[click here to print this entry]
By: Martyn Peddler
Date: 14th Nov 07
Medium: Performance
Drink: Dandy shandy
What:
Blade Runner - The Final Cut
Where:
The Astor Cinema presented by Popcorn Taxi
When:
Nov 15-18
Artists should learn to leave their work alone. Director's cut are often vanity projects or novelty acts: sometimes worrying their own work to death,like Richard Kelly's recut Donnie Darko, or sometimes just PC-gone-mad, like Spielberg replacing his guns with walkie-talkies in E.T. And it still hurts too much to talk about what George Lucas did to the 10-year-olds inside us all.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner doesn't require introduction. Skirting between art-film ambiguity and mainstream sci-fi, it helped define the look of the cinematic future. Its influence has leaked into popular culture in odd and innumerable ways, from Pop Will Eat Itself's "Wake Up! Time To Die" to the Voight-Kampff Test being posed to very confused San Francisco mayoral candidates.
Blade Runner already had a director's cut in 1992, excising the voiceover and the studio-forced happy ending. Now a five-disc ‘final' edition is being released. Every version, newly added scenes, a much sharper print, andhopefully no CGI muppets.
You can see it on the Astor's big screen for just four short days. For anyone who discovered Blade Runner on loved-to-fuzz video cassette, this is unmissable.