Wednesday

In my post about films with bad titles last week I forgot to mention the upcoming Next. There is a large poster for this movie underneath the bridge at Waterloo. Nothing about this film sounds or looks good (except that Nicolas Cage is in it). What you will discover, however, is that it's adapted from the book by Philip K. Dick, called The Golden Man. Does this then make it worth watching? Perhaps. Philip K. Dick's work has been adapted to the big screen about 12 times - none of which he ever got to see, dying as he did just before the premiere of Blade Runner. He was never truly successful in his lifetime, but modern cinema has become quite fond of him. In many ways I think this is because of The Matrix, even though he himself is the source of a lot of its ideas. Most of his books are about reality, and that reality collapsing. The problem has been for a while over his titles. Blade Runner was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Total Recall was We Can Remember it for you Wholesale. The change is debatable. But Next is definitely worse. Hollywood likes big, easily understood in a sentence, concepts, and that's what Philip K. Dick gives them. The greatest adaptations of his work, however, Minority Report and Blade Runner, have paid attention to the subtleties of his ideas.

In a related issue, tomorrow I'm going to talk about the terrible film Equilibrium.