A Scanner Darkly dvd movie.|
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List Price: $27.98 Our Price: $19.99 You Save: $7.99 Features • AC-3 • Animated • Closed-captioned • Color • Dolby • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 28 July, 2006 DVD Release : 19 December, 2006 |
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A Scanner Darkly description How well you respond to Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly depends on how much you know about the life and work of celebrated science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. While it qualifies as a faithful adaptation of Dick's semiautobiographical 1977 novel about the perils of drug abuse, Big Brother-like surveillance and rampant paranoia in a very near future ("seven years from now"), this is still very much a Linklater film, and those two qualities don't always connect effectively. The creepy potency of Dick's premise remains: The drug war's been lost, citizens are kept under rigid surveillance by holographic scanning recorders, and a schizoid addict named Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is facing an identity crisis he's not even aware of: Due to his voluminous intake of the highly addictive psychotropic drug Substance D, Arctor's brain has been split in two, each hemisphere functioning separately. So he doesn't know that he's also Agent Fred, an undercover agent assigned to infiltrate Arctor's circle of friends (played by Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, and Robert Downey, Jr.) to track down the secret source of Substance D. As he wears a "scramble suit" that constantly shifts identities and renders Agent Fred/Arctor into "the ultimate everyman," Dick's drug-addled antihero must come to grips with a society where, as the movie's tag-line makes clear, "everything is not going to be OK." While it's virtually guaranteed to achieve some kind of cult status, A Scanner Darkly lacks the paranoid intensity of Dick's novel, and Linklater's established penchant for loose and loopy dialogue doesn't always work here, with an emphasis on drug-culture humor instead of the panicked anxiety that Dick's novel conveys. As for the use of "interpolated rotoscoping"--the technique used to apply shifting, highly stylized animation over conventional live-action footage--it's purely a matter of personal preference. The film's look is appropriate to Dick's dark, cautionary story about the high price of addiction, but it also robs performances of nuance and turns the seriousness of Dick's story into... well, a cartoon. Opinions will differ, but A Scanner Darkly is definitely worth a look--or two, if the mind-rattling plot doesn't sink in the first time around. --Jeff Shannon |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Weirdest Movie |
| In Sum: Weird
Should you Buy? Sure. This is one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen. The movie is presented in vector animation, which is very cool. Luckily the use of graphics did not detract from the film but added to its weirdness, if you can even figure out what its about and why it occurs in Anaheim. The script is great, with Neo, Woody Harrelson and that one chick from some slacker movies. How does this play in HD DVD? Very well, but nothing special. Animation is a weird thing in HD, especially CGI. I never saw this in SD, but I think it would look okay - obviously not HD quality, but good. Nothing really special or "wowie" about the video quality though. The audio is also middle of the road. There is a nice crisp environment, but like the video ... nothing "wowie" about it. Ultimately, this is a fun and weird movie to watch and great on a big TV. The extra features are informative, but forgettable. ILHDDVD Rating: 3/5 (Lack of wowie) |
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