Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Dark City: An 8.934th Anniversary Appreciation

I love the movie Dark City, but I wouldn't consider it one of the greatest rock albums of all time. I'd say it's roughly as good as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" - bearing in mind that I have some sympathy with Shelley's opinion of that work.

Still, it is undeniably a dark, paranoid little paranormal thriller, with an off-kilter sense of what works that works wonderfully for it; its suspense unspooling tick by almost-missed tick like the beating of a clockwork heart whose gears were designed to skip and catch. You're never quite sure why the film pulls you in - very little that's happening onscreen bears any relation to waking logic - yet if this is a dream, it's a dream with all the fever drained out, and replaced by a cold, clammy sense of some mad ritual being enacted. Like a gothic costume drama séance gone horribly real.

What a load of foaming gibberish that paragraph turned out to be. Listen, I'm sorry.

Anyway, it's a pretty decent flick. Nifty, I call it.

No comments: