jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I’m not fanboy enough to give you an exhaustive rundown of all the scenes Ridley Scott recut, reshot, rescored, and reshuffled to create this “ultimate” version of his 1982 scifi milestone. Rest assured, that list will be online within hours of the December 18 release of the much-anticipated 5-DVD set. But I can tell you that Blade Runner, the movie that defined the cyberpunk look long before William Gibson wrote the opening lines to Neuromancer, has never looked or worked better. I had the pleasure of seeing it on a big screen for the first time in hi-def digital projection at the Walter Reade Theater, and I can’t remember the last time a scene sent chills through me like Roy’s “C-Beams” speech.

Yes, the unicorn is still there, the ending is that of the 1992 director’s cut, and apparently, there’s new music by Vangelis. The sequence where Deckard takes down Zhora has been redone substantially, and the shot in which Roy lets the dove fly is definitely new. There may have been a few new CGI vehicles, too. But everything is done tastefully and subtly; nobody here shoots first who didn’t shoot first before, and those Atari billboards are still were they used to be.

The new cut confirms Blade Runner’s status as a major achievement and the high water mark of Ridley Scott’s career. It’s also fun to see a younger Edward James Olmos as Gaff in a movie that his new show Battlestar Galactica owes so much to conceptually. The Final Cut will screen at the NYFF on September 29 and comes to the Ziegfield for one week starting October 5. Go if you can.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Ridley Scott, 1982/2007. *****

• On the Edge of Blade Runner - Documentary on Google Video
• Blade Runner on Wikipedia
• Metafilter on The Final Cut
• A trailer for this version:

A punchy B-picture, high on testosterone and a Hollywood megabudget, featuring pleasantly absurd giant robots that turn into cars. The boy-hero’s teenage crush is an improbable babe (Megan Fox) sprung from the pages of a glossy magazine, and because this is a Michael Bay movie, the fights are ridiculously overblown.

Now, I have nothing against popcorn flicks aimed at the thirteen-year-old in all of us, but I can’t stand propaganda. Transformers wallows in the questionable rhetoric of heroism and sacrifice, and the shots of fighter jets taking off at dawn and military helicopters swooping over downtown L.A. just need the superimposed tagline “Army of One” to be turned into recruiting ads. When Shia LaBeouf gets his orders and is told “You are a soldier now,” the fun is all but ruined for this pacifist. With John Turturro as anti-alien G-Man.

Transformers. Michael Bay, 2007. **

• David Byrne agrees
• Rotten Tomatoes

“Amélie in a mental institution,” Marcy quipped as we walked out of the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin, where Park Chan-Wooks latest played as part of the Fantasy Filmfest. As usual, she had a point: at the center of I’m a Cyborg is an adorable waif (Lim Su-jeong) who insists on seeing the world in her own peculiar way and is surrounded by a quirky cast of lovable supporting characters.

The filmmaking, as you’d expect from the director of Oldboy, is muscular and inventive. But unlike Jeunet’s unbearably cute Amélie, Cha Young-goon has to face some all-too-real pain. The girl believes herself to be a cyborg (”You know, kind of like a robot”) and is sent to the mental ward after trying to “recharge her batteries” in a way that reads to the rest of the world as a suicide attempt.

Continue reading my review of I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK at About.com.

Saibogujiman kwenchana. Park Chan-wook, 2006. ***

• The trailer
• I’m a Cyborg on Wikipedia
• Review by David and Adrienne Hudson

Danny Boyle sends a group of astronauts–Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and Rose Byrne among them–on a mission to deliver a giant nuke in order to restart our dying star and save mankind. Confined to a ship that instantly brings to mind 2001’s Discovery, they send video greetings to their families and tend to Silent Running oxygen gardens. But no matter how many millions of miles from home, when a distress signal arrives, it’s clear that we’re in some very familiar territory: lethal space walks, ticking countdowns, mysterious ghost ships, malfunctioning life support systems, a computer with a melodious voice denying urgent requests, tripped-out deep-space epiphanies. Nothing new under the sun.

At a post-screening Q&A at Tribeca Cinemas this week, Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) made it clear that he is very much hip to the sci-fi classics. Like the crew of the Ikarus II hiding out behind their giant space umbrella, Sunshine labors in the shadow of Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris — and the books by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem they were based on — with some additional nods to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Perhaps it’s not even possible to send people into space without referring to these touchstone films, and yet, the question remains: why has it been decades since anybody managed to put a brand-new spin on the genre? Fox Searchlight respectfully asks critics to keep mum about the third-act revelations and reversals that work hard to keep Sunshine surprising, but really, there’s no need: if you’ve watched any sci-fi at all, you have seen it before.

Which is not to say Sunshine isn’t a handsomely crafted, engaging, even nerve-wrecking space adventure. The CGI sun, seen through the filtered glass of the ship’s observation deck or shooting over the edge of the heat shield, is a blast of glorious, almost supernatural light. Boyle also does an outstanding job at vividly rendering the astronauts’ extreme vulnerability to the elements. The burning heat of the stars, the razor cold of space, everything is orders of magnitude more threatening than on Earth. The plant life on board the ship in particular becomes more precious than ever. Surely, this heightened state of perception is one of the reasons we go to the movies in the first place. So what if Kubrick already said it all? Set the controls for the heart of the sun anyway. Sunshine will open in the US on July 20.

Sunshine. Danny Boyle, 2007. ***

Bonus videos: Pink Floyd at Pompeii, the trailer, and–just because he happened to turn up in the search–Bill Withers.

Slightly above-average sci-fi anime that, as usual, steals liberally from Star Wars, Akira, Blade Runner, and whoever first came up with BattleMechs. Pacing could be tighter but storytelling is solid enough, and the 3-D computer animation is first rate eye candy. You could do worse for genre entertainment with a Paul Oakenfold soundtrack.

Appurushîdo. Shinji Aramaki, 2004. ***

The tell-all trailer:

Prompted by a comment at The House Next Door, here’s a contribution to Edward Copeland’s Star Wars blogathon: a close reading of the opening minute and a half of Attack of the Clones.

The beginning of Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones isn’t quite in the league of the overhead star destroyer of the original film or the bravura extended space battle take of Episode III, but it sets the scene for a moody second act. The very first shot, the traditional pan toward a planet that follows every Star Wars crawl, moves upward, toward the city planet Coruscant. We see two Naboo fighters and Amidala’s royal cruiser. (In The Phantom Menace, she flies a “yacht” and in Revenge of the Sith a”star skiff,” but they’re always silver.) I adore the deep growl of Amidala’s ship–this sound is the first thing that makes me happy to be watching this movie.

The ships begin spinning around their axes, putting the lie to our idea of up and down. By the second shot, the camera has spun too, and now we descend toward the surface of Coruscant. Right away, this introduces the theme of Attack of the Clones: nothing is what it seems. The Star Wars cycle consists of a tragic half and a comic half (otherwise known as “the prequel trilogy” and “the classic trilogy“), and Episode II is the second act of the tragic half, a time of schemes, subterfuge, and confusion.

Next, in the first of the film’s many stagy interiors that I like to enjoy as intentionally campy allusions to Flash Gordon, a person we only see from behind is addressed as Senator. This makes the first word spoken in this film a lie.

In Star Wars, everything keeps repeating, but with variations. In this case, whenever somebody’s name requires a honorific, it will be unique: Emperor, Boss, Vice-Roy, Supreme Chancellor, Hutt, Princess, what-have-you. By the same token, there are always new planets as well as new vistas of old ones: this time, Coruscant, which we’ve already seen, is covered in fog, again hitting the theme of deception and mystery. The trails left in the clouds by the tips of the cruiser’s wings please me. This shot also echoes the approach to Cloud City, in the second part of the comic half.

The following shot of the landing spaceships plays a peculiar trick on our attention: we think we’re looking at Amidala’s ship, but as it passes, we realize that we were watching the fighter flying alongside all along. And of course: here comes, announced by his signature noise, the first recognizable character in the film, the comic sidekick who knows as much as anyone in the series, the guy who has the first word in Episode IV and the last in Episode III: the real hero of the show, R2-D2. (The mindboggling first shot of Revenge of the Sith comes, after an actual kitchen sink explodes on screen, to rest on him.)

My minute and a half is about up now, but the rest of the scene continues the theme of deception and duplicity. It also caps the decoy storyline that was central to The Phantom Menace. Next to its visual imagination, the iconic success of Star Wars rests on its rigorous but inventive structuring: Lucas often begins and ends familiar stories in unpredictable ways. The belated death of Padme’s double exemplifies this Star Wars principle. For instance, Revenge of the Sith begins with what could have been the climax of Clones--much like the opening forty minutes of Return of the Jedi could have provided a more upbeat ending to The Empire Strikes Back. Each act of the two halves (which wrap around like Moebius strips) corresponds to its counterpart: Menace/Hope, Attack/Strikes Back, Revenge/Return.

My point is this: the first 90 seconds of Attack of the Clones, ominously scored by John Williams, set up the next 8430 very well. They promise more visual splendors, more games played with archetypal structure, more explosions, more tacky dialogue delivered to the hilt. Clones was the film that got me excited about Star Wars again after initial disappointment with Phantom Meance. It satisfies by itself, makes Episode I a better movie, and lays the groundwork for the superlative payoff of Revenge of the Sith.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones. George Lucas, 2002. *****

• Previously: Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
• My original review of Revenge of the Sith
• Digg This

Two faltering eighties franchises are being remaindered for the price of one, but the H.R. Giger-designed Alien will always have a place in my heart as the greatest movie monster ever. AVP is shameless B movie fare without any of the polish and auteurist pretensions of the other installments, but at least it moves fast and has enough awareness of the history of the series to get a number of clever visual quotes in. I won’t bore you with the plot; as far as titles-as-pitches go, this is up there with Snakes on a Plane. The fanboys must’ve enjoyed it: there’s a sequel in the works. I’m tempted to give it three stars just because I remember the original Dark Horse comic book.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator. Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004. **

• Rotten Tomatoes: 22%
• Alien Loves Predator: In New York No One Can Hear You Scream
• Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem

What’s better than Snakes on a Plane? Of course: worms in the brain. Another gleeful B-picture, a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers, either Blob, and any number of zombie movies. There are the usual wisecracks (most of them delivered by Firefly’s Nathan Fillion), a cursing mayor, a teenage girl whose painted fingernails come in handy. What sets Slither apart is how genuinely disturbing the horror elements are. The psychosexual connotations of Michael Rooker’s transformation into an oozing, tentacled squid are obvious; the takeovers of new host bodies play like alien rape, and the grand finale is only a few blinks away from hentai. More than just a cynical recreation like Eight-Legged Freaks, Slither deploys its shock effects like it really means it.

Slither. James Gunn, 2006. ***

[tags]film, horror, 3 stars, james gunn, elizabeth banks, nathan fillion, scifi, monsters, horror, sex, hentai, rape, tentacles, worms[/tags]