Bladerunner 2049
Added 2017-10-10 22:24:00 +0000 UTCI was up on the Comedy Film Nerds Podcast with Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini talking about Bladerunner 2049.
It was the day after the Podcast Festival and Graham Elwood mentioned that he would be watching Bladerunner 2049 at a cinema in LA later that day. I brought some snacks. I always feel a little bit strange about watching things with people who don’t know me well, because as my brother says, I watch movies with my whole body. I am very bad at poker face, and worse when there’s a movie.
If you sit next to me in a film or a tv show where there’s a jump-start, your arm is likely to get grabbed pretty severely. Whatever it is that lets you sit outside the story and judge, I don’t have that. It has to be an incredibly bad or incredibly good piece of art for me to do anything other than be swept away in it.
When the movie finished, an alarm went off in the cinema complex, and my mind immediately jumped “oh god it’s a gun incident”. I now know how visitors to Australia feel about our poisonous animals. It wasn’t a gun incident, just a mall alarm, and so we proceeded without trouble.
Graham asked if I wanted to do the episode of his podcast, which he was just about to drive over to record, and I (as a Comedy Film Nerds Podcast listener) jumped at the opportunity. We drove over to the legendary Comedy Film Nerds Podcast garage at Chris Mancini’s house and rambled about the movie, and ate the rest of my snacks.
Then I went to do a gig in Pasadena on a balcony in a bar that had a view over into neighbour’s apartment windows. It was a really lovely warm gig, and by the end I felt like my brain had turned inside out with tiredness. Then I went home and to bed.
What a fun day.
Comments
I saw BR:2049 following a solo 12 hour drive between Melbourne & Adelaide. A full three days later, I can think of nothing else but this film (I can't even think about The Last Jedi trailer - & *you know* how much I love Star Wars Alice). Everything about this film was near perfect, although I will agree, the back third of it became a little rubbery for me - something, I am sure with repeated viewings, will stablize. Its reverence for the source material, both the book and the original film, its visual execution and even its sound scape - yes, I loved every aspect of its soundscape, especially the bits that made me feel uncomfortable. The exploration of the idea of genetically engineered humans being able to pro-create and the implications of that...amazing! Wonderful! Thought provoking stuff! The evolving humanity of Ryan Gosling's K throughout the film - an interpretation on the arc of Roy Batty in the original. It was an incredible 3 hours. I'm one of those BR purists that never wanted this film to be made. Now that I've seen it, it would have been travesty had it not been.
Dean
2017-10-11 12:46:18 +0000 UTC
