A Few Notes on Movies of the Near Future

BenderFan writes "The first review of the next Futurama DVD, The Beast With a Billion Backs (out in the US on June 24), has appeared online. And the reviewer liked it — a lot." (I hope it's as good as Bender's Big Score.) Read on for reader submissions on two other upcoming movies. The Day The Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves, but also John Cleese) is due out in December, and a movie version of Philip K. Dick's The Owl in Daylight is currently being drafted by Tony Grisoni; the interview linked below is appropriately surreal.

Etienne writes "Tony Grisoni is a British screenwriter who has co-written several Terry Gilliam's films (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tideland, Brothers Grimm and Lost in La Mancha).
He is currently writing the screenplay for 'The Owl in Daylight', based upon the book Dick was planning to write just before he died. The movie is produced by Electric Shepherd Productions, which is run by Anne and Laura Dick, PKD's daughters. Paul Giamatti is co-producing and will take the part of Philip K. Dick."

bowman9991 writes "Keanu Reeves' big budget remake of the 1951 science fiction classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' has all the right ingredients to be his biggest hit since 'The Matrix.' SFFMedia asks whether we are looking at another classic or a disastrous Hollywood star studded rehash? Now that the cold war anxieties from the original movie have been replaced with the threat of environmental catastrophe, will Keanu become some type of extraterrestrial Al Gore and ruin the movie?" (John Cleese plays Klaatu's giant 8-foot robotic pal called "Gort.")

Hey Hollywood

[bk_veggie]

Instead of doing remakes, such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, how about we take older properties, such as, I don't know, Neuromancer? Or maybe something newer like Cryptonomicon? And while you're at it, could you remotely stick to the source material, unlike that abomination you called I Am Legend? I think the only thing that the movie had in common with the book was the fact he was alone in the city.

Re:I hope it's significantly BETTER

[loshwomp]

Parent is right on the money. Bender's Big Score only had ghostly traces of what once made Futurama great. I'm hoping they hit their stride again with the subsequent TV movies...

Re:Hey Hollywood

[maxume]

The Cryptonomicon would never fit into a movie. It wouldn't make a very good miniseries either. It might work in a sort of 24 style format, but they aren't going to produce something like that as a one off, they want to be able to write more words and reuse the story next season.

I liked the book, but it wouldn't translate well, especially if you demand that the visual form stick to the source material.

Philip K. Dick Movies

[cblack]

Keep making them and I'll keep going to see them. I've actually added to my PKD short story collection to make sure I have the short stories any films are based on. I'm a huge PKD fan and I go to see them when they are in theatres in the hopes that they keep making films based on PKD's works. There is so much good material there.
I will say, however, that some of the short stories are not well-suited to a movie. "Next", based on The Golden Man SUCKED SO BAD IT HURT MY FEELINGS. Previous to seeing it I was wondering how they could make it a feature-length film. They did so by changing a whole lot, writing a new plot, and removing lots of the PKD themes. Ick.

Re:Philip K. Dick Movies

[morari]

Blade Runner was great, but left out every shred of thought (Mercerism, Mood Machines, radiation poisoning, social significance of real pets vs. synthetic ones, etc) in favor of film noir. Likewise, Total Recall was a decent action film, but didn't manage much more. Outside of those, the Minority Report was poorly done and riddled with plot holes, Paycheck just outright sucked, and so on.

The only film so far that has worked as an adaptation of PKD's work was A Scanner Darkly. One big problem with it was that they left out much of the overbearing paranoia and resulting melancholy in order to instead highlight stoner humor. Though I admit I would have preferred that the ending remained more nuanced, as opposed to the ever-so-convenient voiceover/recap that films seem to like to push on audiences to counter their short attention spans.

The rotoscoping could have possibly been used to better effect as well. It only really seemed to truly add to the atmosphere on a few occasions. Otherwise the style seemed surprisingly tame given the tone and content of the plot.

Re:wow

[spud603]

Other people liking or not liking it shouldn't diminish your enjoyment of it at all!

By and large I agree with your post, but any psychologist/sociologist will tell you that other peoples' opinions have a lot to do with enjoyment (in a really substantive way).

Re:Quality

[hedwards]

I was mostly happy because it was funny, considering how long it had been it could have been a colossal flop. If you watched the extra features, it took them a bit to figure out how to do some of the voices again, and there were some changes on the minor characters as well.

But, I'm reserving my judgment for when they get back to doing regular episodes rather than these movies, which will be a while.

Klaatu and Gort's Bogus Journey

[Chelloveck]

(John Cleese plays Klaatu's giant 8-foot robotic pal called "Gort.")

Where the fsck did you get that? Both the article and IMDB speculate that Cleese will play the scientist, Dr. Barnhardt. I've seen no mention anywhere of Cleese playing Gort. Cleese could make a good Barnhardt, if it weren't for the fact that everyone will see him as "that guy from Monty Python".

Of course, the whole thing looks like a train wreck in the making. Nothing good can come of Klaatu being played by Ted "Theodore" Logan.

I don't know...

[Ristol]

"Keanu Reeves was ill the day the Earth stood still..." just doesn't have a ring to it.

Re:wow

[howlingfrog]

It has nothing to do with the fact that the movie "played like 3 episodes"

It has everything to do with the fact that it played like (actually) 4 episodes. I mildly enjoyed BBS in movie format, but seeing the episodes it got split into on Comedy Central, they were all above average and the fourth was superb. Then I went back and watched the DVD again for comparison, and I'm pretty sure what diminished my appreciation for it was that it messes with the traditional narrative structure--it's a twelve-act story, four of which feel like first acts, four like second acts, and four like third acts. You pointed out that it feels less snappy, and that's why.

Playing games with people's unconscious expectations for structure like that can work if you do it carefully and have content-related reasons for it--Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, and Memento come to mind--but that's not the case with BBS. A continuous 88-minute movie is not the format it was designed for, and it shows. I'm going to try to alter my expectations when I watch the rest of the movies and think of them as if I'm watching four straight episodes on VHS with the titles, commercials, and credits edited out--because that's what they are.