Nobody Knows Anything

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Golden Compass (2007) *

As I’m currently reading the His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time, it seemed like the right moment to nip to the cinema and catch New Line’s filmization of the first book in the sequence. I was deeply impressed. Who knew that Chris Weitz had a film like this in him after American Pie (1999) and About a Boy (2002)? Those two films were competent but only slightly surprising and certainly no standouts. No wonder Weitz walked off the project once, daunted by the technical challenges, but thank God (that’s a His Dark Materials in-joke by the way) he came back to finish what he started. The only blip in the continuation of the series is its dismal non-performance at the American box office. However, the film has done really well worldwide, and hopefully New Line will figure out some ingenious way to promote the film on DVD in the States and allow it to find its audience. Although it may look like a children’s film, it is so not, it’s about as deeply adult and disconcerting as fantasy films can get, and it knocks CS Lewis into a cocked hat, which is where he and the rest of his wretched Christian brethren belong.

Blade Runner (1982) *

For the record, this was the Final Cut version of the film, projected digitally. As magnificent as Blade Runner now looks on DVD (see previous post), this spanking new cleaned up digital version on a big screen with a decent sound system is simply overwhelming. Vangelis’ score has real presence, the special effects look better than CGI, and the subtlety of the performances and the great craft of the direction really come to the fore. The other thing, even though Golden Compass was coming to the end of its run, the cinema wasn’t crowded at all, but the Blade Runner screening was packed.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

So it takes Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s proprietary rotoscoping software to bring Philip K Dick to the cinema really for the first time, reasonably undiluted and very out there. Maybe what a Philip K Dick adaptation needed was an approach as extreme as Dick’s own approach to science fiction, and it certainly gets it in spades here. Filmed in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2004, it took 18 months to essentially reanimate the film frame by frame to deliver the final product. The blur suit, especially, would be a challenge even in CGI, but the approach here, halfway towards a comic book, works better than CGI would. A Scanner Darkly is an edgy, paranoid, very political film about drugs and the people who consume them and are consumed by them and the people who let people consume them for twisted purposes of their own.

Total Recall (1990)

The other kind of Philip K Dick adaptation is this beauty with its slam bang direction and driving Jerry Goldsmith score, which uses one or two ideas from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and then has Arnold Schwarzenegger beat people up Dutch judo style, when he’s not shooting them in the head and delivering pithy quips, or using dead bodies as shields. By the way, the scene in the hotel room where the head of Rekall arrives to tell Arnold he’s living out a fantasy while suffering from a schizoid embolism is real; Arnold plants the “giveaway” sweat on the Rekall director’s head because he doesn’t want the fantasy to end; and the final fade to white, after Arnold has got the girl, killed the bad guys, and saved the entire planet, is a symbol of his ultimate lobotomy. And then he became Governor of California. Sorry, but can someone pinch me every time I read this or see this? Because it can’t be real, can it?