Blade Runner Reboot

An article in the "Los Angeles Times" this week about "rebooting" movies got me thinking. (Rebooting is making the same film with different actors. It's another way for studios to squeeze every bit of life out of a property without coming up with a new idea or fresh screenplay. The script is tweaked and updated but basically it's the same movie.) What would my reboot film be? Don't groan, but my vote is for yet another version of the 1982 classic--and my favorite SciFi movie--"Blade Runner."

But who will play the iconic blade runner Rick Deckard so memorably portrayed with boozy sexiness by Harrison Ford? Or the perfect cold beauty Sean Young's Rachael (no last name necessary because she's a replicant)?

My choices: "Blade Runner: Reboot" starring Daniel Craig and Eva Green who were sexy and watchable in the 007 action-fest "Casino Royale."

Yes?

Big Love

The August 29, 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, "Not much to like in 'Big Love' finale," Patrick Day complains that Barb, wife number one in a three-wife polygamist family trying to live a middle-class life in Utah, has been griping at and questioning her husband Bill's decisions all season only to turn 180 degrees during the finale to support Bill. What Patrick misses is the theme of big love: power. Bill wants the invisible hand of power over the compound because he was kicked out and became a "lost boy" as a teen. Barb wants power as first wife. Wife number two, Nicolette, tries to manipulate Bill and the other sister-wives to keep power but without the security of the compound where she grew up and knew the power structure, is imploding into a gambling addiction. Third wife, Margene, was so young when she married into the family that she's just growing up and trying to figure out what she wants and how to get it.

Why did Barb back Bill in the last moments of the show? One of Barb's sister-wives, Nicolette's mother (played with intense gravity by Mary Kay Place) gives Barb advice. You lose power when you work against your husband. Barb took it to heart. In for a penny, in for a pound. That's how she'll go into next season and I'll bet the other wives will feel the shift and connive and manipulate to get a bigger piece of Bill. Something I want to see.

As another article in the Times reported recently, the only place to find actresses in their prime, 40's and older, is TV. Actors want to work and the best scripts are for the small screen. And "Big Love" is full of complicated, self-interested women trying to get what they want at any cost, just like the men.