FixedR6 at Fulltime Casual has made his feelings on the upcoming film adaptation of Neuromancer well felt and I am disheartened myself (though I suppose I will have to see it no matter how badly it is done).
This is just a continuation of many movies that I will still have to see despite knowing I will be disappointed including the Star Wars prequels and the latest Indiana Jones. Ok so it’s not a long list but you get what I mean. It’s the phenomenon of knowing you are going to have to go look at a train wreck of a film because you have always dreamed they would make the film and now that you’re presented with reality, the dream has taken on a less than perfect aspect.
I read Neuromancer in 2000 when I was on our big trip to the US (that we regrettably spent our home deposit on in one of those “life’s too short” moments not realising that housing prices were about to go through the roof and we could have saved for three holidays with what we had to raise in order to buy a house eight years later but I digress). Our friend’s boyfriend was with me when I went into a shop to grab something for the train ride from Boston to New York and he said “have you read Neuromancer? You’d really like it, it’s got this hot ninja chick in it”. So of course I picked it up and then wanted to stay extra time on the busses, trains and planes for the rest of the trip so I could keep reading it. I seem to remember being in Toronto just refusing to leave the hostel because “Toronto’s boring anyway”.
Neuromancer blew my mind. It’s kind of about having your mind blown anyway. It’s got dystopian future, mega corporations, cyberspace, and loads of impressive culture which is so alien yet so believable (I mean who would have thought of rastafarians in space?) and it’s prophetic as well (don’t forget it was written in 1984 or sometime about then).
So that was the beginning of my adult love of science fiction which I hadn’t exactly abandoned from childhood so much as lacked a bridge due to just not knowing anyone who could help me find the good stuff beyond what had been in my High School library. Fortunately around the same time, I became friends with my science fiction guru / mentor Nick who fed me a steady diet of Ken Macleod and Neal Stephenson until I could emerge from the nest and find my own way around the shelves of Pulp Fiction (the most bestest ever scifi / fantasy / mystery bookshop in Queensland at least who don’t have a fricking website for some reason).
So Neuromancer has a special place in my heart and if you haven’t read it then you should go and do so before I release some kind of visual virus that hacks your brain and turns you into a drooling reptilian brained zombie. No wait, that was Snow Crash but that’s another story.
Check out my book collection on librarything: see djfoobarmatt
[tags]books, movies, neuromancer, scifi, william gibson[/tags]
books, movies
I’ve never been a drug taker but while I’m on the DVD binge, I have also had a look at A Scanner Darkly. I heard about this film on a movie review podcast somewhere and I’m not sure if it even went to the cinemas here. It is a live action film that has been digitally altered so that it renders with the feel of a graphic novel allowing for all kinds of cool artistic special effects. This is handy because the film is about drugs and there are numerous drug induced hallucinations portrayed in it. The film has our favorite gen-x movie icons: Keanu Reaves and Winnona Ryder. Robert Downey Jnr’s part has the best lines though.
This film is set in the near future where 20% of the population has become addicted to a drug called “Substance D”. Being about drugs, the film is a little hard to follow and it took me a long time to figure out what the hell was going on and then the film ended. Basically most of the characters are just whacked on drugs for most of the film. There is a lot of comedy and some very funny dialog as the party of fools lurch from paranoid crazy scene to paranoid crazy scene but there are also a few really confronting and sad scenes: e.g. when one of the characters almost chokes to death and his friend just watches the whole thing calmly.
The film was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick who I’ve never heard of but apparently he was a big name in the sci-fi biz. The features on the DVD have an interview with him where he talks about his disgust with the American Government (in the sixties and seventies) for how they had him under surveillance for no reason other than he had a few quirky ideas. Apparently he had a few screws loose. This paranoia comes through in the story but I don’t want to totally spoil it as it’s the only part of the film which is decipherable on the first watch (I watched it twice and followed it better the second time).
The film is worth watching if only to marvel at the way the animation is done. I don’t know why but the part of the film that affected me most was right at the end before the credits where a long list of dedications scrolls up the screen – they are all friends of Philip K. Dick’s that were lost to drug use: permanent brain damage, drug induced schizophrenia, epilepsy, suicide, various organ failures – the author even lists himself and some of his family. It’s then that you realise the seriousness of the story. He manages to both capture the uninhibited fun of drug taking and the loss of humanity.
Uncategorized, movies
What’s more important? Reality or how we make sense of it? That question seems to be at the heart of many films and the most recent I’ve seen of this meme is Pan’s Labyrinth. I heard a lot about this film when it was in the cinemas so I was keen to have a look at it when I wondered into the local DVD shop and saw it on the shelf.
Pan’s didn’t meet my expectations. I was told that it was deep and confronting and scary. I didn’t find it scary, I thought the ‘evilness’ of the characters was predictable and one dimensional. As I’ve already said, the idea of the imagination reinterpreting reality has been done before – even in big blockbusters: Don Juan? Never Ending Story?
However, there was something about this film different to what I was expecting. It was really mythical in an Iron John kind of way. The movie is based around fairy tails and I think this is what some people I’d heard raving about the film were trying to express. It seems to have all these deep symbols that tug at some part of you but you can’t resolve them into focus. It mixes up a whole bunch of symbols and creatures that seem to represent things: mystery, greed, sickness, lust, fear, hatred, power, sacrifice, innocence etc… And then there is a response to each of these things in the story from a number of characters.
Our protagonist is a pre-teenage girl obsessed with fairy tails, traveling with her pregnant and ill mother to meet her new step father who is a commander of an army. She has vivid experiences of a fantasy world and as she journeys her fairy tails come to life: she seems to be expressing her inner world and also “coming of age”. At the same time, events around her are escalating as her fascist step-father ups the ante in his ethnic cleansing.
I enjoyed the film in the end because I’m a real sucker for this kind of “re framing reality” thing. I suppose because it seems to be a helpful way of reconciling a spiritual framework in a rationalist world. Like Don Juan, we are left questioning whether it is better to “live in the real world” or to experience life through a lens that brings out a greater meaning to it.
movies
