Sunday, November 10, 2013

Skin jobs




45 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes. Lots of voice over from Harrison Ford with background information on the Blade Runner universe -- replicants, Tyrell Corporation, genetic designers, etc.





This is part of a long documentary on the making of Blade Runner.

I found the videos via this blog. The author shares some of my taste in movies -- he's also a fan of Whit Stillman (Metropolitan)!

35 comments:

Diogenes said...

my dad was one of those metropolitan characters as his uncle was married to one of marshall field iii's daughters, but steve you should listen to von karajan's studio recording of tannhauser and forget the tannhauser gate.

LondonYoung said...

Nice find! Is there any serious opposition to the idea the Blade Runner is the greatest Sci-Fi movie of all time?

Hacienda said...

Star Wars 1 for boys and men.
Blade Runner for girls and women. Ha.

oregonlocal said...

Blade Runner has FTL travel so it really isn't science. Most "science fiction"is political allegory. That said and not gainsaying Cassidy's tits, Hannah's butt, or Sean Young's scrumptious 1940's sexiness I don't really think it is the best of all time.

I'd put Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Andromeda Strain (1971), T1, T2 and Sarah Connor Chronicles, Solaris, The Thing (1980), the TV show Caprica, Alien, Jurassic Park (DNA!), The Matrix and 13th floor and all the other recursive level of reality flicks, A Clockwork Orange (even though today it views as a documentary rather than a satire, Metropolis, and best of all Predator which really gets down to it. Like as blood sport like the story The Most Dangerous Game.

oregonlocal said...

If your dad was one of those characters, how come you are such a low class fucktard?

LondonYoung said...

Solaris (1972) stands out to me as the biggest threat to Blade Runner there. I am surprised you didn't call out Primer.

oregonlocal said...

Time travel stories are too confusing to think about. Like what if you went back and murdered your grandfather before one of your parents was born? Explanations concerning tring theory and alternate brane universes doesn't cut it for me as string theory isn't science either.

David Coughlin said...

I love a good spectacle. I saw Pacific Rim twice [because I had to see it in IMAX 3D after I saw it on the regular screen, it was worth it]. Everything that you listed has great spectacle value. I can't say that I think any of them are greater than Blade Runner. BR owns the dystopic future [I love the Terminator movies, every cheesy one of them, but they are not in the same engaging league as BR].



The only one that you listed that I might watch instead of BR is Predator [seriously, Apollo Creed is the skinny guy; beats the $ht out of The Running Man for the same basic premise], and they couldn't be much farther apart as movies. I have never thought of A Clockwork Orange as a sci-fi movie. It is interesting to watch, but I enjoy it more for the way it, uh, warps the way I look at people afterwards.

oregonlocal said...

Well all the man versus machine/android stories are just different takes on Mary Shelley's themes in Frankenstein. All the alien movies are just lions, and tigers, and bears oh my, tales told around the tribal campfire. I think the best post-apocalypse film is The Road and the best post apocalyptic story is A Canticle for Leibowitz. The tough guy space sheriff movies are all just Ajax or Beowulf redux. I like the AI and different layers of virtual reality films for a certain originality but remember what happened to the Krell on Forbidden Planet. They all got on their iPads simultaneously and evaporated into the static of the network!

Diogenes said...

gs has nerds?

2001, Forbidden Planet, and Star Trek the Motion Picture were MUCH better.

Diogenes said...

you've got no idea what class is. you're trash.

Diogenes said...

and of course you still haven't explained why your phone wasn't ringing when you were a waiter and part time construction worker. you can't. you're trash. america's full of vulgarians like you.

Diogenes said...

oregonlocal is trolling himself. i hope. or does he have tatoos? or is this his twelve year old taking over his dad's comments?

Diogenes said...

forget about movies let's talk NASCAR!


as one hollywood producer put it, "we're in the fast food business. those who come here to make money do well. those who are confused and come here to make good movies always fail."

Diogenes said...

and what do you know about stillman's own bio oregonlocal?

oregonlocal said...

I was quite in demand as an escort at deb parties in the 1960's and my first wife was also a department store heiress so unlike you I know what I'm talking about when I call you a plebeian whiner. Read it and weep and if you are as well connected as you say you are then quit with the "poor me" schtick you constantly use. It's getting tiresome.

Diogenes said...

i never claimed to be well connected. quite the opposite. you've proven my point once again. but why would an heiress marry a guy who made a living selling his labor? and for only 250 a year?

Albertosaurus said...

Am I the only one who is troubled by movies that purport to predict the future and fail?
We live far enough in the future now to realize that on every dimension Blade Runner was wrong. Very, very wrong. First of all it shows a Los Angeles that is dominated by Asians and seems to be suffering from some sort of Global Warming effect that makes it rain a lot. The architecture is weird and cars fly. Of course there aren't many cars. Decker has a TV/computer that is less capable than the one I'm using right now. No one has a cell phone. No one seems to have a maid service.
Those are just the little things but they are all wrong. The big things are the off planet colonizations and the artificial humans. They are even more wrong.
The big news in space travel increasingly looks like there simply won't be any - ever. Humans are a thingies that do well on this planet's surface but are all wrong for anyplace else. They are as out of place in outer space as they soon will be in a fighter plane.
The Terminator was closer to the mark. The machines are coming for us indeed they have been for some time. For example they have destroyed Detroit. The robots we should fear are auto assembly robots. But battle robots are real enough. Google 'military robots'. Then try to imagine how you would fight any of them on a battlefield. All tanks and planes will soon be autonomous. The Nazis had the Goliath tank in WWII. It was remote controlled but the remote control part was it's fatal weakness. We know that ARPA is making Waldos right now based on Heinlein's ideas of half a century ago. They are probably also making Bolos based on Keith Laumer's notions.
I read last week that there was a smart phone app that could do real time voice input translations in 56 languages. Maybe I read wrong. Maybe it isn't ready yet. But of course it soon will be. iPhones look to be smarter that their human operator in my lifetime - and I'm pretty old. Maybe there will be replicants. But it will the choice of the machines.

Kudzu_Bob said...

The big news in space travel increasingly looks like there simply won't
be any - ever. Humans are a thingies that do well on this planet's
surface but are all wrong for anyplace else. They are as out of place in
outer space as they soon will be in a fighter plane.



Every day I read some new story about private companies that are working to make space travel profitable. Some of them, such as Planetary Resources, are even planning ways to mine asteroids.


As for our being out of place in space, the first animals that crawled onto land were definitely out of their comfort zone as well, and yet here we are.

oregonlocal said...

"why would an heiress marry a guy who made a living selling his labor?"


I didn't work much when we were married. It must have been my 12 inch dick.

oregonlocal said...

NASCAR went to shit when they stopped racing cars based on production vehicles in 1971 and went to the small chassis/engine that everyone has to use. Completely severed their moonshining roots. Fans today like your relatives (when they aren't dating heiresses) drink Jack instead of white lightning.

Albertosaurus said...

You may be right of course. But Sci-Fi movies always gloss over the problems of people in space. For example the recent Ridley Scot film 'Prometheus' had the crew wake up after two years asleep. Where were they supposed to be? The plot suggested a star system much further than Proxima Centauri. Their ship didn't have any kind of FTL drive. A more reasonable hibernation period would be a couple centuries.
Unless someone really comes up with a wormhole drive, the size of space will always defeat us.

Albertosaurus said...

Blade Runner looks a bit shabby. I thought so at the time too. The cars are very poor and the LA of the future is obviously just a model. Logan's Run a few years earlier also had bad models and shabby effects but no one thinks it is the greatest Sci-Fi movie of all time.
Forbidden Planet however still looks pretty good, and when it first came out it was mind blowing. 2001 was also mind blowing but today it's unwatchable. Slow - so very, very slow. I have a soft spot in my heart also for 'Invaders from Mars'. I think it does paranoia better than the more renowned "Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. Or at least I did when I was ten.
Ridley Scott's most recent Sci-Fi film 'Prometheus' is just about the best looking Sci-Fi movie ever. Unfortunately none of the human characters acts even remotely like a recognizable human. Scott really isn't very good with scripts. His real talent lies in set decoration. That's why it's a little disappointing to see the poor visuals in Blade Runner. The real attraction in the movie is in the casting. Two relative unknowns - Sean Young and Rutger Hauer - were startling. What did it mean that these two beautiful people weren't really humans at all? Recast them with better known but more ordinary looking actors and the whole movie would fall flat.

Diogenes said...

no. it was that you yourself were from a similar background. right? hypergamy and hypogamy are exaggerated by unattractive men and unattractive women respectively. in general people are matched within their class by physical attractiveness and intelligence level.

a young englishman with a useless degree spends time in india doing nothing, then his brother offers him a job in the city, and he's soon doing well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraint_Anderson

chomsky explained the modest correlation between iq and earned income as the result of the lack of interest of many smart people in money. a better explanation is that social capital and iq are poorly correlated.

Diogenes said...

"...then quit with the "poor me" schtick you constantly use. It's getting tiresome."


can you form a sentence without a cliche? there is no "schtick" (sic). there is no "poor me" anything. all i've ever done is state the facts. give me an example of "poor me" whining? you can't find one.


BUT i do agree that despite almost zero social capital i have been MUCH luckier than most americans, and a fortiori most people on earth.

Diogenes said...

huh?


i'd be very ashamed to know anything about NASCAR.



oregonlocal...pssst...you're "lousy with" tells.



needless to say a multi-racial, multi-ethnic country will always fail, just as latin america has failed, because there will always be class hostility justified by race and ethnicity. "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

Kudzu_Bob said...

the size of space will always defeat us



I'm not a scientist, but I gather that some knowledgeable people think that someday we might be able to harvest significant quantities of antimatter from the magnetospheres of large planets such as Jupiter. That would provide us with a rocket fuel that could propel interstellar vehicles to speeds much greater than one percent of the speed of light.


Or perhaps we will simply copy the smart kids' homework, that is, bioengineer a few super-geniuses who will obligingly come up with ways for us to reach the stars that we could never think of ourselves.



"Always" is a long time.

oregonlocal said...

Five non-sequiturs. Are you even conscious?

Diogenes said...

""Always" is a long time."

and though i hate religion, for those who are honest and want nothing more than eternal life it may be comforting to think, "eternity is too long to stay dead." as goedel said, "Religions are, for the most part, bad--but religion is not".

"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."

considering how disappointing this world is why should "true fiction" be a contradiction in terms?

oregonlocal said...

That's because you are a status conscious petit bourgeois who is fearful and resentful of his betters.

Diogenes said...

except a petit bourgeois is the better of a retired professional.

Diogenes said...

wrong. it's apparent at this point that whatever advantages you may have had iq wasn't one of them.

Diogenes said...

actually oregonlocal my family has been bourgeois since the 18th c. they even published a history of themselves. i have it. geschite der familie --- von ---. i also have a painting of a relative from the 19th c. she was one of the empress of brazil's ladies in waiting. plus there's being a direct descendant of gov braford. which pilgrims are you descended from? there's a street named after my family in staten island. a few buildings at catholic unis named after my family. i'd say more but then you'd guess my name, as jagger might have said.

Diogenes said...

and i almost forgot. far from drinking jack or wight lightning, my family was once the soul importer of a very famous brand of scotch. i won't name it for fear of being identified.

oregonlocal said...

"which pilgrims are you descended from?"


Pilgrims? Hardly. New Netherlanders yes.

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