A Title Stupidly

They let Philip K. Dick come up with the title. A geek of your credentials should appreciate that.

Well, actually, the title is from the Philip K. Dick novel on which the movie is based, A Scanner Darkly and the "Charles Schwab" commercial style you refer to is what director Richard Linklater used in Waking Life as well. The technique is called Rotoscoping and I personally think kicks ass. I think I first fell in love with rotoscoping when I was a kid after watching (many many times over) the 1982 film, Secret of NIMH, in which Don Bluth uses rotoscoping to animate the more complex geometric objects in the film. You can see this in the scene where the rats are moving the Brisby family home (the concrete block) to the lee of the stone, as well as the scene where Mrs. Brisby escapes from the bird cage by kicking out the water dish, and again in the scene where Justin takes Nicodemus and Mrs. Brisby across an underground lake in a punting boat.

So I'm not sure if you're just a Linklatuh Hateuh, or a Keanu Reeves Hateuh, or a inovative-filmmaking-technique Hateuh but I think you should give this film a second chance. I think Linklater and PKD are both important artists, and though I am fearful of the potential "Johnny Mnemonic" style accident that putting Keanu together with a sci-fi powerhouse like PKD (in Johnny Mnemonic it was William Gibson, but are we going to split hairs here?) warrants, I'm hopefull.

Yeah, I knew it was based on a book. But it's a really stupid title. I assume it makes sense in the context of the story, but if there's one thing I believe in it's judging books by their covers.

The original animated Lord of the Rings movie used rotoscoping too, yes? I watched that in third grade and it freaked me the hell out.

Also, I've never heard of Philip K. Dick. I relinquished any claims to sci-fi geekdom in high school. Another reason I probably shouldn't have majored in Physics.

Dick also wrote "The Minority Report," which dropped the "the" when it became a Tom Cruise movie. I assumed that this one was originally called "Through a Scanner Darkly," which makes a little more sense, and thus was the victim of the same kind of coolifying process as Minority Report. But apparently not.

I think the rotoscoping looks pretty cool, but I've never seen Waking Life. I was curious about this one, but the advance reviews from Cannes in Hollywood Reporter and Variety were negative, calling the movie plodding and boring.

Isn't there a famous book or poem called "through a glass darkly"?

I think "through a glass darkly" is a line from the New Testament. Possibly from the Book of Keanu, but don't quote me on that.

to take the discussion to a whole other area, this is the second reference to johnny mnemonic i've come across today. after not thinking about that movie once since i saw it. life is weird.

matt, i'll be back in sf in late july. still no job.

From the dictionary of cultural literacy (awesome!): To see "through a glass"—a mirror—"darkly" is to have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality. The expression comes from the writings of the Apostle Paul; he explains that we do not now see clearly, but at the end of time, we will do so.

For another Johnny Mnemonic reference, see the second image here, though it's somewhat grating that it misidentifies the lead singer as Animal.

Also, it sounds like Paul was ripping off Plato.