MEMENTO - 2000

"Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."


Suffering short-term memory loss after a head injury, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) embarks on a grim quest to find the lowlife who murdered his wife in this gritty, complex thriller that packs more knots than a hangman's noose. To carry out his plan, Shelby snaps Polaroids of people and places, jotting down contextual notes on the backs of photos to aid in his search and jog his memory. He even tattoos his own body in a desperate bid to remember.

The medical condition experienced by Leonard in this film is a real condition called Anterograde Amnesia - the inability to form new memories after damage to the hippocampus. During the 1950s, doctors treated some forms of epilepsy by removing parts of the temporal lobe, resulting in the same memory problems.

Dark City - 1998

My personal friend, Dov Hoenig, was the film editor to this film as well as the classics The Last of the Mohicans, The Crow and The Fugitive (to name a few). His editing touches make a difference in a film. This one--in particular--called DARK CITY is a neo noir sci-fi film that is quite different. I loved the focus, search and yearning for "Shell Beach".


The film depicts a city in which human inhabitants never see the sun, as their lives are manipulated by extraterrestrials referred to as the "Strangers", who masquerade as humans. The Strangers are committed to studying the race of humanity through experimentation. Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jennifer Connelly star in principal roles. Dark City explores the subject matter of murder, as well as abstract ideas such as hallucination, simulated reality, and the relationship between memory and personal identity.


Dark City is a retelling of the "Allegory of the Cave" used by Greek philosopher Plato, who conveyed the allegory as a fictional dialogue between his teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. In the film, the city inhabitants are prisoners who do not realize they are in a prison. John Murdoch's escape from the prison parallels the escape from the cave in the allegory. He is assisted by Dr. Schreber, who explains the city's mechanism as Socrates explains to Glaucon how the shadows in the cave are cast. Murdoch however becomes more than Glaucon; Gerard Loughlin writes, "He is a Glaucon who comes to realize that Socrates' tale of an upper, more real world, is itself a shadow, a forgery."


Murdoch defeats the Strangers who control the inhabitants and remakes the world based on childhood memories, which were themselves illusions arranged by the Strangers. Loughlin writes of the lack of background, "The origin of the city is off–stage, unknown and unknowable." Murdoch now casts new shadows for the city inhabitants, who must trust his judgment. Unlike Plato, Murdoch "is disabused of any hope of an outside" and becomes the demiurge for the cave, the only environment he knows.


The city in Dark City is described by Higley as a "murky, nightmarish German expressionist film noir depiction of urban repression and mechanism". The city has a World War II dreariness reminiscent of Edward Hopper's works and has details from different eras and architectures that are changed by the Strangers; "buildings collapse as others emerge and battle with one another at the end". The round window in Dark City is concave like a fishbowl and is a frequently seen element throughout the city. The inhabitants do not live at the top of the city; the main characters' homes are dwarfed by the bricolage of buildings.


"The Matrix" was released one year after "Dark City" and was also filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia using some of the same sets. Comparisons have been made between scenes from the movies, making note of similarities in both cinematography and atmosphere, as well as the plot.