Where are my flying cars, dammit?
Warm enough to head outside today and take in a movie or two and go grocery shopping. Anyway, I went and saw Paycheck, which was better than I expected - the joke Kate and I had been making when seeing the previews was along the lines of "Why are Uma Thurman and Aaron Eckhart in Paycheck?"/"To earn one, baby, and that's all!" I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, though - yes, there were some extremely stoopid plot points in it, but I have a certain affection for movies that can take obvious contrivances and make a virtue out of it. Serendipity, for instance, is one of my favorite romantic comedies, just because it takes the idea that the genre is built on co-incidence and brings it front and center, rather than trying to make the exercise "believable". Movies contain artifice. Deal with it.

One thing that bugged me, though, was the way it was obviously set in the future - the memory-wipe technology basically requires that - but it sure looks a whole lot like the present. I mean, come on, BMW obviously paid a decent sum for product placement - would it have killed them to whip out some nifty-looking concept cars? Everything involved in the car chase was so twentieth-century it was laughable. It was especially annoying because the premise of this movie is basically "Minority Report Lite", and Spielberg's movie had all kinds of nifty futuristic things in it; they spent a good chunk of the film's budget on set design, talking to think tank people about what life would be like 50 years down the road.

Of course, another possibility is that mind-wiping like that is something commonly known in certain circles, but not discussed outside of them and just commonly passed off as something people would consider nuts or science-fiction... Like reading out the contents of a living human brain and recording it onto another. Is this something that's widespread, but not known outside certain circles? Kind of an open secret, not worth protecting, because by the time people believe some guy/girl writing in a weblog, it'll be too entrenched to do anything about. That would certainly explain why I'm not chased around by people with laser pistols despite my constant blabbing about a fairly advanced, apparently secret technology.

-Marti
- posted 10:14 PM - - (archive use only)