Flower power

I’ll cop … I really have no idea what A Scanner Darkly is all about. If pressured as to what it was about, I could be glib and just reply, “One hundred minutes.” But it’s much, much more than that … it’s also weird. Weird like crashing in the corner of the Butthole Surfers’ pad outside Austin, frying your ass off as you watch the band members get strange on each other. Cool, weird and creepy all at the same time, like being afraid to brush at that skittery feeling on your bare thigh in the dark because it might actually be something … something that might bite.

A Scanner Darkly is cool because it doesn’t bite. It burrows. It’s cool because it not only gets out of the Hollywood rut of trying to make every adaptation of Philip K. Dick look just like Blade Runner, but it also takes the lame rotoscoping technique (filming the actors live, then animating over their movements) and makes it seem organic.

Weird because once you get used to the oddball animation, director Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation, Dazed and Confused) goes and decides to play games with it, as objects in the background surface briefly from the animation, then submerge again.

Creepy in that as portrayed here, the world of seven years from now seems like a fairly inevitable progression from the current time on your wristwatch.

It’s a world of druggy despair and desperate apathy, with the druggies and the narcs seemingly the only residents of a rapidly decaying Orange County de la Apocalypse. The drug du jour is Substance D, an addictively insane-making derivative of an innocuous blue flower that nobody seems to know the how and where of its cultivation. Nobody cares about its origin as long as they get their next dose … nobody, that is, but the narcs. They send a mole to infiltrate a small group of twitchy addicts in the slummy ‘burbs and, well … things get complicated.

What follows is a lot of paranoid jibber-jabber laced with generally wiggy observations, all finally coming together in the end to provide some form of off-the-wall insight. You know … typical Philip K. Dick stuff.

Do not operate a motor vehicle or heavy machinery after leaving the theater.