http://www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/2003_0509_unk.htm

It's my favorite scene from the whole movie. I think.

oh, and this. this is one of those rare critics that actually watch movies.
http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/johnny-mnemonic-robert-longo-1995/

Searing in its intensity, full of Shakespearean grandeur, Reeves’s wonderful performance pushes a character to the limit, and beyond, in order to define the human condition. Partly to make bearable its tremendous agony, moreover, Reeves invests his role with sharp, mordant wit. (In this and many other ways the amazingly gifted Canadian reminds one of Olivier.) What Reeves will not do, though, is open his acting to rhetoric by tomcruising about in it; he refuses to make Johnny selfish merely as set-up for some glib shift in character. Rather, Johnny’s is a terrible, painful growth (a rebirth really, where parent and offspring are gruelingly one), which Reeves charts and (see below) even delightfully interpolates, in order to complete, where the script runs shy of a necessary transition.

(much more in the actual link)

I also think Johnny Mnemonic, with its flaws, is a very much more effective film than the bloated and unrecognizable Blade Runner with Harrison Ford - a movie that i still find pretty much unwatchable. Longo's and Keanu's understanding of and respect for William Gibson makes such a difference - glaringly unlike Ridley Scott's mangling of what was once a Philip K. Dick story.

the only faithful adaptation of PKD ever made for the screen is... guess which? ;)
Linklater's Scanner Darkly.

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the only faithful adaptation of PKD ever made for the screen is... guess which? ;)
Linklater's Scanner Darkly.

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Yup! Even I knew that and there is much PKD I have to read.

The name of PKD's story that was the basis of Blade Runner has to be one of my top favorite book titles ever. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"

edit to add: Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite KR movies as well. :)

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oh, and this. this is one of those rare critics that actually watch movies.

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Reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday about 47 Ronin. ;)

His experience with films also includes penning the box-office flop Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves with a military-grade haircut as a courier who transports data in his head. The film was a critical disaster and Gibson told me why: "It was made in a way that would be completely impossible now. The director [Robert Longo] and I began by trying to raise a million dollars to make a black-and-white short, and no one would give us the money. One of Robert Longo's biggest collectors happened to be a Hollywood big shot, and he turned around and said, 'No one is going to give you a million dollars—you have to ask for ten!' So he did, and he got it. It went rolling on from there. It was about five years from conception to release, and it was all wonderfully peculiar."

But why was it a flop? Wasn't he annoyed? "I was really fond of the film that I wrote and that Robert shot, but that wasn't the film that Sony Image Works released. It's a really extreme example of not being the director's cut. It was written to be comic in its own way, and be a commentary on sci-fi films and how they are made. Keanu never played any of it straight because we didn't want him to."

"It was torturous. We tried to make the best move we could. It was really hard. I talked to William recently. William and I had post-traumatic stress from that movie. I said y'know what, I'm going to turn it black and white and for the 25th anniversary and re-release it on the web. Actually, right now we're in the process of trying to figure out how to do it, the 45-minute version of it without Dolph."

... if only.
then again, one can hope.

"181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint"
- Maggie Nelson
Jul. 3 2016
#Maggie Nelson #quotes
4 notes

Pharmakon, Pharmakom.

I'm always happy to see a Keanu Reeves' movie for the first time, it feels like getting a gift and you get to unwrap it, lol if that makes any sense.

https://www.screenslate.com/articles/room-service-redeemed-robert-longo-revisits-johnny-mnemonic