Pirates Shmirates

[prog]

I saw A Scanner Darkly last night. I enjoyed it but I don't know if I would generally recommend it to anyone. You should see it if you know what you're getting into; having read the book counts.

* Boy, are the trailers misleading. In one way that's good, because the story so isn't the paranoid dystopian thriller that the trailers make it out to be, and so my concerns of outrageous plot deviations were put to rest. On the other hand, I worry that audiences will feel confused and frustrated at seeing a very different movie than the one they were expecting.

* I forgave the rather oddball depiction of the "scramble suits". While the book didn't precisely describe what they looked like, I'm fairly certain that they didn't give their wearer the aspect of a constantly shifting chimera; that would rather defeat the purpose of an indentity-hiding, blending-in disguise. But they looked really cool, so who cares. I also noticed that PKD's face (see icon) briefly phased through the Arctor-suit during its first close-up.

* The movie very closely followed the book, including several lengthy scenes of the brain-addled junkies sitting around in their cluttered house talking paranoid nonsense. The actors hammed it up and it was fun to watch but boy, there was certainly a lot of it. They could have cut half of it out, but then the movie would have been only 45 minutes long.

* I misted up at the unexpected postscript text, which was taken word-for-word directly from the final page of the book. Even now I feel affected at how the author's name lingered for an extra half-second on the black screen before blipping out. I worried about the rest of the audience feeling more confused or uncomfortable by its presence, though.

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

don't know if cinematical is on your RSS feed, but they've given ASD extensive coverage. this review overlaps with some of your thoughts.

my dislike for linklater (or for the cult of linklater) is high enough that i will probably catch this one on cable, if at all. (since his other 2006 film, fast food nation, count avril lavigne, ethan hacke hawke, and wilmer valderamma among its cast, i'm marginally more likely to see ASD.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

There's a scene near the end where smock-wearing asylum patients sit around a table dribbing faux-philosophical aphorisms at each other. A friend and I joked that, wow, Linklater snuck an entire sequel to Waking Life into the movie!

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

oh man, that is awesome!

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Scramble-suit: In some ways what was depicted did seem to follow the literal description in the book: "it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure--the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, and then switched to the next..." The problem being, I think, that we saw those things for lengths greater than a nanosecond at a time. You are certainly correct in that it did not give the effect that was stated in the book (and movie) that the wearer looks like a "vague blur."

lengthy scenes of the brain-addled junkies: There was a lot less of that than was in the book though.

I was concerned that a lot of the narration and exposition that was in the book and missing in the movie resulted in a missing "layer" in the movie that was present in the book. Certainly it wouldn't have made a good movie to include all of that unaltered, but although I like the movie and do think it is a good movie, it struck me as a little thin.

postscript text I misted up too. I didn't worry about how the rest of audience might take it, though I'm sure some of them were confused or uncomfortable.