I read Gary Indiana’s review of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, when it first appeared in Art Forum last summer. It took me about ten minutes to read and I still think about it all the time. It’s a 2000-word blitz through the entire Linklater oeuvre, a joyous stomping on it like of grapes at a drunken bacchus harvest fest. Yum.

Here’s a tasting.

On the Linklater-ness of Linklater movies:

“He undermines the ostensible premises of his movies by applying a can opener to his characters’ heads […] He is the Dostoyevsky of movie dialogue, however flighty and paper-thin his narratives appear to be. The repressed and unconscious yodel forth… even when [his characters] are uttering boilerplate banalities, there’s something defective and unsettling in their delivery, tense evidence of a yawning abyss between what they articulate and what’s really churning through their minds.”

On Linklater’s pet pathology, male characters and the Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy series:

“…the burnouts, blabbermouth slobs, and insatiable pot heads who usually typify the male gender in his movies illustrate the pathology he’s inscribing with laudable self-awareness. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (2004) almost avoid making Julie Delpy into a sprightly but stereotypical gamine, but Delpy herself is a cliché, albeit an intelligent one, so limited in range that Ethan Hawke gobbles both films down to the gizzards, even with his most fatuously overworked mannerisms.”

On Linklater and drug use and Los Angeles:

“…since most of the characters are perpetually stoned and usually in throes of paranoia, their ability to spend the eon of the void pondering missing gears on a bicycle or the finer points of carburetor repair while suspecting one another of murky conspiracies, A Scanner Darkly is a film best seen after smoking at least one substantial spliff, in which case it’s vastly enjoyable. Much of it has that crisp look that Los Angeles has when you’re driving on amphetamines, and, likewise, it’s a lot easier to follow when you’re not trying to make any sense of it.”

And then there’s this on Keanu:

“Keanu Reeves saves this film… His performance as Robert Arctor, a man whose brain has started to atrophy, is the role he was born to play… On the whole, he seems more human as an animated character than as himself in films like the Matrix.”