Blade Runner: The Final Cut...

Some of Ridley Scott's finest cinematic hours have been tweaked, spit-shined, picked clean of lint, and are being reissued today. I have always admired the way he made the images of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968, leap off the pages. Casting was quirky and precicely right. Just marvelous eye candy. It all made me feel that I was truly there, in 2021, post-apocalyptic Earth, triaged among the masses too radiation-sick to depart for ('escape to', really) colonies on healthier planets.

If you haven't read the book, you must. This is one of those rare movies that actually followed the movie faithfully, and did so without rabid hordes of followers threatening to leave their parents' basements in a pasty-white, blubbery, blinking-in-the-sunlight rebellion to pressure the director and writer into submission waving dog-eared copies of (TITLES OMITTED, you -- we -- know who you -- we -- are.). Plus, it's classic Philip K. Dick. If you're into paranoid sci-fi, no one did it better. He is (along with Ray Bradbury; I have to name the two together) one of my all-time favorites.

I resent, however, this being almost 2008, that I am still without my flying car. I love my VW Golf; I just want it to be designed to go airborne on purpose.

If it's the final cut, are they done with the cars? Can I have one?

You know, I'd be content to settle for this DVD under the tree, and give the flying cars a miss. I'm gonna bet those cars have awful emissions.