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The Matrix
In words we very nearly used to sing as children, Neo
(“The One”) says, “I know that’s what it looks like but
it’s not.”
The artistic basis is something along the lines of The X
Files. Really, it’s the apotheosis of UPN/WB/FOX-TV science fiction.
Ed O’Neill, who isn’t as dumb as he looks, is supposed to have said
he never thought Married With Children would get on the air, and it’s
hard to see something like Babylon 5 (or whatever) making money at the
movies.
It takes money to make money, or Handmade Films wouldn’t
be out of business. The 400 or so million dollars this picture made has mostly
been plowed into sequels, in hopes of exponential returns, I presume.
The Sight and Sound reviewer was very impressed with the
window washers, though it’s only a question of a Home Improvement
wipe.
The Wachowskis’ script for Richard Donner’s Assassins
would appear to have been doctored by the director (or rather Brian Helgeland),
otherwise it’s unaccountable. It’s a question, in The Matrix,
whether the script or the direction is more responsible for the acting. Perhaps
it’s only a matter of accepted style. Ah, the special effects. The
disappearing mouth was done perfectly by Buñuel in Un chien andalou, not
so here.
An extreme close-up turns a telephone into monumental sculpture,
doesn’t it?
Man is born free, and he is everywhere in The Matrix.
A great stinking green cheese of a movie.
Tron, by comparison, isn’t bad at all. Artificial
Intelligence, like manufactured evidence.
From 1984 there is an amusing theme: the second coming of
Goldstein.
And then it turns into Peter Pan. “Whoa!
Okey-dokey!”
Every year now comes a batch of films under the rubric properly
given to them by Groucho Marx: “Ooga-Booga!” File The Matrix
there, on the high-tech end, in Eisnerland.
“Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony,”
thus it provides a public of nerds with a fable of cyber-reality presented in
crypto-cyber-reality and a marketing scheme to match.
A recent book given serious critical attention puts forth the
theory that all untoward revolutionary elements (i.e., terrorists, Nazis, etc.)
adhere to an apocalyptic vision corresponding to that of Babylon Destroyed in
the Book of Revelation, by which logic you receive here the good “ship”
Nebuchadnezzar.
Are the black costumes somebody’s idea of la vie
parisienne, or borrowed from one of those Midwestern S&M cliques that
like it skintight so you can pee in it?
Hyper-kicky wire-fighting though, sort of, not.
The lamest piece of unadulterated shit I’ve ever seen on
film. A corporate sellout, the New Economy worshiping all its idols, even the
Unknown One the faux triumphal orchestral score sings unbounded. A commercial
for the phone company and the computer company.
The least you can do is buy the video game.