What do you know about this new movie "A Scanner, Darkly?"

[Syrinx]

The title is kind of awkward, but the movie sounds timely. From the Internet Movie Database:

"A Scanner Darkly" is set in suburban Orange County, California in the future. It imagines a paranoid world in which it seems two of every 10 Americans has been hired by the government to spy on the other 8 -- in the name of national security and drug enforcement. When one reluctant government recruit (Reeves) is ordered to start spying on his friends, he is launched on a journey into the absurd, where outsourced government contractors largely define the social construct, where identities and loyalties are impossible to decode, and where not even his girlfriend can be trusted. The film highlights the inconsistencies and ironic consequences of the war on drugs.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/plotsummary

[jus_the_facts]

1. It's a Phillp K. Dick story...hope they do it justice! eom

[Nevernose]

2. Wonderful book about drug addiction and paranoia; Hollywood sucks

I could rant about Dick for hours, but the long and the short of it is: Dick was addicted to methamphetamines. It fueled his creativity, his sense of alternate reality, his genius, and many times almost destroyed his life; many suspect that in the end they DID take his life with a stroke, about the only negative physical consequence meth has been linked to, besides the dead brain cells (the psychosis, psychological disorders, and lifestyle-destroying behaviors amphetamines induce are a different topic).

"A Scanner Darkly" is about a cop who develops a drug addiction and becomes obsessed with hunting down the major distributor of this drug, only to (slowly) realize that he has split personalities and is, in fact, also the distributor of this drug.

The only reason this movie is being made/released is because "Sixth Sense" made the twist ending popular a decade ago. Hollywood is now running out of new material, and the twist ending is becoming predictable, so they've turned to older literature as an "inspiration."

I should point out that while I have high hopes for this movie (even a shitty adaptation of Dick can't be all bad), this director, and perhaps even this cast, my greatest fear is that it will somehow denigrate Phillip K. Dick, an author whom I truly believe will be with us in the centuries to come, alongside Hemingway and Twain and Steinbeck. Fifty years from now, when people say "American Literature," Dick's name will be mentioned in reverence.

[DarkTirade]

3. Running out of?

I think they ran out of new material a while ago. I can't think of a single movie that's come out in the last year that wasn't either a remake, a sequel/prequel, or based on a book, TV series, ect. :)

[Nevernose]

4. They're not running out of new material at all

They're just not willing to take any "risks" at all -- not unless it's sold already in some other format.

Look at how many versions of "Beowulf" have been sold since Seamus Heaney won that award a few years back...

[aden_nak]

7. Dag, yo! Drop a spoiler warning on that post!

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

5. Linklater is a fantastic (and subversive) director

& I'm sure he'll do justice to the book. He's filmed this using the same animation technique as "Waking Life" -


Winonan Ryder still from the film

Here's a trailer:
http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wip/us/med/scanner_darkly/scanner_darkly_a_tlr2_qt_300.mov

Interview with Linklater:

(...)

How do you think the meanings of the book have changed in the years since Dick wrote it? Or have they?

Dick wrote this paranoid future, and my premise with the movie was that we are living in science fiction now. This is the paranoid future. I mean, Dick was coming out of the Nixon era in which there was wiretapping, there was COINTELPRO, after citizens, even to the extent of assassinating citizens like Fred Hampton. There?s always a time to be a little paranoid about your government, but I think that?s hit another peak today. If you put a peak in a chart during the Nixon era, I think we?re at another little peak in the graph, a spike up, today in the Bush administration. What he was writing about, which we would term paranoia, well, you just wait a generation and paranoia becomes reality quite often.

Seeing the movie in the context of the Iraq war, heroin trade in Afghanistan and the intelligence controversy involving the NSA, the storyline seems very much of this specific political moment.

Yeah, it?s all tied in, the geopolitics. Again, I didn?t want to make it front and center, but it?s there if you listen closely. At the beginning of the movie, when the guy in the Brown Bear Lodge says, ?Our troops are down there fighting for us,? you get a sense that our government is using as a pretext to go into any country it wants. That?s there, but some people probably won?t pick up on that.

(...)

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2006/features/schizoid_man.php

[Syrinx]

8. interesting, thanks! n/t

[JitterbugPerfume]

6. I seriously doubt

that Hollywood can do it justice This book is very nuanced


look what they did to Hitch hikers Guide to the Galaxy