Renegade Reverse Engineering - John Woo Style

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."

awesome

[iamdrscience]

Philip K. Dick is awesome, but I've always kind of been on the fence about John Woo and Ben Affleck. I'll probably bow down to the hollywood Gods and go see it. However, I'll go hoping for the best and expecting the worst.

Sounds Like ...

[Honig the Apothecary]

after a quick memory wipe, finds trying to piece together the mystery of his past

This sounds like Memento [imdb.com]. Maybe instead of a polaroid and tattoos, they will use a pda or cell phone with acamera for him to remember what happened.Or not.

Although the Uma aspect is tantalizing. :-)

Honig

IMDB Movie Listing, ISFDB story listing

[Nova Express]

Here's the IMDB listing for the movie. [imdb.com]

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database [tamu.edu], the story originally came out in 1953. (It's one of the Dick stories I haven't read yet.) Dick always was waaaaay ahead of the curve. (Anyone else notice how dead-on the youth-culture extropilations of Time Out of Joint were?)

Maybe we can hope for John Woo to return to his previous form of Hard Boiled and The Killer.

Re:Looks like a good one

[lightcycle]

The thing I like about Philip K Dick is his ability to take _really_ far-fetched stories and still make all the pieces fit. Of course, this is mostly true for his stories in written form, the movies based on them mostly lack the depth found in his writing. OTOH, I have yet to see a PKD-based movie that is boring. I find Blade Runner to be by far the best, but the others (Total Recall, Screamers and Minority Report) are at least entertaining.

Re:IMDB Movie Listing, ISFDB story listing

[discogravy]

PKD was so paranoid and loony that no-one -- least of all himself -- though his stuff would be seen as anything but pulp fantasy. And now it's creepy how spot on he could be about some things.

Make A Choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Either the MPAA is evil and you are boycotting them, or give them free advertising to millions of readers on the front page of /. and shut the hell up. You can not have your cake and eat it too.

Re:Looks like a good one

[dtfinch]

I was about to say "It sounds nice at first, but what's the point of making a movie if half a viewers know it in detail before it's 20% complete? It doesn't seem to fit the open development model of 'start a cool project and let the customer base finish it.'", but then thought of something

One could, of course, produce software under a modified GPL that says that all media produced under it be free (as in speech), which would require that all imported media must have been free in the same respect. 3D models like people, cars, helicopters, building, office equipment, and such would be free to anyone who wanted to make open movies, greatly reducing the development costs to "film and plop in some premade special effects". You might occasionally see two movies with similar scenes, but as this grows, it will become less frequent.

a cursed writer

[pgjpgj]

PKD has been dead 21 years, doomed in life to being treated like a hack and in death to having his work mutilated by hacks. Hollywood has a knack for picking up only the most superficial details and missing the creepy paranoid subtleties that make the fiction so memorable. Of the half-dozen efforts to date, only "Screamers" (relatively obscure low-budget effort) and parts of "Blade Runner" are even modest approximations of the works upon which they are based. I have low expectations for "Paycheck": one of his earliest short stories, too long and clumsily plotted compared his masterpieces of the 60's and 70's. I fantasize about what a first-rate director could do with "Martian Time Slip", "Man in the High Castle", or especially "A Scanner Darkly". As long as crap star vehicles with the likes of bozos like Affleck continue to get greenlighted, fantasy it will remain.

Great!

[lightcycle]

Actually, that sounds like a cool idea. There is of course the machinima [machinima.com] genre, but it would be cool to hava a GNU/Movie tool or development environment rather than using game engines, which seem to be a little too limited to really make advanced movies. Does anyone know of any ongoing projects in this direction?

Re:Chasing Amy was top of his game?

[jayratch]

Yeah, and since it's all Matt Damon, then without Affleck his best was in "Bourne Identity"? I appreciate suspension of disbelief, but when a non-scifi movie asks me to abandon rather than suspend, I tend to wish I'd spent my $8.75 on... umm...

what else can you do that costs about the same, takes up a single evening, yet is equally painful?

come to think of it, IMHO Affleck and Damon are good as a team, just about worthless individually.

Re: Chasing Amy was top of his game?

[spectecjr]

Gigli has, to date, raked in an amazing $5,600,000. (It cost $54,000,000 to make, not including marketing).

Freddy Got Fingered, however, has grossed $14,249,005 to date, and cost $15,000,000 to make.

Let's hope that Gigli doesn't get close.

It's sad to think that for $15,000 (give or take), I can make a 35 minute short which will be much more entertaining than this (the script is ready, it's nearly completely cast, all we need is a location and financing). Yet I'm having trouble getting the money to do my short, while crap like this has no trouble getting cash.

Simon

Re:Looks like a good one

[1u3hr]

The real crime here is that yet another PKD story has been twisted beyond recognition
and in the article: "Written by Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report"

And where does the "reviewer" get off saying "written by" PKD? He's been dead almost 20 years. "Based very loosely on". If you're going to mention Dick, how about listing some books he actually DID write?

Re:Paycheck, the short story

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great. I am a big PKD fan (yas, I read all his short stories), and always said that if I had _one_ short story to adapat, it would be paycheck.

The premise is great, the guy beeing helped/fucked by himself. It could be a really great movie.

The two next best short story, IMHO, would be one which I forgot the title (Out In The Garden, maybe ?), in which a guy try to get his girlfriend back from another dimension by spreading blood in the forest. Unfortunately, it worked.

And "The Electric Ant". This could be a Matrix caliber film, only more intelligent. The premise ? A very highly respected guy discover that he is in fact a robot. He then start hacking himself to change his perception of the world. Awesome.

Of course, the best book, would be UBIK, but I don't think any current director can do the adaptation (maybe terry gilliams, but I am biased).

On the book side, "Eye in The Sky" could be quite a good horror movie, and not a very hard one to adapt.

I hope that they won't fuck up PayCheck...

Cheers,

--fred

INternational action star Chow Yun Fat!!

[spineboy]

He seems to have done quite well, with several US hits that I can think of (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Wires, etc.)

But you're right, once American producers get ahold of something, it goes thru the comittee process and get's vanillified/homogenized and made into visual wallpaper/mush. That's why you have to avoid the big name releases and see smaller films that have much more character/personality...

Re:Really?

[TaliesinWI]

Oh sure, I vaguely remember the interview he said it in. Something to the effect of "everyone will see Matrix whether or not Jet Li is in it, so I might as well contribute to my own projects. What would be better, seeing a movie that you were already going to see that has me in it, and that's it, or seeing a movie you were already going to see PLUS a movie with me in it?"

I mean, he wasn't arrogant about it or anything, but matter of fact. Let's face it, although it would have been cool to see Li as Seraph, would people who weren't going to see the movie suddenly wanted to see it because Li was in it? Li realizes that and figures that if a movie's going to be a draw because he's in it it may as well be a project that isn't already highly anticipated.

Re:Note on Li

[kamapuaa]

I'd be the last to argue that Jet Li's choosing his American roles wisely (although even in HK, while he was in some definite classics, the majority of his movies were crap)

However, the role of Seraph was fucking embarassing, a real Charlie Chan character. Seraph's good at Kung-Fu, he talks like a fortune-cookie, he hangs around in traditional clothes, and that's about it. The crowd where I saw the movie was maybe 50% Chinese, and the movie got roundly hissed at that point...

I remember reading, Jet Li was approached, and wasn't happy with the role, so he asked for something like $9 million, which was turned down. Supposedly, he didn't want the role if he was just going to be a small side-character. Michelle Yeoh went through the same negotiations, with the same results.

I think we're avoiding the deeper issue, that "Matrix Reloaded" was a sorry movie.