For the Nashville folks, Blade Runner: The Final Cut will be playing at the Belcourt in January.

* * *

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Sat & Sun, Jan 4th & 5th @ Midnight

Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982, USA, 2hrs 18min, R.

Twenty-five years after the initial release of BLADE RUNNER, director Ridley Scott uses archival footage to re-create his original vision for the sci-fi classic. Based on a story by Philip K. Dick, the film is set in Los Angeles in 2019. Earth has become a polluted and miserable dystopia, and many people have fled to live "Off World" on other planets. This dreary vision of the future features replicants: lifelike robots built as slaves for human use. When a replicant escapes his owner, a "blade runner" is called in to hunt him down and kill him. Enter Harrison Ford as the retired blade runner Rick Deckard. He is pulled out of retirement to help catch four escaped replicants: Batty (Rutger Hauer), Leon (Brion James), Pris (Darryl Hannah), and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy.) Despite his distaste for the job, Deckard is soon hot on their heels, tracking them down one by one through the over-crowded, crumbling city streets. In the midst of his hunt, Deckard becomes involved with a beautiful replicant named Rachael (Sean Young). Rachel has fled her owner, and Deckard rightfully should kill her. However, the two fall in love, and after some startling revelations, they are both soon on the run from the very authorities that once employed Deckard.
This final cut is a bleaker, more cynical version of an already dark film, which might explain why the studio insisted on a softer, more optimistic ending when it was first released. While some superfans might take issue with some of the revelatory new twists, they will no doubt delight in the quality of the digital restoration. The special effects were already impressive for 1982, but these new touch-ups give them a look that appears just as sharp and imaginative as the sci-fi films of today.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Sat Jan 4 and Sun Jan 5, Midnight, Belcourt Nashville

This is the first one I sighted. Picture taken March 25th in SLC, UT, one block from the LDS temple.

USPS Jedi Master

The rumors are no more! Feast your eyes on what will soon be popping up at local United States Post Offices!

As reported here earlier, the USPS will be helping Star Wars celebrate its 30th anniversary. Stay tuned for more as we get it, right here at TheForce.net.

In the meantime, click away on these super cool R2-D2 wrapped mailboxes. I want one for the end of my driveway!

* * *

If this is not a hoax, this is way cool!

R2D2 Mailboxes

Verbage snatched from IMDB:

* * *

Just saw this on Film Four tonight (UK TV chanel)... very interesting, but 50 minutes isn't even near long enough if you've read Paul Sammon's excellent "Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner". Interviews with everybody involved except Harrison Ford and Sean Young of course, who hated each other's guts during the making of the film. We even see Philip K. Dick before he died - what a paranoid bloke he was! And even, for the first time ever, a look at the deleted scene where Deckard visits Holden in hospital. If you look you'll see the set for that scene was from Alien.

It's amazing visiting the buildings Ridley Scott used to make his future vision of Los Angeles. In the daytime they look NOTHING like Scott's sets, particularly the Bradbury Building in L.A., used for the final battle... when you see the before and after shots it really brings home what a genius of visual style Scott is.

Most shocking is that whilst all of the people have obviously aged in the last 20 years, Joe Turkel (Eldon Tyrell) hasn't aged a day! Hmmmm...

For anyone that hasn't read Paul Sammon's book, you'll be amazed at the problems encountered making this film, a true up-hill struggle. But Blade Runner still remains one of the best American movies of all time.

Ridley Scott admits this is one of his best films, and millions of cult fans worldwide agree. A true original...

On The Edge Of Blade Runner

Director Wong Kar-Wai's style reaches its fullest expression in his stunning film 2046. Picture period sets and intricate costuming, finely wrought atmospheres, languid shots, glamorous cigarette smoke, lamplight and allusions to film noir. 2046 is a meditation on memory, eroticism, love, loss, and longing which surpasses the director's beautiful, widely acclaimed IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) in terms of formal ambition and visual sumptuousness. With its intriguing, layered structure, the film follows the adventures of Chow Wo Man (Tony Leung), a womanizer who is writing a science fiction novel about a future year in which all memories are suspended. The film shuttles between the BLADE RUNNER-like world of Chow's futuristic novel (complete with androids and other metaphors of emotional disconnection) and late-'60s Hong Kong--where Chow writes from a hotel room, and engages in relationships with a series of beautiful, complex women. The film also journeys to Singapore and through the increasingly mysterious corridors of the protagonist's memory.

...

I really enjoyed this movie.

2046