A SCANNER DARKLY
A SCANNER DARKLY
June 11 (?) 2008, DVD, home living room, from library
Well, holy shit, this is kind of a cool, fun movie. Not at all what I was expecting. I mean, I'm kind of a fan of the wavery-rotoscope-animation movies that Richard Linklater seems to be exclusively doing these days - WAKING LIFE was pretty good - but somehow I managed to forget that Robert Downey, Jr. makes everything he touches turn into gold, even an adaptation of the world's most depressing drug-fueled tragedy from your friend and mine, Philip K. Dick. Somehow, in the translation from book to screen, the bleakness and horror got mostly scrubbed out of the picture, instead leaving a lot of pleasantly-paranoiac drug madness that, hell, anybody who's ever stayed up all night with a bunch of ketamine and/or MDMA fiends is familiar with. Hell, I cried after I finished reading A Scanner Darkly and I felt wretched for ever experimenting with any substance that changes the way I think or perceive. The movie both makes drug use seem kind of fun, and also puts the viewer at such a distance that the wrenching fear-and-loathing and identity dissociation have about as much emotional impact as a particularly rollicking episode of Cops.
Still, Downey is a genius; and he's joined on his crazy rants by other famous drug fiend Woody Harrelson in some of the funniest (and truly, saddest) moments in the picture, and Winona Ryder absolutely Methodically taps into her own past as a coke-fuelled, but still eminently sensible good-time girl (and secret agent, as almost every character is in this story), and Rory Cochran (who you may remember from DAZED AND CONFUSED, or maybe EMPIRE RECORDS or a crapload of guest-star slots on some TV crime procedurals) makes a great, twitchy, gigglesnort-inducing Fleck. And I guess Keanu Reeves is in it, too, but he's about as expressive as a block of cedar, even with groovy rotoscoping making his skin all squirmy and liquid.
Really the whole point of making this movie as an animated feature - and its entire raison d'etre - are the scramble suits. This couldn't have been done live-action, and even to try it with CG would have been a nightmare. The scramble suits - a method for the agents to remain undercover - cycle through hundreds of thousands of genotypes and appearances every few minutes, never quite showing a complete human figure. Uh, I don't exaggerate when I say that this shit is cool and I could watch it for hours. And one of the best things about it is that the wearer's voice is also disguised, so Keanu isn't even reading half of his own dialogue. I've got nothing against Keanu as a person; he's just a really spectacularly limited actor. Kind of perfect for this role, but even so, the less of him, the better.
Recommended, even if it's not as Dickish as it should be.
June 11 (?) 2008, DVD, home living room, from library
Well, holy shit, this is kind of a cool, fun movie. Not at all what I was expecting. I mean, I'm kind of a fan of the wavery-rotoscope-animation movies that Richard Linklater seems to be exclusively doing these days - WAKING LIFE was pretty good - but somehow I managed to forget that Robert Downey, Jr. makes everything he touches turn into gold, even an adaptation of the world's most depressing drug-fueled tragedy from your friend and mine, Philip K. Dick. Somehow, in the translation from book to screen, the bleakness and horror got mostly scrubbed out of the picture, instead leaving a lot of pleasantly-paranoiac drug madness that, hell, anybody who's ever stayed up all night with a bunch of ketamine and/or MDMA fiends is familiar with. Hell, I cried after I finished reading A Scanner Darkly and I felt wretched for ever experimenting with any substance that changes the way I think or perceive. The movie both makes drug use seem kind of fun, and also puts the viewer at such a distance that the wrenching fear-and-loathing and identity dissociation have about as much emotional impact as a particularly rollicking episode of Cops.
Still, Downey is a genius; and he's joined on his crazy rants by other famous drug fiend Woody Harrelson in some of the funniest (and truly, saddest) moments in the picture, and Winona Ryder absolutely Methodically taps into her own past as a coke-fuelled, but still eminently sensible good-time girl (and secret agent, as almost every character is in this story), and Rory Cochran (who you may remember from DAZED AND CONFUSED, or maybe EMPIRE RECORDS or a crapload of guest-star slots on some TV crime procedurals) makes a great, twitchy, gigglesnort-inducing Fleck. And I guess Keanu Reeves is in it, too, but he's about as expressive as a block of cedar, even with groovy rotoscoping making his skin all squirmy and liquid.
Really the whole point of making this movie as an animated feature - and its entire raison d'etre - are the scramble suits. This couldn't have been done live-action, and even to try it with CG would have been a nightmare. The scramble suits - a method for the agents to remain undercover - cycle through hundreds of thousands of genotypes and appearances every few minutes, never quite showing a complete human figure. Uh, I don't exaggerate when I say that this shit is cool and I could watch it for hours. And one of the best things about it is that the wearer's voice is also disguised, so Keanu isn't even reading half of his own dialogue. I've got nothing against Keanu as a person; he's just a really spectacularly limited actor. Kind of perfect for this role, but even so, the less of him, the better.
Recommended, even if it's not as Dickish as it should be.