The Urban Pantheist

I feel like I must have. One of my favorite blog subjects seems to be "movies that everyone likes except me." I have attempted to watch Blade Runner at least 3 maybe 4 times. I finally succeeded last night, only falling asleep in the last 8 minutes, in which (like so much of the movie), nothing happens. I watched the "Final Cut" version that director Ridley Scott endorses and over which had complete artistic control. Apparently the early DVD transfer was muddy--a serious problem in a movie that is rainy and dark for 2 solid hours--and this was fixed, and the sound was restored as well.

I get the artistic importance of this movie. I get that it was also a technical achievement. In fact, without the painfully dated Vangelis soundtrack it is amazingly ahead of its time. The art movie pacing is a serious problem; I'm surprised as many sci-fi fans worship this movie as they do. I realize that in previous attempts to watch it I had a really hard time figuring out which details were important and which were things that the camera just lingered on for no detectable reason. By now I know the backbone of the story, last night I didn't have to expend as much energy sifting plot points from atmosphere.

My current fear is that the fellow who is choosing the next zookeeper movie night is going to pick Blade Runner. He is on record as declaring it his favorite film, but is he the kind of person who will drag a whole room full of people through the soup of 2019 Los Angeles for two hours? We shall see. And I should talk: I made the same group of people watch my favorite movie, Repo Man.

Orlando Science Center is not too different from the Boston Museum of Science where I got my start in animal care. They have a lot more alligators though.

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In honor of the fact that I'll be seeing Chris Hardwick (the nerdist) entertain Boston at the Wilbur in an hour in a half, I'll quickly share a nerdy thing that I've been momentarily obsessed with.

Alexis and I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently (all star treks are on netflix instant btw). At the beginning of one episode they showed a child eating oatmeal. All the food on the space station is made by the replicators--machines that use transporter technology to generate food and other items from a stored bank of matter (I read up on them today). Presumably this means not only can you procure ANY food you can think of (or have the schematics or software for) but that the machine could be programmed to alter the nutritional content of the food.

If I had access to a replicator, I might say "Tea, Earl Grey; hot," once or twice, just to work on my Patrick Stewart impersonation, but most of the time I'd be saying stuff like "Masamam curry tofu, medium spicy, with pineapple chunks." Or I'd say "Crunchberries, large bowl with lactose-free milk!" Since the machine is generating the food--it never grew, it never lived, it was never killed or harvested--you could say, "veal cutlet, breaded, with dolphin sauce" guilt free. Hell you could have big bowl of baby monkey hearts, if that's your thing (those guys that are black on one side and white on the other eat baby monkey hearts, look it up).

But I would live on DS9 for a long long time before it occurred to me to say "Oatmeal, lumpy, too hot on the inside, slimy and cold on the outside." (This describes every bowl of oatmeal I've eaten.) I brought this up with some of my coworkers, and five out of six of them said the same thing to me: "I love oatmeal. What's wrong with oatmeal?"

...

"Spaghettios, room temperature, from the can."

Make it so.

Saturday afternoon movie in bed. "Looper."



I enjoyed the movie, but like many sci-fi action movies, it doesn't hold up to post-viewing scrutiny. That's fine--action movies only need to hold up to the imperfect scrutiny that you apply to them while they are happening. Of course crazy things are going to happen in an action movie, but if the movie is gripping enough you won't care.

So after "Looper," you might suddenly say--wait, there's a powerful criminal organization that has time travel technology and they only use it to dispose of bodies? Probably some of you are smart enough to think that while the movie is on, but I'm not.

Another issue that I have with Sci-fi movies is the number of things that require my suspension of disbelief. If there are more than one of these things, then I need for them to relate to one another in a logical organic way. So for example, in "Looper," we're told right away that time travel exists. Fine. But then we're told a little later that telekinesis exists--but it's only a parlor trick. So the only conclusion you can draw is that telekinesis will figure strongly in the third act.

So then the movie is requiring me to believe in both time travel and telekinesis independently--but nothing else paranormal. It's not like X-files or Heroes or Misfits or even The Avengers where there's a ton of paranormal things happening and it's the new normal. It would be another thing if one or the other thing led to the other--like time travel technology was made possible by the telekinesis mutation, or the telekinesis mutation was a result of the time travel technology.

But that's a minor quibble. As action movies go, it respects the viewer's intelligence, as time travel movies go (a major subgenre in my taste, as it turns out) it's less impenetrable than many. The silly make-up to turn Joseph Gordon-Levitt into Bruce Willis didn't distract me too much, and I liked all the actors' performances. The main character(s) moves from sympathetic to villainous and back without changing who he is really, just the desperation of his circumstances.

Anyway, if I haven't ruined it yet, check it out.

Shorter review: Better than Batman, not as good as The Avengers.