Keanu Reeves, Darkly

I'm catching up on some SF cinema that I've missed in the past few decades. A Scanner Darkly is the latest one I got from Netflix. Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. among the cast. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney also associated with the production. Directed by Richard Linklater. This is not a collection of names I expect to see associated with an sf project.

Whatever expectations, the movie is actually quite good, and a reasonably faithful adaptation of PKD's piece of paranoid druggy nightmare. I was a bit taken aback when I first realized that the entire movie had been animated by rotoscoping the original footage. Shades of Ralph Bakshi stirred uneasily in the recesses of buried memory, if you know what I mean. But, in fact, the technique worked out splendidly, giving the entire movie a visual surreality that reflected the equal surreality of the story itself.

So two thumbs up, one from each of my cerebral hemispheres.