Hi everyone. Robbie here. I'm proud to announce my newest novel the Split Circle is available now on Amazon.com, it's $2.99 for the ebook, $9.99 for the paperback. Available preview for free.
It's kind of limited. Here's the description. In the small rundown European town of the cult of soccer dominates and losing a game could cost you your soul. Referee Tyler Tensen is a scapegoat.
Franken and Scandal Tyler's hired in Croft lay low. The crop is more than just notice for a obsessed town. Fans take to the streets at night in red hooded robes. They chant in an unrecognizable language.
The faithful conduct strange rituals, all in service to victory on the field. And one symbol hangs over everything. The split circle. The sigil hangs throughout the town reared by yam alike represents the town and its team.
And after seeing it, Tyler is having visions. Visions of sacrificing blood. As the season wears on and mysteries stack up, Tyler finds himself tighter in crops rasp. Tyler must unravel the secrets of CR were faced with awaits inside the split circle.
Again. It's great for fans of horror mysteries and stories about goals. And I hope to check it out. Hello everyone.
I'm Robbie Dorman and this is Serial Fanasis, the podcast Friends of Everything. Welcome. Today I'm joined by Andrew Bloom of Andrew Blogden and to talk about the 1998 film Dark City. Dark City is one of my favorites.
Andrew is kind enough to join me talk about it. We discuss the city as a character in and of itself, compare the film to the other similar films of the time period and talk about Kiefer Sutherland's capital C choices with his actor. It is one of my favorites. I love it and I love talking about it with Andrew on a discussion.
Hello everyone. I'm here with Andrew Blue of the Andrew blog.net Andrew, how are you? I'm doing well, Robbie, and thank you for letting me join or at least whatever this version of me is that is ascended to serial fanatics right now. How many identities, self conceptions of self and questions about self identity?
We're going to probably a lot. Probably have a lot of them. I mean are we going to have them, Robbie, or will people like us have one? I have a pretty big appetite for this guy stuff, Andrew.
Maybe you're testing me. We are talking about Dark city film from 1998, one of my personal favorites. I got Andrew to watch it, so we talk about it. At least this one went better than Predator Andrew.
That is true. I like Stark City. I probably would not count it among my favorite films. But I thought it was enjoyable and there's a lot that it did that I admired, which is more than I can say for better.
There's some similarities though, I think in between the two films. I thought about. I think at least I think there's similarities. You probably will disagree, but that's okay.
They're both movies. That's true. Actors in them. That's true as well.
They have vague science fiction elements in them. Some. Both two of my favorites. That's true.
Both liked by Robbie Dorman. There's a genre. The similarities are piling out. They're basically the same film.
I like a lot of movies. So that's not really. I guess that's not a good category because I like more movies than I don't like. Probably.
Actually. I don't know is. It depends, I guess. You know.
There's a lot of garbage that comes out of here that I just don't even think about. So I was going to say I probably dislike more movies than I like, but I just never see the movies that I think I dislike. Exactly. There's good quality control.
I like most of the movies I see. Which is all we can ask for. Exactly. Dark City is.
I don't. It's not an element. It's not a movie you can. Elevator pitch.
It's not an easy like. Here's a synopsis of Dark City before we go further. We are talking about the director's cut of Dark City. The version I suggest anyone watch.
It has. It has a distinct. I don't know. Distinct differences in that the beginning doesn't spoil a big reveal of the movie and a little few extra scenes that some people don't like or do like.
I like them. I think this is one of the very few directors cuts that take ads to the film. And we're gonna talk about that. And there's a lot of spoilers in this.
And this is a movie that I think does certainly get. Is better when you are kind of left in the dark about it. So go watch it now. I already did.
Ronnie. Not you. Our listeners said you. I thought you.
Okay. The royal you. There's a royal me. There is.
Wonder why identity I have. You're the guy with the. You go your face down in your suit and then you wake up and you're like a rich guy. All right, I'm liking this.
Yeah. You're a rich guy. He's not the same wife. So there's that at least you don't lose like all your loved ones.
They get an extra long table and candles that magically light up on their own. One more kill man want. It's not magic. It's science.
It's the stranger's mind machine science. Totally. Who doesn't learn about that in freshman bio? Dark City is a weird mystery.
A weird spooky mystery is what I believe. I texted you I would agree with that. It's certainly. It's got a detective noir feel to it.
It is a mystery. Somebody is accused of murder. Do you want to know whether or not they did? And what exactly is going on with the weird stuff that bubbles up around the titular Dark City?
Yeah, you're following John Murdock as he is framed for murder and doesn't remember anything. He's in Pasadena and there's weird guys chasing him. There's cops chasing him. He has a wife he can't remember.
Trying to figure out what is with the city. What is going on? Why is he being one for murder? For murder he's pretty sure he didn't commit.
Why does he remember things that don't exist? Why is or why are there things that he's supposed to remember that he doesn't? Why? Where's Shell Beach?
Which? My own personal favorite. Like, do you know the way the Shell Beach. I'm a fan of that motif in this film a lot.
What does it represent, Robbie? What is the question of trying to find Shell Beach? Is it heaven? Is that self actualization?
Is it truth? Is it something else entirely? I think we'll get to it. I think that we'll circle back around the Shell Beach.
I think. I think it's too big of a question to get. Before we get the basics. You can't get there directly.
I can't see. You got to go around in circles for a little while before you get to Shell Beach. Then you got to break through a wall or two even maybe. I have seen this film many, many times.
I know this is your first time. Yes, it was. I. I saw the regular theoretical version many, many times before the director's cut finally came out.
And then I was very kind of upset that the director's cut was better. I saw the director's cut. I was like, oh, man, I wish I'd seen this one first. It's better.
I already love this thing. And then they released a better version of it. That makes me angry for having spent so much time on the inferior version. Yeah, the inferior version is so very good.
It's also, like, interesting. It does the thing that the Predator does. It does the thing. The theatrical version, most notably.
There's other added scenes along the way. But most notably, the theatrical version basically does like. You know, it's like if the first minute of Citizen Kane was them explaining what Rosebud was. So.
So having only seen the director's cut, did they just immediately give away that it's a spaceship and that the. Yes, the strangers are controlling everything? They don't. They don't.
They don't specifically say exactly what the strangers are or what the city is. But it makes it. It definitely makes it more. Less murky.
It makes it very like, oh, they're in space and the strangers abducted human. Like, it tells. It spoils a lot of those details. And I think it's better with that mystery totally obscured.
So that the big reveal at Shell beach is more of a reveal. It's not. It's. There's, you know, that steady build up to the reveal at Shell Beach, I think is much better than the director's cut.
And it. It is that, like, incremental addition of knowledge that I think the best mysteries do really well. Where you learn a little bit more. And that is another.
It gets you a little. You learn something, then you get a crumb to the next bit of knowledge. The next bit of knowledge, the next bit of knowledge, and then big bombastic reveal of what. Where they are, or at least not even.
Even the real Hill beach isn't necessarily. I know you're kind of mostly told everything about Dark City, the city itself up until that point, but it is that, that big shot as the detective is floating away and you see. You actually see everything from the outside. That is the kind of.
The moment that I think the increment, because it's so big. The literal first shot of the theatrical version is a shot of the city from the outside. I see. Well, I can say, apart from the general structure and parceling out of the mystery, the advantage of doing it the way the director's cut does is it puts the viewer in the position of John Murdock, where you're wondering what's happening here at time.
He is. And I think, particularly for a protagonist who maybe partly by design is kind of a cipher, who doesn't have much of a personality to him. Helping the audience be in his shoes. Asking the same questions he is wondering the same things that he is, helps create a level of identification that is probably stronger than if you immediately know more than the character does.
Yes, I don't I was actually listening to our Castle. Our Castle Rock episode. Getting hyped for the new season. No, I have no interest in seeing that.
In watching season two. Zero. I've read about it, and it does not. It makes me.
What's the opposite of excited? Sad. Yeah, it just. It makes me.
It's bewildering to me what that show is. Now I'm like, what is it doing? It's Annie Wilkes divorced entirely from the plot of Misery. As a detective in this, I'm like, what is going on?
Why? Why? That's so dumb. But that show has a lot of.
You even say at one point in the podcast about how that show is constantly making the audience give the audience way more information than the people the characters know. And I think I'm learning that. I really don't like that pretty much most of the time. I like.
I like being in the character's shoes. I like sharing a perspective with the characters. I think there's times when it can work if you have a situation where a character is doomed and the audience knows it, but the character doesn't, or even instances where a character is suffering and the audience knows that there's some kind of redemption or something good coming down the other side. But there can be a dramatic irony there that can be really useful and help the audience appreciate the character's plight or the character's struggle.
But for a mystery box type story, for something where the character is learning information and uncovering things as they go. You know, I'm not saying the audience knowledge can never outstrip the characters, but it definitely helps you to be in the same shoes as your protagonist if you want the audience to be on board and not just looking at their watches, waiting for the character to figure out what the audience already knows. Right. And we get, you know, John Murdock is played by Rufus Sewell, I think is how you say his name.
That's how I, Roger Eber, described it. Sewell. So I'm gonna go with how Roger Eber pronounced it. Who I didn't know if you knew this.
Did a director's commentary for this film. I did not know that. For both the theatrical and the director's cut. This is one of the.
This is Roger Bieber. Loved this movie. Gave it a perfect score. Call it one of the great films in his great films series, whatever you call it.
Absolutely adored it. Most critics at the time liked it, thought it was good to very good. But he was one of their few, called it, like, great. Give five stars, all that stuff.
But it's. I think we've established on previous podcasts, at least in my opinion. Roger Bieber's never wrong. Never wrong.
I don't. I do not like. I respect Roger. Robert.
I respect Roger Ebert's opinion because he was a very knowledgeable guy about film. Not necessarily. Not always necessarily right. Or that I always agree with him.
But even when I disagree with him, I can understand why he says a certain thing about a certain movie. He usually has interesting things to say, whether you agree with him or not. Yes, exactly. But John Murrak Rufusul is a really interesting protagonist because 1.
It's. Rufusul almost always plays villains. It's really weird. And this is the first role I saw him in where he's the protagonist and hero.
And yet every other film I've ever seen him in, he is a villain. Anti issue, for that matter. He's currently. I don't know, he's probably by this point in the Manhattan Castle.
He's like a. Like a tweener. He's. I've watched season one of man and Eye Castle, so I don't know where that character is anymore.
But, I mean, he wasn't. He's a Nazi, so he can't be all great. But he's old positions. I know, I know.
I mean, I think he's supposed to be like, even in the first season, he starts doing stuff that is, like, he starts doing things that are, you know, against the doctrine of, you know, of his commanders. He's trying to, like, you know, he's starting to sway into being. Doing good things against orders and stuff like that. So I don't know if how far that show's gone in season three now, but he's a villain in the Illusionist.
He's a villain in Knight's Tale. I think that's the name of the movie. Heath Ledger. That's.
That's the movie. That's right. Okay. He's going that.
He's going to lots of things. Mostly, I think just because he kind of has like a weird face. They do make you a villain. Your face is not.
Maddie, I'm good. Yeah. It's not that he's not handsome. I think he just looks a little odd.
He has this weird otherworldliness to him. And I think that in this film works really well as a protagonist. And I certainly don't think he plays hero poorly. He is, you know, all the characters are blandish.
I think that's fair. Except for Kiefer Sutherland. Except for Kiefer Sutherland and maybe Mr. Hand.
Yeah, he's got. Those two feel like they're almost in a different movie than the rest of the characters. Well, I have a whole argument about that. I have a theory.
Yes, we'll get. But it's. I, I, I think that. Let's do it now here.
I have a theory, Andrew, about the characters, because I think that in your review, you and pretty much everyone, regardless how they feel about most of the movie, everyone talks about how amazing visuals are. That is right. I totally agree with that because they are amazing. The film looks beautiful.
It's shot gorgeous. It looks great. It is made in 1998 for a relatively modest budget, and yet it doesn't. I honestly can't really see many spots.
There's a couple little tiny spots where the effects show their age. I was gonna say when you have the final showdown between Murdoch and the Strangers, you start to see some of the scenes. But in most of the movie, particularly in the scenes where you see Dark City as a place where things are moving together, where they're changing and shifting, it is flawless. And it frankly would be jaw dropping today if it came out a week from now.
And we'll dig deeper into this probably after I do my argument about character. I think. And this is the. And I think this is where my simulating predator is also.
It lies in here somewhere. Okay. All right. I'm intrigued.
Okay. So the whole pretense of all the people in Dark City, aside from the Doctor, from Kira Sutherland's character, is they don't have any memories of their own. They are reimplanted with new memories assembled for, you know, arbitrary ways to test different experiments that the strangers and the Doctor devises. And they are, they're who they are at any one day, day in quotations, because there is no day in Dark City.
There's only night. Whoever they. That's why it's dark. I get it.
It's a very subtle title, to be fair. Direct titles are honestly usually probably better. I like the title of Dark City. They are all randomly given new personalities, new jobs, new identities.
And there was, I read a comment online about it, about something that's particular to the director's cut that kind of triggered something. Because Jennifer Connelly is a good actress. No, no, not a good actress. I mean, I wouldn't call her a bad actress by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't know that I have ever seen a movie where she blew me away or I really. Look, not all acting has to be flashy, but I don't know whether I could point to something and say, like, oh, yeah, that's a great Jennifer Conway performance. Granted, I haven't seen that much of her film. At the same time.
Again, she's not somebody. I would go, yes, no, I trust her to deliver a great performance. I'm not saying she's great. She's good.
She's solid. I would say consistent performances in everything I've seen her in. I'll sign off for solid. I'll go with solid.
I have seen a fair number of her performances. I largely always like her. I think she has a good enough charm and acting skill to deliver certain roles. She's not Glenn Close or whatever, but I think she has enough jobs to carry herself well enough.
And her. But her character in this is relatively, you know, blandish. Like I said. Yes.
Yeah. Emma. Emma first. Then she becomes Ann at the end.
I think that's her name, her new name. Think of her new name at the end. Emma Anne. Her character and all the people.
John Murdoch, Detective Bumstead. Is that his name? Bumstead? Swear to God, I didn't saw this movie a week ago and it's escaped from my brain.
Apparently. That is. There is a famous. A lot of these people, like David Schreiber.
Shriver is a real doctor, a real psychologist who apparently has suffered from a lot of problems. Was. Was inspired for Light and other psychologists of that era. So that was that names and even.
I think Kiefer and Sato's performance is inspired by reports of how the original doctor behaves sometimes. Bumset is apparently the last name of a like 50s art director in the film. Okay, hesitate. Homage.
Henry Bumstead, I believe. I'm not sure about that. I think that's what I read. And there's, you know, there's John Murdock and Emma.
Like, you know, they're like archetypal names. Noir, archetypal narratives. But all the people are blank slates. They're.
They have been poured like the weird chemical that the doctor mixes up into them, injected into them actually into their foreheads, which. God, that kneel and that noise it makes. I think we firmly established Robbie does not care for body horror. Yeah, I hate it if it involves things going under the skin or piercing the skin or just general exposed body parts.
It gives Robbie the ways. I don't like needles. Specifically don't like meals. I will say that giving my diabetic cat shots twice a day has helped me.
Help disabuse me of that feels that severe fear. So that, I guess just another way cats make us Better people. Exactly. They're all.
They're all kind of empty. Because they are empty. And I. And like, there's a specific scene because Emma is a lounge singer.
At least this version of Emma is. And we see her sing. And in the director's cut, this is another difference between the director's cut and chapter version. Director's cut.
That is actually Jennifer Connelly singing. I don't mean to be rude, but it sounded not unprofessional, but non professional. It didn't sound like a sweetened. Oh, this is really just a pop star they dubbed over.
So I buy that. I like that. I like that it was actually her. And then the theatrical version, they used a jazz singer who's very, very good.
But it feels artificial because it is. And frankly, it fits the film better. Have Jennifer Connolly, actually. Her singing voice.
Her voices. Her singing voice is fine, but it's not something I would expect to be a professional singer. And that reflects that. They didn't really think about if this.
This human is a good singer. When they gave her this personality and his memories and stuff. They were just like, we need this person to be a singer for this weird set of things to happen. So that's what she is.
So her voice is going to be like, you know, like an amateur singer. And I think that reflects outward on all of the characters. And I think you can. And you see that disparate the.
Disparate the difference. The separation in the. In doc, in the doctor and in Mr. Hand, where you have these.
These people who are outside of the system and they are eccentric and one's an alien, so, you know, he's gonna be strange anyway, but they are. You can. I think you can clearly see it in Dr. Schreiber and the fact that he is, you know, you describe Kiefer's behavior.
He's easy it up. He's over the top in this film, especially compared to all the people, you know, most of the rest of the cast that aren't aliens. The only other one would probably be the crazy detective who kills himself. The detective Wolensky.
He's definitely got personality. He's doing the. I've lost it. I'm crazy.
I'm going over the top here. Roll. Yeah. And throwing things on the walls and chopping different trains, all that kind of stuff.
So I think this is. And I think connecting right back to Predator. I have a similar feeling about how you're gonna feel about this, Andrew. But, you know, I insisted in Predator, and it's also present in Starship Troopers where purposely making bland characters.
It is. It's a choice. We. Murdoch is.
Is. I mean, you said yourself when we started recording, Murdoch is a perspective character. So he is lacking in some, you know, distinct. A lot of distinct personality traits because he has to serve as our perspective character and he doesn't know anything, so he's learning things as we are, etc.
Etc. But the same could be said of Bombset, could be said of Emma, of any of the other human characters. They don't have much personality because the characters are not given much personality by these weird aliens, by the strangers. It's a choice for them to be bland.
I mean, taking that theory at its most charitable, and I look at it this way, I don't think that's a bad way to read the film. I'm not entirely sure that's what was intended, but I don't think that's a bad way to read the film. But even taking it with the best intentions, it makes it hard to follow planned characters for two hours. And you can be serving a purpose with that.
I'm not saying that all art has to be exciting or a thrill ride from moment A to moment C, but if you feel like you're. If you don't have anybody to latch onto in the film, if it feels like you're watching a bunch of mannequins being moved around the stage, then it becomes really hard to invest in what's happening to them. And even if it serves the purpose of the story, even if, to your point, it's a story about mannequins being moved around the stage to some extent, functionally, it just makes it tough to be a movie if you treat it that way. I'm not.
I don't mean to compare the two otherwise, but if you do that, then eventually you get 1999's the Phantom Menace and you can have all the story, other visual excitement you want. But if people can't connect to the characters, it's just. I mean, maybe I'm an outlier, but it's a tough time to connect with a film for me. You mean the best of the prequels, the Phantom Menace?
Well, this is a whole other podcast. Can't let it. Subsequent. I've been lurking in all your little threads you've disseminated today about how the Phantom Menace is the worst, the worst of all of them.
All the people's arguments about which is the crappiest. No, this is why I agree here that Dark City is a better film than the Phantom Menace. That May not be a high bar, but it is a bar that this movie firmly clears and should take pride in that. Yes.
And I think I don't, I don't know, I openly acknowledge that a lot of the, you know, the human characters are kind of. They are kind of tropey. Just, you know, detective on set is a very like that noirish stereotype. I think William Hurt elevates it a little bit because William Hurt's a very good actor.
He's good, he's perfect. He has nothing short of confidence. He doesn't blow me away every once in a while. There's a sort of subtle moment.
But he's also just every other hard boiled detective you've ever seen. Yeah. And I think that's. I think, you know, the characters are as much of a product of the writing as they are a product of the performances.
I think the performances are all good. I think, you know, if any critiques about the characters themselves I think can fall back to the writing, which I think is the weakest part of the movie. I think the direction is great. I think the acting is good.
I think the visuals are great. I think the story is good. I think just the writing itself, the dialogue and how some of the construction and stuff I think is a little. A little weak, not a lot.
I still hedge my criticisms because I still love this movie. I have a dark city tattoo to put my card, lay my cards out on the table. What is a tattoo? Probably it is.
It is a maze, much like the city's maze, but in the center of the maze is a clock face. Okay, I can dig that. Simple. I don't know.
Most of my tattoos are not very complicated, complex things. It just I think represents the feelings about. Represents the film very well. And frankly the more the themes of the film that I really like a lot which we will probably touch upon at some point in this discussion about.
I have a type Andrew has finally identified and made me realize. I certainly have a type of thing that I really, really like. And I just keep coming back to it. Can't get enough visuals.
Let's talk about. Let's dig into the visuals, Andrew, because they are the bright shining light that this film is the strongest point of this film. Something I think puts it among as good visuals as probably any movie I can think of. I don't know if I can go that far.
But I think there's two things that are worth noting about the visuals. The first is that there's times when the film gets very showy about it and when you're putting your focus on the visuals, that is always the toughest thing because you have to maintain the audience's attention without advancing things through character or story or other things that make us invested in characters. But at the same time, you're also putting the most focus. You're putting the biggest spotlight on the visual elements of your film.
And so when you have that showpiece scene, which is, for me, the first time that you see the city changing, you see it transform from being one thing to another. That is remarkable. And they build on that throughout the film. But I think that is just an exquisite sequence.
And the seamlessness of it, the way that one cityscape blends into another really sets the mood and gives you a sense of place. And at least the director's cut adds to the momentousness of realizing what the situation is, adds to the weirdness of what is going on here in a way that raw exposition couldn't. But what's even more impressive is that the visuals really help create a mood and create this sort of unsettling sense of something weird going on before you ever have confirmation in the text itself. Even when your focus is on the cityscape is not on the special effects.
Even when it's just people talking in a room or moving from one place to another, there is a very disquieting air that hangs over every frame. I think that has a lot to do with production design. It has a lot to do with the direction. The visuals that are at play sell a lot of what the movie is trying to do better, in my opinion, at least, than the performances or especially the writing area, too.
I mean, it is a character in itself, the city. It's the title character, Bobby. There you go. The titular dark city.
It never is named. We never get a name for the city. It is just the city. The buildings are a mishmash of architecture from different time periods.
The bottom of the building will look different than the middle and look different than the top. From, you know, it could be New York in the 30s to Europe from 1910. It could be. You know, I'm not an expert in architecture or anything, but you can clearly see that those two things don't go together.
And yet they do. It immediately establishes a sense of. A strong sense of place, a strong sense of. Ibrahim talks about this in his commentaries.
He talks about how a lot of films like this, you can see. You can see the limits of a set. Like, you understand why they don't go around that corner when you're watching like, oh, they don't film around the corner because there's nothing there. Because the set ends at this point.
So that's why the camera isn't following them. And Eir points out, like, it feels in this film like the camera can go anywhere, even though it certainly has. It's all sets. There's no physical.
They don't film anywhere real in this film because I don't know how they could. It's impossible. It's an impossible place. So they had to build it.
You have to have a film in the bottom of the comet, the ship that goes upside down and everything. Ugh. That's just the sound of the feeling. Just imagining myself in that thing.
Ugh, gross. But. And like you, you have establishing shots of the city from above. You see, like, highways and you see trains and you see this polarity hits midnight.
You see kind of all the cities stop and freeze while they're changing things around. And it's reflected. Like, it has an incredible understanding of how to make a place that is alien and impossible. Feels somehow also congruous at times.
And a lot has to do with lighting because the lighting is the same everywhere, even inside. Even in interiors. The lighting echoes the lighting that's outside with the street lights and everything very well lit. And despite the fact that it is dark city, it does not have that problem of, oh, I can't see anything.
That's true. Everything is very clear, very crisp. You have good contrast with all of the blacks on. Blacks don't blend into one another.
And people are basically like the source a lot of times. The source of any. Any warmth, any warm light is from people. It's from their faces.
And I didn't really think about that until I heard Roger talk about it. And I'm like, that's true. Everything. Everything else, like you talked about, like, movies that are tinted green, like Matrix, like City of Lost Children, like a lot of 90s movies, late 90s movies.
But I will say that this does have, I think, a better grasp on lighting than a lot of those films do. I don't. I don't feel. Even in the Matrix, another movie I really love, I get tired of the weird desaturation after a while.
I don't feel that way in this movie. I don't ever get tired of the weird of the green tinge because I feel. I think it is because of the fact that the humans are the source of warmth here. And probably also through the ending, which kind of pulls us out of that color palette.
It gives you the contrast it gives you the difference between. It uses its visual power to make meaning, which is not something you can say for every movie. The difference between what life is like within the dark city. And once Jean Burdock uses his tuning powers to dramatically reform it and point it back toward the sun.
The difference in visuals tells a lot of the story there, which, frankly, again, the script does. It. It sells a feeling, it sells an idea in a way that the text of the film doesn't necessarily. And I think that's why I really appreciate about.
The visuals in a Vacuum are great and are very striking, but they also are used in that way to make you get the difference, to make you understand what people are going through and feel oppressed and disoriented by this place in the same way that a lot of the characters do. It's another way that the movie ties the viewer into what the characters are thinking and feeling. At least the director's kind of. Yes.
I mean, the. The cut is not. It is not that different. It's just.
It's small things here and there that. Because I've seen the movie so many times, it made me go, oh, man, I like this more, and I like this more. Director's cuts, I think, are garbage. I think they're bad and they're full of stuff that should have been got.
And. But in this one, I disagree this. And Donnie Darko, I think, also has a good director's cut. I've never seen the Donnie Darko director's cut.
I think I've only seen the actual cut. Okay. Again, it's minor stuff. I really.
I. I don't like Donny Darko. I saw a Donnie Darko tattoo. I'm just gonna do a movie series on the movies I have tattoos for.
It's those two. Those are the only ones. Ink and celluloid. There you go.
I mean, I could just, you know, span it out. Interview people who have tattoos based on movies and why. That'd be the pitch, I guess. Visuals, yeah.
I don't mind the palette. I don't mind the tinge. I don't. I think, yes, it's a visual.
Film is a visual medium. And as much as I harp about lazy story a lot of the time, lazy plotting and stuff like that, that is, I think, easier criticize. It's easier to pinpoint, like, what doesn't make sense here. Why is this here?
But films that really excellently use the visuals to tell a story where it's not explicit. It's all about evoking emotion and guiding the audience, in a way, that's harder. I think it feels harder to me because I'm not a visual storyteller by nature. I feel like that is something that feels more difficult to do.
And that's another thing. I didn't really thought about that for a long time about this film. But as I got over and watched it more again, that is the thing you keep coming back to, like what you said. The fact that it uses those visuals to make you feel for these characters in a way that the writing sometimes doesn't.
Which, as you know, it's a visual medium. The visual storytelling can be a thing in and of itself. But if anything, I mean, that's part of the problem. The visuals are so good and so dovetail of what the movie is trying to do that it makes, frankly, the dialogue and some of the characters seem that much worse by comparison.
You know, I think it's. I mean, I don't. I think my. A lot of my love for this film has nothing to do with.
It's more of a whole. It's not really about individual pieces. It's more about what it does as a whole. And frankly, the themes which I mentioned earlier, I like things that are about identity and conceptions of self and weird, spooky mysteries.
And that's not. You pointed out, Westworld is there. Has a lot of similarities, right down to the mazes and having a writer of the Dark Knight on board. Yeah.
David S. Goyer, who I think is incredibly inconsistent with his. I mean, he wrote Batman vs Superman, so I think it's really productive of the director he's working with. They're not all good, but he's not involved in Westworld.
This, I think, is just Jonathan Nolan. Remind himself there. I don't. Westworld looks like Goyer looked at it, but maybe he didn't.
Goyer. What did Goyer. Oh, did Constantine. He did not.
Okay, he did not do Westworld, but he did work on Batman, so he did that. He did the Nolan movies with the Nolan. So there's a connection. Yes, that's a connection.
The other guy, he's credited Lynn Dobbs. Much spottier record after the 1990s. He wrote Dark City, then he wrote the Limey, and then he most recently wrote Gotti Woof. Okay, well, let's try to put all the blame on him, then.
Exactly. Maybe some of the bad stuff is the guy who wrote Gotti. I mean, he wrote the Lime. That's a sober movie, so I don't know.
That's not. It's Hard to. You know, he is not as prolific as lawyer who has written so and worked on many, many, many, many things. Some of it's very bad, some of it's great like this.
So it's hard to, you know that. Membits is certainly good. Blade is good. Blade two is good.
Blade three is terrible. So again, I think it's a product of the director, you know, when he's working with Guillermo del Toro. Hey, the movie's great. When he's working with Christopher Dolan.
Hey, the movie's great. He's working with Zack Snyder. Eh, maybe less great. Maybe less grey.
Apparently he's writing a Hellraiser reboot. Okay, well, that seems very necessary. I'll probably see it because I'm a sucker, but. Yeah, you don't need to do that.
The first one's great. Just leave a love, though. Of course, the first one is. It's a great horror movie.
One and two, both great. Three is stupid. Four is fun. But after that are all terrible.
Another podcast for another day, right. Hellraiser 1 and 2. I will defend my dying day. I think those movies are great.
Great body horror, great art movies in general. I would. I guess I haven't seen two, but one was enough to make me hesitant about scene two. So two is better in some ways than one.
One I'm. One is, but I think one has. There's charms of both. It's one of the movies where the sequels, I think is as.
Of course, you don't like Aliens. So what. You know, what am I gonna. 80s 80s horror, man.
The 80s in general are tough. Go for me. You just. You just.
You're like. You're like Steve Rogers. You're like a man out of time. That's just not in my wavelength.
I don't know what it is. There's a certain nature of 80s films that are just like. They're indulgent, I think a little bit. I think that's the thing.
Maybe that's it. I feel like that is the thing that catches you in a lot of suffice. Anything that is at all indulgent, you kind of. This is not comedy.