perfidy

The trouble is that movies made out of Dick novels suck all ass. I hear they are making a film out of "A Scanner Darkly," my personal fave PKD book, and I know that they are going to fuck it up. Kubrick is dead, so there's no director fit for the material, Sean Penn is too famous to do the part, though Johnny Depp would work too, and any movie with more than one story won't sell in today's hollywood, because thinkin' gets in the way of the shootin'. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Well, it's too bad Hollywood has to make it at all. I only saw "Minority Report" (sucked), "Total Recall" (sucky, but fun..you know, with the shootin' and all), and "Blade Runner" (most promising of the bunch but sheesh have a stiff chair and a mug of potent coffee for that experience).

I mean, "independents" or, perhaps more accurately, Hollywood outsiders, are capable of quality work. Hell, they can sometimes even get major distribution and marketing... what was that hulabalo over that movie with the wizard and the midgets the past few years...?

I loved Blade Runner and think the film was beautiful in a weird post-apocalyptic 40s noir Seattle kind of way.

Few books work as film anway as the genres are just too different. Slaughterhouse 5 is the only "success" that comes to my mind.

GP,
"Blade Runner" just fizzles for me about halfway through. I find the most interesting and arresting scenes come in the first 45 minutes or so, and I reach a point where I don't care anymore who's a replicant and who isn't.

But it's a shame that more can't be done with lit, sci-fi especially, making good films. Remember awhile back all the posts about how awful "Starship Troopers"? How do you fuck up a great story that includes aliens and big guns and powered armor? It just seems one would have to go far out of his way to blow that.

"How do you fuck up a great story that includes aliens and big guns and powered armor?"

I'm still laughing, GL. Your question is awful damn funny and straight to the point. I can't figure it out either because wanton suckiness doesn't sell very well. Maybe Buckethead has an idee.

I think the entire Ministry has a certain penchant for armored/atomic infantry and doesn't appreciate it when films get it all nutty and wrong.

I'm sure the indefatigable Dr. Buckets does have opinions on this, but I don't want to cause the poor guy an aneurysm. I've never met him, but I imagine nasty, visible arterial throbbing about B's head and neck-al areas when he has to deal with the "Starship Troopers" flick.

Well GP put his finger on one big problem with the movie adaptation of Heinlein's classic tale of soldiers in powered armor. There was no fucking powered armor in the movie. That's how you screw up a movie with aliens and powered armor.

I keep my throbbing arteries on the inside, thank you very much. But you have accurately charactized my feelings for that sad, sad excuse for a movie.

Okay, I can take people attacking Starship Troopers(it really wasn't very good, although I didn't mind it as much as most seem to), but anyone who says that Minority Report sucks has some SERIOUS explaning to do. It's one of the few big movies I've ever seen that had a truly good story - not to mention all the other things it had going for it. I loved it, it's one of the handful of movies I own, and I'm really wondering how anyone can really dislike it.

Alex, I'm with you on that one. I like MR, and Bladerunner as well. I know they are completely different from the original stories, but very good movies on there own.

Movies made from Dick's oevre are hit or miss - some very good, some very bad. Heinlein, however, has been uniformly destroyed by Hollywood. I still want to see a film noir version of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag."

Look, that's the whole problem right there. If the flicks go too far afield form how I imagined the characters and scenes on the page, the film is wrong. Or at best, grudgingly OK. And there's alot of room for movies to fail that way- cheesy, instantly obsolecent music, for example.

I'm just a bitch over it, what can I say?

Regarding the movie versions of Dick's storys, it is sort of like the stars aligning perfectly to have the right people to be able to express in film what his storys sometimes only hint at. In my view, Bladerunner really was one of those times. You can't really expect two of those moments in one lifetime.