Paul Raven @ 10-01-2008
I have a bad relationship with the movie industry - they have a terrible habit of taking books I love and murdering them on screen. I had a rant about it when I first heard someone had optioned William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but Jason Ellis has just pointed out the fact that they’re actually casting it already.
Being somewhat detached from the cinema world, I have no idea who Hayden Christensen is, or whether he’d be any good as Case (or indeed as anyone). But there’s a microcosm example of why good books die when they leap to celluloid, in the commentary at this film fan site where Ellis found the news:
“I’ll be honest and admit I’ve never read NEUROMANCER and my rudimentary attempts to try and understand the plot have only confused me. But it seems very much a precursor to the Matrix with the book even referring to “the matrix.”" [my emphasis]
Face, meet palm. I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of explosions and bullet time to keep the slow readers happy. [Image lifted from linked article at JoBlo.com]
Anyone care to suggest a book-to-film conversion that really worked, with the obvious (and in my opinion unique) exception of Blade Runner?
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Paul Raven @ 16-10-2007
Tired of technophobic portrayals of Artificial Intelligence in movies? Convinced that the Technological Singularity is more than just "The Rapture of the Nerds"? Then you’ll be looking forward to the movie that Singularity advocate and inventor Ray Kurzweil has in the works. Based on his book of the same title, "The Singularity Is Near" will be a blend of documentary interviews and science fictional narrative, intended to communicate Kurzweil’s ideas about the near-future destiny of mankind and its machines. [Via AdvancedNanotech] [Image from KurzweilAI.net]
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Stephen Years @ 30-09-2007
Image Credit: Blade Runner Partnership
The 25th anniversary version of Blade Runner, dubbed, “The Final Cut,” is being shown in select theaters this month in New York and Los Angeles, and will be released as a five disc set (Blu-ray and HD-DVD) in December. According to a New York Times article, this is the movie as director Ridley Scott originally intended for it to be seen. In creating this version, the film was painstakingly restored:
The special effects that produced this vision were amazing for their day. Created with miniature models, optics and double exposures, they seemed less artificial than many computer effects of a decade later. But like film stock, they faded with time.
For the new director’s cut, the special-effects footage was digitally scanned at 8,000 lines per frame, four times the resolution of most restorations, and then meticulously retouched. The results look almost 3-D.
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I have a bad relationship with the movie industry - they have a terrible habit of taking books I love and murdering them on screen. I had a rant about it when I first heard someone had optioned William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but Jason Ellis has just pointed out the fact that they’re actually casting it already.
