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Here´s my review, I saw it last week at the Fantasy Filmfest:
Nice one! Worth seeing at the movie theatre, form and content work very well.
As you might know, this movie is about Philip K. Dick´s drug experiences, that he and his friends went through. And at the end, we see a list of people who PKD lost to the drugs.
Which is important: This is not one of the cool drug movies like Spun or Fear & Loathing. Here, you see people, that have long ago stopped living and are now only using. Maybe that´s why the actors were mostly in their fourties, to underscore that they´re not party teenage pill poppers, but that this is not about being cool, it has become their way of life.
And what actors would be better suited than Keanu Reeves, who always acts as if stoned, Woody Harrelson (ditto), Wynona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.
Reeves and Ryder are their usual selves, Harrelson is a non entity and sometimes comedic relief. Downey really works here! Crazy as Depp´s Hunter Thompson but obviously dangerous and insane. I don´t know how actors, that have always been straight, could have pulled this of.
The movie stays really close to the book, and has its best scene executed wonderfully: the overdosed guy lying paralysed on his bed while an alien being reads him his sins for all eternity ("after one hundred years, they had reached the sixth grade. Where he had discovered masturbation").
And it also delivers PKD´s vision, of a man who is torn, almost split, as he has to spy on himself. Reeves slides into the situation, doesn´t know how to handle it, and then the drug takes care of his situation. It´s kind of funny watching Keanu Reeves constantly swallowing red pills.
So this is one time, where Philip K. Dick can rest and doesn´t have to spin in his grtave. No total recall here! |
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