wildcat

I've been hard at work on this draft of "Yobbos," or whatever it ends up being called. I'm a bit at odds with two of the characters who have just shown up and seem to be ciphers, serving a function within the plot but not actually feeling - in any way - like characters in and of themselves. I'm going to throw out some character biography bits and try to build them up and then attack their scene with more fervor.

A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's adaption of the Philip K. Dick novel was decent. I enjoyed it, mostly, although it dragged in places because it felt like the screenwriters didn't exactly understand the difference between a novel and a movie in terms of visual and kinetic movement. As well, they seem to have failed to set up the basic and most central conceit of the story: who Bob Arctor is, who Fred is, and what their connection is. Oh, the connection is there but they don't clear lay out the lack of connection between the two - I went and saw it with Steph and Michael and they never really got that the character wasn't capable of seeing the link. I only knew about it because I've read the bookjacket of the book and part of the beginning, way back when.

I was thinking about all that this morning and realized that I would have preferred Linklater to use the Blade Runner approach to adapting the works of Dick: basically, take the basic premise and plot of the story and then go off in a completely different direction. Blade Runner is similar to and connected to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but ends up running at a peculiar angle to it. The thematic focus of the two entities are quite seperate. I think A Scanner Darkly could have used that emphasis, especially given that many of Dick's ideas are prototypical, and have been used and abused in hundreds of different ways since he wrote them originally; taken straight, the works of Dick fail to feel entirely fresh. The acting was all right but there's only so much Keanu Reeves I can take. The animation aspect was incomplete - it was necessary in some ways but completely unneeded in others.