Scratch
Here you will find older scratches, musings and other detritus that once were located on the front pages, but have now faded.
Filed away here to collect dust and cobwwwebs in perpetuity, links may break, facts may change and data may corrupt.
On occasion I may come down here to tidy, but for the most, I prefer to leave the past where it lies.
Based on Philip K. Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly depicts a violent and lawless future, where drug abuse is rife among the human population. One of the most popular narcotics is Substance D, a powerful hallucinogenic which has the side effect of causing serious mental problems. Undercover police officer Fred (Reeves) is hooked on the illegal drug, and whilst which has created a rather unfortunate alter ego - a notorious drug dealer known only as Bob. As he works against himself, his disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. As the drugs keep oiling the gears of suspicion, seducing them down really absurd corridors of absurd syllogistic reasoning, you can feel them out-thinking their own paranoia to the brink of insanity. The humour is very dark, blackly farcical, full of surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens taking 11,000 years of listing sins to reach Freck's discovering of masturbation.
The aggressive nature of the book itself doesn't easily lend itself to cinema, and on occasion, I wondered whether Richard Linklater might not have been better to stick more to the spirit of Dick's novel than the wording. However, the use of interpolated rotoscoping*, adds to the surreal drug induced weirdness that helps empasise the discontinuity experienced by the characters, without being too gimicky or distracting.
If you fancy a look, view first 24 minutes at IGN.
* where live action film is animated over using vector keyframes. Each minute of animation requires 500 hours of work.
5 Sep 2006 9:48 | (0) comments | Movies
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