Time This, Tomorrow

Confirmation today I’m to be in the audience of This Time Tomorrow, a BBC quiz pilot and blatant Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush clone. Audience members are selected at ‘random’ and quizzed. The sting is the prize is a holiday and you have to leave in the morning. This is the pilot, won’t be shown on TV (they say). Prizes are stated as holidays, but are in fact cash. No word on the actual amount, thousands were suggested by the BBC researcher calling possible contestants, this being the BBC (one suspects BBC3, but not certain) it’ll be £15 and custard cream.

This gaudy nonsense counterbalances, somewhat, a recent bereavement of someone I cared for greatly. I knew him for a couple of years and was a good man; intelligent, wise and compassionate. I cared for and respected him greatly and am sad to hear he has gone.

Recall the Replicants – 2070

For a while I’ve been trying to track down the 22 episodes of German/Canadian TV series Total Recall 2070, based – quite loosely – on the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, filmed as Total Recall, and the novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, of course Blade Runner.

Entire futuristic sets were built in Toronto, and quite reasonable 3D/effects were generated. As stated in another post, it was the creation of Art Monterastelli, who co-wrote the recent Rambo movie.

The pilot, Machine Dreams, is available in the US as a “movie”, however the only release of the series was in Japan, but is deleted. However, it is available on the Joost system, for everyone except Americans and Canadians (sorry Dave), for them it is (apparently) on Hula.

Anyway, one quick install of Joost (on University equipment) and I’m already watching episode 3. It’s not brilliant. It’s no Heroes or 4400, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all. There’s gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence; and cartel-based paranoia. While, in theory, Earth is ruled by a one-world government known as the Interplanetary Council, real power lies with the Consortium, the six multi-global companies that financed the colonization of Mars. Rekall does the computers (and brain implants), Minacon does the energy and mining, Tashimo-Pacific does transport (inc. “Johnny Cab”), Uber Braun do the rockets and robotics, Variable Dynamics do medical/bio-tech company and work on synthetic humans, Tillman Health are agriculture and chemicals, working on illegal cloning.

The format is (yet again) buddy-cop: one a hard-nosed detective; the other a beefy, slightly autistic android (androids are not illegal on earth, it’s not strict Blade Runner). More than anything the format reminds me of Alien Nation (the TV series more than the movie).

Worth Joosting – if you’re not in America!

Rambo Is Legend

I confess to having watched Rambo (IV) last night, on opening night. Couldn’t have been more fun. Years ago (mid 80s) I watched Rocky IV and Rambo II at a local cinema, with American childhood friends of mine. The cinema was packed and during the action people shouted a cheered (and during the Rocky showdown, stood on their seats screaming and waving their arms in the air).

Last night was similar. Packed cinema, and opening logos someone shouted “Gee, I’m SO excited”, to which the audience laughed and clapped. They clapped and cheered during some of the more extraordinary deaths and mutilations, and to Rambo’s classic line (which I feel free to spoil as it’s in the trailer): “you live for nothing, or die for something”.

It’s a brutal, brutish film; demonstrating US idiocy in terms of both military aggression and fundamentalist Christian zeal. On the other hand I’ve never seen so many people exploded in such a short length of time. Not only does it star Stallone, it’s directed by him and co-written by him (with Art Monterastelli, writer/producer of Total Recall 2070).

But it could have been so different. Consider the alternative ending to the first Rambo movie (unlike it’s successors, an anti-war movie) First Blood: