Well now I'm quite motivated to have a #scificlub on this. What say people?
It may not be for you. My wife is not a fan, despite having gone as Pris for halloween one year. The tricky part is the movie does gain from having voiceover, but the voiceover we ended up with was the one Harrison Ford did terribly on purpose in order to buy time while the latest producer-in-charge spun out and got fired (the gambit failed). To really appreciate it you have to watch two or three different versions and that gets tiresome if you aren't a die hard fan.
I feel like it's such a cultural cornerstone / Patient Zero that it deserves me at least giving it a try sometime. What other redeeming qualities does it have? I honestly don't know. I can probably tolerate Grumpy Ford. Whenever the story and characters matter in a movie, I usually turn on the closed captions just to make sure I don't miss stuff. Watching films as ESL isn't as easy as might seem. Sidenote about that: House of Cards is an example of a mix / line delivery that is perfect for ESL. The sentences and character names that mattered were always clearly enunciated without much background noise. Less important lines (e.g. policy debates) could be rambly or have people talking in the background, but the parts that matter always got emphasized. Even my parents could understand most of it without subtitles.
British version or Netflix version? I gave the first season of the Netflix version a try; David Fincher just wears me out because he hates people so much. I think it's difficult to separate Blade Runner from its cultural milieu. It did not do well at the box office, yet in backwater New Mexico there were TV ads celebrating trivia prizes for people who went to see it five, ten, twenty times. It was a Syd Mead future, an Enki Bilal future, not a Ralph McQuarrie future and since then, the tide has turned. Realistically speaking, the Replicants born in an impossible future back in 1982 are alive now. It's also more of a gestalt work than a lot of films. You can watch Chinatown for the dialogue and plot. You can watch Star Wars for the SFX and one-liners. So much of Blade Runner is non-diagetic, though - not just the audio, but a lot of the visuals. It's halfway to being a Peter Greenaway film. I think you have to have lived through the Cold War to really grok Gibson's Neuromancer. And I think you had to have seen the Sparkly '70s collapse into the Dirty '80s to truly appreciate Blade Runner. Unfortunately, lots of critics and cultural writers were right there with it so that's the only perspective you get. Alien was, in many ways, a parable for the coal closures in '70s UK. It's still a hell of a horror film but... I mean, you lose a lot of the impact of Wizard of Oz if you don't know who William Jennings Bryan was. Blade Runner was too busy fleeing its own failure to really be the masterpiece it could have been, and without really understanding where it comes from, it becomes just another overrated sci fi film.
CS-80s are like something alive because they've got layers and layers and layers of circuitboards in a tightly-enclosed space and they take about 20min to warm up. If you move them, you may have minutely bumped some of those circuitboards and will need to retune the whole thing. Taking one on tour was like taking a harpsichord on tour - the CS-80 needed its own tech. I got to play Stevie Wonder's at NAMM one year and it has a lot more in common, viscerally, with an organ than it does with a synth. Shown here is a CS-70m, basically 1/8th of a CS-80 and much more readily available on the market. I've seen a CS-80 for sale exactly twice - I almost bought one off of cEvin kEy of Skinny Puppy back in the late '90s for $800 but in the end, couldn't justify putting that much on a credit card as a student. The choice haunts me to this day. The other time was when I stumbled across the old auction pages blowing out Frank Zappa's gear... two years after the fact. he had two of them for $400. When they've got Vangelis talking about playing, it's worth noting that he's mostly diddling around on a PPG Wave, which was pretty much the world's first commercially available digital synth... so effectively the opposite of the CS-80. Finally, the recordings Vangelis used to score Blade Runner were tied up in litigation for more than ten years. If you wanted to listen to the Blade Runner Soundtrack, you got to hear an instrumentation by the "New American Orchestra." The first time we heard Legit Vangelis was prolly '92. The CD was six months out but the music store in Santa Fe had an advance copy. I bought it immediately. Probably the first thing I ever prepaid. I used to tune club sound systems with this track. A proper system will shake the ashtrays off the counters. We drove to Dallas to see the Director's Cut. Twelve hours each way.
I had a visceral, cringing reaction to this. Ugghhhhh. Worse than Harps! It blows my mind that people like Mozart needed to bring their own keyboard places for performances - gotta hire a few dudes, have them negotiate it down some stairwells and carry it out through an Austrian winter evening so you can go play at some rich schmuck's party. On the plus side at least the legs were a separate feature and you could just follow behind the harpsichord dudes, carrying your fold-up fortepiano legs. And your music. And also probably everyone elses' music because you just finished writing the piece.Taking one on tour was like taking a harpsichord on tour
We had a day at the club once where we had World Party (and two openers) in the afternoon and Fish (from Marillion - with two openers) in the evening. World Party insisted on an 8' grand. For one song. So we had to get that fucker up on stage, tuned, and mic'd for one fucking song, then get it down and out the door before we could load in a fuckin' 28-input band. And two openers. In the world, there are dilettantes. It was super-gratifying to see that half-empty room and it's never gratifying to see a half-empty room.
Always enjoy Nerdwriter's stuff. I've mentioned it elsewhere on Hubski (more than once), but there's been a great resurgence in a kind of neo-80's scifi music in the last few years. This YouTube channel is a great place to start.