The release of A Scanner Darkly is eagerly anticipated in my household, mostly by me, but I've already talked D into going.
Beyond the Multiplex | Salon Arts & Entertainment ... Let's put it this way: “A Scanner Darkly,” a mesmerizing dark comedy adapted from Philip K. Dick's story, using the same combination of live-action footage and rotoscope animation that Linklater employed in “Waking Life,” will have particular resonance for viewers of about his age and generational predilections. If “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused” were major cultural events in your life (along with, say, “Repo Man” and “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Blue Velvet” and “Sid and Nancy”), then this movie is for you.
That's a pretty damn good film festival right there (with the exception of the lesser movie, Dazed and Confused). I hope more folks discover Philip K Dick because of it.
“A Scanner Darkly” (Richard Linklater)
“A Scanner Darkly (Vintage)” (Philip K. Dick)
“A Scanner Darkly” doesn't offer any obvious sound bites about the real world's anti-drug hysteria or our contemporary surveillance society, but its portrayal of American suburbia as a zone of physical decay, chemical addiction and ever more intrusive high-end technology could hardly seem more urgent. Arctor becomes incapable of telling whether he's making love to Ryder's character or someone else; he is ordered to spy on his best friends and betray them, only to discover that at least some of them have already betrayed him. Do these things result from widespread addiction to Substance D, or from the society that has made it necessary? And how do we tell the difference?In its mode of Dickian paranoid gloom, “A Scanner Darkly” is among the darkest and loveliest movies you'll see this year. But I found it most effective as a depiction of sun-baked Southern California slackerdom run to seed, and that mode is both ironic and elegiac.
Tags: PKD
