John Carpenters The Thing is a brilliant remake of Howard Hawks The Thing. A fistful of dollars is a meaningful re-imagining of Yojimbo. I’d even argue The Departed is a meaningful companion to Infernal Affairs. Personally I loved the new season of Twin Peaks as well 
Al Pacino’s Insomnia is one of the better Nolan flicks.
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This was a big year for me in this regard, not only for blade runner, but for twin peaks as well. I watched the original twin peaks in 2010 and realised that it encompasses just about everything I love. I tried very hard to keep my expectations in check for it. Luckily, I’ll say that the new twin peaks was incredible and blew me away. 2049 did this to a similar extent too.
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I am really looking forward to Mute. As a European, I really enjoy cyberpunk fiction set here, especially how our north\east European aesthetic compares to the normally Japanese inspired American cyberpunk.
All of Philip K Dick’s work helped me grow into the savvy critic (picky curmudgeon) I am now. I always felt like a lot of his writing was edited very lightly or not at all, and I liked that feeling.
K.W. Jeter’s first sequel to Blade Runner was awesome, as was Death Arms. Totally Worthy successor to PKD. I think the protagonist of BR 2049 may be named as a nod to PKD and / or Jeter.
Look, youse, this is me just oot of the IMAX from seein this, aight?
It’s The Good Shit Yall. Enthralling stuff. What a thing, yo. What a Thing.
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Fortunately the movie almost better than the Final Cut in a lot of ways, it’s excellent.
This article has me in my feelings.
I believe it is a good thing to risk ourselves emotionally over art.
As to media that’s helped me grow, I think one of the first was ABC’s Modern Family. The show was a family favorite; we started watching during the shows third season, and when it went on hiatus we binged the DVD collection in a matter of weeks, in unison. It was definitely the first time any of us consumed media in that way, and it opened up something new. I knew which episodes I loved, which were OK, and which I tolerated. And I was able to look back on the show to see things I hadn’t before. My old categories of “good” and “bad” weren’t enough to capture my thoughts anymore. I think starting with something that was really, really big, and pulling it apart and putting it back together again in my head, made me think critically. I don’t remember any of my takes from that time, and I’m sure they’d be very different now, but I definitely had them.
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Reviews and critiques including this one have helped me be a better thinker and media consumer.
Other recent writing about Blade Runner 2049 points out what’s become depressingly standard for media targeted at young white men: that other groups of people are used for dramatic effect only as backdrop to the white male leads, without letting them be full characters. Dramatization without representation if you will.
But then that would be a completely different movie…
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That’s a really good point! Do you have any other good examples of cyberpunk set in Europe? _Observer looks really cool and I aim to finish it before the end of the year, but apart from that and Mute I can’t think of anything else (Shadowrun Berlin felt incredible shallow and didn’t do a lot with its setting I felt).
The original is my favorite movie ever, but I was disappointed that this one didn’t overcome the exoticism of its 70s Euro-comic roots. It’s even down to the languages displayed throughout 2049, like they had a checklist of “huh make sure to have a weird to an English speaker looking language here.”
It’s arguably cyberpunk (it’s near future sci-fi at any rate), but Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World is a pretty good film if you like sprawling aimless road trip type movies and it does feature a sequence in Europe.
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I’d like to write a long explanation as to why but I’m kinda scatterbrained so I’ll just leave the piece in question and hopefully come back to it when I can - Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero from 2007. The tl;dr is it’s the first album from the (now actually a) group that I got to partake in the pre-release hype for - and I don’t know of any album with a marketing campaign like it, nor an album that’s tenth anniversary collides with a political landscape more hellish than the one it was attacking upon its release. It also just has a lot to unpack sonically, and as a marker in NIN’s career, my personal life, and so much I just love to talk about it. 
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Yeah, >observer_ is pretty cool, I’ve been making my way through that. If you are into books Ken Macleod’s Fall Revolution series is a pretty great Europe set cyberpunk world. I think The Last Night is also set in Europe but I’m not sure if I want to play that game because of the devs. Atomic Blonde whilest not being cyberpunk still pulls a lot from the genre.
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It seems like Reflektor gets a bad rep when compared to the AF’s first three records because they change it up and go in a different direction. The Suburbs will always be my favourite, I went travelling to South East Asia, and had that album on my crappy zune. It’s weird how that album about moving back to the suburbs and growing older and standing still took on a new life as I travelled around Thailand. It became the soundtrack of my experience. Even when I think back, I just hear the synths of the slowed down version of The Suburbs at the end of the album. Bangkok, Chiang Mai and the Gulf of Thailand just rolling by.
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There was certainly a noticeable thing about how white the future was, that doesn’t seem to chime with current demographic shifts, but then it seemed like most replicants are white so perhaps that is a design or PR decision on the part of sinister slave-manufacturing corporations? I mean demographically there should have been one or two white faces tops, and given that everything had a lot Asian writing on it there weren’t a lot of people who looked Asian that I noticed.
With that said, I don’t know how strong “this dystopia isn’t very progressive” is as a criticism, I mean, it is a dystopia? The films don’t really go into what the state looks like now, but the atmosphere across both doesn’t give a strong impression of a world where the progressives came out on top or indeed one where progressive ideals necessarily still exist. I would go so far as to say that neither of the Blade Runner films represents the future liberals want.
