About a year til A Scanner Darkly

[jazzbo]

Good point Mark, that had occurred to me too. And then a counterthought occurred: Keanu will mess it up, it's his nature.

[Dr. Rat]

i hear ya' lonbo, i've just personally made the decision not to support that system w/o extreme provocation... i almost went to see "dogville," still want to see "the five obstructions" but in this case, i can only be disappointed & thus annoyance outweighs any possible escape... i have pals w/more open attitudes & even a terrible movie is fun for them for weirdness value, yuks...

i do NOT understand not loving film-- it's not like loving oral sex or similar but... i am also not a priori against PKD movies but this just seems like a bad idea done too late. imagine an early to mid-'70s version, however, when you could still be dark, weird in American commercial film?

i'll stick to rewatching "The Long Goodbye," "Fat City," "Chinatown," all the Downey's, etc + all old, foreign stuff i love.

some other time Senor Bo i'll yell ya' abt my month working temp for Texas Dept. of Health... i remember it was summer that Jerry died bc a pal called from Mass to tell me... i was right near the capitol, can't remember exactly which building, maybe 20th st? anyway--

it ** is ** funny keanu reeves is so loathed... i know absolutely nothing abt the guy but if ya'll told me nicolas cage was dead... i'd laff & say it's fucking ABOUT TIME. (cf. "leaving las vegas," most execrable "art" of any kind/any era & THEE final straw in my slow/steady rejection of '80s, '90s & beyond hollywood product... i was a dumbass for seeing it-- read an inane & misleading rev. of in the chron comparing it to Cassavetes-- but THIS is my revenge-- a 150% loathing for any/everything nicolas cage & the director was/is/will ever be involved in.)

thanks for understanding.

sam fuller jr

park row

Well, I'd imagine that even receiving oral sex may not be universally loved--plenty of possible reasons why not. Not all of them to feel guilty or inadequate about, I should think.

But anyhow, I have a theory that the deep love of film has something to do with the deep religious impulse. Someone else has made this observation before, I think.

Therefore there's a sort of parallel between loving late PKD (which I have no patience for) and loving film as a sort of life-altering experience.

Myself, I'd be a different person without having read Catch-22, but Chinatown (one of my very favorite films) could be eliminated from my synapses with nary a change in who I am or how I think. This is even true of more obscure, non-Hollywood pleasures I've watched--sorry, I can't list them straight off, just not top of mind sort stuff for me.

I, myself, am more attached to the early Dick, when he was more pre-occupied with German philosophical matters. I still think he had some fairly prescient insights into consumerism years before cultural studies began to take mass culture seriously as an aesthetic/sociological phenominon.

Certainly some of the stuff in High Castle has changed the way I think about "connoisseurship."

Scanner Darkly I can read and enjoy a lot a sa humorous novel, but a lot of the later writing just seems to me to be a drugged-out cry for help.

(I, obviously, don't have much of that religious drive, at least not of that particular flavor.)

--eric

[7/4]

trailer.

[Jazzmoose]

Scanner Darkly I can read and enjoy a lot a sa humorous novel, but a lot of the later writing just seems to me to be a drugged-out cry for help.

I suppose it's just the way it ends, but I never thought of A Scanner Darkly as a humorous novel...

And Lon, you're right, of course: he'll screw it up. :

[Jazzmoose]

trailer.

Gee...one little trailer and it's already reached 'wait for DVD' stature for me...

[Dr. Rat]

Scanner Darkly I can read and enjoy a lot a sa humorous novel, but a lot of the later writing just seems to me to be a drugged-out cry for help.

I suppose it's just the way it ends, but I never thought of A Scanner Darkly as a humorous novel...

And Lon, you're right, of course: he'll screw it up. :

Dick always had a lot of trouble ending his novels--a lot of them just collapse under the weight of agglomerated plot elements (psychic powers AND time travel AND aliens AND psychoactive drugs AND convoluted conspiracy theories . . .). He does better in Scanner and that may be one of the reasons I liek the book so much, but I tend not to credit Dick's endings much generally--a lot of times he just needed some way of dismounting, and about any contrivance might be utilized in that effort.

Scanner Darkly definitely has its very dark quality, but I think what makes it stand out for me amongst Dick's later work is the fact that he was still able enough to get outside of that dark end of things to make jokes that are sometimes quite other than gallows humor.

There are some great comic moments in the book. Which come to think of it is odd, since the funny moments in most of the early novels have more fo a satiric (laughing AT something/someone as opposed to laughing at the absurd qualities of the human condition) edge to them.

--eric

[Dr. Rat]

Well, I'd imagine that even receiving oral sex may not be universally loved--plenty of possible reasons why not. Not all of them to feel guilty or inadequate about, I should think.

giving it, brother, giving it... & while there are extremes of human experience, there is NO good reason short of extreme, extremely unfortunate abuse or mis-acculturation not to dig it. maketh love, not bad hollywood (or so-called "indie") movies, sweetie.

the same goes for J-L G "Weekend," "Point Blank," Andre de Toth "Crime Wave" & "Day of The Outlaw," Fuller's war movies +++, Preston Sturges... then there's Brakhage, Harry Smith, the Fleischer Brothers, the GREAT Jorgen Leth...

seriously, Rat, try to find as many Leth films as you can, even if you think you don't like film...

MEANWHILE--

it is pretty funny to see ya'll rag on Keanu Reeves... as i said, i know NOTHING abt the guy... i can't imagine him being worse than Brad Pitt McConauhey Affleck Dicaprio etc. goddamn DeNire who's HORRIBLE i knew he was a goddamn hack when i saw "Heat" back whenever (just ok btw).

FILM ASIDE--

do any of ya'll know abt a short film writ/dir by Ray McKinnon called "The Accountant"? he's also an actor, was on that show "Deadwood" i've never seen... anyway, "The Accountant" gets RAVES & has a PKD sound to it also... just wondering if anyone can cofirm/deny.

orally yrs,

clementine (bon vivant)

On the oral sex image: we can agree on the giving end. I really think you are giving me the hard sell on film, though. Can it really be that good? I am skeptical, but . . .

I will do what I can re: leth. Mind I do not live in a cultural capitol of our fair land, but there are some people who are interested in film at the local library. They actuall had a Harry Smith film. And the college I work at has a Preston Sturges festival going on right now--so I guess I shouldn't sell this place too short.

For Reeves: you might want to have a look at his truly stunning performance in Much Ado about Nothing, just as an illustration of what one can get away with in Hollywood these days. If you haven't seen this you don't really have a proper perspective on just how bad the machine you hate can be--way beyond aesthetic head up ass syndrome.

On the Accountant: it has become one of those films that people recommend to me when I tell them I don't like films that much.

I'm actually going to be in Philly with a film buff friend of mine in a few weeks. I'll see if he's willing to indulge me.

--eric

Edited March 19, 2005 by Dr. Rat

[BruceH]

Keanu Reeves? I'm giving this one a miss.

[Quincy]

trailer.

Gee...one little trailer and it's already reached 'wait for DVD' stature for me...

Oof. It may have even gone beyond that.

Well, there is $1 day on Monday & Tuesdays around here.

[nmorin]

I found both A Scanner Darkly and VALIS to be gut wrenching, but hilarious at the same time.

If I had known it was hameless I would have killed it myself...

[jazzbo]

Me too. . . I think it is a matter of whether you have personal experiences you can relate to in the material and I do. . . . I don't see these as drugged out cries for help rather than a search for direction and hope and I think they're pretty wonderful books.

I love Dick the prober of our contemporary world in the earler novels as well, I believe that they are all equally fascinating aspects of this fertile mind and its work.

Man, this trailer dampens my enthusiasm but I'll go to see it opening weekend. I like to be alone in the dark!

[JSngry]

Charlie showed me the trailer a few weeks ago, rather excitedly, actually, and you know what? It looks like a video game. EXACTLY like a video game. For those of us who haven't had our perceptions of "reality" shaped in some kind of way by video games, this might be off-putting, but there's a whole generation (or two) on whom the medium has had a profoundly McLuhan-esque effect. So I'd keep that in mind, fwiw, the medium being the message and all...

And about Reeves, sorry, but both Bill & Ted movies are on my "always watch" list whenever they're on TV. No, they're not "good", but that's at once besides the point and exactly the point. Part of a well-balanced pop culture imbibement, I'd say.

Edited March 20, 2005 by JSngry

[Swinger]

I'm a PKD nut and I'm eagerly waiting for the movie to be released in September.

I downloaded the trailer and watched it through.It didn't convince me to watch the movie but since I'm a PKD nut (Am I repeating myself around here?) I want to see it.

I've read A Scanner Darkly 3 times through and I want to see how well Keanu can play Arctor.

Anyway...only 6 months to go...

[jazzbo]

As you know, I'm just such a nut as well.

Video game. .. yeah I thought of that. . . and I guess that there is a generation to which these are very important as a part of their "reality". . . . And it would be PhilDickian to explore that. . . .

Just isn't how I personally view or want to view Scanner!

[JSngry]

Face it dude, we're OLD now!

[jazzbo]

Oh, I've faced it. I've even embraced it!

[Stefan Wood]

How the heck did I miss this topic? I don't care if Keanu is in it; I will be interested in how the film is executed. I think the semi animation is a smart move; it does lend that dream like "reality" that is so uncertain in Dick's novels. I still think someone has to have the guts to do either UBIK, or my perswonal favorite Phillip Dick novel, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.

[Harold_Z]

Face it dude, we're OLD now! 

←

Oh, I've faced it.  I've even embraced it!

←

...And I've got 10 years on you guys ! ARGHHH !

I think the semi animation is a smart move; it does lend that dream like "reality" that is so uncertain in Dick's novels.

←

Yeah, but in this particular PKD the Sci-Fi element is very minimal. The scrambler suits and the holographic surveillance cams are pretty much the entirety of the sci-fi. They could have handled that pretty easily with today's special effects.

IMHO, this is is really a dope/cop novel - funny and absurd at times and very poignant at others.

[7/4]

July 7, 2006

MOVIE REVIEW

'A Scanner Darkly': Keanu Reeves, Undercover and Flying High on a Paranoid Head Trip

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Identities shift and melt like shadows in Richard Linklater's animated adaptation of "A Scanner Darkly," a look at a future that looks an awful lot like today. Based on a 1977 novel by the science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick, the semispeculative story involves a cop (call him Officer Fred) who, by assuming an undercover identity (call him Bob Arctor), is inching his way up toward a big drug bust, score by score. But there's a little problem: Fred is starting to forget he's Bob, or maybe vice versa.

Given that Fred/Bob has been regularly dropping Substance D, as in Death, tab by tab, it's no wonder he's feeling a bit off; no wonder, too, given that this is the world Philip K. Dick made. Like the writer's other worlds, that of "A Scanner Darkly" is one in which drugs predominate and reality tends to be a big question mark, hovering like an electro-colored thought bubble above characters who are more everyday normal than super-this or -that. Ordinary guys who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances like Fred/Bob, who in Mr. Linklater's film has been given seductive voice and corporeal outline by Keanu Reeves, an actor whose penchant for otherworldly types and excellent adventures make him well suited for vision quests like this one.

Mr. Dick wrote "A Scanner Darkly" after several years of firsthand experience with what he called the street scene in the early 1970's. By 1971 he was ingesting a whopping 1,000 hits of speed a week, along with plentiful daily doses of tranquilizers. "The happiness pills," he admitted around that time, "are turning out to be nightmare pills." He entered a rehabilitation center shortly thereafter and in 1972, in a letter to a drug treatment center in Southern California, even offered his services as a counselor, having had, as he wrote, "five friends kill themselves on or as a result of acid trips — and seen many fine brains burned out on narcotics." The novel "A Scanner Darkly," which drew on his memories of that time, followed.

As in the book, the film finds Bob Arctor pursuing his drug-and-love connection, Donna (voiced by Winona Ryder), while Fred puts in time in front of a bank of video monitors, watching surveillance images of himself as Bob Arctor and his housemates, the prankster Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and the joker Luckman (Woody Harrelson), vegetating amid their collective chaos and broken-down furniture. To protect his undercover identity, Fred often wears a "scramble suit," which turns him into a "vague blur" not unlike all the other vague blurs to whom he delivers antidrug speeches at the local Lions and Elks clubs. Not unlike the vague blur that Fred was once upon a married time, before he conked his head and, as Bob, started to turn on, tune in and drop out.

On its most basic level, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of drug abuse and indeed closes with a poignant roll call of Philip K. Dick's friends who had been lost, "punished" — as he wrote — "entirely too much for what they did." That said, to reduce the novel to a "just say no" diatribe would be to greatly miss one of its and its author's sustaining points. Drugs are generally a bad idea in "A Scanner Darkly," in the book and film both, though in the novel it's the real world or what we perceive the real world to be that makes for the more obviously bad trip, not scary little pills. "So-called 'reality,' " as Mr. Dick once said, "is a mass delusion that we've all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure."

Mr. Dick searched long and hard for those reasons, as both his frenetic work output (more than 40 novels, zillions of stories) and recreational drug use suggest. In 1980, two years before he died at 53 from a series of strokes, he described himself as an " 'acosmic panenthiest,' which means that I don't believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and he is more than the universe. The universe is an extension of God into space and time." Whether he was having some fun with his interviewers matters little; he had found a reasonable way to puzzle over those ballooning question marks that didn't require him to stay awake for days at a time with eyes and brain bugged and bugging.

As he did in an earlier film, "Waking Life," Mr. Linklater uses the animation technique called rotoscoping to translate Mr. Dick's worldview, mostly to fine expressive effect. With this technique, a version of which was used by early giants like Max Fleischer and even in the old Disney factory, animators directly trace over live-action images of performers. (What was once achieved through ink and paint is now accomplished through software.) The results tend to look fluid, almost as if the bodies were floating above the background visuals — an effect that appears to have been pushed in "A Scanner Darkly," where the bodies can appear almost liquid, as if the characters had been recently poured and had yet to harden into final shape.

Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action. "A Scanner Darkly" has a kind of hypnotic visual appeal, and there's something very appropriate in how a chair in Bob Arctor's kitchen appears to hover above the floor, replicating the kind of time-space visual dislocations that can be produced through the consumption of hallucinogens. Even so, considering that the animation is not transcendently beautiful and that Mr. Downey has been pretty much out of commission lately, in part because of his own drug troubles, it would have been nice to see real shadows crossing his face.

"A Scanner Darkly" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has drug use, adult language and animated bare breasts.

A Scanner Darkly

Opens today in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Tex.

Directed by Richard Linklater; written by Mr. Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick; director of photography, Shane F. Kelly; edited by Sandra Adair; music by Graham Reynolds; production designer, Bruce Curtis; produced by Anne Walker-McBay, Tommy Pallotta, Palmer West, Jonah Smith and Erwin Stoff; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 100 minutes.

WITH: Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor), Robert Downey Jr. (Jim Barris), Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman), Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck).

[7/4]

Brain Candy

Richard Linklater's literate Dick adaptation is a brain-bending D-light

by J. Hoberman, VVoice

July 5th, 2006 3:34 PM

The year's most animated performance: Downey

Stoned babble and decomposing reality, A Scanner Darkly—Richard Linklater's animated version of the 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick—is the most literal of Dick adaptations and also, in a perverse way, the most literary.

Dick, as tactfully pointed out by his Polish colleague Stanislaw Lem, was less a writer than a man cursed with prophetic sight who "does not so much play the part of a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth." What's extraordinary about Linklater's animation, computer-rotoscoped in the fashion of his 2001 Waking Life, is just how tangible the Dickian labyrinth becomes.

Linklater renders coherent Dick's amorphous account of SoCal dopers addicted to the brain-destroying Substance D, the narcs who police them, and the shadowy corporation stage-managing the seedy drama. This straightforward version of Dick's anguished vision of drug-addled addiction makes Naked Lunch seem positively romantic. (Indeed, Linklater—or is it Dick?—even seems to be specifically mocking the "blue flower of romanticism.") The skin-crawling opener has D-generate Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) frantically fending off a plague of nonexistent aphids erupting out of his scalp; like the book, the movie ends with Dick's dedication to his drug-casualty friends.

Animation allows Linklater to efface the distinction between hallucination and "reality," as well as unmediated reality and video surveillance. Everything has the same somber palette and heavy outlines. Faces disintegrate into paint-by-numbers light patterns; interior planes shift and slide. The nominal hero, an undercover cop posing as one Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), is introduced addressing a businessmen's lunch from the safety of an identity-blurring "scramble suit." This shape-shifting outfit is made for animation and it's also the movie's ruling metaphor. Midspeech, the cop—who has, of course, been dabbling in the brain-fissuring D—snaps into his other personality.

Dick's novel may be a morass of unplayable dialogue, but Linklater, who has been orchestrating spaced-out riffs since Slacker, has a connoisseur's appreciation for druggy logic and crackpot conspiracy. At least half the movie involves Arctor rapping with his pals, motor-mouthed Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and hysterical Luckman (Woody Harrelson), as well as their dealer Donna (Winona Ryder), whose source he is trying to ascertain. Most scenes are set in Arctor's living room and the movie is characterized by superbly putrid crash pad mise-en-scéne—cigarette butts and dirty dishes on every surface, hand-scrawled signs ("Time to Thaw Walt Out," "Just Keep Keeping On") on the wall, an American flag stapled to the ceiling.

As an exercise in brain-fried absurdism, A Scanner Darkly is far darker than Dazed and Confused. The psychedelic stooges are perpetually paranoid while Donna, Arctor's nominal girlfriend, is viscerally so. Recoiling from Arctor's touch, she unconvincingly explains: "I have to watch it because I do so much coke." The bizarrely conceited Barris, his mind in perpetual overdrive and ears ringing with "news from the guinea-pig grapevine," has the best theories—even as Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)

It's Luckman, however, who has the key bit of jabber, droning on ad nauseam about a celebrated impostor who decided that, rather than impersonating all manner of individuals, it would be far less taxing to simply impersonate a celebrated impostor. This inevitably brings up the subject of cops disguised as dopers and leads Arctor, through a stoned non sequitur, to ponder his own fissured situation: "Shit, I'm spaced—posing as a narc, wow!" Dick's idea of a tragic modernist paradigm, Arctor is the character who suffers most acutely the loss of identity. (His name, realistically enough, sounds like "actor" on quaaludes.)

Once the D kicks in, Arctor is both beset by false memories and pathetically unaware of his current situation. He lives his junkie life and then goes to work to watch himself living it (hence the title), dutifully informing on his vegetative friends—at least one of whom is reporting on him to him. Arctor briefs his superior, each wearing a protective scramble suit; he's only himself when submitting to the required psychological tests that, indicating cross-chatter between his brain's two hemispheres, suggest he has no "self" at all.

After he no longer seems to realize that he is Arctor, nothing remains beyond a sad spiral through bogus rehab and meaningless group therapy. "Living and nonliving things are exchanging places," someone, possibly the bugged-out Freck, explains. Speaking of the group: People will complain that A Scanner Darkly is hard to follow. True, there's no use dropping bread crumbs in this maze. Just remember that everything in this grimly amusing world is its opposite—except, that is, when it's not.

[ejp626]

The movie is playing next weekend at the Cambridge (UK) film fest, but I don't think I'll be able to make the showing. I'll probably just wait for it to come out on DVD. Plus, it will give me a chance to finish reading the novel (got about 50 pages in and got distracted by life).

[7/4]

A Scanner Darkly -- The coolest thing about the movie version of Philip K. Dick's seven-years-from-now dystopia is that director Richard Linklater takes the title seriously. The painted-cell animation he used for his film Waking Life, has been improved to the point that this whole picture looks as if it's been run through a medical scanner and then colorized to bring it back to a semblance of real life. What this has to do with anything is anyone's guess, but it looks pretty amazing. The story -- about an undercover cop who's investigating a drug scourge called "D" (an amphetamine-style substance that seems to make "E" seem pretty tame) -- is less interesting than watching what the animation does to the faces and movements of Keanu Reeves (as the cop), Winona Ryder (as his junkie girlfriend), and Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. (as his constantly feuding housemates). When the roomies are front and center -- Downey especially -- the story crackles. When the conspiracy stuff takes over, things slacken, so it's nice that the look of the film is so unusual. Cops, when they're undercover seven years from now, will apparently wear special suits made up of DNA fragments (or chips, or something) taken from thousands of people, so they're literally shape-shifters, a notion that the rotoscoping visual style Linklater's chosen is ideally suited to illustrate. And frankly, you've gotta love the director for finding a way to make Keanu Reeves seem, er, animated.

- Bob Mondello, NPR

[Jazzmoose]

Okay, gotta admit this is now on my "must see" list.

[BFrank]

I generally like Linklater and "Waking Life" was great to watch even if sometimes a little too trippy in the 'discussion' department. Isn't this the same technique used on those Charles Schwab commercials, too?

Anyway.....high on my list of films to see this summer.

[ghost of miles]

Richard Linklater's on Fresh Air right now, talking about the movie... it's on my "must-see" list, too. I'll post the audio link once FA has archived it.

Scanner Darkly website

Edited July 10, 2006 by ghost of miles