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

Well, it's official, my good buddy King Pin has finalized the trailer for his first feature length film. You can pop over to his blog to view the trailer. Although I'm definitely biased, since I helped with the graphics, and was there for at least part of the shoot, where I had to put up with these guys.

I gotta say kudos. And yeah, I know this post has MORE than it's share of hyperlinks per word.

Labels: film, video