Saturday, December 11, 2021, Delray Beach, Florida


Worth Watching

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Blade Runner (1982)

Based on the book by Phillip K. Dick

Available to buy/rent on several streaming services

Directed by Ridley Scott

Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young

A few weeks ago, I watched Apocalypse Now, a genre-expanding movie classic. As I wrote in my review, it exceeded my expectations.

Still in the afterglow of that experience, I decided to watch another breakthrough film from the past. My choice was Blade Runner.

I loved Blade Runner when I first saw it. I loved the imagined future – a steampunk devolution of Los Angeles – created by Ridley Scott and company. And I loved the story – the quirky, noir, sci-fi plot about a cop (Harrison Ford) assigned to eliminating errant robots (“replicants”).

I wondered, before watching it again, whether the special effects would still work. The movie is almost 40 years old. Ancient by technology standards.

And yes, the special effects were dated. But the set design and the photography and the sound effects and score more than made up for that. Those were – and still feel – brilliant. And Harrison Ford played his role pretty much perfectly.

Critical Reception 

As noted in Wikipedia: “Initial reactions among film critics were mixed. Some wrote that the plot took a back seat to the film’s special effects and did not fit the studio’s marketing as an action and adventure movie. Others acclaimed its complexity and predicted it would stand the test of time. Negative criticism in the United States cited its slow pace. Sheila Benson from the Los Angeles Times called it ‘Blade Crawler,’ and Pat Berman… described it as ‘science fiction pornography.’ Pauline Kael praised Blade Runner as worthy of a place in film history for its distinctive sci-fi vision, yet criticized the film’s lack of development in ‘human terms.’”

Over the years, appreciation of Blade Runner has grown and its influence has spread. It currently has an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 125 reviews) and an Audience Score of 91% (based on 250,000+ ratings).

You can watch the trailer here.

 

Interesting Facts 

The eventual success of the film brought Phillip K. Dick, author of the book it was based on, to the attention of Hollywood producers. Several of his other books were then made into big movies, including Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002), and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, was released in October 2017.

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Worth Reading

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Out of This World 

By Graham Swift

212 pages

Published in 1988 by Viking Penguin

I found it among the bookshelves in the family room of our house in Nicaragua. I selected it because it was the size I was looking for (less than 300 pages) and because I liked the sound of the author’s name. Graham Swift. Very promising.

Books, like people, have very different personalities. There are some that take time to warm up to. And there are others that are instantly likeable. For me, Out of This World is one of the latter.

I liked it immediately because it was beautifully written. I’m talking about the paragraphs and the sentences. They are polished gems. Each one is its own pleasure. And the thoughts and perceptions behind this beautifully crafted language are so damn good.

If you read books primarily for plot and action, though – if you are a John Grisham fan, for example – you may not like this book. The plot… well, it doesn’t really have a plot. There are two stories that are told sequentially. The first is about a father and daughter, one living in England and the other in the States, coming to grips with the troubled history of their family. The other is a social critique of 20th century culture.

After reading the first chapter, I looked at the photograph of the author on the book flap.

I was surprised to see the face of a child. He looked like he was 17 years old. How could someone that young write so well?

It doesn’t matter.

I just wish I had discovered this book when it was written more than 40 years ago because I could have been a fan of Graham Swift’s since then.

Critical Reception

* “A moving, ingenious and often very funny tale that takes us deep into his characters’ wounded, resilient hearts with breathtaking virtuosity… rich, complicated, joyful, arresting.” (USA Today)

* “Out of This World is the latest of Graham Swift’s highly intelligent attempts to write a private and intimate novel which also takes account of history…. You can’t but applaud the scope and ambition of this novel. What it lacks is a radical approach to structure which would in some way reflect the sheer mess of the events with which it attempts to deal.” (Jonathan Coe in The Guardian)

* “Like the author’s Waterland (1984), a compendium of dark personal histories and darker meditations about the ways of the world.” (Kirkus Reviews)

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