I have seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in a theater of some kind either on 70mm, 35mm, or digitally projected twenty times altogether over the past twenty-seven years, starting with its first release in 1982. This is NOT because I am a fanatic about the film, or any film really. In fact it is rare for me to see any movie that many times. I know part of the reason is, as for most viewers, Blade Runner’s uniqueness as a movie on almost every level. But also I feel that for me it is the fact that this film, perhaps like no other, has undergone revisions by its director that impact the picture’s tone and focus and yet leave its original creative core untouched. While the phenomenon of a popular film, or in the case of Blade Runner also a cult film, finding an afterlife in theaters is not at all unusual, especially in the last twenty years or so when so many films from the recent and distant past have been “restored” and “preserved," what makes Blade Runner unique is t
Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven is a very unique, nontraditional western. On its very surface it purports to be an action-revenge tale, where self-aggrandizing gunfighters attempt to collect a bounty on two men who have attacked a young girl, in a small Wyoming town in the late nineteenth century. But in the first five minutes of the film, Eastwood quickly whisks us deep beneath those conventions and gives us not an illustration of how good triumphs over evil but instead a demonstration of degrees of brutality and how they play against each other. Throughout the film, three of its five lead characters--William Munny, Little Bill Daggett, and English Bob--are presented to us, the viewer, as practicing violence for the sake of violence, they like the thrill of killing and brutality--it seems to be in their nature. We see the film’s main character, William Munny, ostensibly having some past experience as a very successful gunfighter, at the film’s outset, a pig farmer an