the case for a new cp movie

[Kevin Calder]

I'd say that right now we have a decent shot of getting a CP movie.

Youth fashion is currently heavily influenced by borrowed nostalgia for the 80s. My partner, whose job it is to source vintage clothes so that they can be sold to hipsters, recently suggested to me that since they came back so hard it is now inconceivable that denim jackets could ever go out of fashion again.

There is some support in credible popular music at the moment also. Take "brokendate" by com truise (a vintage usenet moniker if ever I saw one).

If this isn't the score to some yet unmade cinematic exploitation of some fever dream version of our lost future then I don't know what is.

The video to that song is pretty CPish also - but its also artless so I didn't link to the videoed version.

Additionally the recent history of sci-fi movies shows that to the extent that there is a desire to make sci-fi movies, there is a desire to make them darker and more searching.


All we need is for Nicolas Winding Refn to make a movie that is essentially a brooding, wistful love-letter to said 80s feverdream, possibly starring Ryan Gosling - portraying an existentially becalmed loner who finds himself somewhat down on his luck and gets into trouble by selling his illicit skills to the wrong shadowy figures ;)

[cykros]

Post by Kevin Calder
I'd say that right now we have a decent shot of getting a CP movie.
Youth fashion is currently heavily influenced by borrowed nostalgia for the 80s. My partner, whose job it is to source vintage clothes so that they can be sold to hipsters, recently suggested to me that since they came back so hard it is now inconceivable that denim jackets could ever go out of fashion again.
There is some support in credible popular music at the moment also. Take "brokendate" by com truise (a vintage usenet moniker if ever I saw one).
http://youtu.be/WeBwHzKStck
If this isn't the score to some yet unmade cinematic exploitation of some fever dream version of our lost future then I don't know what is.
The video to that song is pretty CPish also - but its also artless so I didn't link to the videoed version.
Additionally the recent history of sci-fi movies shows that to the extent that there is a desire to make sci-fi movies, there is a desire to make them darker and more searching.
All we need is for Nicolas Winding Refn to make a movie that is essentially a brooding, wistful love-letter to said 80s feverdream, possibly starring Ryan Gosling - portraying an existentially becalmed loner who finds himself somewhat down on his luck and gets into trouble by selling his illicit skills to the wrong shadowy figures ;)

Well, while I don't suggest getting your hopes up due to the history of
this film possibility, there is a project to make a Neuromancer movie
underway, with a fairly decent sized budget. The number of difficulties
in adapting it to the screen make me a bit dubious, along with the prior
failed attempts, and I'm not so sure the finished product will be as
good as we'd all demand it to be, but, we may at least get a movie to
complain about the poor film adaptation of, and the masses may at least
get a renewed interest in cyberpunk out of it...

Anyway, there's some information about it on the wikipedia page for
Neuromancer... Here's a link about it suggesting it'd air in early 2012
(woops...)
http://www.totalfilm.com/news/vincenzo-natali-s-neuromancer-to-film-in-early-2012
.

And in the meantime, I'm really going to have to get used to cp being
used to abbreviate "cyberpunk", as my initial response was to assume
this thread was just pedophilia spam...

cykros

[Kevin Calder]

Post by cykros

Post by Kevin Calder
I'd say that right now we have a decent shot of getting a CP movie.

Well, while I don't suggest getting your hopes up due to the history of
this film possibility, there is a project to make a Neuromancer movie
underway, with a fairly decent sized budget. The number of difficulties
in adapting it to the screen make me a bit dubious (...)

Wow, i didn't realise something was in the works again. From what what
slim info i can find on it the project doesn't sound entirely misguided.

The main problem I see with making a NM film now is resisting the urge to
"update" it. For me its essential that the director swallows NM's peculiar
future-fantasy whole, and avoids the urge to rethink stuff that has come to
seem implausible or perverse i.e. how useful would a navigable 3d
representation of network nodes actually be, or when exactly is hacking
going to become about battling ICE rather than plain old social
engineering?

Some kind of twitter+mirrorshades hybrid movie would be my worst case
scenario.

I just want some fully realised future 80s, with all the existentially
unmoored, visually gorgeous, morally ambiguous bleakness that that implies!
I was sort of joking about Drive, but also sort of not. It seems like a
decent model for an NM movie in particular.

Post by cykros
And in the meantime, I'm really going to have to get used to cp being
used to abbreviate "cyberpunk", as my initial response was to assume
this thread was just pedophilia spam...

Hah! I never noticed that. "cyberpunk" started to seem like a dirty word
in the late 90s and on and i started typing cp instead. Maybe its been
long enough now that we can rehabilitate the term!

[Kevin Calder]

Also i do wonder if we are getting to a point now where some of the central
concerns that inform cp are getting a little hard for folk to identify with
given how comfortable we have become with some forms of virtuality (and so
quickly too!) - and that this might influence the direction an adaptation
like the NM movie might take, for the worse.

One thing the probably non alt.cpers working on the NM movie (or some other
cp adaption) might find hard to see is that CP was never really interesting
as a fable warning us about the direction we were headed in, or even as
plain old speculative futurism - and a potential cp movie doesn't need to
try to be those things - and in fact will probably turn out pretty twee and
meh if it does.

Ive never really settled on what it is that i find exciting in cp but it
could be something like the way it explores the human capacity for
sacrifice and survival, in the face of universe committed to disinterested
absurdity. When things get brutal people get transformed by their own
tenacious inclination to survival in ways that make us uncomfortable but
which we also admire.

Cyberpunk is a meaningless story about the application of brutality to
humanity and the disturbing and thrilling ways in which some people are
transformed in order to thrive.

[Kevin Calder]

Also I guess the form of the brutality is hard to get right.

Cp's dystopias are certainly violent but where it gets interesting is where
the brutality manifests in other ways. Like the way that facebook is
brutal for instance, except x 9000 because in a cp dystopia it is usually
very hard to function without constantly transacting with vaguely hostile
facebook like entitiies due to the proliferation of interconnectivity
(which has very nearly already happened!).