Movies – Page 35

‘A Scanner Darkly’ movie

$\'A Scanner Darkly\' movie poster$ While channel surfing today, I stumbled upon this movie called A Scanner Darkly (Yahoo! Movies page), which is a movie adaptation of the novel of the same name by Philip K Dick. I haven’t read the novel, but I do know the story. Directed by Richard Linklater, and starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, and Winona Ryder – so it isn’t really some movie with nondescript actors. Small budget movie though, but stands out because of its visual style.

I couldn’t watch the whole movie, because when I tuned into HBO, it was into the last hour of the movie. Still whatever I saw was so stunning that I’m totally awed by it. Although it was the latter end of the movie, still, the visual style of the movie was so engrossing that out of 10, I’d give it a 10 for visual style.

The technique used for making this movie is called ‘rotoscoping’. Basically, live action (‘normal’) scenes are shot (digitally, in this case to make it easier for editing later), and then it is animation is done on top of that live action sequence footage. This, obviously, used to be a very tedious process earlier as EACH and EVERY frame had to be animated by hand; thus, it was used sparingly. For example, the lightsabers in the earliest (according to release date) three Star Wars movies were animated using this technique. You can see what I mean by rotoscoping by looking at the movie poster – that’s Keanu Reeves’ face with animation done over it.

A Scanner Darkly could take this a step further because they used to software to ease the burden. Instead of animating EVERY frame, human animators simply animated a few ‘keyframes’ – the rest was filled in by computers. It makes a better overall effect too, because the software is able to make a smoother transition than the human hand ever could. Have a look at the trailer of A Scanner Darkly to get an idea of how ossum this REALLY looks!

The story is about the ‘near-future’, where the problem of drug abuse has grown exponentially. A drug called ‘Substance D’ is one of the major drugs of that time, and the police hires the Keanu Reeves guy as a spy to go into a drug network and bring them down. Keanu’s character however, gets addicted to the stuff – and under its influence becomes schizophrenic. No more spoilers – you rather watch the movie. It doesn’t have any significant plot twists, which could be spoiled by revealing here – quite a guessable plot actually, but no point revealing it. Winona Ryder looks quite sexy too in her psuedo-animated avatar, something which she never achieved in live action; or rather, she looks really unique in this avatar.

One more thing that I really need to figure out is why Keanu Reeves always seems to end up in sci-fi flicks, always plays the One Savior type character, and always ends up in a tragic situation. Even Adam Sandler has more versatility than Reeves when it comes to the kind of characters played.

$Grand Theft Auto 4 \'Lollipop Girl\'$

One more thing that this animation technique might remind you of some animation sequences in Grand Theft Auto 4. Maybe they used rotoscoping, maybe they didn’t – but the visual style feels the same as that of A Scanner Darkly. I said ‘similar’, because the visual *feel* of the movie is way far ahead.

Indiana Jones and the Crap of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Starring: ET, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf.

First things first-I haven’t seen the previous 3 Indiana Jones films and am judging this film purely on its own merits and not on the reputation built up by the previous 3 flicks.

The first thing that strikes you about this movie is just how boring it is, the whole mountain out of a mole-hill joke notwithstanding (it’s a visual joke involving the mountain in the Paramount logo). At least on that count, the film is consistent-the beginning’s boring, the middle’s boring and the ending, is well, absurd. And boring.

The story is one twisted pile of mumbo-jumbo involving a crystal skull that has the power to influence people’s thoughts. Woven into all this is some more mumbo-jumbo about the power of thought and “the space between spaces”. The movie has just too much of plain, dry, drabby dialogue to keep you engaged for a span of more than 5 minutes.

Indy is portrayed as some super-archaeologist who can decipher clues before you can say “Dr. Jones” and survive a nuclear blast by sitting inside a lead lined fridge. But one thing has to be said, he really hasn’t slowed down. The stunts that guy manages are pretty decent, the high point being the bike chase culminating inside a library. That to me, was also the best sequence of the film, but sadly, it came too close to the beginning and from there, the film was pretty much sliding way south. Very quickly.

To his credit, Shia stands his ground against the likes of Ford and Blanchett as the James Dean style greaser. The attention he constantly endows on his hair provide some nice little comic relief. Sadly, the rest of the support cast is just wasted. Even the main baddie, Irina Spalko (played by Blanchett) has little to do, other than look cold and aloof. John Hurt as Professor Oxley, the man because of whom the whole quest for the crystal skull starts, does little to further the story, and a lot to cloud your mind by spouting philosophical mumbo-jumbo at every opportunity he gets. It is really sad seeing someone of his calibre wasted in a role like this.

For all of Spielberg’s talk that this movie was going to be CGI free, the ludicrous climax DOES feature A LOT of CGI which just cramps Indy’s style. In fact, the CGI comes out with a vengeance as soon as the story shifts to the jungles. A lot of scenes look embarrassingly artificial.

The music by the otherwise dependable John Williams is just clumsy and boring to say the least. Williams shows complete lack of imagination while scoring the action bits and the bike chase I mentioned earlier lost a lot of its steam because of the music (which, I can only guess, was dance music at best) playing in the background. Williams neither builds upon, nor rehashes his old Indy themes, leaving a rather sore ear at the end of it all.

All said and done, this movie shows what poor scripting can do, with the combined likes of Ford, Blanchett, LaBeouf and Williams at a complete loss about what to do. Watch it only if you have to. Although, I would strongly advise people to give this one the miss.