From Aintitcoolnews, "Here's some info on a new film based off of a Philip K. Dick story. This time we have Lee Tamahori helming an adaptation of Dick's story THE GOLDEN MAN. The adaptation is called NEXT and stars Jessica Biel and Nicolas Cage. Cage plays a dude that can see future events and their outcomes who is being pursued by the FBI. They want to use his abilities to prevent a global terrorist attack. Biel's the love interest and apparently in the clutches of the evil terrorists.
I have not read the short story, but after a quick search I found a blurb saying it's about the purging of mutants before they affect the human gene pool. Mutants, terrorists... whatever. Hopefully there's a solid script beneath this one. If not, we can always look forward to Richard Linklater's A SCANNER DARKLY, eh?
19 comments:
Okay Octopunk, I'm sure you've read this (because you've read everything) - what's the scoop?
Golly, I've never even heard of this one. The only Philip K. Dick books I've read are Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and of course Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? All three are crap.
Really? Why are they crap? Has there ever been a direct translation of one of his books?
And I, Jordan, have read The Man in the High Castle.
It's crap.
I thought Dick was supposed to be this brilliant author - what's the deal?
He wrote in English, didn't he?
I read Man in the High Castle too! I forgot. In my opinion, Dick was just in the right place at the right time, kind of like Ralph Bakshi. For a while I thought he was one of those writers who had good ideas but no writing talent to back it up, but actually, after reading some of his stuff, most of his ideas weren't that great either.
After reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said last year (what a crap title, by the way), I reckoned he got a lot of juice for sounding off counter-culture paranoia at just the right time. In that novel, all college campuses have been in a state of siege for years, "student" is synonomous with anti-government terrorist, and in the society at large EVERYONE is a potential police informant, even the criminals. Sounds like something a lot of hippies would call cool while ignoring the fact that a siege of a college campus would only last a month before the food and drugs ran out.
The main story of this book is about a celebrity who wakes up and suddenly nobody knows who he is. Turns out it's because there's a hallucinogen that causes people's dream realities to actually happen, and somebody else took some and was thinking about the celebrity. This is the old simulacra theme handled in the sloppiest way I can imagine, worse even than Lawnmower Man's "virtual reality IS reality!" What happens if a room of people take this drug? A dozen new alternate universes all overlapping? But enough people were all "the acid works in the reeeeeal world, man" to boost this book.
By the way, I thought A Scanner Darkly had come and gone, and then I saw a trailer for it with Night Watch. I'm intrigued, even though Winona Ryder's in it.
Keira Knightley - 1 ton of sex appeal + fifteen years + two bottles of balsamic vinegar = Winona Ryder
Awesome post, Octopunk - thanks for the info. Most of Dick's titles are pretty bad, huh?
Jordan, that formula is so freakin' funny!
I let Octo do all the talking about Phillip K. Dick because he's read more of the guy's stuff and he's got a great angle on the stuff. I agree with the "right place at the right time" concept; more directly, it's good to be the only person doing a particular thing because you get mad credit for it even when you do a bad job. My favorite examples are Charlie Rose and Woody Allen.
BTW if Keira Knightley wins that Best Actress Oscar she'll be the youngest woman ever to win it. Winona Ryder was nominated for "The Age of Innocence And Primary-Colored Filters" but didn't win. Then she did her big "breakthrough" performance in "Girl Interrupted"...and co-star Angelina Jolie won the Oscar. The only role I liked Winona Ryder in was her self-parody in "Celebrity." When she was cast in "Alien Resurrection" I knew the movie would suck because she's never been in a good movie. And don't tell me Heathers.
I liked Heathers a lot, but it sure fooled us all. We thought Winona was gonna be great after that.
I haven't watched Heathers in many years and have no idea how it has aged with time. Back in the late 80s I loved that damn movie. I'm such a geek that I even bought the soundtrack, on cassette! It's amazing that she and Slater went on to have pretty lackluster careers (Don't tell me about Pump up the Volume, Octopunk!). Wasn't she good in Mermaids? Wait, that sentence makes no sense.
"It's good to be the only person doing a particular thing because you get mad credit for it even when you do a bad job." This is an excellent augmentation to what I was saying. It still baffles me how Dick got to be so huge -- there's a sci-fi literary award named after him, for pete's sake. If you win one, does that mean you're as good as Philip K. Dick? Nein danke.
Maybe it's just down to the strange universe of sci-fi prose. I mean, Asimov gets all these props but he's hardly written anything.
While I myself am a fan of Pump Up the Volume, I realize it's not much of a big stick in an argument. I'm also a fan of Samantha Mathis, which is even more embarrassing, really.
I was about to say I'm not a fan of hers just because she takes her shirt off in PUTV, but then I realized that actually might be the reason.
Samantha Mathis from Broken Arrow? (Opposite Christian Slater again?) She's very charming.
Isaac Asimov is terrible. Screw his "rules of robotics" and all the dumbass conversations I've had to endure because of them.
I'd like to take this opportunity to gratuitously bash Arthur C. Clarke as well.
Clarke, really? Didn't he create 2001?
JPX: check your inbox, where I answer at greater length than would be convenient here...
Actually, I think it'd be good to have Jordan's letter posted here, inasmuch as this is our informal archive of movie stuff.
In his essay “The Electric Dreams of Philip K. Dick” (Nov. 3) Richard Bernstein refers to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey as having been “based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke.” This is a common misconception. The 2001 screenplay is an entirely original work credited to “Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke” (in that order) while Clarke’s book is what is frequently referred to as a “novelization”—a prose adaptation of a screenplay—first published several months after the film’s release and clearly identified as having been “based on a screenplay.”
In Jerome Agel’s comprehensive account The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (Signet, 1970) and in a subsequent volume entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Signet, 1972), Clarke himself describes the ways in which the most memorable elements of the film’s story, including the title itself, the Homeric and Nietzschian themes, the surrealist ending, and particularly the confrontation with the computer (which accounts for Mr. Bernstein’s reference to the film) are solely the work of Kubrick. “I would say,” Clarke commented during the film’s production, “that 2001 reflects about ninety percent on the imagination of Kubrick, about five percent on the genius of the special effects people, and perhaps five percent on my contribution.”
Mr. Bernstein aptly finds in 2001 an important example of science-fiction’s ongoing examination of the metaphysical and moral questions raised by our society’s increasing dependence on technology. Kubrick’s film portrays a duel to the death between an astronaut and a sentient computer jointly engaged in a voyage “Beyond the Infinite,” and Kubrick’s flat refusal to explain the man/machine struggle or the quest itself in any literal terms is precisely what gives the film its subversive edge and its narrative power and contributes to its status as a cultural landmark. By way of comparison it may be pointed out that Peter Hyams’ 1984 sequel film 2010 actually is based on a Clarke novel (2010: Odyssey Two, Ballantine, 1982)—and that this second film is, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably faithful adaptation. Clarke had commented about Kubrick’s film that he “personally would like to have seen a rationale of HAL’s [the computer’s] behavior. It’s perfectly understandable, and in fact would have made HAL a very sympathetic character.” In both versions of 2010, freed from any collaborative obligations, Clarke “explains” most of the mysteries of the original film and attempts to provide a “rational” motivation for the rogue computer’s enigmatic mutiny.
Jordan sent me these additional notes which should be included here for the archives,
"Clarke's contribution was as follows:
Kubrick decided to make what he called "the proverbial good science fiction movie" around 1965. He contacted Clarke based on his reputation as "the best in the business" and started discussing the project. Clarke offered a bunch of pre-existing short stories, most of which had been collected in the books "Earthlight" and "The Nine Billion Names of God." The stories in question were "hard-nosed" technological tales of an imagined early period of planetary exploration (going to Mars etc.) but the stories did not connect together. One story in particular, "The Sentinel," struck Kubrick's fancy. It's a pretty turgid little anecdote about a bunch of boring scientists (Clarke's favorite kind of character) who uncover a weird tetrahedron on the moon; the sun hits it and it sends a signal into deep space. Then the boring scientists speculate about "what to expect" now that the human race (or, "Man") has been deemed ready.
Kubrick bought the rights to about nine stories including "The Sentinel" and hired Clarke to help him string them together into a narrative. What's interesting about this part is that "The Sentinel" was conceived as the CLIMAX of the movie, following the other eight stories which were about people losing wrenches in space or whatever the fuck Clarke likes to write about. The point was to end with a big Twilight-Zone-style burning question mark. As Kubrick developed his movie idea he lost interest in each of the lost-wrench stories, one by one, until finally all that was left was "The Sentinel." (I just remembered Clarke's last line: "I do not think we will have to wait long." For the super-aliens to arrive, that is.)
So now they had "The Sentinel" and had to turn it into a full length screenplay called "Journey Beyond the Stars" (Clarke's title for the project). This part of the story is chronicled in Clarke's book "The Lost Worlds of 2001," which provides a lot of the discarded material of Clarke's. Kubrick came up with HAL, the Dawn of Man sequence, the ending, and the new title, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (complete with Homeric reference for his tale of a Bow Man). Clarke, meanwhile, provided the infrastructure of the Heywood Floyd part of the story, and helped work out the scheme for getting to Jupiter with hibernating scientists etc.
What's particularly interesting is that nearly all the commentary on the movie from when it came out in 1968 notes the "soullessness" and "antiseptic emptiness" of Heywood Floyd's life; the "future technology man" who "might as well be a machine himself" etc. What you have to understand is that Arthur C. Clarke thinks Heywood Floyd is a swell guy and a great protagonist. That's the way his mind works. To Clarke, the conversations on the space station about "underwater research in the Baltic" and "be sure to bring that darling little daughter with you" and "Elena, you're looking wonderful" is great stuff; fascinating dialogue. The "emptiness" of Heywood Floyd's world is utterly lost on Clarke, as are the Christian/Nietszchian themes. The subsequent books in the series, I believe, demonstrate this perfectly. Once Kubrick is gone, we're in an irony-free, IBM, pocket-protector universe, and one of the greatest and most profoundly far-reaching cinematic narratives ever conceived is reduced to a goofy tale of aliens warning us that Jupiter is going to...wait for it...turn into another sun..."All these worlds are yours"....Jesus. (And what kind of name is "Heywood Floyd" anyway?)
Anyway that's the $0.50 tour of the topic.
J"
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