Monday, June 19, 2006

A Scanner Dorkly














The midnight show for the Seattle International Film Festival last Saturday was an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, A Scanner Darkly. As we strolled up to the theater there was the whole geek crew from the comic book store. It does appear that dorks of a feather flock together, even when they're not trying.

The movie was quite good. The adaptation of the novel was really quite good, though I feel it could have been a tad longer and played up the central drama a little bit more. I love Philip K. Dick, and when a new adaptation of one of his novels comes out I am always quite excited. Of course I found out today that Nicholas Cage is in the next one. The man is movie poison and I wish he didn't share so many of my interests. He is such a dork.

The movie was filmed in live action, then animated, but I still felt like everyone had a great performance- most notably Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. Of course since this is the ONLY type of part (spacey drug addict) Keanu Reeves ever plays, he was just fine. I still hold that Keanu Reeve's best movie performances involve kidnapping Socrates and playing twister with the Grim Reaper.

Interestingly A Scanner Darkly had two taglines:
What Does A Scanner See?
Everything Is Not Going To Be OK
Obviously, one is brilliant and the other utter crap. "Everything Is Not Going To Be OK" is the perfect tagline, it intrigues and is completely relevant to the movie.

A Scanner Darkly-- go see it.

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