Even when Ford tried to bring the conversation back on track, it just ended in even more laughter.
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It’s true that right now, we’re engaged in bitter debates about specific policy issues, from health care to gun control to environmental protection. The slogan of the first film’s replicant-producing Tyrell corporation was “more human than human”, but in both films, the replicants themselves are treated as anything but.
“Blade Runner” was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.
Unlike the optimistic “E.T”. And so begins K’s nightmarish journey that would lead him to Dickard (Harrison Ford) and face some startling truths.
Then comes the music. Seven are said to exist, five are still available. The Final Cut is digitally remastered and looks way better than anything else they’ve put out.
Krista Kosonen, Elarica Johnson, Mackenzie Davis in BLADE RUNNER 2049 from Warner Bros.
After 35 long years, finally, someone had thought of making the sequel to Ridley Scott’s cult classic, Blade Runner. It took the late producer Bud Yorkin and his wife Cynthia Sikes 12 years to persuade him otherwise. “He’s so amusing. One night we were in the tub and I said, ‘Harrison, where did you get your sense of humor – your mom or your dad?” But it is really hard to just act blind. The script, by Michael Green and original Blade Runner co-writer Hampton Fancher, is cleanly wrought (although when Leto uttered the line “You do not know what pain is yet”, I wondered if it had been re-purposed from Hellraiser). It’s directed by “Arrival” and “Sicario’s” Dennis Villeneuve. Unsafe storms, foggy pollution, and a canopy of hopelessness cloud the overrun Los Angeles metropolis, though in the three decades since Blade Runner’s 2019 setting these hell-on-Earth tribulations have only intensified for those unable to leave Earth for a new life “offworld”. Director Denis Villeneuve along with cinematographer Roger Deakins have woven together a film that is not only layered and tense but also jaw-droppingly gorgeous.
Sticking to its noirish roots, it is a detective story, but Villeneuve deepens and focuses the original film’s examination of Deckard’s dubious humanity to actually dissect the story of our new detective himself as he tries to solve the case. The original 1982 cut, which Scott emphatically denounced as quickly as he was able, contains a pulpy first-person voiceover from Harrison Ford’s Deckard.
And then of course there was that huge water tank that took two months to build. And they were closing so I didn’t have a lot of time. “Both of my main actors were gentlemen”.
Beyond number one, it’s a bit tough to figure where the week’s new releases will settle among the holdovers.
5 stars to 4 1/2 stars: Must see on the big screen. “It warms everybody’s heart”.
“No, it’s not”, Ford said.
The completed film, he added, will “knock your socks off”. “Blade Runner” was a dark, dystopian view of the future wrapped in an enigmatic neo-noir mystery.
Thanks to Sony’s impressively hefty non-disclosure agreement, which I did not sign but will honor the spirit of, there is little of the actual plot of Blade Runner 2049 I can discuss. “It’s tricky. We do have business decisions to think about, but this is a unique circumstance”.
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Villeneuve, for his part, is at peace with the film. So you couldn’t see who was shooting and all you could see were these silhouettes in the mist. I gave it everything for better or worse. And now I know it for sure. I’m not going to tell you that 2049 is the film that the world needs right now – that cliché is already growing exhausted – but I am going to say that it is refreshing to see a filmmaker use a big budget Hollywood vehicle to exhibit nothing less than radical kindness; to stake everything, absolutely everything, on sentiment.
