Cool Trailer

George Lucas filmed most of his recent prequels in front of a blue screen and then added in the backgrounds later.

Sin City did pretty much the same thing. Most of that movie was just shot on an empty set on a soundstage.

A Scanner Darkly continues this trend by filming live actors and then turning them into animated characters. Kind of like Ralph Bakshi did for parts of his aborted Lord of the Rings suckfest, only cooler looking.

This trailer is by now quite old. I saw it as a trailer on a DVD months ago. But Oregon Muse reminded me of it, and you haven't seen it, it's cool looking.

I wonder if they can animate Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder into actually having a full panoply of human facial expressions. Is that the most vapid-looking pair of stars ever, or what?

The Philip K. Dick movie-making machine rolls on. His heirs must be happy. The guy died a hack who never sold a huge number of books, but by just count all the movies now based off his books and stories. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Imposter, Minority Report, Paycheck, and now A Scanner Darkly. And I'm sure I've missed a few.

I Said It Looks Cool: I mean, superficially. The animation looks cool.

That trailer doesn't do much to sell the movie. I can't think of a lamer sci-fi trailer in recent memory. I can't tell what the hell the thing is about and there's nothing particularly interesting going on in the trailer. Everything's recorded and a guy has a split personality. Big whoop-de-doo.

Then again, do you really need to know the premise of any Philip K. Dick story? They're all the same. They're all variants on the same theme, each a similar installment in a long megaseries called Mindfuck, in which someone wakes up to realize he's not the guy he thought he was -- he's actually a clone of himself, who actually died fifteen years ago -- and his wife may be a clone too and then he learns he's not so much a clone but an android-clone, with implanted memories of his past life as a clone, which never really existed, but even worse he's actually dreaming it all, stoned out of his mind in a coma on an android-clone hallucinogenic drug called Psiborg, and when he wakes up, he realizes that Hitler is really President of the world, and also, unfortunately, also an android. With a nuclear bomb in his chest.

posted by Ace at 09:41 PM

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