Does Linklater See Clearly...
Or darkly?
I'd say the former, in his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. Clear as day. I don't intend on doing a movie review here, so I'll leave it at that.
If you want to get a sense of what the movie is like, you can watch the first 24 minutes for free online.
While waiting for some renders to finish out, I figured I'd check out a few reviews. Rotten Tomatoes is a good review aggregator, and oddly enough, the first two negative reviews I read held as part of their reasoning "the movie is too faithful to the book", then chastize Linklater for not making the theme of an increasingly authoritarian police state too blatantly a fable for the current political climate in the U.S... WTF?
That has got to be the LAMEST excuse for a negative review.
Now, I agree with the sentiment regarding increased loss of civil rights, and all that double plus nongood stuff, but Phillip K. Dick's books were never such blunt instruments, so WHY should Linklater need to hit the viewers over the head with such sentiments?
I guess the long and short of this is, if you're a PKD fan, then you can take these negative reviews as positive.
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but before seeing the movie, I had googled for a review, and came across the best site for movie ratings ever, and Scanner rates a healthy 7.6.8.
What does that mean exactly? On a scale of 1-10, it rates a 7 for Sex and Nudity (right on, painted over boobies), a disappointing 6 for violence and gore (sigh - but then again PKD isn't about that), and an amazing 8 for profanity!
Here's the evaluation of why the film got an 8 for the latter...
PROFANITY 8 - 31 F-words and its derivatives, 7 sexual references, 1 obscene hand gesture, 20 scatological terms, 2 anatomical terms, 13 mild obscenities, name-calling (loser), 10 religious exclamations.
The capper had to be the "name-calling (loser)".
They also end their review with an explanation of "the message" of the film. Some of them are brilliant ('brilliant' in it's ironic post-post modern hipster form, in other words 'bad').
Pick some of your favourite movies, and see what they have to say. As a lark, I put Pulp Fiction in the search, and it rates a whopping 9.10.10!
But I digress...
I liked the movie. A lot more than this square. I say "square" because only a square would feel the need to both portray a piece of talking cheese, and also indicate it to the viewer through the dialogue of the cipher.
Strange doesn't neccesarily equal random.
Nuff said.
Labels: film
posted by Doug @ 10:39 PM
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Caught the preview with Kingpin a couple of weeks ago. He, of course, was thrilled with the execution of the rotoscoping. I couldn't figure out why, given that method, they decided to make this particular film.
Some nice dialogue, some good stoner-moments (by a not-really-acting-are-they? cast) and, as always with Philip K., some thought provoking ideas regarding the nature of identity.
But I don't think I got anything from the movie that wouldn't have been there without rotoscoping. Linklater needs to be as ambitious in his vision as he is in his application of technique.
There was some effective stuff going on with background perspectives that enhanced the 'druggie' ambience, without hammering you over the head with the technique (beyond the uniqueness of the technique itself).
As for the cast, there probably wasn't much of a stretch going on there!
Haven't seen the film yet, but I'm wondering ... how much Linklater was there really in it? One of the few other movies he's done where it wasn't an original script but an adaptation was Tape and that was actually brilliant. It seems he's just as good a director when it's not his own material, so I have been looking forward to this one, and I've been thinking of it as maybe Tape-meets-Waking Life. Any truth to that?
Paul.
Hey Paul!
If there was one PKD story for Linklater to direct, this is probably it, given that the main characters could have been adult versions of the Dazed and Confused kids, or a collection of people from Slacker.
I'd say there's a LITTLE of both Tape and Waking Life in there, but in the end, it's really a PKD story, and Linklater doesn't either step all over it or dilute it, like what happens with most PKD adaptations.
That sounds promising, Doug.
Actually, Tape was not original material, either. It was pretty much a verbatim adaptation of a play that Uma was really excited about and which Ethan took to Linklater for advice on producing it, kind of secretly hoping that Linklater would do it himself and cast them in it (guess the plan worked), and if you listen to the director's commentary, the approach Linklater took was very similar; he just wanted to get out of the way and let the material speak for itself. Still he left his stamp on it despite himself -- I think his mark is all over that film.
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