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May 22, 2003

STOMPE: Caroline and I collaborated on a mix CD (i.e. I went through her extensive library of mp3s and picked out upbeat stuff for her ride to school the next day). It is now the Sound Track of My Pathetic Existence, at least for now.
Nick ::: 9:37 PM ::: 0 comments

May 20, 2003

I kind of want to post something sappy about graduation, but I'm not quite ready yet. To use a rather weird metaphor, my heart is like a child's sippy cup. I'm letting the sad juices well up, and while they are certainly few and far between, my heart isn't known for it's great size or carrying capacity, so it won't take long to overflow. When it does, that will be the moment for writing about graduation.
Nick ::: 11:28 PM ::: 0 comments

May 19, 2003

Why Matrix: Reloaded Failed to Blow Me Away

While normally I wouldn't comment on one of these film debates, which seem to always end with someone asserting that "if you don't agree with me completely, you are wrong, you have no taste, and your opinion is worthless," I feel that this particular situation calls for a bit of explanation. I hope that certain people will, for once, acknowledge that perfectly valid thoughts may lead to a conclusion totally different from their own. I certainly don't feel that my admittedly convoluted opinion is inherently superior to any other, but as it is my own I am in a unique position to explain it.

I felt that it was a pretty good movie with a lot of really great stuff in it. It did not blow me away because it was not well-rounded. It did not have essential narrative tension and it lacked focus. It completely failed to address many important needs of the viewer, and spent agonizingly long periods of time on purposeless inanities. It failed to even play to its own strengths. It felt pretentious and cartoony rather than moody and dark. I also realized that the second time I saw it, I expected at some gut level to see a bit of nip and tuck; the film didn't feel finished at all.

My main complaint is that only once or twice did I really feel like saying, "Wow. That was the Matrix." It didn't have that unique flair, that sense of awe, that made the first movie more than groundbreaking. That feeling made the first movie a cultural phenomenon. There were exceptions, of course: the stairwell scene, Morpheus on the truck, Neo vs. the Cool Engrish Dude -- but these were the exceptions, not the rule. Most of the movie felt more like Episode II's political "intrigue" than the Matrix's noir cyberpunk.

So I guess the best way to continue this is to give a list of things I liked and...other things. To end on a positive note, something I like to do, I will start with the other things. Warning, spoilers, blah blah blah I'm sure you've all seen the movie, and if you haven't, you shouldn't read this until you have so you can develop your own opinion.

• Sex : The Wachowskis don't understand it. I noticed it in the Animatrix short I saw, Osiris, and it only got worse in the movie itself: these guys have the most juvenile approach to matters of the heart and related organs that I've ever seen on the silver screen. Neo and Trinity, who seemed like deeply connected soul mates the first time around, are reduced to poster children for raging pubescent hormones in Reloaded. The cake? The dance? The elevator? What the hell are we watching, God-Like Badass Cyberpunk Freedom Fighters Gone Wild?
• Agent Smith : My favorite character from the first movie is reduced to a bunch of Shrek-animated clods who won't stop delivering piss-poor one-liners no matter how hard I beg them to stop. In the interim between films, I wondered what cool challenges Neo would face this time, but a million replicated agents didn't occur to me, and with good reason. It lends itself to fake-looking, cartoony action, and it actively undermines any efforts at noir storytelling. Not that anyone is making any.
• The "Philosophy" : If you can call it that. A self-important stream of opaque, paradoxical, self-defeating mumbo-jumbo that makes the Bible look positively streamlined, unified, and precise by comparison. Something about predestination coexisting with choice, but the choices have all already been made, but the random factor of choice still exists, but it doesn't where it applies to fate, but it does where it applies to individual action, but those choices are fated, but we choose to understand why...with a generous helping of buzzwords like "reason" and "believe" thrown in for the so-called "philosophy's" verisimilitude. What's not to love?
• His Superman Thing : I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Neo looks like a total douche flitting through the air with that CG skirt flapping around. I also think it occasionally colors his fighting style to ill effect. I mean, who honestly wants to see Keyanu Reeves pirouetting through the air like a prima ballerina, complete with flat black tutu?
• The Dialogue : Frankly, I'm apalled. It has its good, even great moments ("It's like wiping your arse with silk." "So, you have some skill."), but the bulk of it feels overwrought ("ergo, the anomaly, while clearly to be assiduously avoided..."), and most of the remainder sounds like it was improvised by a sloshed I Am Sam ("I see two of me in the mirror. Me, me, me. Hey, me too!"). Puh-lease. What's next? "You know what happens to an Agent when it's struck by lightning"?
• The Focus : The lack of it? Not really; the movie is always clearly focusing on something. But I have to ask, from time to time, "why choose this to be the center of attention?" Why are we staring at the CG-animated matrix code of a clock for the first five minutes of the film? Why are we panning past all these sweaty girls' nipples? Where is Morpheus going with this bloody idiotic speech? What is the point of this whole cake scene, and why must you, Messrs. Wachowski, actually show us the Matrix code for the female orgasm? Concentrate on what you're trying to accomplish next time! Is that too much to ask?
• The Music : OK, this is a nitpick, but the music in a couple of scenes, notably whenever Neo was fighting agents, totally blew. I rather liked the first movie's sound, by comparison.

OK, that's why it failed to blow me away. I've got it out of my system, and I can now explain why it was no more a bad movie than it was a good one.

• The Stairwell Fight : Hey, guess what: Neo doesn't need a million identical opponents to have a great kung-fu battle! This was the best fight scene in the film, despite probably costing a fraction of what the playground scene did. If you subtract the tackiness of the replicant Smiths, actually film your bullet-time sequences instead of generating them à la Shrek, and throw in something silly like a motivation for the fisticuffs, your scene won't suck. In other words, do what you did on the stairwell. This fight rocks my world.
• The Twins : These guys prove that the Wachowskis still have great new ideas, if they're careful to stay away from sex and repetitive one-liners that share the punch line "there are more than one of me."
• The Highway : Like the Twins, this mind-blowing scene proves that the world of the Matrix can be successfully expanded in daring new directions. A Matrix car chase is unprecedented, but it's the sort of concept that just screams cool. No listener could possibly react the same way to this idea and one of the bad ones from this film. "Let's have a Matrix-style fight, with guns, Agents, kung fu, and bullet time, but introduce tons of metal screaming a long at 90mph, daring leaps from overpasses, and hijacked vehicles -- then top it off with an explosive head-on collision!" ...or... "Let's change the extreme kung fu skill showdowns of the first movie into one guy swatting aside a bajillion inept opponents with a pole, then getting bored and flying away." These two scenes just don't belong in the same movie.
• Hand-to-hand Weapons : The Matrix action style was adapted brilliantly from guns to knives, sais, swords, maces, spears, tridents, katanas, and clubs. What more is there to say?
• Lines the Writers Understood Well Enough to Explain to the Audience : I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure there were some. Possibly a few of the ones about how people will always depend on machines. The Oracle saying she was there because she loved candy was a winner. Link continued the tradition of overawed crew members admirably when he said things like "yes!" and "I can't deal with this." Of course, for the whole movie to meet this requirement, they'd have to entirely cut the characters of the Oracle and the Architect, and drop a lot of Morpheus and the Megima-whatsis' lines.

So I guess that does it. Anything not listed here was either forgotten or just plain blah, neither good nor bad. I hope this clarifies things a little.
Nick ::: 11:32 PM ::: 0 comments