I've got the new Matrix film on Plex, so I'm going to give it a watch and have a couple of beers tonight.
If you want you can watch it with me and then we can talk about what we thought about it. I'm personally expecting it to be pretty bad, because the sequels were both quite dire; but the Matrix was just too influential of a franchise in my youth (and yours too, I suspect) to ignore.
We can watch the Red Letter Media review as well and see if they agree with us or not, that's one of my favourite things to do when I watch a new film noawadays because it makes me feel like I still have friends to talk about movies with.
In fact why don't we try and make it a regular thing. Not just watching the Matrix, I mean, but new films what come out. If it doesn't go anywhere fair enough but let's give it a go eh. I'll be Mike and you be Jay.
Well I watched it, and overall it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. But then I usually do feel less harshly about these sorts of rehash reboot sequels than most people.
What cheapened the whole affair was having the constant intercutting of footage from the old films. It was not shit enough that it would have stood up on it's own without all that nonsense. But I suppose we needed all that for the zoomers who somehow haven't seen the originals.
It feels like they more or less tried to follow the pacing of the original, but they bloated it out too much. The first film always felt like an epic but when I've re-watched it in more recent years, I'm always surprised by how quickly it clips along- Neo gets rescued, they train him up, then it all goes wrong on their first proper time in the matrix, and after that the last half hour is all the big climax where they rescue Morpheus and Neo unlocks his powers to become the One. This one does something similar, just with a lot of padding inbetween.
Also Keanu hasn't given a performance this wooden in years, I can't tell if he's just hamming it up at this point or if he's just phoning it in. I'll have to watch Bill and Ted to compare and contrast.
Also Carl from Starship Troopers is getting on a bit.
Oh and the action scenes were really very sloppy, that's a big shame. Considering the original Matrix was one of the most fresh and interesting action films, you would have thought the one thing they'd do right in a reboot is to get some good action set pieces in there. Sure they didn't want to just re-hash the cliches, but I mean... Come on, what's really the point of a Matrix sequel otherwise? I mean yeah the original was actually quite deep underneath the action, but you're never gonna replicate THAT part, you might as well give the gunfights and kung-fu a bigger budget.
It was a pretty clever film actually if you consider all the meta stuff to be a valid part of a film's appraisal. I'm sure we've all either watched it or watched a video review by now, and we know how the central conceit is basically to just subvert the whole idea of a Matrix sequel.
Now, that's fine, but the thing is this film isn't going to age at all. It's a film of here and now, and it will have no lasting relevance. And I think they knew that- That's why all of it looks so cheap and naff. That's one of the biggest things I noticed about it all, it didn't feel like a big budget movie, it felt like a Netflix adaptation. It might have had a high budget, but the crew certainly didn't agonise over the process of making it.
It's nice if you're an arty farty film critic snob who likes to think about the deep stuff and the meta-context; if you actually wanted a good Matrix sequel, though, you're shit out of luck.
It's kind of the exact opposite of Denee Veelnuh's Dune. That film is exceptionally well made, but straight as an arrow, with all the subtextual depth of a drink coaster. In fact all of Dennis Veelnerv's films are like that, people wank over them but they're always just really hyper-focussed, "one note", very literal. He even managed to make Blade Runner too straightforward somehow.
Watched the new Resident Evil movie the other night.
Complete and total dross.
All the talk about keeping it close to the source material was clearly just marketing spiel.
This also seems entirely redundant for Resident Evil, now, because many of the new games are more cinematic than the actual films. The first 70 minutes or so of REVII gameplay more closely resembles a film than any of the Paul W. S. Anderson nonsense.
I really enjoyed watching bits of REVII. It borrows heavily from horrors The Texas Chainsaw Masssacre with the father, Saw with the son's sadistic games, and various "found footage" films like the Blair Witch Project. The sense of horror for the series has come a long way since "Itchy. Tasty.":
>>24267 It looked absolute shit from the trailers, and I say this as a fan of the Anderson movies and (most) of the video games. The CGI looked laughable, like something from a Tim & Eric skit. The upcoming Netflix series should be interesting, due to Lance Reddick playing Wesker.
Finally got around to watching Don't Look Up.
It was "fine".
A lot of smug, quitde honestly a lot of unwarranted smug in all fairnes seeing as the world does look like the world is sort of moving on the whole climate crisis thing with the global meetings and the G20 and that.
Again, "fine".
>>24276 Oh, it was rubbish. The whole thing was so on-the-nose and lacking any real nuance, even to the point they had scenes of hundreds of thick yanks in the street chanting "don't look up!"
The only saving grace was Jonah Hill's character, and even then only because it was nostalgic for the kind of comedy that him and his mates would routinely put out a decade ago, but comedically the world has moved on substantially.
I couldn't help but wonder what someone like Chris Morris would have done with the concept, or Mike Judge ala Office Space/Idiocracy.
I do feel like it's one of those films where the people snubbing it are largely just indignantly trying to pretend the didn't feel called out. But nevertheless, what didn't help is that the whole thing had the air of a self-satisfied, snarky Cracked article or something. It felt very much like you're supposed to be one of us laughing at people like them.
I've a feeling this will become a trend in movies in future though, if it isn't already. The in-group mindset of social media communities will start spilling over into mainstream media, and everything you watch will make you roll your eyes and cringe internally, because even if you like it, you don't want to feel identified with one of the tossers on Twitter stroking their knobs about how much they get it.
>>24277 I was going to say that Jonah Hill was undeniably the best thing about this movie and criminally under-utilised thrughout.
>>24278 Funnily enough, it did sort of remind me of Idiocracy if Idiocracy had been made by someone with a severe lack of the understanding of nuance.
What the movie could have done, rather than taking a stab at tech giants(?) was go after energy conglomerates. Rather than trying to shoot the comet down, they could have had it where the solution instead was to move the Earth out of the way with a massive rocket engine strapped to that Mexican desert (in the dinosaur extinction crater for added symbolic effect) with the caveat being it will require all fuel resources to be diverted there affordably.
Cue in some Armando Ianucci bureaucratic comedy and you've got a movie that whilst literally is even more on the nose, has more to actually say about the issues it raises.
So I finally watched this Don't Look Up, and while it is certainly a very blunt movie, I don't really get where the criticisms are coming from.
It lacked nuance? Sure, but that's about as valid of a criticism as attacking Keith Lemon for being unsubtle. I really don't think subtlety is what they were going for. And besides- Americans simply aren't very good at it. I see the comparisons to Idiocracy certainly, but the other thing it reminded me of quite strongly was The Thick Of It, only in a much more directly cynical manner.
The character that seems to come at the focus of most people who disliked the movie is the tech-CEO strawman. I thought maybe people were rustled by a bit of an unfair portrayal of Musk-esque billionaire idealists; but then, I saw this article about Musk's own experiments with putting brain chips in monkeys.
>Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autopsy revealed the animal suffered from a brain hemorrhage.
>Jeremy Beckham, a research advocacy coordinator with the PCRM, told Insider that out of the 23 monkeys, seven survived
You really don't even need to strawman this kind of stuff.
>>24328 >You really don't even need to strawman this kind of stuff.
I've been working on a piece of fiction where some characters get arrested for giving away food, showing how cruel the regime they live in is and it just feels cartoonish, unbelievable over-the-top stuff. Despite the fact that it's happened and continues to happen, here, in the West. It's hard as fuck to satirise the reality we're in.
>>24329 That's a law in Hungary, right now, for giving food to begging refugees and immigrants, to dissuade them from going to Hungary. If they start dying of starvation, it's illegal not to let them starve. I assume you were already aware of this, but this is a law in a country that's honestly called Hungry. You're right: some things are beyond satire.
