Word: scanners
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even high-art programmers know that films are also movies. So this year Cannes had a quartet of horror-SF pictures. Two, X-Men The Last Stand and the Taiwanese thriller Silk, showed out of competition in the main selection. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly played in the official sidebar Un Certain Regard. The fourth film, Bong Joon-ho's The Host was in the independent Directors' Fortnight program...
...Scanner Darkly was the second of two films at Cannes this year by writer-director Linklater, and I'll start by saying it's better than the other Linklater item, Fast Food Nation, which so far has tied Richard Kelly's Southland Tales as the Festival's biggest flop. This one is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by that crucial and deeply disturbing SF visionary, Philip K. Dick. It's Dick's memoir of his addiction to painkillers and other drugs, as refracted through the sci-fi-delic prose style of his later years...
...Scanner Darkly can be synopsized... you know, I'm not going to try. The whole enterprise is too dizzyingly oneiric. I'll just say that everyone is after a drug called Substance D, for Death (and for Dick). Also that the two leading characters are a drug-addled renegade, Robert Arctor, and his pursuer, an undercover cop named Fred - and that both are the same person. See? It's complicated...
...scanner is an amazing thing; it can detect some tumors that are only the size of a grain of rice. Here's roughly how it works: You hold really still for half an hour or so in a big machine made of a magnet and some computers. The magnet itself is big, heavy and expensive - not to mention so strong that it could pull on a paper clip with nearly 100 pounds of force. You're blasted with strong radio waves. The protons in your body absorb some radio waves, then they let some back out - like a crystal wine...
...conference past a couple hundred photographers. This is catnip to the Festival administration, which gets free worldwide publicity from the stars. No one is more eager for Angelina Jolie to have her baby early than Fremaux; if she does, Brad Pitt may show up here for his movie A Scanner Darkly...