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. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign this pro-therapeutic cloning petition: http://www.franklinsociety.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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