A Scanner Darkly Sneak-Peek

An anonymous reader writes "Some images for the upcoming film 'A Scanner Darkly' have been posted on aintitcool.com. Looks like it's going to look alot like one of Richard Linklater's previous films, Waking Life."

Comments

I like it...!

[soliptic]

I had no idea this movie was taking this approach, I thought it was going to be standard live action.

I've got to say, I think this could really work. Being "non-realistic" in the first place adds scope for elegantly coping with the multiple (and extremely blurred) levels of reality in the book (which, btw, is my favourite from all the Dick I have read so far).

Re:I like it...!

[sakusha]

Yeah, I thought this was going to be regular live action too. And this book deserves to be a regular film. All the action is plain old reality, is are hardly any SF geekery except the "scramble suit" to disguise someone's identity. This film SHOULD be a live action film. That's one of the main points of this film, that it happens in a reality so close to ours, not some unimaginably unrealistic SF world. This film is about the 1970s, not the 2070s.

This style vs. Miyazaki

[Dancin_Santa]

I gotta tell you, this more "realistic" style of cartooning is much more interesting than the anime style of Miyazaki. For one, the 3 dimensional depth aspect is added through the use of very well thought out shading, so the characters seem more alive than most other cartoons.

With the exception of Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), which succeeded because of the power of the story more than anything else, Miyazaki's work pales in comparison to the screenshots shown here.

Re:This style vs. Miyazaki

[krymsin01]

Wait...

Just because the source for the work happens to be series of photographs instead of a series of sense impressions in some artists mind means that it's not animation?

Please, that's just the fanboy mentality that calls pen & inkers "tracers." It's demeaning to the work involved in the process. In pen & ink, the artist takes a base drawing and adds furthur dimension and artistic merit by applying his or her own style.

That's exactly what they animators (and yes, rotoscoping IS animation) are doing here, and you are doing them a diservice by belittling their work.

If you want to attack this film, there are plenty of other avenues to go down.

Re:wtf? why, what?

[orangesquid]

*shrug* It doesn't have to.

Most nerds like sci-fi... Most people don't complain when Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and/or Arthur C. Clarke are mentioned in stories.

retro 70s sci-fi

[Bootle]

I like the animation style, but animation seems to be a bit strong of a word. The technique, developed by a guy from MIT, strikes me as a cross between rotoscoping and key-frame animation. The actors are filmed and then painted over. So they have a complete reference for the shadows, etc. It's tracing, not true animation. I always pictured A Scanner Darkly the movie as looking very much like Cheech and Chong with bits of neat sci-fi tech. The book oozes its 70s setting with the cars and the guy's house and stuff. Also, the book starts off very funny, like C&C, and starts to tumble down from there. If I was filming it (thank god I'm not), Up in Smoke would have been my main visual inspiration!

Re:wtf? why, what?

[orangesquid]

The movies are pretty much all under the "Movies" category. If you have a useraccount, you can simply choose to filter these out of the frontpage.

You don't have to venture into any stories you don't want to read, either... that's the idea behind having the short little blurbs on the front page. If something doesn't interest you, just keep scrolling :)

I'm not trying to sound like a smart-aleck, but, I agree with the slashdot admins in that I think there should be a lot of different things here, not just science, math, and computer technology articles.

Read Charlie Kaufman's adaptation...

[mattyohe]

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/scanner.pdf

I would have prefered to see this one.

missing Dick's point about the drug war?

[willwarner]

The protagonist is a drug dealer and a narcotics agent. The IMDB summary implies this is only because he uses drugs that split his personality. The much more interesting truth, which shone through Dick's novel, is that people do switch sides all the time! Captured drug dealers really are offered immunity from punishment if they'll be DEA double-agents. And agents who realize the money to be made, and their privileged position, really do succumb to temptation and start dealing drugs. More generally, both cartels and the DEA work to preserve the current Drug War, rather than managed and taxed legalization as with alcohol since Prohibition. Hopefully the movie pushes this home, despite IMDB's summary.

Plus, he's played by Keanu Reeves. I mean, really.

On the plus side, if they left the EEG machine in the movie, this should spike interest in OpenEEG.

Apparently you can read the book online

[felix rayman]

It looks like the text of the original the novel is online.

The main thing to note here is that they will fuck up the movie. There is no way they can be honest to the spirit of the novel and get the movie distributed in the malls of America. Then again, the perversion of the novel will pay for a shopping trip to those malls for the heirs of PKD, who, I would assume, are happy to live in the world he predicted.

Anyways, my favorite part of the novel is this, where one of the characters has decided to commit suicide by overdose:

Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating his favorite page of _The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex_, which showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside his bed, lay down with the Ayn Rand book and unfinished protest letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, although he kept remembering the girl being on top, and then, with a glass of the Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once. After that, the deed being done, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book and letter on his chest, and waited.
However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact--considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed--that he was in for some trip.
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll.
"You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.
The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours."
Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as 'space' and 'time' no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."
Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.
A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade, when he was six years old.
Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.
The year he had discovered masturbation.

That, my friends, is some fine fucking literature.

Why this film actually has a snowball's chance

[Ohreally_factor]

#5 Irrelevant.

#4 I argue elsewhere that Ridley Scott stayed true to PKD*, despite, or even because of the way he transposed the emotional meaning of Decker/the androids. Pretty much all the others I've seen I'd agree with you. *(I'm refering to the director's cut. The studio version was an abortion.)

Furthermore, stripping elements is pretty much a given when adapting any novel to the screen. The key to a good adaptation seems to be knowing which elements are essential and which aren't. So, yes, there are huge amounts of material missing from Bladerunner, and I'm sure we all have our favorite bits that were left out (I especially missed the Penfield Mood Organ), but that's pretty much the way it goes, unless you're talking Elmore Leonard.

Anyway, by this criteria, all adaptions must fail it.

#3. This is a failing of your imagination, not mine.

#2. A big budget movie will suffer from exactly the problems that Paycheck, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., etc. suffer from. A big budget scanner darkly will be burdened by flashy special effects and the twisted story itself will be jettisoned in favor of some formulaic doppelganger abortion because with so much money on the line, the studio will be nervous. In the big budget version, Bob Arctor kicks his substance D addiction by the end of second act, kills the Islamic terrorist drug manufacturers that killed his best friend Jerry with invisible bio-engineered aphids in the first act and finally marries Donna, and they all live happily ever after. The only chance this project stands of succeeding on our terms is if it's a low budget prestige project that stays mostly under the radar of the execs, lawyers, and bean counters.

#1. You've got me there. I'm pretty worried about this aspect. I can think of a hundred name actors they might have gotten. Why not Ed Norton? Why Keanu? As far as I am concerned, the three actors that would stand the best chance of totally wrecking this movie are Keanu, Matt Damon, and Ben Afleck. Shit! I think I'd rather see Jean Claude Van Damme in the role.

Still, the rest of the cast sounds incredibly impressive, so I still hope for the best.