[movie] Dark City: Sleep. Now.
I am just full of musical goodness today...er...okay, I just have a lot of free time on my hands, perhaps.
I just realized that both of my movie FSTs involve Jennifer Connelly as the heroine and Trevor Jones as the soundtrack composer. Whoa. My subconscious is trying to say something here.
Well, anyways, Dark City was a movie that was released in 1998 and apparently sank without a trace. Some reviewers loved it, such as Roger Ebert who has been trying to pimp the movie to people for years (and provided a DVD commentary track and some other stuff). Neil Gaiman wrote an essay on the movie which is contained in the DVD. Basically, it's one of those cool little movies that nobody saw (in the US, at least; I understand it was the second-top-grossing film in Australia for 1998).
The voiceover at the beginning of the film informs us that at one point "The Strangers" came from another solar system, changed their forms, and slipped into our world unnoticed.
In a dark city somewhere, a man wakes up in a bathtub, with blood on his forehead and a light wildly swinging from the ceiling. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Frightened, he staggers out, gets dressed, and finds a dead woman in the bedroom with spirals carved into her naked body. Just as he makes this discovery, the phone rings and a man beathlessly gasps, "They're coming for you; you must leave now." Of course, our nameless hero does so with a quickness. He discovers, as he slinks through the old-fashioned, 1940's-style city, that there have been a string of prostitute murders and he's wanted for questioning. His name, according to his wallet, is John Murdoch.
In addition to eluding the police, he's being chased by strange people in black trenchcoats and black bowler hats; their skin is dead white and they are all bald, even the children. They have the power to reshape reality, which they call "tuning." When the clock strikes midnight, John watches the entire city stop in its tracks and warp and shift into entirely different forms. The Strangers move silently through the sleeping inhabitants, wiping their memories and injecting them with new ones, changing their surroundings and relationships with the greatest of ease. A couple can be in the middle of a fight in a ghetto, for example, and wake up as a upperclass couple in a mansion with three children, and never know the difference. The Strangers have great powers but they are still mortal, and in their quest to understand mortality and humanity, they're experimenting to find out if the "soul" is somehow linked with "memory". If a person has their memories completely changed, do they become a fundamentally different person?
To their great displeasure, one subject woke up while his memories were being changed, and, to make things worse, he appears to share their power to "tune" reality...you get my drift?
It's kind of sci-fi noir navel-gazing with some pretty slick CGI and some great actors. Jennifer Connelly plays John Murdoch's wife, Ian Richardson plays the head Stranger Mr. Book, and Richard O'Brien (that's Riff-Raff of Rocky Horror fame) plays Mr. Wall, the Stranger in charge of capturing Murdoch. Kiefer Sutherland plays Dr. Daniel Schreber, the lame, scarred human psychiatrist who is helping the Strangers in their experiments...and yet who was the man on the phone who warned Murdoch to escape from the room he awoke in.
Interestingly, the movie seems to be heavily based on the memoirs of a famous paranoid schizophrenic, Daniel Schreber. Freud saw him and wrote some pretty interesting things about him. The man's 1903 memoirs were entitled Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. The vast conspiracies, the city of neverending night, the memory-wiping and memory-swapping were part of the man's delusions. You can read the comparisons here if you're interested.
[ FULL ZIP OF ALL SONGS(70MB) ]
01. David Bowie - Shadow of Doubt
Wow, this seems lame so soon after the Labyrinth FST, but I swear I compiled this FST first! Murdoch wakes up in a dark room with a dead woman.
02. The Raveonettes - Beat City [lyrics] [about the band]
As Murdoch notes, "It's midnight again? When was it day? I've been awake for hours and hours..."
03. Orbital - The Girl With The Sun In Her Head [about the band]
Murdoch discovers quite by accident that he's married; his wife is a sad-looking torch singer in a local nightclub who seems to have a guilty conscience.
04. Chris Vrenna - Flying On The Wings of Steam (remix) [about the artist]
The sleeping city changes every night at midnight...
05. tweaker - Crude Sunlight [lyrics] [about the artist]
...and Murdoch can only watch.
Ha, I cheat; tweaker IS Chris Vrenna. Well, that's all right.
06. Squarepusher - Square Window [about the artist]
Murdoch meets his wife Emma in their darkened apartment, and discovers that they've been fighting and he's been staying in a hotel for the past three weeks...three weeks in which six prostitutes have been murdered. It's just a tiny detail. Let the making-up begin!
07. Iggy Pop - Nightclubbing [lyrics] [about the artist]
The Strangers move through the city like ghosts...
08. The Cure - Lullaby [lyrics] [about the band]
...observing their human experiments and manipulating them as they see fit. If they come across an awake human, they simply pass their hands over the person's eyes and tell them, "Sleep. Now."
09. The Velvet Underground & Nico - I'll Be Your Mirror [lyrics] [about the band]
Luckily for John, his wife stands by him and doesn't seem to mind that he's a possible serial killer and/or total headjob. That's love for you, folks.
10. Gary Numan - Warriors [lyrics] [about the artist]
One of The Strangers has "John Murdoch's" memories implanted in his own brain to learn how he thinks and where to search for him. Human memories, especially those of a psychopath, seem to severely unbalance the aliens.
11. Schneider TM - The Light 3000 [lyrics] [about the artist]
John is hiding at his "uncle's" home, trying to reconcile his childhood memories with the evidence that they never happened.
12. The Black Heart Procession - Sympathy Crime [lyrics] [about the band]
The Stranger with human memories visits Emma, as he too remembers that he has a wife.
13. Prodigyremixed.com - Action Radar (FakeID Mix) [lyrics] [the webpage]
John pulls himself together and has a battle of wills with The Strangers.
14. PJ Harvey - (Untitled)
John returns to Shell Beach, the scene of his childhood memories...
Comment if you download, whatever. Or maybe just make your favorite sound effect!
I just realized that both of my movie FSTs involve Jennifer Connelly as the heroine and Trevor Jones as the soundtrack composer. Whoa. My subconscious is trying to say something here.
Well, anyways, Dark City was a movie that was released in 1998 and apparently sank without a trace. Some reviewers loved it, such as Roger Ebert who has been trying to pimp the movie to people for years (and provided a DVD commentary track and some other stuff). Neil Gaiman wrote an essay on the movie which is contained in the DVD. Basically, it's one of those cool little movies that nobody saw (in the US, at least; I understand it was the second-top-grossing film in Australia for 1998).
The voiceover at the beginning of the film informs us that at one point "The Strangers" came from another solar system, changed their forms, and slipped into our world unnoticed.
In a dark city somewhere, a man wakes up in a bathtub, with blood on his forehead and a light wildly swinging from the ceiling. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Frightened, he staggers out, gets dressed, and finds a dead woman in the bedroom with spirals carved into her naked body. Just as he makes this discovery, the phone rings and a man beathlessly gasps, "They're coming for you; you must leave now." Of course, our nameless hero does so with a quickness. He discovers, as he slinks through the old-fashioned, 1940's-style city, that there have been a string of prostitute murders and he's wanted for questioning. His name, according to his wallet, is John Murdoch.
In addition to eluding the police, he's being chased by strange people in black trenchcoats and black bowler hats; their skin is dead white and they are all bald, even the children. They have the power to reshape reality, which they call "tuning." When the clock strikes midnight, John watches the entire city stop in its tracks and warp and shift into entirely different forms. The Strangers move silently through the sleeping inhabitants, wiping their memories and injecting them with new ones, changing their surroundings and relationships with the greatest of ease. A couple can be in the middle of a fight in a ghetto, for example, and wake up as a upperclass couple in a mansion with three children, and never know the difference. The Strangers have great powers but they are still mortal, and in their quest to understand mortality and humanity, they're experimenting to find out if the "soul" is somehow linked with "memory". If a person has their memories completely changed, do they become a fundamentally different person?
To their great displeasure, one subject woke up while his memories were being changed, and, to make things worse, he appears to share their power to "tune" reality...you get my drift?
It's kind of sci-fi noir navel-gazing with some pretty slick CGI and some great actors. Jennifer Connelly plays John Murdoch's wife, Ian Richardson plays the head Stranger Mr. Book, and Richard O'Brien (that's Riff-Raff of Rocky Horror fame) plays Mr. Wall, the Stranger in charge of capturing Murdoch. Kiefer Sutherland plays Dr. Daniel Schreber, the lame, scarred human psychiatrist who is helping the Strangers in their experiments...and yet who was the man on the phone who warned Murdoch to escape from the room he awoke in.
Interestingly, the movie seems to be heavily based on the memoirs of a famous paranoid schizophrenic, Daniel Schreber. Freud saw him and wrote some pretty interesting things about him. The man's 1903 memoirs were entitled Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. The vast conspiracies, the city of neverending night, the memory-wiping and memory-swapping were part of the man's delusions. You can read the comparisons here if you're interested.
[ FULL ZIP OF ALL SONGS(70MB) ]
01. David Bowie - Shadow of Doubt
Wow, this seems lame so soon after the Labyrinth FST, but I swear I compiled this FST first! Murdoch wakes up in a dark room with a dead woman.
02. The Raveonettes - Beat City [lyrics] [about the band]
As Murdoch notes, "It's midnight again? When was it day? I've been awake for hours and hours..."
03. Orbital - The Girl With The Sun In Her Head [about the band]
Murdoch discovers quite by accident that he's married; his wife is a sad-looking torch singer in a local nightclub who seems to have a guilty conscience.
04. Chris Vrenna - Flying On The Wings of Steam (remix) [about the artist]
The sleeping city changes every night at midnight...
05. tweaker - Crude Sunlight [lyrics] [about the artist]
...and Murdoch can only watch.
Ha, I cheat; tweaker IS Chris Vrenna. Well, that's all right.
06. Squarepusher - Square Window [about the artist]
Murdoch meets his wife Emma in their darkened apartment, and discovers that they've been fighting and he's been staying in a hotel for the past three weeks...three weeks in which six prostitutes have been murdered. It's just a tiny detail. Let the making-up begin!
07. Iggy Pop - Nightclubbing [lyrics] [about the artist]
The Strangers move through the city like ghosts...
08. The Cure - Lullaby [lyrics] [about the band]
...observing their human experiments and manipulating them as they see fit. If they come across an awake human, they simply pass their hands over the person's eyes and tell them, "Sleep. Now."
09. The Velvet Underground & Nico - I'll Be Your Mirror [lyrics] [about the band]
Luckily for John, his wife stands by him and doesn't seem to mind that he's a possible serial killer and/or total headjob. That's love for you, folks.
10. Gary Numan - Warriors [lyrics] [about the artist]
One of The Strangers has "John Murdoch's" memories implanted in his own brain to learn how he thinks and where to search for him. Human memories, especially those of a psychopath, seem to severely unbalance the aliens.
11. Schneider TM - The Light 3000 [lyrics] [about the artist]
John is hiding at his "uncle's" home, trying to reconcile his childhood memories with the evidence that they never happened.
12. The Black Heart Procession - Sympathy Crime [lyrics] [about the band]
The Stranger with human memories visits Emma, as he too remembers that he has a wife.
13. Prodigyremixed.com - Action Radar (FakeID Mix) [lyrics] [the webpage]
John pulls himself together and has a battle of wills with The Strangers.
14. PJ Harvey - (Untitled)
John returns to Shell Beach, the scene of his childhood memories...
Comment if you download, whatever. Or maybe just make your favorite sound effect!