Blade Runner

Last night I was watching the 1982 movie Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. The film is set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, where most of the human race have moved away to "Off-World" colonies, where they are given their own android slave (known as "replicants"). The most advanced of these replicants is the "Nexus-6" model which are virtually identical to humans aside from their lack of emotions, however it is believed that in time they would develop their own emotional responses, and to safeguard against this each replicant is given a built-in lifespan of only four years. Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is a "blade runner", a cop who specialises in killing ("retiring") escaped replicants, and is given the job of tracking down a group of escaped Nexus-6 replicants, led by the charismatic but violent Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), but soon finds himself having increasing doubts about who is human and who isn't. The film is one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made, with it's spectacular sets and production design virtually transforming the look of science-fiction throughout for the past thirty years. The film exists in about seven different versions. The one that I saw was the 2007 "Final Cut".

I was also reading a few of the Philip K. Dick short stories. The ones I read were "The Father-Thing" (about a boy who discovers that his father has been replaced by a vicious alien duplicate), "Foster, You're Dead!" (in which a boy worries about his family's refusal to buy a nuclear fallout shelter - which was a really big issue in the 1950s when the story was written) and "Human Is" (in which a cruel and selfish husband returns home from a trip to space as an alien duplicate, and his wife decides she prefers the alien).

It was the start of another week at work and it went fairly quietly as usual. The Film Festival starts next week so that should be a pretty busy time.

I've been listening to a radio show recently called My Teenage Diary in which comedians select entries from their teenage diaries. It is pretty interesting. As I wrote a few days ago, I read my old diaries a lot and sometimes they are really interesting. Although I was really boring as a teenager when the most exciting thing that happened was watching episodes of The Twilight Zone and Quantum Leap. I'm not any more interesting today, of course. I never really went wild and did crazy things when I was young, and I always regret that. I always think I missed out.