This is the requisite tie. It’s either Nosferatu or the Director’s Cut of Dark City.<\/p>\n
I adore both of these films so, so much. They’re both obvious masterpieces, and they both resonate with me personally; Dark City, especially, but we’ll get to that in a moment.<\/p>\n
So this morning, thanks to the magic of YouTube and the lapsed copyright gods, I rewatched Nosferatu.<\/p>\n
What a great, great film! It accomplishes so much and its black and white cinematography adds so much to the experience of watching it. <\/p>\n
It’s really a thing of beauty, isn’t it? This was a film made with a limited cinematic palette but with so much care and attention to detail. It’s still unnerving, if not scary, a hundred years later. Max Schreck is perfect in his role. <\/p>\n
I watched the unrestored version for the patina. I thought it added something to the experience.<\/p>\n
What I like most about Nosferatu is that Murnau and Schreck both understood the fundamental nature of vampires better than most others who create art about them: they’re monsters. They’re not human, not anymore, and human desires and understandings elude them. They were<\/i> human, but are no longer; not in any way. They have as much in common with a normal human as the next corpse. <\/p>\n
In American art, few people get this. Coppola did to an extent, but not quite enough, IMHO. His Dracula movie was very fun to watch and well made, but I thought his antagonist was still a bit too human.<\/p>\n
Credit here must go to Kouta Hirano and his work on Hellsing. He gets it; he truly does.<\/p>\n
I must quote Ebert here: \u201cTo watch F.W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ (1922) is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
There you go. That one sentence explains the film better and more thoroughly than most reviewer\u2019s entire articles.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to Dark City, which I am familiar with thanks to Ebert. I owe him.<\/p>\n
The reason I rewatched Nosferatu is because of Dark City’s Strangers, who were clearly inspired by Schreck’s Orlok.<\/p>\n
In fact, if you ignore the extraterrestrial thing, the Strangers are pretty much cinema’s most perfect depiction of vampires ever. They’re so much so that I wouldn’t object to Dark City being placed in the vampire genre bin, despite of what others who don’t really understand these things would say.<\/p>\n
Well, back to the point\u2026 everyone has their movie, that one film that really speaks to them on the deepest level; that one film that they can point to and say THAT is what I’m about.<\/p>\n
Dark City is that film for me.<\/p>\n
Dark City isn’t the movie I’ve watched the most, but it’s the one that means the most to me. This is that one film that really hit me in my youth like a ton of bricks. This was the movie that opened my consciousness. It was the film that introduced me to the real world- it opened my soul to the power of love, the realization of the supreme mind-controlling influence of the media, the reality of conspiracy, and, most particularly, the idea that one could use their subconsciousness to alter reality and bend it to their will.<\/p>\n
This was my most formative movie; the one in which I can truly say that I wouldn’t be here without it.<\/p>\n
Well\u2026 I would be here, of course, but maybe not here<\/i>. As in, what I am now.<\/p>\n
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll fully investigate this later.<\/p>\n
This time, I think like my twelfth viewing or something, I was struck by Jennifer Connolly.<\/p>\n
She’s pretty much the perfect woman, isn’t she? In a way, she’s almost too much so. I always liked her, but she just seemed so damn\u2026 perfect<\/i> that it made it difficult to figure out what to do with her.<\/p>\n
I mean, what exactly does one do with Jennifer Connolly? How does one improve upon obvious perfection? <\/p>\n
IDK. I never really tried. Back twenty years ago, she was on occasion too intimidating to even fantasize about. I mean, Jesus Christ! Just look<\/i> at her! No actress today has her looks. I mean, it’s not even close!<\/p>\n
IMHO, not even Emma Watson, or Taylor Swift, or Emma Stone, or Jennifer Lawrence, or\u2026 anyone<\/i>, really, is Jennifer Connolly tier. She just stands above all; the impossible starlet dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the requisite tie. It’s either Nosferatu or the Director’s Cut of Dark City. I adore both of these films so, so much. They’re both obvious masterpieces, and they both resonate with me personally; Dark City, especially, but we’ll get to that in a moment. So this morning, thanks to the magic of YouTube […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1717"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1721,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1717\/revisions\/1721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sighinide.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}