Blade Runner

My mom is dying of cancer. Its a slide into misery and she's on heavy pain meds, but there's nothing anyone can do. My brother brought his family to see her today, likely for the last time. I'm glad he did. I asked him to. Kids should know their grandparents, and be able to say goodbye to them if they can.

For whatever reason, she decided to watch Blade Runner this evening. Blade Runner is known as the single most influential Sci-Fi movie, ever. Things in that movie get used elsewhere, over and over. The chains with the water splashing down them, and a fan spinning above, with a light shining through the fan? That was done in Blade Runner FIRST. Alien, Aliens, a ton of movies use that trick. It looks gritty and fantastic. There's gritty realism in it. Foreign languages. Its one of the best examples of "Full Immersion" scifi ever made into a film. Its much better than the book, and some of the dialogue is modded from the cancer doctors who told the author, PK Dick, that he was dying and why. This was his last artistic creation. He died before the film was released. Since then, PK Dick has had a number of his films made into movies, including Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly (awful, read the book), Screamers (good short story), Paycheck (didn't know that, but okay), Impostor, Confessions d'un Barrio, and Next. There's a couple more in production. Box office totals for his films is $1B and counting. This from a guy who's method of writing is to get wired on Meth, and not sleep for the two weeks it took to finish the book. His girlfriend or wife was invariably between 12 and 19 years old, at which point he'd divorce them. Creepy. Not someone I'd want as a friend. But his legendary paranoia came across really well in his books, and those make good screenplays which make good movies.

I'd love to see the Unteleported Man as a film. Star Trek touched on this in an episode of Next Generation about Reg. After all, if you believe in the Soul, you're being killed and copied, and what lives on after transport/teleport is just a copy, a homunculus without a soul, probably occupied by a demon. Religions should think about that really seriously. Its not a joking matter, if the soul exists. You are a dead pile of goo when the machine frags your body into atoms. Sure, it makes another one with your memories, and that's just as good, right? Right? What if there's a glitch and the backup makes one or two or three of you? Which one is you? Who owns the house? Who's wife is that? See the problem? Star Trek pretends that never happens because they said so, but that's not the least bit consistent or realistic.

Rutger Hauer when he was young. Isn't that something?