Karen and I saw Paycheck at the cinema last night. I think we caught Hoyts’s last scheduled Australian session. It was exactly our kind of movie: heavy on the sci-fi, action and adventure, very light on the angst, insight and character development.
As the movie unfolded, I couldn’t help but notice similarities with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1990 sci-fi, Total Recall, including the hero with a memory wipe, the gigantic conspiracy, the pure-hearted girl, the sneaky substitute girl, the treacherous friend and fortune telling. The reason for this is that Paycheck and Total Recall are based on Philip K. Dick short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
Paycheck’s fight scenes, on the other hand, are faster, lighter and more artistic than Total Recall’s. I didn’t twig as to why until a white dove appeared (for no apparent reason) just as the climactic confrontation scene began —John Woo‘s trademark.
I can’t explain why I typed ‘edlin’ at the Windows-XP command prompt. I haven’t used edlin since 1988, when I had to type up a 100 line Pascal assignment in a PC lab, because all the Unix terminals were full.
Imagine my surprise when it worked.
C:\>edlin File name must be specifiedC:\>edlin /?
Starts Edlin, a line-oriented text editor.EDLIN [drive:][path]filename [/B]
/B Ignores end-of-file (CTRL+Z) characters.
C:\>
That’s right. Windows-XP ships with edlin.exe in C:\windows\system32.