Dark City (1998)

I liked this movie so much I put the Blu-ray Director's Cut in my queue as well.  This is how I know how long it takes for me to get a movie.  Wow.  Since I'd only seen it once before, I'm not entirely certain where the 11 minutes of restored footage fit in but it's still a really good movie.  I don't have anything to add to my original review, which is down there under all the bitching about installing my Blu-ray player.  That was before we moved.  I let Rob fix the one we have now.  Much easier on me.

Sunday, 6/13/11    It may not surprise any of you to know that I tend to wear out DVD players at a rapid rate.  My last one had lasted about four years but earlier in the week it started to enter the Random Pause part of its life cycle.  So I decided to upgrade to Blu-ray, mostly because I read the product description where it said I could stream Netflix directly to my TV. 

Granted, those of you with gaming consoles have been able to do this for quite some time but since I don't play games of any sort, that technology had always been just outside my reach.  Because I'm lazy.  So I bought the blu-ray player, paid less for it than I did for the cables to connect it (which is the dictionary definition of bullshit, in case you're wondering).  Seriously.  $87 for a blu-ray player.  $93 for three cables.  But I'm trying not to be bitter about that.

I borrowed a drill and spent nearly two hours putting a hole in my drywall, threading the cable, hooking it up, resetting the modem, losing my temper, storming around my apartment, making angry phone calls, cursing the world, everyone in it, and especially whoever built stupid motherfucking blu-ray players but finally, victory was mine.

Dark City was my inaugural movie and it looked pretty good for being up-converted.  The sound was great and except for a tiny scratch which prevented me from seeing one chapter, it played beautifully.  I had seen part of it before, but barely remembered it.

Rufus Sewell (Dangerous Beauty) wakes up in a bath tub with no memory of who he is or how he got there, but seeing as there's a dead hooker on the floor, he needs to figure it out quickly.  William Hurt is a police detective whose last partner went completely insane while hookers are turning up dead all over town.  Jennifer Connelly is Rufus' wife, who hasn't seen him in three weeks after she told him about an affair she'd had.

Except that none of that actually happened.  See, the world as they know it is under control of The Strangers, a group of aliens who have their pet doctor (Keifer Sutherland) mix and match memories to try and figure out what makes humans human.  Every midnight, this telepathic race puts the whole town to sleep and then rearranges them all, imprinting completely new memories.   Until something goes wrong and Rufus' imprint fails.  Now he has to beat a murder wrap and avoid the stick-thin corpse-pale Mr. Hand (Richard O'Brien aka RiffRaff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and his cronies.

I very much enjoyed this film, especially the end.  I don't think Rufus Sewell is an attractive man (his eyes are weird) but I find him to be a compelling actor.  He's enigmatic and has a way of emoting very subtly.  I like that.