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January 2 movie: A Scanner Darkly. I'm home with a nasty cold. Ugh. But forget that, let's talk about A Scanner Darkly. I was excited about this when it came out, but somehow I forgot to go see it. I'm not really good with the movie theater thing. (I've started adding movies to my Netflix queue while they're still in theaters because that way I'm more likely to see them.)

I had never read A Scanner Darkly and I had heard the movie was a very close adaptation of the book. Which gave me concern that I might have trouble following the movie, but I didn't. In fact, Georg and I commented afterwards that the plot was much more straightforward than we were expecting. I guessed the big plot twist pretty early on, but it wasn't much of a deductive achievement if you've ever noticed how women behave in Phil Dick novels. And knowing didn't detract from my enjoyment of the movie, which was much more about mood and psychological issues than plot or suspense.

Though I can't compare it to the source material, it seemed extremely true to Phil Dick's style. I think the animation technique helped. Not just by allowing them to show things (like the hallucinations and the shape-shifting suits) that would have been hard to do plausibly in live action, but more fundamentally by distancing the actors, making them seem (pardon me for stating the obvious) unreal. I really enjoyed this movie. I think I'm going to go get the novel from the library.