FC: Wired mag. on Steven Spielberg's forthcoming "Minority Report"

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 09:59:40 PDT

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    Previous Politech message:
    
    "More on 'Minority Report' photos and Philip K. Dick novella"
    http://www.politechbot.com/p-02263.html
    
    Politech irregular Wayne Madsen's stealth photos of Minority Report's set:
    http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/minority-report-filming-june01.html
    
    ---
    
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html
    
       Spielberg in the Twilight Zone
       
       Adorable aliens and menacing dinos made him the biggest science
       fiction director of all time. With Minority Report he's finally
       turning to the dark side.
       
       By Lisa Kennedy
                                                                             
       Steven Spielberg, as even he will tell you, makes two kinds of movies.
       There are his films that play with the future, and there are those
       that star the past. On a warm afternoon in Pasadena, he's shuttling
       between the two - he's taking a break from shooting Catch Me If You
       Can, set in the mid-1960s, to talk about Minority Report, which opens
       June 21.
       
       Based on a short story by science fiction's tender, dystopian ironist
       Philip K. Dick, Report unfurls in a near future where murderers are
       caught before they do the deed. This breakthrough in crime fighting is
       powered by the revelations of psychically gifted humans called
       precogs. When the chief of the precrime unit is fingered as a future
       killer himself, he runs. For Spielberg, the film was an opportunity to
       create "a future that is not too distant, yet with the kind of
       technologies we can only dream about." Sitting at a picnic table,
       dressed in the directorial uniform - jeans, sweater, baseball cap -
       Spielberg mixes measured insights about technology with a cantering
       enthusiasm for his first noir.
       
       There is, however, anxiety wafting around the movie. Minority Report
       is pure Dick, rife with governmental malice and bodies of flesh wired
       into machines. So it's no surprise that Dick's fans are paranoid; it's
       practically a requirement. But the hand-wringing over Minority Report
       goes beyond the usual page-to-screen fretting. This is a
       Spielberg-specific worry. He can't do irony. He doesn't do darkness.
       Or when he does, he compulsively rescues the bleak truth with a bolt
       of hopefulness, with a touch of E.T.'s illuminated finger. He did that
       with the endings to Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. He did
       that to A.I., which failed because he grafted a "Spielbergian"
       conclusion onto Stanley Kubrick's somber proceedings. Or so the
       argument goes.
    
       [...]
    
    
    
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