Flying and a movie

A friend of ours has his pilot's license and took us for a plane ride today. We flew from Waterloo to Shelburne to Goderich to London to Stratford and back to Waterloo. We were up for just over 2 hours. It was a beautiful day to go flying - the sky was a beautiful cloudless blue, there was little to no humidity, and it wasn't too hot. Ian took a bunch of pictures; you can see them here.

We also saw the movie A Scanner Darkly, which is based on a Philip K. Dick novel. The film is directed by Richard Linklater, who also directed Waking Life. Both films were shot and then rotoscoped, which lends them a weird half-animated floaty quality. We thought that the rotoscoping in A Scanner Darkly is better than that in Waking Life; there seemed to be more depth to the animation, and some scenes looked almost real. This may have been a choice by the director, though, to support the confusion, uncertainty, and dissociation that the protagonist was experiencing.

For the most part, I enjoyed the movie. It was definitely Philip K. Dick - it portrays a dystopian, police-state future where no one is who they seem. The only thing that was weird to me is the way A Scanner Darkly strongly reflects the culture and negative aspects of being a drug addict. In a way, those themes felt much more like Philip K. Dick saying something to the reader/viewer than the book/film saying something to the reader/viewer.