we shall always carry our paranoia with us. It cannot be blotted out. There will forever be dark fears lurking in the deeper pools of our mind about our untrustworthy friends, co-workers, policemen, criminals, the FBI, the CIA, the Communists, the aliens, or God himself… and beyond. Existence will always be open to question, forever taunting us with its uncertainty. We can’t trust reality, but we have to live there.

This paranoia runs through Blade Runner like a knife edge. You cannot trust others, or yourself. You cannot trust your memories, your past, or your future. The entire world may be against you, even if it doesn’t appear to be. Then again, you don’t have to like it.

The heroes and villains of Blade Runner do not like, or accept, the oppression of the paranoid worldview. Deckard fights a series of seemingly impossible battles, even against what he thought was true, and finds romance where it should be impossible. Roy Batty, the leader of the renegade replicants, fights against death itself, seeking to extend and outlive his designer-mandated expiration date. The inhuman fights to become human, so humans must prove their humanity. This is the message at Blade Runner‘s core, and it has never been replicated.

Near the end of Dick’s 1976 novel Radio Free Albemuth, the protagonist, an author surrogate for Dick who also writes pulp science fiction, is faced by a gloating representative of the government conspiracy that the writer has become entangled with, who coolly informs him they will continue to put out books under his name — lurid trash scattered with a few of the author’s trademark concepts to keep it recognisable for his fans, but encoded with non-too-subtle propaganda messages designed to keep its readers afraid and unenlightened.

At our most cynical, it’s sometimes difficult not to think of Hollywood the same way: trading on Dick’s name and style and core ideas, but discarding the message and the mind behind them.

Authors often have to face a string of misfires and misinterpretations before their work gets the cinematic treatment it deserves; Dick, on the other hand, got a masterpiece on the first go. And it remains ours to enjoy: Blade Runner, as Dick wrote, is invincible.

Maybe it’s finally time for Hollywood to leave the legacy of Philip K. Dick at the local bookstore, where it belongs.

“What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I am writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I’m finished, and I have to stop, withdraw from that world forever — that destroys me… I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this… and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.” — Philip K. Dick, “Notes Made Late At Night By A Weary SF Writer”, 1968.

Saturday Matinee: Man of Tai Chi

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By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

Keanu Reeves has a mixture of stilted awkwardness and gangly grace that is uniquely his own, and that makes him an often strange, disaffected presence. This can either work or not work. His line readings are sometimes baffling. But his simple sense of truth and touching trust in the material (whatever it may be) is one of the reasons his career has lasted so long. There isn’t a ton of ego in his work. It’s refreshing.

“Man of Tai Chi”, Reeves’ feature film directorial debut, has the same sometimes-awkward blend that Reeves brings to the table as an actor. The film is super serious (as befitting the martial arts genre, where everything is a matter of life or death), with moments of strange stilted dialogue (also par for the course) and scene after scene of thrilling physical combat, filmed with grace and certainty and no small amount of awe for the athletes involved.

Tiger Chen, a stuntman in the two “Matrix” sequels, plays the eponymous character, also named “Tiger Chen”. He is a devoted practitioner of the ancient art of tai chi, working with a master named Yang (Yu Hai) in a beautiful temple. For his day job, Tiger works as a delivery boy, driving packages around the city, and flirting with a receptionist at one of his regular stop-offs. He lives with his parents. He does not have ambition to “do anything” with tai chi, because the rules underlying his apprenticeship with Master Yang say that those who practice tai chi do not do so for money, glory, or even to win. But during a public competition, his undeniable skill brings him to the attention of a mysterious individual named Donaka Mark (Reeves). Donaka lives in a cold man-cave of a penthouse, furnished in black leather and chrome. He strolls around barefoot on shiny black marble floors, he speaks only in terse commands. He has a security detail working for him that would rival the NSA’s. He reaches out to Tiger, offering him a security job, when in reality it is a recruitment for a deadly underground fighting ring.Tiger is flown to an undisclosed location, put into an empty grey room with a mirror on one wall, as he waits to see what will happen. A female voice commands: “Fight”, and from out of nowhere an opponent grabs Tiger from behind. Tiger is then engaged in a fight for his life in that grey room with the big mirror, and it is an Alice-through-the-looking-glass moment which will bear fruit through the rest of the film: Like Alice, Tiger is catapulted from one strange experience to the next. The normal rules of regular life no longer apply.

Donaka, of course, is watching through that mirror. That first fight is a test. Tiger passes, but it is only the first of many. Donaka’s fight club is run like a cult, where essential information about the nature of the organization is withheld from the participants until they are too deeply embroiled to get out. Tiger finds himself back in that grey room again and again, fighting increasingly vicious and skilled opponents. To what purpose? What is it all for?

The money Donaka offers is substantial. When Master Yang’s temple is slated for demolition unless money can be raised for necessary repairs, Tiger caves. And so the sacred temple is now being financed by someone who has betrayed the underlying principles taught there, a terrible irony. Tiger Chen, a superb athlete (to watch him is to go slack-jawed in wonder and appreciation), is also a terrific actor, going believably from sweet open kid to cold lean killer with a haunted aspect. “Man of Tai Chi” takes place in a deeply moral universe where our choices have spiritual implications.

Tiger Chen, a stuntman in the two “Matrix” sequels, plays the eponymous character, also named “Tiger Chen”. He is a devoted practitioner of the ancient art of tai chi, working with a master named Yang (Yu Hai) in a beautiful temple. For his day job, Tiger works as a delivery boy, driving packages around the city, and flirting with a receptionist at one of his regular stop-offs. He lives with his parents. He does not have ambition to “do anything” with tai chi, because the rules underlying his apprenticeship with Master Yang say that those who practice tai chi do not do so for money, glory, or even to win. But during a public competition, his undeniable skill brings him to the attention of a mysterious individual named Donaka Mark (Reeves). Donaka lives in a cold man-cave of a penthouse, furnished in black leather and chrome. He strolls around barefoot on shiny black marble floors, he speaks only in terse commands. He has a security detail working for him that would rival the NSA’s. He reaches out to Tiger, offering him a security job, when in reality it is a recruitment for a deadly underground fighting ring.Tiger is flown to an undisclosed location, put into an empty grey room with a mirror on one wall, as he waits to see what will happen. A female voice commands: “Fight”, and from out of nowhere an opponent grabs Tiger from behind. Tiger is then engaged in a fight for his life in that grey room with the big mirror, and it is an Alice-through-the-looking-glass moment which will bear fruit through the rest of the film: Like Alice, Tiger is catapulted from one strange experience to the next. The normal rules of regular life no longer apply.Donaka, of course, is watching through that mirror. That first fight is a test. Tiger passes, but it is only the first of many. Donaka’s fight club is run like a cult, where essential information about the nature of the organization is withheld from the participants until they are too deeply embroiled to get out. Tiger finds himself back in that grey room again and again, fighting increasingly vicious and skilled opponents. To what purpose? What is it all for?

The money Donaka offers is substantial. When Master Yang’s temple is slated for demolition unless money can be raised for necessary repairs, Tiger caves. And so the sacred temple is now being financed by someone who has betrayed the underlying principles taught there, a terrible irony. Tiger Chen, a superb athlete (to watch him is to go slack-jawed in wonder and appreciation), is also a terrific actor, going believably from sweet open kid to cold lean killer with a haunted aspect. “Man of Tai Chi” takes place in a deeply moral universe where our choices have spiritual implications.

The fighting ring is illegal. The cops (one in particular) close in on Donaka, who remains elusive and omniscient. Donaka understands that tai chi is not the usual fare in the martial arts underground, and he gets off on the fact that Tiger has sold out. That’s the turn-on, the power trip. Reeves isn’t in the film all that much, and there are a couple of extremely stiff scenes of dialogue, but he does get a very impressive fight scene with Tiger near the end. This is Tiger Chen’s picture all the way. You watch him transform, and you watch his soul go dark.

CinematographercElliot Davis films the fight scenes with thrilling immediacy: lots of long takes, so you realize you are actually seeing these guys actually do this, as opposed to watching something pieced together later in the editing room. The camera circles and rises and pulls back, moving horizontally and vertically with the movements of each fight. The filming is intuitive and visceral. There’s one masterpiece of a scene that takes place in a hidden night club floating in the bowels of a cargo ship in Hong Kong harbor. The setting is surreal: the circular stage painted with psychedelic dizzying swirls and the circular tables surrounding said stage, not to mention the bored elegant silent crowd, is reminiscent of the midnight theatre scene in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” or the freaky tiered nightclub in Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Gesture”. Each fight gets more dangerous. The stakes rise. Death is the only possible outcome. Reeves approaches the genre with respect and passion. “Man of Tai Chi” is hugely entertaining.

 

Saturday Matinee: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

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Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

By Jessica Winter

Source: Film Comment

When is the audience allowed to laugh at a serious movie? How do you gauge whether the laughter expresses surprise, shock, nervousness, disdain, feigned superiority, genuine mirth, or some combination thereof? Take Werner Herzog’s films with his best fiend, Klaus Kinski: at a New York repertory screening of the deranged-conquistador saga Aguirre, Wrath of God a few years back, the patrons might as well have been watching The Hangover. Were they wrong? Or how about Abel Ferrara’s 1992 hell trip Bad Lieutenant: is it wildly inappropriate to laugh when Harvey Keitel’s depraved cop screams “You ratfucker!” at a church lady he mistakes for Jesus Christ? Is it wildly inappropriate not to laugh?

Herzog’s not-a-remake, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, tacitly addresses this dilemma. Like much of the Herzog-Kinski catalogue, it’s a case study in bug-eyed monomania, and like Ferrara’s original, it’s a descent into the swamplands of the human soul with a drug-addled, quasi-righteous, borderline-insane cop as your tour guide. Unlike either, the reboot appears to be a comedy, or something close to it. BL:POCNO has comedy props: singing iguanas, a “magic crack pipe,” Val Kilmer. It has comic refrains that become funnier with each iteration, including Nicolas Cage’s emphysematic laugh and—for reasons that are tough to explain concisely—the letter “G.” It has punch lines. (“Everything I take is prescription. Except for the heroin.”) It has, for lack of a better term, a Gator Cam. Best of all, it has Cage, a walking sight gag who throws out his back early and spends the rest of the film bathed in a cold sweat of cocaine and Vicodin, lumbering around the post-Katrina landscape like he’s got a jumbo-sized T-square surgically jammed between his shoulder blades.

Cage’s Terence McDonagh comes off as part Kinski-style holy fool, part standard-issue Rogue Cop Who Gets Results. He shuttles crookedly between his adorable coke-whore sweetheart (Eva Mendes), his alcoholic father (Tom Bower), Dad’s beery girlfriend (Jennifer Coolidge, impressively frowsy), and his 24-7 mission pursuing local crack kingpin Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner), who’s possibly the most affable and credulous drug lord in cinema history. (This ambitious lad is happy to show new friend McDonagh the would-be flagship of a future real-estate empire: “waterfront condos” sited on some godforsaken loading dock, where Big Fate’s henchmen currently dump the bodies of their victims.)

But BL:POCNO’s shaggy police procedural (the screenwriter is NYPD Blue and Law & Order alumnus William Finkelstein) is almost an afterthought, always secondary to the Passion of the Cage: stations include a pharmacy meltdown worthy of Julianne Moore in Magnolia, a scary-funny parking-lot shakedown of two club kids out on Daddy’s credit cards, and above all, a feat of witness intimidation involving an electric shaver and a nice old lady’s nasal cannula. Pawing absently at his face, sniffing at bags of evidence (usually pocketing them for later), and huffing crack with anyone who’s holding, McDonagh is a mass of primitive, unexamined desires. In the grip of both addiction and workaholism, he has an appetite but not a will, a brain but not a mind. He is, perhaps, reptile brain incarnate—hence those singing iguanas and surveillance-camera-eyed alligators, not to mention the lone little fish swimming sad circles in a glass in a dead boy’s room.

The Herzog version almost entirely eschews the religious iconography of BL 1.0, but McDonagh does occasionally experience the kind of ecstatic self-forgetting that saints and drug addicts have in common. The dopey bliss that washes over Cage’s face when he glimpses a break-dancing ghost or regales his starry-eyed girlfriend with childhood tales of “buried treasure” is the happiest gift this erratic actor has given us in a long time. Shot in New Orleans largely for the tax break, labeled Bad Lieutenant largely because the producers had rights to the brand name, and starring an actor who, not to put too fine a point on it, makes a lot of crap, Herzog’s movie has expedience and exploitation written all over it. But it’s too weird and unhinged and endearing—and, for all its sordid details, too ingenuous—to be anything but a labor of love.

 

Watch the film on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12197641

Saturday Matinee: The Guest

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The Guest review: A super-sleeper of a black-comedy thriller

By Tara Brady

Source: The Irish Times

Film Title: The Guest

Director: Adam Wingard

Starring: Dan Stevens, Maika Monroe, Brendan Meyer, Lance Reddick

Genre: Crime

Running Time: 99 min

Blue-eyed soldier boy David (Dan Stevens) arrives in a small New Mexican town to visit the family of a fallen comrade. The grieving mom (Sheila Kelley) notices that the young Iraq War veteran has appeared, as if from nowhere, but David’s “yes ma’am” manners soon put her at ease. The family are not in great emotional shape: dad has hit the bottle, teenager Luke is sullen and withdrawn, and his older goth sister Anna (Maika Monroe) stays in her room making mix-tapes.

Might their new guest allow the healing to begin? Perhaps. David soon makes himself useful by tackling Luke’s schoolyard tormentors, hanging out the household washing and carrying kegs around a party Anna attends. But Anna continues to suspect that David is not all that he seems to be.

She has no idea.

Adam Wingard is the mumblegore horror hotshot behind the better bits of the V/H/S portmanteau horror and the 2011 cult favourite You’re Next. The latter’s hefty profit margin – $25 million back from six figures – has allowed the hyphenate director, editor, cinematographer and writer to move up divisions with a budget of more than $1 million.

Being accustomed to producing his earlier, murkier movies for $20,000 or so, Mr Wingard knows well how to get more bang for your buck. Armed with something approaching a real budget, he now puts on one hell of a show. The Guest, a thriller that becomes a horror that transitions into a hilarious truncation of every 1980s action picture and back again, is as extravagant and ambitious a film as you’ll see all year. Picture Commando as a psychological thriller. Imagine Halloween as a theme park ride. Think Drive as a comedy.

A cleverly picked constellation of TV favourites – Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, LA Law’s Sheila Kelley, Fringe’s Lance Reddick – add some star wattage to an outrageous and outrageously entertaining hybrid.

Stevens keeps a poker-straight face as he delivers some of the year’s funniest lines. Maika Monroe’s screen magnetism is enough to keep Scar-Jo and J-Law awake during the long winter nights.

If Luc Beeson’s Lucy has left you jonesing for something that stands apart from the superheroes and straight-world toughs that populate the movieverse, then The Guest is a most welcome imposition.

 

Watch the film on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/13703180

Saturday Matinee: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

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“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) is a science fiction horror film directed by Philip Kaufman (The Wanderers), with a screenplay by W.D. Richter (dir. Buckaroo Banzai) and starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy. It is a remake of the 1956 film of the same name, also based on the 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers” by Jack Finney. The plot involves a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who discover that humans are being replaced by physically identical alien clones devoid of emotion.

Saturday Matinee: Death Laid an Egg

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Synopsis by Robert Firsching

Source: AllMovie

This is a deliriously strange thriller about a scientist (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who is breeding headless, boneless chickens at a high-tech farm. He’s having an affair with Ewa Aulin, who is plotting with him to kill his wife (Gina Lollobrigida)…and she’s plotting with Aulin to kill him…and he and Lollobrigida are plotting…oh, it’s too confusing, but extremely memorable. The bizarre, only semi-linear editing and trippy cinematographic techniques are artifacts of the psychedelic era and combine with the twisted story to make any Euro-cultist’s dreams come true. A film that defies easy categorization, it veers uneasily between giallo, drug film, and science-fiction, with heavy doses of romance and Antonioni-like weirdness. Some parts are even reminiscent of David Lynch‘s Eraserhead. Aulin was in the even stranger Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion a few years later. A must-see for genre fans.

 

Watch the full film on Kanopy.

Saturday Matinee: Sorry We Missed You

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“Sorry We Missed You”: Ken Loach Exposes the Holes in the Gig Economy

By Chuck Collins

Source: CounterPunch

Director Ken Loach has done it again.  “Sorry We Missed You” is a family drama infused with a searing look at life in the “gig economy” with a frayed social safety net. Like his previous film, “I, Daniel Blake,” this movie is about working class people maintaining their dignity and humanity in the face of government austerity, privatization, and corporate greed.

“Sorry We Missed You” was just released in the U.S. through affiliated independent theaters, such as our Boston-area Coolidge Corner.  A portion of the ticket price through virtual screenings support these theaters.

In the context of a pandemic, “Sorry” connects us to the frontline workers delivering packages and caring for the elderly and disabled — workers who are grossly underpaid while being at greatest risk.

Set in Newcastle, UK, the film takes its name from the package delivery slip that Ricky, the father in a family of four, leaves when no one is home to sign for a package.

Like most workers in the U.S. and UK, Ricky and his spouse Abbie are still struggling to get out of debt a decade after the 2008 economic meltdown. Abbie works as a home care nurse, hopping buses between visits to up to eight patients a day. Ricky takes a job as a driver with a package delivery service. Both work hard and with integrity. Abbie says she cares for her patients “how she’d like people to treat her own mother.”

Like workers at Uber, DoorDash, and other similar delivery services, Ricky’s employment status is in the limbo between employee and independent contractor.  Maloney, the boss man who manages the package distribution facility, makes it clear: Ricky isn’t an employee, but a “franchisee,” a self-employed delivery driver. This status requires him to take on all the risks, including purchasing a van, leasing a delivery scanner, and toiling unlimited hours. The scanner serves as the symbol of the surveillance economy that enables the company to monitor Ricky’s every turn. Yet the company also fines him for late deliveries and, when robbers smash Ricky’s delivery scanner, they assess him a £1,000 charge.

Ricky and Abbie attempt to mind their two children, Seb and Lisa Jane, often via phone and text. The children absorb the stresses of their parents, who work 12 to 16 hour days to survive.

Director Loach balances a family story while dramatizing the structural forces that drive the gig economy and pit workers against each other. When one delivery driver struggles with family issues, the boss Maloney offers his route up to other drivers. Breaching the thin whisper of solidarity between the drivers, Ricky takes the other driver’s more lucrative route. Meanwhile, one of Abbie’s nursing patients shares photos and stories from her struggles as a labor union activist, a reminder of the past solidarity that existed among workers. “What happened to the eight-hour day?” she asks.

Maloney celebrates his own tough-guy unwillingness to bend to meet Ricky’s need for an emergency day off, saying the “shareholders of the trucking depot should build a [expletive] statue of me here.”  Maloney also blames the customers, saying to Ricky, “do any of them ask you how you are? They just want their package delivered on time for as cheap as possible.” We have met the enemy, and it is in part the consumer who expects to pay less and get it now, with no understanding of the social costs of convenience.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are more dependent than ever on those who drive the delivery trucks, who bring the packages, who stock the shelves, and attend to those in need.

“Sorry We Missed You” dramatizes why we need a system where all workers have universal health insurance, living wages, and paid family leave. And we need stronger protections against employers who restructure their enterprises to extract more wealth, while shifting costs on to workers and the rest of us.

Watch the full film on Kanopy.

Saturday Matinee: Color Out of Space

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By Peter Sobczynski

Source: RogerEbert.com

According to IMDb, the seemingly inexhaustible Nicolas Cage has no fewer than six additional movies in various stages of production that are currently scheduled for release in 2020, ranging from high-profile studio outings to the kind of demented head-scratchers that he somehow manages to sniff out in the manner of a pig finding truffles. And yet, none of these films may be able to top his latest effort, “Color Out of Space,” in terms of sheer nuttiness. Considering that the film takes its inspiration from one of the most famous short stories by the legendarily weird H.P. Lovecraft, and was directed and co-written by Richard Stanley (making his first stab at narrative filmmaking since being fired from his remake of “The Island of Dr. Moreau” after only a few days of shooting), there was very little chance that it was every going to be just another run-of-the-mill project. However, the addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

The film centers on the Gardner family, who have recently left the hustle and bustle of the city for a more bucolic life in a remote house near a lake in the deep woods of Massachusetts. While father Nathan (Cage) is gung-ho about becoming a farmer and raising alpacas (“the animal of the future”) despite no discernible talent for either, wife Theresa (Joely Richardson) is preoccupied with recovering from a recent mastectomy, eldest son Benny (Brendan Meyer) is off getting stoned most of the time, teen daughter Lavinia (Madeline Arthur) vents her annoyance at the move by dabbling in the black arts with her paperback copy of “The Necronomicon” and young son Jack (Julian Hilliard) more often than not simply gets lost in the shuffle. The Gardners are not crazy or hostile in any way, but it also becomes quickly obvious that their isolation has begun to drive them all a bit batty. 

That weirdness escalates one night when the sky turns an almost indescribable shade of fuchsia, and a meteorite crashes into their front yard. Although the meteorite itself soon crumbles away, strange things begin happening in its wake. A batch of new and heretofore unseen flowers begin blooming while Nathan’s tomato crop comes in weeks ahead of schedule; the family’s phones, computers, and televisions are constantly being distorted by waves of static that render them all but useless. The Gardners themselves begin exhibiting signs of strange behavior as well: Nathan begins acting daffier than usual, flying off into rages at the drop of the hat; a seemingly dazed Theresa chops off the tops of a couple of her fingers while cutting carrots; Jack is constantly staring and whistling at a well that he claims contains a “friend.” Before long, everything in the area begins mutating in indescribable ways, and while Benny and Lavinia recognize what is happening around them, even they appear to be powerless to escape the grip of whatever is behind everything.

The stories of H.P. Lovecraft have inspired, directly or otherwise, any number of films over the years but with very few exceptions (chiefly Stuart Gordon’s cult classics “Re-Animator” and “From Beyond”), most of them have not been especially good. In most cases, the problem is that Lovecraft’s stories tended to focus on indescribable horrors and much of the impact for the reader came from taking the vague hints that he did parcel out and then picturing it in their own minds, where their imaginations had no limitations or budgetary restrictions. To successfully adapt one of his works, a filmmaker needs either an unlimited budget to try to bring his horrors fully to life, or the kind of unlimited imagination that allows them to take Lovecraft’s suggestions and go off in their own unusual directions. When these requirements are missing, the results can be fairly dire, as anyone who saw “The Curse,” a dire low-budget 1987 adaptation of Color of Outer Space, can attest.

In this case, the film works because it is clear that Stanley is not only working on the same wavelength as Lovecraft was when he wrote the original story, but has managed to transform the author’s decidedly purple prose into cinematic terms. Take the titular color, for example. In the original story, it is never properly described to us other than being of a shade never before seen on the typical color spectrum. That sort of non-description description can work on the page but isn’t especially helpful as a guide for someone who has to bring it to life. Stanley proves himself to be up to the challenge, and hits upon a wild color scheme that honors Lovecraft’s intentions by bathing everything in a genuinely otherworldly tinge. Not content to rest there, he builds upon that weirdness with an equally vivid soundscape, including a creepily effective score by Colin Stetson. Stetson’s score shifts levels of reality in aural terms and conjure up the kind of terrors that are even harder to shake than the numerous and undeniably eye-popping physical mutations on display.

Stanley also manages to work the film’s additional otherworldly element—Cage’s performance—organically into the material, without losing any of its total strangeness in the process. For fans of oddball cinema, a Cage-Stanley collaboration is the stuff dreams are made of. In that respect, it does not disappoint. Obviously, once things go crazy in the second half, Cage brings out the weirdness full force (even randomly employing the wheeling vocal tic that he used decades earlier in “Vampire’s Kiss”). But what is interesting is that, instead of making Nathan into a completely normal guy who does an immediate 180 as a result of the strange occurrences, he and Stanley instead see him as a guy who is already a bit off right from the start, albeit in endearingly oddball ways. As a result of his work in these early scenes, there is an unexpected degree of poignance that he brings to the proceedings later on even as things go fully gonzo.

The chief problem with “Color Out of Space” is that, at nearly two full hours, it is a little too much of a good thing at times, with some plot elements—chiefly one involving potentially shady dealings by the town’s mayor (Q’orianka Kilcher)—that could have easily been jettisoned. For the most part, however, the film is the kind of audacious and deliriously messed-up work that fans of Stanley, Cage, and cult cinema have been rooting for ever since the existence of the project became known. Both as an effective cinematic translation of Lovecraft’s particular literary skills, and as a freakout of the first order with sights and sounds that will not be easily forgotten, this is one of those films that I suspect is going to grow in significance and popularity in due time. Hopefully it will serve as just the first of many collaborations between Stanley and Cage, two decidedly kindred artistic spirits.

Watch Color Out of Space on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/13038495