I WANT ROOM SERVICE!
We just watched Johnny Mnemonic.
No, seriously, I hadn't seen it before. I know, I know, but let's face it, it would have been wasted on me in 1995. I was fiften and too busy seeing Braveheart and Batman Forever a half-dozen times, I barely knew what cyberpunk was and my musical taste was nowhere near ready for that sort of onslaught by Stabbing Westward. Later on, I'd actually read some Gibson, and much as I'm fond of Dina Meyer, I couldn't face the concept of her as Molly (now, I discover, they actually called the character "Jane", which is sort of laudable). But in the face of rampant Cowboy Bebop speculation, we finally got around to it (and, may I add, there's something very right about pirating William Gibson-based movies off the internet...).
Strangely enough, I think that movie contains some really good work from Keanu. I mean, the first scene is fucking WOEFUL, but every time he gets twitchier he cranks it up a notch, and by the time he's ranting about club sandwiches and ten-thousand-dollar hookers, he is working SOLID GOLD. And then, he pitches a hissy-fit about a dolphin, and it's so brilliant I think I would have rewatched it eight times if the Male hadn't wrestled the remote off me. But the point is: yeah, he can emote. He can emote just fine.
Plus, the obvious Constantine similarities - the suit and the matching shadows under his eyes, not to mention the chair ("How long since you surfed?") - made me all nostalgic and covetous.
But I think maybe I should have seen it in 1995. Before fifteen years worth of advances in special effects made it look clunky and obvious. Before advances in fight training and staging made Molly Jane look ridiculous. Before the costumery got dated to hell and back. And before audiences and the stories that were told them got so much more complicated and "smarter" and made it feel hackneyed and weak.
So it's nothing like the original story and it's downright laughable in places, but it has brain and quirks, and I think it's actually not that bad. Plus it has a guy bitch-slapping a machine, Keanu getting all cyber-crane-technique in virtual-reality, Hank Rollins ranting about mindless media culture, and fucking awesome mono-molecular thumb effects. No SERIOUSLY, all the improvements they've made since then and that is still one of the most brilliant things I have ever seen. So it's not strictly accurate to the concept. SO WHAT? It's a gleaming red whiplash of pure fucking genius.
*cough*
I'm also kind of impressed that, even fifteen years after the fact, the amount of storage he has in his head hasn't been completely blown out of the water by technology advances. By actually 2021, of course, it will have been, but that's some tenacity.
No, seriously, I hadn't seen it before. I know, I know, but let's face it, it would have been wasted on me in 1995. I was fiften and too busy seeing Braveheart and Batman Forever a half-dozen times, I barely knew what cyberpunk was and my musical taste was nowhere near ready for that sort of onslaught by Stabbing Westward. Later on, I'd actually read some Gibson, and much as I'm fond of Dina Meyer, I couldn't face the concept of her as Molly (now, I discover, they actually called the character "Jane", which is sort of laudable). But in the face of rampant Cowboy Bebop speculation, we finally got around to it (and, may I add, there's something very right about pirating William Gibson-based movies off the internet...).
Strangely enough, I think that movie contains some really good work from Keanu. I mean, the first scene is fucking WOEFUL, but every time he gets twitchier he cranks it up a notch, and by the time he's ranting about club sandwiches and ten-thousand-dollar hookers, he is working SOLID GOLD. And then, he pitches a hissy-fit about a dolphin, and it's so brilliant I think I would have rewatched it eight times if the Male hadn't wrestled the remote off me. But the point is: yeah, he can emote. He can emote just fine.
Plus, the obvious Constantine similarities - the suit and the matching shadows under his eyes, not to mention the chair ("How long since you surfed?") - made me all nostalgic and covetous.
But I think maybe I should have seen it in 1995. Before fifteen years worth of advances in special effects made it look clunky and obvious. Before advances in fight training and staging made Molly Jane look ridiculous. Before the costumery got dated to hell and back. And before audiences and the stories that were told them got so much more complicated and "smarter" and made it feel hackneyed and weak.
So it's nothing like the original story and it's downright laughable in places, but it has brain and quirks, and I think it's actually not that bad. Plus it has a guy bitch-slapping a machine, Keanu getting all cyber-crane-technique in virtual-reality, Hank Rollins ranting about mindless media culture, and fucking awesome mono-molecular thumb effects. No SERIOUSLY, all the improvements they've made since then and that is still one of the most brilliant things I have ever seen. So it's not strictly accurate to the concept. SO WHAT? It's a gleaming red whiplash of pure fucking genius.
*cough*
I'm also kind of impressed that, even fifteen years after the fact, the amount of storage he has in his head hasn't been completely blown out of the water by technology advances. By actually 2021, of course, it will have been, but that's some tenacity.