I rented a couple of movies this past weekend, and they were both good enough that I felt like passing on my recommendation. The first was A Scanner Darkly, which I’d been trying to rent for a while now. It’s one of those movies that didn’t get enough commercial success for Blockbuster to have 200 copies of it, but is good enough to always be checked out. Anyway, I really liked the animation effects in the movie (Wikipedia tells me it’s called interpolated rotoscoping); for the most part it didn’t really get in the way and resulted in a nice artistic effect. That is, with one notable exception. For whatever reason, the car scenes in the movie really distracted me. Something about them just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the animation. I’d be interested to hear what other people who’ve seen it thought, but for me these scenes really jarred me out of the movie momentarily. There weren’t very many of them, however, and it was a small thing in the larger context of a very good movie that I would recommend pretty highly.

I also picked up a movie called Idiocracy on a little bit of a whim. I’d walked right past it before – it stars Luke Wilson and I thought at the time that it must have gone straight to video since I hadn’t ever seen a preview for it. But then I noticed that it was done by Mike Judge (who also did Office Space), and after reading the synopsis on the back of the box, I gave it a shot. And I’m really glad I did; it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. If you want to see the basic premise of the movie, you can check it out on YouTube. It’s not a spoiler or anything; it’s just the little intro blurb from the beginning of the movie. I looked up more information about why I never saw a promo for it, and it seems like the movie company got worried that they might get sued or something and limited the release. After seeing the movie, I’m not really sure how much I blame them. The movie certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it deals with companies, and it referes to them by name.

I was trying to figure out which of the two movies I liked better. My first instinct was to go with Idiocracy, but I’m starting to lean more towards A Scanner Darkly as I think back on it. Regardless of that, it’s been a while since I’ve rented two movies that I haven’t seen before and had them both turn out to be this good.