A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater. [A] december 25, 2008.

It is with great trepidation that I approached this; I fuckin hated Waking Life and here I am about to watch a movie that looks just like it from the same director. It's a testament to this movie that now I'm kind of tempted to give Waking Life a third chance. (My recent rediscovery of the magical Dazed and Confused is also a factor - that one's quickly shot up the ranks for me and, if I'm being honest with myself, it might be my favorite movie at this point, or at least the one I'd most readily watch at any given time.)

ANYWAY, a drug movie in the vein of Naked Lunch, a sci-fi movie in the vein of Alphaville, A Scanner Darkly is set in a hallucinatory, barely-disguised modern future virtually crippled by a highly addictive ("You're either on it or you've never tried it") and destructive drug called Substance D. So now there's surveillance cameras everywhere and "Scanners" sitting at monitors - like a real-time version of the ESPERS in Blade Runner - keeping track of everything at all times; license plates are bar codes, houses are surveilled in addition to public places, and standing in a McDonald's parking lot screaming about The Man doesn't just get you put in the clink, it gets you shoved into an unmarked van by an entire gang of goons in riot gear armed with assault rifles.

Keanu Reeves is working undercover for the sherrif's department as "Fred," although his badge is nowhere to be seen. His assignment is monitoring Bob Arctor's house, a bit of a drug den in Anaheim, CA. He also is Bob Arctor, a Substance D addict living with two drugged out misanthropes, a fact the sherrif's dept. isn't aware of because all drug agents, and their superiors, wear identity concealing "scramble suits" as a security precaution. These scramble suits are one of the first things you see in the film and they more or less set the tone - they divide their user into multiple fragments so that the wearer looks like a constantly shifting patchwork of various people, "the ultimate Everyman," and it's just one of several reasons why this movie couldn't have been done any other way. The rotoscoping effectively places us within the headspace of Arctor, transforming the world around him into something recognizably real, but unreal. The colors are too vivid, the surfaces constantly in motion, people's faces swirl as they speak, environments are transformed in an instant, sometimes echoing the past, sometimes becoming something else altogether, the lines between reality and dream or perception and reality or even perception and dream are completely and utterly gone.

The rotoscoping is at the heart of this; when we watch Robert Downey Jr. transform into a bug in a chair, we know that he was filmed sitting in that chair, that he was drawn over and eventually transformed into a bug, but we see his face and his performance is retained, if we could wash away the drawing somehow, the reality of what was captured on camera can still be seen, but the perception of the animation has transformed it into something else, which is itself a transformation of the reality within the film itself. Do you mistrust your eyes or Arctor's? The line blurs, and the beauty of the film is that it constantly forces you to deal with this - the animation isn't a gimmick, the crux of a high-concept thrill ride, it's an element of the reality of the film's world. There are no action set pieces, just people pissing around, having aimless conversations, shooting off guns into the air, discussing the number of gears on a bicycle, calling a tow truck when their car breaks down on the side of the road. What kind of world is this?


Private Fears in Public Places, Alain Resnais. [D] december 25, 2008.
Blah blah it's not fair to hold him against the standards of his earlier achievements etc. etc. Nahhh, it's completely fair. It's not fair to hold the ambition of his earlier achievements against the ambition of this film, maybe, but it's fair to assume that, since he's turned out some masterpieces, he can turn out some good movies. The fact is that this isn't a poor movie by Resnais' standards, but by anyone's. Facile in its characterizations, embarrassingly scripted, this movie is uninteresting in almost every capacity in which it can be uninteresting, the very definition of MOR. I hate saying that, but it's true, I haven't had a more torturous experience sitting through a movie in a while and the respect I give to Resnais is that I forced myself to not turn it off. I guess I could say more about it, but I've wasted enough time on it. It looked nice.