Sunday!

I’m sure you all have seen “the original 24 pilot” set in 1994, right? Well, if you haven’t:

It was kinda hard for me to not remember that as I was watching The Bourne Identity for the first time last night. “Look at those monitors!”, I said as I looked at the black ops spy center. During a car chase, the car crashed through an open door of a phone booth. “A phone booth!”, I exclaimed. “Well, it *IS* Europe”, Maribou pointed out. When spies got their orders on those clamshell phones, they were SMS messages and this was supposed to be ominous rather than evocative of “Damn You, Autocorrect” or targeted ads where the assassin gets told to go to the Suisse Bank and have a little bubble pop up asking if he wants to refinance his boat.

Oh, there was the one assassin who had that hairstyle where he said “yeah, I’d like to go blonde… but just the tips.” That gave everybody in the room a shudder, I tell you what.

Then, when the credits started rolling and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” started playing, I really started wondering stuff like “when did this movie come out???” Specifically, was it pre 9/11, post 9/11, or in that strange limbo where it was made before but released after or what?

This is why we have Wikipedia, right? Well, according to the wiki, “A number of reshoots and rewrites late in development and scheduling problems delayed the film from its original release target date of September 2001 to June 2002 and took it $8,000,000 over budget from the initial budget of $60 million; screenwriter Tony Gilroy faxed elements of screenplay rewrites almost throughout the entire duration of filming.”

So that tells me that it was in that strange limbo… and it makes me wonder how we’re going to look back at movies made in 2014. “You just had superhero movies and teenage dystopias?” “We also had The Expendables.”

So… what are you reading and/or watching?