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Monday, February 21, 2005
French peasant blood!
The Great Curve links to the trailer for A Scanner Darkly at the Yahoo! Movies page.
This is one of my favorite books, and my favorite book by Dick so I'm interested to see how the adaptation goes. There's an unfortunate streak in Dick adaptations where the filmmakers seem eager to use all the sci-fi concepts that Dick created but do not want anything to do with the themes Dick goes over. One of Dick's favorites, the question of what is reality, is passed by and the idea of states bent on destroying privacy seem to be nothing more than a jumping off point for the special effects crew. Minority Report did a bit more with the government stuff but I felt it was a bit too much on the nose (granted you can make the case that Dick himself was never subtle about anything in the first place). Total Recall made for a good film because there was a nice sense of the grotesque to it but it didn't have more than that going for it. Blade Runner might have come closest to achieving what Dick does best, but I must admit it has been a long time since I've seen that film and can’t remember much other than it looked great. I haven't seen Paycheck or Screamers but with the former I'll assume I'm not missing much.
The film A Scanner Darkly does look like a visual treat. I didn't really warm up to Richard Linklater's Waking Life but I think that had to do with my disdain, at the time, of college students' philosophical musings that already surrounded me. I felt the animation was a neat trick and if I saw the film again today I might have a different opinion of the film as a whole. The animation in A Scanner Darkly looks a lot more appealing, like lost artwork from Radiohead's OK Computer album or the covers for The Filth. I must say that Keanu Reeves doesn't have a screen presence I find attractive and I have long since given up hoping that his, let's say, "relaxed" method of acting will be used to any good effect. The other cast members like Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson might fare better. In fact the idea to cast those three as drug abusers with lives that have come to a complete halt seems so audacious, considering their lives off-camera, that I might want to see the film just for the tabloid aspect.
That's the thing, though. Dick even spells out in his author's note at the end that this is a tragic of tale of people who have chosen chemical pleasure over all else. It's a William S. Burroughs type of story (another one of my favorites) jammed into the suburbs of Los Angeles. In fact, I would like to see a filmmaker like Linklater adapt this film with all of the science fiction stuff gone and just present it as the documentation of a masochistic lifestyle that it is.
One point of trivia is that one of my favorite screenwriters, Charlie Kauffman, wrote an unproduced screenplay for the book. I must admit I haven't read it all because I hate reading screenplays (they’re not even half of a film, therefore not even half of a completed product) but it seems to be a pretty straight adaptation of the book.
Of course if the film’s bad it might hurt the reputation, and sales, of the book. But people in this country don’t read anyway so fuck worrying about that.
Permanent Link: 4:47 PM |
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