Homage to Hauer

I was thinking about Blade Runner, and how much it was Rutger Hauer's film. The resonance of so many scenes, from the famous pre-death soliloquy to moments such as the revulsion when he first sees J F Sebastian's toys, is 100% Hauer. Acting a non-human with nascant humanity is difficult enough - and Hauer conveys this as effectively as his maker's explicit explanation of the problem, with a mixture of child-like emotions and decisive leadership - but that's just the baseline; Hauer makes it real, and makes us (or at least this viewer) care.

I thought it strange his career didn't take off at the point, but http://www.rutgerhauer.org/ implies he's done far more than Blade Runner followed by blockpopper action roles.

I love P K Dick, but I see Blade Runner as stronger than the "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" story it was based on. As a movie must, it pares down the story, losing the Mercerism thread completely, and re-focuses it on what becomes the dominant theme. It's tragic that PKD is dead, but even more so that he never saw a film that might have changed his mind about "Hollywood". One wonders how much stronger Total Recall and the folgettable film rendition of his "Second Variety" story would have been with his hand guiding the rudder.

Today's tech content; two pages to start off a new "case stories" section at my site.

One is on an atypical presentation of the motherboard bad capacitor problem, and the other being a strange one-site problem with Eudora vs. "spool" files.