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brkl

Blade Runner 2049

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That's great. I've seen Ford be a sourpuss in many interviews. Nice to see him having fun. 

 

Huh, I guess I have to trust the hordes of critics praising the film and actually see it. 

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I find Alison Hammond very annoying but that was pretty fun. I don't think they needed to save any booze for Harrison, pretty sure he was baked already.

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Maybe similarly to brkl, I was very comfortable assuming that this movie would be bad, and think it's inconsiderate how people are saying it's good.

 

I'm joking, kinda, but also not really.

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On 2/10/2017 at 10:33 AM, Kolzig said:

I have decided that I will watch the movie. But not now this week when it comes out, I will watch it later this month or beginning of next month in Japan so I can experience it in IMAX. That I can't do in Finland.

Or come to Tallinn - https://kinokosmos.ee/

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All my money is tied to the Japan trip, also I live too far from Helsinki to go to Tallinn for a short trip in the near future.

 

I will keep it in mind when my daughter gets older that we could do a family trip to Tallinn and see an IMAX movie there. :)

 

I heard that a Finnish actress is speaking Finnish in this movie. So embarassing, should we believe now that Finland is in this sequel what Japan was in the original? This is like Star Wars Masters of Teräs Käsi all over again when foreigners think our dumb language is exotic. Next thing they tell me is that Gosling's character is eating salmiakki candy or something like that.

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Blade Runner is my favorite movie, so this definitely had a lot to live up. I watched a double feature - the theater showed the original Blade Runner (Final Cut) first, then this movie. I loved this movie, and upon further reflection I realized I was focusing too much on comparing it to the first movie, which doesn't do any favors, so I reappraised it in my head by thinking of it as its own film and it grew in my estimation. So what I'm saying is, now I really love this movie. We don't get enough blockbusters that are this slow and ponderous.

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It's excellent! To me it was almost like the experience of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road. Both I saw without too many expectations, and in both cases watched an old favourite from the 80s come to life again in very pure form. In the case of Blade Runner it's maybe even more surprising thanks to some talk about bad marketing, but actually I think the same preceded Fury Road and at this point I think I'm starting to ignore when people complain about marketing - it's not part of the movie, if it's not perfect, who cares in hindsight (only the people in marketing business). Movie of the year so far!

 

Unfortunately, the theater I went to ruined the mood by switching the lights on just a fraction of a second even before the final scene ended.

 

BTW I think it actually hurts the movie a bit when it obviously references the original - it kind of pulls you out when you make the comparison, but then I'm not sure how they could have made it a proper sequel without any referencing. I mean, the original had some pretty memorable and outstanding imagery.

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Another note, I saw it in 3D and I thought it was subtle, but quite well done. Since I actually recently saw some old 3-D from early last century, and mentally made some notes what seemed to work in 3-D and what didn't, I was now watching with that in mind, but... I think it broke what I thought was a hard rule that everything should be sharp, because blurry stuff will seem jarring to the eyes in 3D. I was surprised that there were out-of-focus stuff in many of the scenes, but it didn't look jarring at all. Maybe it was because the depth in the scenes was limited and I don't remember anything coming out of the scene. I haven't paid attention to this stuff before, but maybe they have improved the 3D technology/techniques enough nowadays that they can get around some of the limitations of earlier 3-D? Better cameras or what? Or maybe my home 3D projector and DLP-link glasses isn't comparable to cinema 3D?

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19 hours ago, Erkki said:

 

Unfortunately, the theater I went to ruined the mood by switching the lights on just a fraction of a second even before the final scene ended.

 

 

Weird, they did that to us too! 

I really liked it. 

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19 hours ago, Erkki said:

Another note, I saw it in 3D and I thought it was subtle, but quite well done. Since I actually recently saw some old 3-D from early last century, and mentally made some notes what seemed to work in 3-D and what didn't, I was now watching with that in mind, but... I think it broke what I thought was a hard rule that everything should be sharp, because blurry stuff will seem jarring to the eyes in 3D. I was surprised that there were out-of-focus stuff in many of the scenes, but it didn't look jarring at all. Maybe it was because the depth in the scenes was limited and I don't remember anything coming out of the scene. I haven't paid attention to this stuff before, but maybe they have improved the 3D technology/techniques enough nowadays that they can get around some of the limitations of earlier 3-D? Better cameras or what? Or maybe my home 3D projector and DLP-link glasses isn't comparable to cinema 3D?

 

I haven't seen it yet, but apparently cinematographer Roger Deakins oversaw the 3D conversion process himself, so that might account to why it is so subtle and well done. According to some very quick googling it's all 2d-to-3d conversion, so none of it was actually shot with two cameras.

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Uh, so, it's good and I liked it. I mean, it's hard to throw unreserved enthusiasm behind

 

Spoiler

an American movie about slavery and a slave uprising in which all the principle actors are white

 

...but I agree that it is remarkable for all the reasons people have listed here. I might like it just about as much as I like the original – which is to say, a lot, but with some big caveats. Although I suspect I might come down a bit on it later, after I come down from the audio-visual high.

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41 minutes ago, dium said:

Uh, so, it's good and I liked it. I mean, it's hard to throw unreserved enthusiasm behind

 

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an American movie about slavery and a slave uprising in which all the principle actors are white

 

...but I agree that it is remarkable for all the reasons people have listed here. I might like it just about as much as I like the original – which is to say, a lot, but with some big caveats. Although I suspect I might come down a bit on it later, after I come down from the audio-visual high.

 I thought about this a little bit. I describe it to myself as a 2017 white fantasy of uncovering your own ancestral victimhood.

Spoiler

First time I noticed this was Ghost In The Shell (2017).

 

 

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After watching this last night, I'm still digesting it. But I'm sure I've never seen a sequel so respectful of the philosophy of the original, both narratively and cinematographically (check out dat adverb!) From the evidence, I'm not convinced Scott would have been so restrained. It's the richest thing I've seen at the cinema for years. Do whatever you can to see it on the biggest possible screen. It would be an immense sadness to watch this on your phone.

 

Really wonderful.

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So yeah... This movie was pretty fantastic! The visuals were exhaustively detailed and just absolutely gorgeous. I liked the combination of normal and drone synth as well. It wasn't quite Vangelis, but I think that is good, because this movie is a different beast entirely.

 

I liked how subtle the original Blade Runner was about the ecological and socio-economical disaster called Earth – for example how no one expected to find living animals anywhere, and rich people kept manufactured animals as status symbols. This was only explicitly alluded to in a couple of scenes, whereas it was discussed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to an almost comical degree (including the actual title of course). Having said that, I also really liked that these issues took more of a center stage again in the Blade Runner 2049. The layers of inequality were presented in some interesting, bleak ways, for example

in the scene where the waste disposal area dwellers try to steal/kidnap/kill K with their makeshift equipment, K tries fight them with his superior android powers and weaponry, but still gets overwhelmed, at which point someone remotely orders a drone strike to get rid of the attackers.

 

On 6.10.2017 at 7:41 AM, Kolzig said:

I heard that a Finnish actress is speaking Finnish in this movie. So embarassing, should we believe now that Finland is in this sequel what Japan was in the original? This is like Star Wars Masters of Teräs Käsi all over again when foreigners think our dumb language is exotic. Next thing they tell me is that Gosling's character is eating salmiakki candy or something like that.

 

It is not that fortunately. It is just part of the general Babel of the city.

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I saw this yesterday and found it a similar beast to The Force Awakens in many ways:

 

- It's a good film, very well-made, I enjoyed it

- It often manages to capture the tactile, lived-in feel of the original, but misses it on occasion (here, the clean, minimalist sets throughout and some CG cityscapes)

- it successfully replicates (lol) the overall tone of the original, but hits too many of the same beats, overstuffs the narrative (a lot of loose threads and 47 mins longer than the original) and crams in some pointless cameos

- Ford is great in it and makes this recognisably old Deckard as opposed to old Han or old Indy

 

Having said all that, it took a couple of viewings for me to appreciate the original, so I may need the same with this one, perhaps moreso as it might help view it as its own thing a little more.

 

It's a shame it's not doing well at the box office. I guess not enough young people know the original well enough for the good reviews and word of mouth to pull them in? 

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Hah, I had a weird experience on watching the original for the tenth time and suddenly being surprised by all the replicant exposition Deckard the expert gets explained to him. Then there's the, uh, romance scene which was always really uncomfortable. I have to keep in mind the original always had rough corners when I see the new one on Sunday.

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Yeah, I just rewatched the original and that romance scene was... more than uncomfortable. I assume it was on purpose..? He wa very aggressive in closing the door and basically commanded her to say and do a bunch of stuff... then suddenly romantic sax kicks in. Was there some voiceover on top of that scene in the Theatrical Cut that made it seem more romantic or something?

 

Watching the Final Cut and having never watched the Theatrical Cut, I just kept thinking I couldn't imagine how this entire film would even work with a voiceover...

 

Anyway, I'm excited to see the new one tomorrow! :tup:

 

Also, weird little goof: When Ford begins testing Rachel he doesn't actually lift anything out of the case (I don't know which cut this is from or if it's been fixed later): 

 

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That's just the hand gesture you have to use to activate the machine. It's a very advanced interface, you folks probably wouldn't understand it.

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1 hour ago, BigJKO said:

Also, weird little goof: When Ford begins testing Rachel he doesn't actually lift anything out of the case (I don't know which cut this is from or if it's been fixed later): 

 

That's amazing. Probably my brain will latch on to that every time from now on. Oh, well.

 

Yeah, the saxophone doesn't help the romance scene. Without it, you could accept is as pretty dark. Deckard isn't really portrayed as a wonderful guy anyway. But having the saxophone blaring really undermines any interpretation you might want to make. It's supposed to be sexy, I guess. Ugh.

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Rom-com K-dramas do this regularly. Scenes that are very clearly abusive have comedyesque music played over top to take the severity out of the circumstance.

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Confession: Although I'm a total 80s movie nut, I was comparatively meh on Blade Runner. Also, being that total 80s movie nut, I often question the need for any movie to have a run time of more than 99 minutes. ^_^

 

So I hesitated to accompany a friend to the theatre yesterday. Long story short, I loved it. Absolutely, loved it. Sets, framing, camera, storytelling/structure, revelations, ending. When was the last time I liked the ending of a movie?! Must have been years.

 

Damn shame it tanks so hard.

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I'm going to paste what I wrote over on Waypoint about this film. 

 

The more I think about this movie the less I like it. The most positive thing I can say about its rhetoric is how it evokes a powerful emotion on the political effects of fertility.
I appreciated the scale and colors and such, but I think it is worth asking oneself what this movie looks like to an ethnonationalist or fascist or misogynist. Everything (including the visuals) is about monetary, patriarchal, technological and violent power. I’m not well schooled on Futurism, but I think it might be a movie a Futurist would make in 2017.
There was only one character who was anything more than her societal role and she was in the movie briefly. All the other characters appear as pawns of the actual hero of the film, the cruel distopia itself. Some of the minor characters (including K) have the shallowest idea of faith and hope, but ultimately they are just vehicles to show how the distopia exerts its power. I can see an argument that the point of the movie is to show how this technology nightmare rips everyone out of their sense of interconnect humanity and uses them all as individual tools, but the resulting lack of acceptance of human dependencies on one another takes what I find interesting about narratives Out Of The Narrative. It’s a tech-demo of cool ideas and premises with no actual humans living in it (with the exception of Stelline). This is the dehumanization that bothers me in the film and even though it is made to look unpleasant, I think the overall rhetoric is a glorification of the rhetoric that makes it possible; people are no more than their professions and political affiliations and human agency is no more than a reaction to where one is placed in an institution of power. I think there is some truth to that but when it is presentedso absolutely and cooly, I don’t like it. With the exception of the visual aesthetics, the only things I find interesting about this film is my reactions against it.

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1 hour ago, clyde said:

The more I think about this movie the less I like it.

 

I don't necessarily agree with everything you wrote, but I'm definitely with you wrt liking this less the more I think about it. There's a hypothetical draft of this movie – that isn't terribly different from the one we actually got – that could've been one of my favorite sci-fi movies ever. Instead, I feel... complicated.

 

(IDK how careful I have to be in here about spoilers, but I'm using the tag just in case.)

 

Spoiler

 

I really do wish this movie was less white. I'm not usually one for demanding representational checkboxes-checked before I can enjoy a movie, but in this case, with the social caste themes (and the Asian exoticism inherited from the original) there's just too much dissonance there to ignore.

 

And then there's also a lot to say about how this movie treats women (I don't suppose anyone here doesn't know what I'm talking about or hasn't read any of the online criticism from women). But suffice it to say, a lot of feminist concerns about this movie coincide with its storytelling shortcomings. Joi was particularly underserved, and I think that goes hand-in-hand with how her arc felt hollow and perfunctory. I can understand the intent – there are some interesting concepts that Joi and her relationship with K represent. Potentially. But I don't suppose any of those concepts are really explored. They're just... presented, really, as if gesturing towards high concepts makes up for the regressive role she plays in the actual narrative. Because we don't get enough time with Joi to understand her beyond her role as a romantic interest / comfort woman for K, moments that should feel resonant are just awkward. The inventive sex scene, which could've been something truly special (and a rare example of positively-portrayed sex work), ends up just feeling like a techno-fetishistic threesome fantasy. And of course, ultimately, they just fridge her. 

 

But maybe this movie simply didn't need a romantic B-plot at all, and instead we could've had more meat in other areas. I loved whenever K was doing detective work, those might've been my favorite parts of the movie. But once we fully know what's going on, I'm much less into it. There's some sort of underground resistance, but we don't get to learn anything about it. As far as we're concerned, "Deckard and his baby are special" is what we're meant to care about in the final act, and... meh.

 

That said, I think the fight scene in the water was completely amazing. And K's death scene was actually somewhat affecting. So like I said, I feel complicated.

 

 

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