{"id":5583,"date":"2010-07-08T22:22:31","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T05:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/?p=5583"},"modified":"2015-11-04T07:54:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T12:54:36","slug":"sci-fi-july-week-1-we-watched-johnny-mnemonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/sci-fi-july-week-1-we-watched-johnny-mnemonic\/","title":{"rendered":"Sci-Fi July week 1 – we watched Johnny Mnemonic!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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the opening of Sci-Fi July, a weekly month-long rooftop film series for friends and friends of friends, was a resounding success! Around 23 people showed up for an unknown screening of Johnny Mnemonic.<\/p>\n

I introduced the series, or the film more-specifically rather, with the following text:<\/p>\n

The movie you’re about to watch is based on a short story by William Gibson, regarded by some as the father of cyberpunk, who coined the word “cyberspace”, and sought a “combination of lowlife and high tech” in his often dystopian novels.<\/p>\n

This 1995 screenplay of Gibson’s 1981 short story stars Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic, post-Bill and Ted and pre-The Matrix, whose realization of his role lies somewhere between the “duuuude” and the “whoah” of those respective films.<\/p>\n

Set in the year 2021, Johnny is a digital data courier who stores clients’ information in a cybernetic implant in his head. It holds a whopping 80 gigabytes – which is a laugh today given our phones hold nearly this much data, and we’ve easily achieved the multi-terabyte compression level.<\/p>\n

Johnny’s “pride in profession” rests in the security of his data-envelope, which is protected by seemingly randomly generated images, yet also reminds one today of fffffound images, delicious gif streams, and image macros: I want room service!<\/p>\n

I won’t sugar-coat it, this is an especially bad film! A special<\/em> movie to a lot of cult sci-fi fans, yet IMDB rate it at 4.9 and I think that’s being generous. Keanu’s acting is horrendous. The editing is choppy. And at 1 hour 40 minutes it can appear to go on forever. But there are some special full-minute VR scenes, some incredibly geeky one-liners, oh and performances by Udo Kier, Takeshi Kitano, and none-other than rapper Ice-T as a tattooed & dreadlocked hacker, Black Flag’s front man Henry Rollins as a saviour doctor, and Dolph Lundgren as a street preaching Jesus freak-cybernaut.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Sci-Fi July.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the remarkable crowd shot above was taken by current Flux Factory<\/a> resident from the Low Countries, Astrid Bussink<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Sci-Fi July is an informal rooftop film series curated by moi, and will happen every Tuesday in July – you will not be told what movie will be screened, but they will all be of the sci-fi genre and they will all reward you in one way or another!<\/p>\n

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the opening of Sci-Fi July, a weekly month-long rooftop film series for friends and friends of friends, was a resounding success! Around 23 people showed up for an unknown screening of Johnny Mnemonic. I introduced the series, or the film more-specifically rather, with the following text: The movie you’re about to watch is based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20],"tags":[1229,663],"series":[],"class_list":["post-5583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-friends","category-geekathon","tag-geekathon","tag-sci-fi-july"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/07\/4772280770_4a4e9b86ff.jpg?fit=500%2C375&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6OfVu-1s3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5583"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15485,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5583\/revisions\/15485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5583"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=5583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}