O.K. – to set the scene – my long Christmas travail was coming to an end…it was the end of the day and business was trailing off…I was too tired to write or read so I decided to watch a movie on my laptop, something I do very rarely. There’s a few DVD’s at the store, some I bought for a pittance from a couple of black youth who had probably ripped them off and a few more from a customer named Steve Press, who has since moved away. (Hi, Steve, if you google yourself). Steve’s big hobby in life is his noir movie list, which he wants to be a comprehensive list of noir movies, using his own subjective definition of noir. The creation and maintenance of this list necessitates the viewing of lots of movies to see if they belong on the list or not, and once he’s seen them he’s done with them, because he doesn’t want to collect every noir movie, he just wants to know if he’s missing something on the list. After he was done watching some obscure movie he’d quite often bring them in to me for credit so he could get a book about film noir. I’ve sold a lot of his movies over time (many to modern day master noirist author Loren D. Estleman, who does want to own every noir movie, but has a much more restrictive definition of them than Steve), but there are still a dozen of them on my shelf, only a few of them DVD’s.

As I looked over the selection last night I wasn’t too bowled over – Ocean’s Eleven, Oceans Twelve, Training Day (which I’ve seen) – but then one caught my eye, something called Paycheck. Initially it was the name Uma Thurman that made me give it a second look – I worship her and had just watched Kill Bill 1 & 2. But then I saw that it was directed by John Woo and adapted from a short story by Philip K. Dick. It even had Paul Giamatti in it! If I overlooked Ben Affleck, it sounded intriguing, and started out promisingly, with the usual Dickian stuff about wiping memory, losing time, etc. Then there was the part that blew my mind…

Affleck’s just woken up after having his memory wiped and looks up at the calender. The date? Friday December 22, which of course was the day and date that I was watching it…my wife wasn’t very impressed by that coincidence, yeah, so what?, but come on, O.K., it’s kind of fantastic that it would show December 22 the very day that I finally watched the movie – there’s a one in three hundred and sixty-five chance of that, but to have it be Friday December 22? Adding in the fact that I watch a movie at work maybe twice a year, what are the odds of that? Friday December 22 is a combination that only comes around every seven years, and one that you I have to wonder how the film makers came up with, seeing how the movie was made in 2003. And we’re talking about Philip K. Dick here, people, the guy who is the master of the paranoid, of small coincidences which prove to be of cosmic significance, and that the movie itself was about seeing into the future, and the future intruding itself into the past.

Well, then I had to watch the whole thing, of course, to see what the cosmic message was. I could only watch a few ten minute installments at work, because in my store, as we all know, the customer comes first, and I had to take it home to finish it off. And naturally, as always happens when things hint at forming a larger meaning…nothing emerged. After the kicky beginning, the rest of the film was pretty lame. It reminded me of Total Recall more than anything (only not so offensive), a moody, thoughtful, dark Dick concept blown up into a noisy, silly technicolor action flick with mile wide plot holes. Even Uma wasn’t that great in a perky ingenue role. When Paul Giamatti can’t make any headway against the lame dialogue, you know it’s going to be another painful Ben Affleck performance, and the John Woo action sequences seemed like parodies of John Woo action sequences. The great mysteries involved were why Woo’s once promising Hollywood career has fizzled out, and why Uma looked unusually ungoddess-like – was this the time of her personal problems with that idiot Ethan Hawke? – and the like. The big philosophical message was that if we could see into the future it probably wouldn’t be a good thing because then we couldn’t cling to the consolation of free will – but, boy, wouldn’t be nice to buy yourself a winning lottery ticket. Ah, I guess the cosmic revelations will have to wait for, well, the future…