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Re: a few things
Mark wrote:
> I'm trying to remember what dark city was. was it a dark film set in a
> futuristic city... [rest of description snipped for Ysoie's sake]
No.
I haven't seen the film you describe, but Dark City's design is deliberately
retro-noir. A mish-mash of styles dominated by the 40s. Not futuristic at all
(with one or two significant exceptions). It is indeed dark, which serves both
the design and the plot. The film opens with a narration that explains what's
going on, and my advice to those of you who haven't seen it yet: turn the sound
off during this narration. I think it would be more fun to be thrown into the
situation and not know what's going on, and like the protagonist, have to
figure it out as you go. YMMV, but if you decide to try it, once you see
Kiefer Sutherland turn his back to the camera, it's safe to turn the sound up
again. There are bald, pale people who either wear studded leather full-length
frock-coat-type outfits (no idea what the technical name for the outfits is),
or gloves, trenchcoats and black fedoras. I think an image you would remember
is one of dozens of pale bald heads, chittering in a sea of black. I hope that
doesn't reveal too much of the film; I should think not.
I've noticed people's opinions tend to be pretty strongly divided on this one.
Love it or hate it; not much room for lukewarm feelings. Most people I know
either think it was a total waste of time, or else it was brilliant. I happen
to fall in the latter category, and I could go on for at least an hour about
why, I should think, but that would require including spoilers, so I'll leave
it at that. I showed the movie to some of my housemates a few years ago, and
they all looked at me like they thought I'd been replaced by an alien because I
had been raving about this as a work of genius. Sometimes I wonder if it's
possible at all to evaluate the quality of art beyond "I liked it" in any kind
of objective manner, or if our attempts to define standards of good
craftsmanship are just post facto justifications of our subjective preferences.
This film seems to me to display obvious brilliance in crastmanship, design,
imagry, script construction and dialogue, and acting (how would *you* portray
someone who has memories of decades of piano lessons but has never actually sat
at a piano before?). It manages to explore some fascinating and horrifying
questions about identity and memory, while still hitting the marks of an
mystery thriller. My only complaint about it is (can I phrase this so as
not to give away any plot?) that there are too many explosions, shall we say,
but that's not enough to dent my appreciation of everything else about the film.
It's not like it's Terminator 2 or anything! :-)
Well, it certainly doesn't seem to be to everyone's taste, but it always
strikes me as curious how and when people decide to move from "I didn't like
it" to "it was bad". I didn't like _Clockwork Orange_ at all, but I thought it
was brilliant. Same with _Pulp Fiction_. Conversely, I thought _Wild Things_
was awful, but I confess (slightly guiltily) I liked it, and not just for
Denise Richards! ;-) (okay, so that's an obvious straight line; let's just
skip the snappy comeback, okay? Here, I'll say it for you: "Neve Cambell was
cute, too." :-)) But I've noticed with Dark City in particular, precisely
because I think it is brilliant *and* I like it, that many people don't seem to
make this distinction (and I'm not necessarily referring to anyone here).
Sometimes the reasons they give for not liking it are the very reasons I give
for liking it. Is there a way to determine if one of us is "right"? Certainly
we can like and not like a film and both be right, but if the statement changes
to "it is bad", that's a claim about the film itself: can it be evaluated for
the same kind of truth content as "the film is in black and white", or is the
question fundamentally different?
I just finished my monthly movie discussion group. Can you tell? ;-)
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"a social relationship between two individuals who have a reciprocally amorous
and increasingly exclusive interest in one another, and shared expectation of
the growth of that mutual interest, that has endured for such a length of time
and stimulated such frequent interactions that the relationship cannot be
deemed to have been casual." - US Court's definition of "dating".
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