![\"Why](\"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/scannerdarkly.jpg\" "\\"scannerdarkly\\"")
Why is Keanu Reeves so down? Is it his usual low-key acting? Or a conspiracy?<\/p><\/div>\n
Just Say “Maybe”<\/span><\/em><\/h1>\n[xrr rating=3\/5]<\/p>\n
A Scanner Darkly<\/em>. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, Winona Ryder. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. Written and directed by Richard Linklater.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>(Warner Independent, 2006, Color, 100 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)<\/strong><\/p>\nDirector Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock<\/em>) has brought to the screen a faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick\u2019s 1997 sci-fi novel\u00a0A Scanner Darkly,\u00a0<\/em>a cautionary tale about drug addiction and the all-too-real \u201cWar on Drugs.\u201d<\/p>\nThis film\u2019s predecessors were big-budget action movies such as\u00a0Minority Report\u00a0<\/em>(2002),\u00a0Blade Runner<\/em>\u00a0(1982) and\u00a0Total Recall\u00a0<\/em>(1990)\u2014the latter two based, respectively, on Dick\u2019s novel\u00a0Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>\u00a0and his short story \u201cWe Can Remember It For You Wholesale.\u201d By contrast,\u00a0A Scanner Darkly\u00a0<\/em>is an independent production with more intimate dialogue, locales, and situations, as well as a polished ensemble cast.<\/p>\nSet in Orange County, California, seven years in the future, the plot revolves around Keanu Reeves\u2019s character, Agent Fred, a local narcotics officer. He\u2019s assigned to gain the confidence of a passel of burnouts in order to find the source for the highly addictive \u201cSubstance D,\u201d which is ravaging the brains of about twenty percent of the population. As Robert Downey Jr.\u2019s character puts it, \u201cEither you\u2019re on it, or you haven\u2019t tried it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside police headquarters, Agent Fred dons a holographic \u201cscramble suit,\u201d an undulating, visage-changing second skin that protects his anonymity. Out on the streets, he uses the suit to take on his workaday persona, Bob Arctor, a loser who has become an addict in order to avoid detection by the stoner housemates whom he is investigating. Although critics savage Keanu Reeves\u2019s acting, you can\u2019t deny that he has striking screen presence, something that often eludes more talented thespians. Here he gives one of his more convincing performances\u2014ironically, by playing someone who\u2019s heavily sedated most of the time.<\/p>\n
Anyone who\u2019s ever tried drugs will instantly recognize the bizarre logic of doper group dynamics. Woody Harrelson plays Ernie Luckman, a mind-expanding hippie who relates to everyday life through Beatles lyrics; Winona Ryder is Bob\u2019s attractive girlfriend Donna, sexually frigid because her vascular system is constantly constricted by cocaine; Robert Downey, Jr. gives a nuanced performance as Jim Barris, a manipulative Iago who mouths pseudo-scientific doubletalk; and Rory Cochrane\u2019s paranoiac Charles Freck suffers harrowing hallucinations of aphids swarming over his body\u2014images that make Ray Milland\u2019s DTs in\u00a0The Lost Weekend<\/em>\u00a0seem like the paragon\u00a0<\/strong>of sobriety.<\/p>\nIdentity, reality, and hallucinations tumble over one another in a visual kaleidoscope, bits of which undoubtedly originated in the novelist\u2019s own experiences with drug addiction and suicide attempts. In the novel, Freck strategically places a copy of\u00a0The Fountainhead\u00a0<\/em>near his body prior to a suicide attempt in order to \u201cprove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn.\u201d A version of this scene survives in the film. This shouldn\u2019t be perceived as a tribute to Ayn Rand, though: Dick didn\u2019t sympathize in the least with her vision of a society of heroic, productive achievers. In a 1978 interview he commented, \u201cI\u2019m with the little man. I wouldn\u2019t be with the \u2018superman\u2019 characters for all the money in the world. You know, the characters in Ayn Rand and [Robert] Heinlein who have such a contempt for everybody. Because one day that little man is gonna rise up and punch the superman out and I want to be there when it happens.\u201d<\/p>\nWell, in this tale he has certainly given us little men aplenty.<\/p>\n
A Scanner Darkly<\/em>\u00a0does present a vaguely libertarian argument about the threats to civil liberties from criminalizing drug use, and envisages a future in which the government exploits the War On Terror as a pretext to employ electronic surveillance of homes and public places in order to nab users and dealers. However, I doubt that this film\u2019s relentlessly bleak portrait of drug addiction will win it many fans from among those single-issue libertarians who na\u00efvely believe that legalization will cure a host of social ills. Apart from a couple of outrageous pothead scenes worthy of an old Cheech and Chong flick, the movie captures starkly the vicious circles in which addicts move\u2014a world where the main focus is scoring the next fix, and the ultimate result is loss of identity in slavish drug dependency.<\/p>\nYet, while the movie\u2019s moral center remains intact, Linklater\u2019s directorial approach doesn\u2019t exactly make for the most riveting cinema. To re-create for the viewer the drug addict\u2019s ambiguous, constantly shifting state of mind, visual effects director Richard Gordoa filmed in the animation process of Rotoscoping\u2014a trippy, graphically seductive imaging technique that layers painted animation over actual footage of the actors. Although many movies pair dramatic images with a largely nonsensical plots\u2014I think of David Lynch\u2019s\u00a0Lost Highway\u00a0<\/em>(1997) and\u00a0Mulholland Drive\u00a0<\/em>(2001)\u2014I felt that without the Rotoscoping,\u00a0A Scanner Darkly\u00a0<\/em>would be just as mundane as its aimless subjects.<\/p>\nThat visual effect just doesn\u2019t elevate its fairly threadbare story line, and the film never fully overcomes its gimmicky execution. While the surprise ending provides a satisfying payoff, having to sit through almost two lumbering hours to arrive at the climactic plot twist (as with Bryan Singer\u2019s modern\u00a0noir<\/em>,\u00a0The Usual Suspects<\/em>) proved taxing. Linklater could learn a thing or two from Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s masterful examples of how to build suspense\u00a0throughout\u00a0<\/em>a film until it reaches fever pitch, and\u00a0then<\/em>\u00a0unleashing the final shock.<\/p>\nAlthough\u00a0A Scanner Darkly<\/em>\u00a0serves up a morsel or two of food for thought, what is up on the screen won\u2019t compete with the buttered popcorn in your lap. Unless you wash it down with your drug of choice.<\/p>\nRobert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Just Say “Maybe” [xrr rating=3\/5] A Scanner Darkly. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, Winona Ryder. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. Written and directed by Richard Linklater.\u00a0\u00a0(Warner Independent, 2006, Color, 100 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.) Director Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock) has brought to the screen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,35,37,3,68,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animated-movies","category-dramas","category-independent-films","category-mreview","category-rotoscoping","category-sci-fi-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Director Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock<\/em>) has brought to the screen a faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick\u2019s 1997 sci-fi novel\u00a0A Scanner Darkly,\u00a0<\/em>a cautionary tale about drug addiction and the all-too-real \u201cWar on Drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n This film\u2019s predecessors were big-budget action movies such as\u00a0Minority Report\u00a0<\/em>(2002),\u00a0Blade Runner<\/em>\u00a0(1982) and\u00a0Total Recall\u00a0<\/em>(1990)\u2014the latter two based, respectively, on Dick\u2019s novel\u00a0Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>\u00a0and his short story \u201cWe Can Remember It For You Wholesale.\u201d By contrast,\u00a0A Scanner Darkly\u00a0<\/em>is an independent production with more intimate dialogue, locales, and situations, as well as a polished ensemble cast.<\/p>\n Set in Orange County, California, seven years in the future, the plot revolves around Keanu Reeves\u2019s character, Agent Fred, a local narcotics officer. He\u2019s assigned to gain the confidence of a passel of burnouts in order to find the source for the highly addictive \u201cSubstance D,\u201d which is ravaging the brains of about twenty percent of the population. As Robert Downey Jr.\u2019s character puts it, \u201cEither you\u2019re on it, or you haven\u2019t tried it.\u201d<\/p>\n Inside police headquarters, Agent Fred dons a holographic \u201cscramble suit,\u201d an undulating, visage-changing second skin that protects his anonymity. Out on the streets, he uses the suit to take on his workaday persona, Bob Arctor, a loser who has become an addict in order to avoid detection by the stoner housemates whom he is investigating. Although critics savage Keanu Reeves\u2019s acting, you can\u2019t deny that he has striking screen presence, something that often eludes more talented thespians. Here he gives one of his more convincing performances\u2014ironically, by playing someone who\u2019s heavily sedated most of the time.<\/p>\n Anyone who\u2019s ever tried drugs will instantly recognize the bizarre logic of doper group dynamics. Woody Harrelson plays Ernie Luckman, a mind-expanding hippie who relates to everyday life through Beatles lyrics; Winona Ryder is Bob\u2019s attractive girlfriend Donna, sexually frigid because her vascular system is constantly constricted by cocaine; Robert Downey, Jr. gives a nuanced performance as Jim Barris, a manipulative Iago who mouths pseudo-scientific doubletalk; and Rory Cochrane\u2019s paranoiac Charles Freck suffers harrowing hallucinations of aphids swarming over his body\u2014images that make Ray Milland\u2019s DTs in\u00a0The Lost Weekend<\/em>\u00a0seem like the paragon\u00a0<\/strong>of sobriety.<\/p>\n Identity, reality, and hallucinations tumble over one another in a visual kaleidoscope, bits of which undoubtedly originated in the novelist\u2019s own experiences with drug addiction and suicide attempts. In the novel, Freck strategically places a copy of\u00a0The Fountainhead\u00a0<\/em>near his body prior to a suicide attempt in order to \u201cprove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn.\u201d A version of this scene survives in the film. This shouldn\u2019t be perceived as a tribute to Ayn Rand, though: Dick didn\u2019t sympathize in the least with her vision of a society of heroic, productive achievers. In a 1978 interview he commented, \u201cI\u2019m with the little man. I wouldn\u2019t be with the \u2018superman\u2019 characters for all the money in the world. You know, the characters in Ayn Rand and [Robert] Heinlein who have such a contempt for everybody. Because one day that little man is gonna rise up and punch the superman out and I want to be there when it happens.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, in this tale he has certainly given us little men aplenty.<\/p>\n A Scanner Darkly<\/em>\u00a0does present a vaguely libertarian argument about the threats to civil liberties from criminalizing drug use, and envisages a future in which the government exploits the War On Terror as a pretext to employ electronic surveillance of homes and public places in order to nab users and dealers. However, I doubt that this film\u2019s relentlessly bleak portrait of drug addiction will win it many fans from among those single-issue libertarians who na\u00efvely believe that legalization will cure a host of social ills. Apart from a couple of outrageous pothead scenes worthy of an old Cheech and Chong flick, the movie captures starkly the vicious circles in which addicts move\u2014a world where the main focus is scoring the next fix, and the ultimate result is loss of identity in slavish drug dependency.<\/p>\n Yet, while the movie\u2019s moral center remains intact, Linklater\u2019s directorial approach doesn\u2019t exactly make for the most riveting cinema. To re-create for the viewer the drug addict\u2019s ambiguous, constantly shifting state of mind, visual effects director Richard Gordoa filmed in the animation process of Rotoscoping\u2014a trippy, graphically seductive imaging technique that layers painted animation over actual footage of the actors. Although many movies pair dramatic images with a largely nonsensical plots\u2014I think of David Lynch\u2019s\u00a0Lost Highway\u00a0<\/em>(1997) and\u00a0Mulholland Drive\u00a0<\/em>(2001)\u2014I felt that without the Rotoscoping,\u00a0A Scanner Darkly\u00a0<\/em>would be just as mundane as its aimless subjects.<\/p>\n That visual effect just doesn\u2019t elevate its fairly threadbare story line, and the film never fully overcomes its gimmicky execution. While the surprise ending provides a satisfying payoff, having to sit through almost two lumbering hours to arrive at the climactic plot twist (as with Bryan Singer\u2019s modern\u00a0noir<\/em>,\u00a0The Usual Suspects<\/em>) proved taxing. Linklater could learn a thing or two from Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s masterful examples of how to build suspense\u00a0throughout\u00a0<\/em>a film until it reaches fever pitch, and\u00a0then<\/em>\u00a0unleashing the final shock.<\/p>\n Although\u00a0A Scanner Darkly<\/em>\u00a0serves up a morsel or two of food for thought, what is up on the screen won\u2019t compete with the buttered popcorn in your lap. Unless you wash it down with your drug of choice.<\/p>\n Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in\u00a0<\/span>Black & White Magazine<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Entrepreneur<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Hoy! New York<\/span><\/span>, the New York\u00a0<\/span>Post<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>RCA Victor\u00a0<\/span>(Japan)<\/span><\/em>,\u00a0<\/span>Scene in San Antonio<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>Spirit Magazine<\/span><\/span>\u00a0(Canada),\u00a0<\/span>Top Producer<\/span><\/span>,\u00a0 and the Trenton\u00a0<\/span>Times<\/span><\/span>. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of\u00a0<\/span>The New Individualist<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Just Say “Maybe” [xrr rating=3\/5] A Scanner Darkly. Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane, Winona Ryder. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick. Written and directed by Richard Linklater.\u00a0\u00a0(Warner Independent, 2006, Color, 100 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.) Director Richard Linklater (Slackers, School of Rock) has brought to the screen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,35,37,3,68,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animated-movies","category-dramas","category-independent-films","category-mreview","category-rotoscoping","category-sci-fi-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonesing4movies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}