The Ohio Sci-Fi and Horror Marathons

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 Post subject: SCANNER DARKLY
PostPosted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 8:51 pm 
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Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2006 8:14 pm
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Location: Los Angeles
Anyone in Ohio catch Richard Linklater's animated version of the Philip K. Dick book?

It's a pretty frightening drug metaphor. The true SF content is fairly minimal - mainly the all-important 'Scramble Suits' which conceal their wearer's identity - but it works as a paranoid drug-addicted future society (or, is it really all that 'futuristic'?). One could deduce that it's sort of a precurser to the wasted deadened society seen in BLADE RUNNER (after all, Orange County is only an hour or so from L.A.).

I did like the choice of going with animation with it, though I also would contend that the Animation Over Video approach doesn't work as well as it did in Linklater's earlier (and superior) WAKING LIFE. The major problem is that it's so plainly obvious we are watching Robert Downey, Keanu, Winona etc. that their animated selves look just like them with a bit of airbrushed blur smeared over their features. Just as in POLAR EXPRESS, what is the point of making an animated film where the character animation strives to make the performers look as realistic as possible?

The film is quite chilling, and even more 'visionary' than even Philip K. Dick may have wanted to achieve himself. You can certainly read it as symbolic of how our loving pharmaceutical companies simultaneously cure and cause drug addiction in the populace. Of course, providing drugs on both ends of the cycle to their ever-expanding profits along the way.

A sad and melancholy film not for all tastes, and I fear how it would fare with our ever increasingly impatient Marathon crowd - at least in Boston. Ohio?

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