Fever Dream

A Scanner Darkly: adapted by Richard Linklater from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name; directed by Richard Linklater; starring Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor); Robert Downey Jr. (James Barris); Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck); Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman) (2006): Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fueled mental breakdown.

Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.

Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.

Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.

The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.

The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety. Highly recommended.

Me and Orson Welles

Me and Orson Welles, written by Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr., based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, starring Zac Efron, Clare Danes, Christian McKay and Zoe Kazan (2008): Having graduated from high school musicals, Zac Efron does solid work here as a high school student who manages to get himself cast in the career-making staging of Julius Caesar by Orson Welles and the Mercury Players in 1937 New York.

Christian McKay makes a convincing Welles, ego and talent and all, and Danes provides a light romantic touch as the troupe's assistant manager. Efron's character is complete fiction, but much of the events here are real, or at least reality-based: Welles's drastically shortened Caesar, performed in modern, Italian-fascist costumes, did indeed help take the young impresario's reputation to the next level.

And Welles was young -- in his early 20's -- and talented and something of a dick. Nonetheless, he inspired great loyalty among many of his actors, and we see that at work here, along with his genius, his manipulativeness, and his glory-hogging ways. Really, we only miss seeing Welles's famous appetite for food and drink, which would ultimately make him the gigantic, tragic figure of 1970's Gallo wine commercials and talk-show-host jokes about his mighty girth, but never about his mightier talent..

The rest of the cast does yeoman's work embodying the mostly real members of Welles's troupe on the cusp on stardom, of War of the Worlds, of Citizen Kane, and so on. One can see how Welles came to make Citizen Kane (for which he took too much creative credit), but also how he alienated the studios, leading to the tragically re-edited Magnificent Ambersons (still a great work in bowdlerized form) and decades of scrambling to make movies without much funding while taking well-paying roles in other people's movies (none more towering than Welles's Harry Lime in Carroll Reed's The Third Man, opposite his old Mercury pal Joseph Cotten). Highly recommended.