Neuromancer enters preproduction

You are indeed giving me shit.

Oh now it’s on.

You said:

If that isn’t saying cyberspace is language, then what is? If this is shit, then it’s your shit.

And what the fuck is this supposed to mean?

What in God’s name does Malthus have to do with it? I mean, I’m sure you have some answer, but it will make no sense. Just like this makes no sense:

Are you really saying Google search queries are fate incarnate?

Not shit as shit, but shit as in nothing. You add nothing except footnotes. If this kind of patter is what it takes to have you actually engage in a discussion instead of just passive-aggressively telling me that you are familiar with the subject, I’m fairly happy with how this turned out.

There is no contradiction. I have no idea why you’re bringing this up.

It’s simple enough: moral restraint is bred out of an understanding of our coexistence with our environment (I’m speaking from the perspective of virtue ethics here, which I’ll be happy to debate in another thread if you have a particular problem with it), but if innovation and the creation of new human-interfacing technologies become an end in themselves (an ideology if you will) they increasingly subsume such a perspective in favor of short sighted internal order. I think this conflict is prevalent in a lot of Gibsons work.

I’m saying that the low-level tailoring of content to individual consumers presumes an idea about what you really want that becomes insular, cheap, and self-fulfilling.

I’m fine with explaining my posts, but if “what the fuck does this mean/this shit is meaningless” is going to be your angle I’m afraid this might be short.

So this is what it looks like when someone disappears up their own navel.

OK, so you’re terse and cryptic, but you do eventually make sense. Looks like I gave you too little credit. I certainly agree that Gibson is a technological skeptic at heart, viz. his use of typewriters (at least as of his Neuromancer-writing days), so your “Malthusian” connection is plausible in that regard.

Your language was a bit more tightly encoded than you really wanted, if your goal was to be properly understood. Hence you reminded me of early-nineties academic takes on cyberspace, and hence my reference to the Chip Morningstar deconstructionism paper, which is all about unpacking meaning.

Back on topic, and de-snarking, I think Natali is about the best director I could imagine for Neuromancer, insofar as he is clearly deeply concerned with issues of transformation through technology and the torment of excessively rapid change, all of which is at the heart of Neuromancer.

I wouldn’t count on this actually happening just yet. If you read the link, it’s just Natali announcing at Cannes that he’s secured a distribution deal for “South Korea and Thailand, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, CIS, Poland, and the Middle East”. In other words, he’s still trying to drum up support for something that seems, at this point, about on par with a chintzy straight-to-DVD release with, say, Adrian Paul or Lorenzo Lamas in the lead role. We’ll see what sort of cast and financing he can get before he expects to start shooting next year.

But if it does happen, I just hope cyberspace in this movie will be as cool as it was in Gamer:

-Tom

I like Gamer a LOT.

I have never seen Gamer. Is that an actual shot from the movie? I might have to see Gamer.

Looks like I need to see Gamer.

The weird thing about the ‘dead channel’ line is that he’s actually talking about a sort of vibrating luminous gray colour - not static. So it’s at least two generations behind.

Apart from that, and the obvious ‘hot RAM’ thing, it’s aged pretty well. Though it’s got the problem of everything else having stolen its shtick.

Let me put it this way, Matt: Near the end of Gamer, that dude who plays Dexter on Dexter does a full-on song-and-dance number… and I still didn’t like it.

It wasn’t a “good” movie, but there were some pretty awesome bits, like the part Tom posted the screencap from.

A low budget creative Neuromancer shot in modern urban SE Asia would probably be 100x better than if it went through Hollywood.

I have never seen what you’re describing. Every TV set I’ve used in my entire life has dealt with dead channels either by just displaying static, or by detecting the lack of signal and switching to a solid blue or black image.

Maybe it’s a PAL thing.

I don’t have my copy handy - did we put that on the back or something? I dimly recall it allegedly was “soon to be a major motion picture”, but my understanding at the time was that Timothy Leary was just angling for a movie deal.

Talking about Gamer, here’s Steven Shaviros infamous analysis. Some of you might get a kick out of it.

Yeah, although I don’t have the box handy either, it was either on the box itself or on a sticker.

Matt, I can’t in good conscience let anyone watch Gamer without warning them that even I couldn’t make it all the way through. It just felt crass, snide, and tacky, which isn’t surprising considering it’s the guys who did Crank. Which I liked. But I gave up on Gamer about two-thirds of the way through.

I agree 110%. You know what movie it reminds me of when you put it like that? Push. That movie looked way better than you’d guess from the budget, mostly due to the location. Another great example of a sci-fi movie that used real world locations instead of a big budget is Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46.

Which actually raises another concern about a Vincent Natali Neuromancer. Cube and Splice were very “small” shoots, on contained locations with tiny casts. Neuromancer is a much more wide-ranging story. It’s like having a stage director do Chinatown. I’m not saying Natali couldn’t do it, just that it’s probably going to take a whole new process for him.

-Tom

I am now convinced that your presence in this thread will add nothing to my enjoyment of a Neuromancer film.

Please grace another thread with your brilliance.

The real question is whether Devo will be doing the soundtrack.