My wife and I co-moderate a film discussion group here in Knoxville and this months movie is “Blade Runner” by Ridley Scott. BR is one of those “I can’t believe you haven’t seen it yet” films that I have avoided for whatever reason over the past 20+ years (actually, the subject matter sounds kind of dull - this coming from a guy who actually liked the English Patient! :lol: )
Anyway, my wife and I rented the DVD tonight and we are about to spin the platter that matters. If there is anything that I should look for, themes that we should explore, discussion points that absolutely need to be brought up, please let me know. Usually I don’t do this (it has the faint stink of a “please do my homework” question), but the last month has been exceptionally busy and we need to have an hours worth of material to discuss by, a-hem, Monday. :eek:
Btw, I have done a search for threads with BR in the title, and came up with a couple of hits which I will read later, what with spoilers and all.
The original release had a sappy happy ending, the director’s cut ends with a bleak reality. I found the narration by the protagonist trite and I hope it was deleted for the d.c. I think most fans of Philip K. Dick, author of the novel, would find that the movie fell short of the subtlety and personal involvement of the book, but I believe all would agree that the sets in the movie are great – the vision of the future L.A. is overwhelming. Kind of like David Lynch’s Dune: not much of a movie plotwise, but cool as hell to look at.
First impression: “Stylistic bore.” When Sean Young walked into Deckards apartment, I turned to my wife and remarked that it looked like they raided the wardrobe from the movie Dune*. She wanted to know if the shots of the “aircars” were done by the same people who designed the little spaceships in Close Encounters. I also kept humming the old '70s schlock hit “It Never Rains in Southern California.”
No narration in the directors cut, btw.
Anyway, the guy who argued and argued to discuss this movie absolutely loves it. I might make him our guest moderator this month, because I frankly have little positive to add.
GO DAWGS!!! I live in Knoxville and I will just LOVE going to work with the knowledge that the Volunteers are 0-for-the-millennium against the mighty DAWGS. My wife now calls the UT football team Georgia’s butt-monkeys - Fly my pretty’s, fly!
Appreciate you registering just to answer my widdle question, slonslaither.
Yes, I know that Dune was filmed and released after BR. Lighten up.
DVD release–Sucks, except for the fact that they were at least smart enough to put on the director’s cut.
Movie–The director’s cut is much better with the loss of narration. There is also a unicorn dream not in the original movie–but you’ll have to figure out what it means, if anything.
I NEVER use Google before I ask a question. And let’s just suppose that my question is a the name of a song and the only things I know about it are a few lyrics, nothing else/ Google won’t do d*** for me then.
So, I suppose it makes me a horrible person for not Googling for all 1000+ of my posts, right?:rolleyes: :rolleyes:
I fall on the other side of the equation. The director’s cut sucks hideously. The narration in the original helped MAKE the movie a study in noir and carried on the tradition on Phillip Marlow, et al.
Without the narration, you really get no feel for Deckard or anything else other than: Gee that’s pretty in a really dark and damp sort of way.
Also, the original ending was not happy. It looks it on the surface, but if you stop to think about for more than 5 seconds, you realize there’s a definite finality every bit as compelling as the hit upside the head “reality” of the dc.
My $0.02. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
What it means to be human.
It’s related to the “Is Deckard a replicant?” question, but it’s a point that gets woefully overlooked in discussion of the movie. Segue into it with the also overlooked “Deckard bears a striking phonetic resemblence to ‘Descartes’ the philosopher who coined the phrase ‘I think therefore I am.’”
Personally, I didn’t find the original ending sappy at all, and chopping it off so the movie ends with Deckard and Rachel getting into the elevator simply begs the question: where the hell are they going? Even the narrative, which is also missing from the director’s cut, doesn’t force a happy ending:
Deckard: “I didn’t know how long we’d have together. Who does?”
This doesn’t suggest to me that they lived happily ever after, only that they lived, but for how long and how well, nobody knows. It is, if anything, a reasonably realistic ending.
> So, I suppose it makes me a horrible person for not Googling
> for all 1000+ of my posts, right?
Yes, you are a horrible person. You’ve wasted the time of many people and slowed down the SDMB (which is, because of you and others, very slow). Part of what we’re doing here on the SDMB is teaching people to learn things on their own. When you don’t Google simple questions, what you’re saying, in effect, is that you’re too lazy to do your own research. You’d rather waste the time of everyone else on the board than have to think for yourself.
I am moderating a “discussion” group. What I want to know is what sort of themes are worth discussing, meaning that I want to know what sort of things I can bring up that will draw people into the conversation. What is the best way to do that? Why, by asking an eclectic group of people what in BR is worth talking about. It is my experience that whenever one relies on IMDB or other basic web sites to come up with topics, it makes for very boring discussions as most of the people are familiar with the very same material and you end up just repeating what everybody has recently read. Trust me - most everybody in the group will Google BR and most will peruse the first few pages of links that will appear. Why be boringly repetitive?
And what is this “what WE’RE are doing here at the SDMB”? I was unaware that you are an official employee of the vast SD empire, or a representative thereof. Are you?
Btw, is that your standard reply to EVERY post on this board? Do you say “Google it!” to every question posted in Great Debates? Do you say “Google it and stop wasting our time” to every post in MPSIMS or the Pit? :rolleyes:
This is one of the things Google is best for. Say I have the words “I am but one small instrument” running through my head. Googled, with the added search term “lyrics” if you choose, I find many pages where people have listed these lyrics as part of Jimmy Eat World’s Goodbye Sky Harbor.
Indeed, posting to find out the name of a song if you already know some of the lyrics is a waste of board time.
To get this thread back on track, I recommend that JohnT read this thread for a fascinating exploration of the ideas and themes of Blade Runner. I found particularly fascinating, the discussion between Abe and Bryan Eckers that developed on the second page of the thread.
I’ve told people that they should have Googled first a number of times. It was only when they asked questions that could easily be answered with a search that I’ve done that. Have you read all of those links I’ve given? I suspect not. I suspect that you’d rather just read the discussion in this thread and not have to do research by carefully reading those links. Those links cover everything already discussed in this thread. You can come up with some general topics for discussion just by reading them.
I don’t believe for a second that the people in your discussion group have all read the Blade Runner FAQ and looked over the Blade Runner website. Claiming that those people will all have read those things is absurd. It’s no more likely than that the people in your discussion group will all have searched the SDMB archive, in which case they will already know all the things that we have discussed anyway. If you’re worried that the people in your discussion group (who supposedly know all the things in the FAQ and other websites) will be bored because you can’t tell them the topics discussed on the SDMB, I think that your discussion group just isn’t good at discussion. I think that people who are primed with the facts are more ready for discussion than ones who are given a set list of “topics for discussion.”
Having never been there, having never participated, not knowing the makeup of the group makes you the PERFECT expert as to how the group functions, a far better expert than I.
Are you always an officious prick, or is it just something this thread is bringing out in you?
