Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style 397
MankyD writes "Just saw the trailer to a new John Woo film over at apple.com called PayCheck. Written by Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report, its a story about a top notch reverse engineer (Ben Affleck) who, after a quick memory wipe, finds trying to piece together the mystery of his past. It's also got Uma Thurman as the female lead. Unfortunately the website isn't up and running yet, and the premise of the movie seems a little far fetched, but this still ought to be a fun one."
no (Score:3, Informative)
Also, Kevin Smith has pretty much sucked ass since then.
Incidentally... (Score:5, Informative)
http://a772.g.akamai.net/5/772/51/30378f1c0dfafa/
It's a good one. (Score:5, Informative)
A guy works for a large company for a period of time. When he leaves the company, his memory of the entire experience is wiped and he gets the pay he negotiated for himself prior to starting the job. He was expecting a large sum of money, but instead gets a handful of objects. He then proceeds to get into multiple situations where one of the objects is exactly what he needs to get him out of a jam, and eventually he pieces together what he was doing during the period of time that was wiped from his memory.
It's in Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, [amazon.com] featuring "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford."
~Philly
and don't forget... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chasing Amy was top of his game? (Score:2, Informative)
Paycheck, the short story (Score:5, Informative)
For reference to other movies, Minority Report [imdb.com] was published in 1954, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Total Recall [imdb.com]) published 1965, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner [imdb.com]) published 1968, Second Variety (Screamers [imdb.com]) published 1953, Impostor [imdb.com] published 1953.
Personally i really enjoy the cheesy wit that most of his short stories are innundated with, and am looking forward to Paycheck, despite my apprehension with Ben Affleck (god, that jaw!).
If you want to read PKD, i think his best stuff was from the late 60's early 70's. The short stories from the 50's and early 60's feel like quick thoughts that PKD was shooting out on the fly, stuff he was thinking through on his way to later full thoughts. His stories after the mid-70's (there aren't many) are too ethereal and "out there", almost to the point of being unreadable. And for a very different sort of work by PKD, read Confessions of a Crap Artist.
Disclaimer: I've read a substantial amount of PKD, but as he was such a prolific writer, i've read nowhere near all or even most of his work.
As for John Woo, I've enjoyed his style in Face/Off [imdb.com] and Broken Arrow [imdb.com], and in both he had to overcome the Actor Wraith John Travolta (lately seems to act so bad that he sucks the acting ability out of others). Hell, Hard Target [imdb.com] even had some style thanks to John Woo, and it's a Van Damme movie. Presumably he'll be able to work through Ben's jaw as well.
It's too bad the rumours of John Woo doing a TMNT movie aren't true [countingdown.com].
Re:Incidentally... (Score:1, Informative)
Go to apple's movie page where the plugin loads (or doesn't, if you use Linux, the OS Apple is scared shitless of) and view source. From there, find all the href akamai links that end in
Minor spoiler here (Score:3, Informative)
The story starts as he wakes up with this 2 years memory blank. He's told that he opted for a handful of trinkets as paycheck instead of the $$ just before undergoing the memory wipe. At first he's pretty pissed off against his former self. But he quickly realizes that some of these trinkets (wire, bus stub, poker chip...) prove incredibly useful.
It dawns on him that his former self had a master plan in order to (i) survive and (ii) (re)discover a truth worth far more than the $.
All in all, it's a pretty nice story. The unnerving feeling that he is remote controlled is mitigated by the fact that he is the remote controller. One of the good short stories by Dick. I hope Hollywood doesn't destroy the best ideas like Spielberg did in Minority Report.
Some more details from the book (no spoilers) (Score:5, Informative)
The book concentrates on the individual's loss of power in the face of the tension between omnipresent government and big business.
Our hero, Jennings, an electronics engineer signs a two year contract with Rethrick Industries - a catch being that all knowledge of his two years with them will be surgically removed on leaving. This is pretty much where the story starts.
On attempting to collect payment at the end of his mysterious contract he is presented instead with a bag of apparently "trinkets": bits of wire, tickets, a broken poker chip etc. He is told that he (before his memory was wiped) supplied the items to be given back instead of the money. He's obviously not pleased.
However as the story progresses these "trinkets" become far more valuable than money ever could...
And there I shall stop.
I enjoyed the story. I'm 3/4 of the way through "Beyond Lies The Wub" and at the end of almost every story I end up thinking "Ooh, XYZ really ripped off some of these ideas for this film or that book".
What amazes me about Dick is how stories written in the 50's haven't dated, either socially or (often) technologically.
In "Wub" there is a very interesting preface by Dick himself and some extra context set in a posthumous introduction by Roger Zelanzy a friend of his.
If you haven't read any of his stuff before (I hadn't) then this collection is a great place to start.