I’m guessing misogyny is why people are reacting badly to the Jumanji announcment, too, right chief?
It’s weird to be this invested in something like a movie. If the reports are that this Ghostbusters is terrible, then I won’t go see it. Simple as that.
And I’m sorry, but Leslie Jones’ character still seems like a super racist trope. It’s not raising my expectations much to see that Karan Soni is cast as a Chinese deliveryman ('coz all Asians look alike, amirite?)
I think gender had a bit to do with it. A leading cast of female misfits in a semi-action film is fairly new territory and I don’t think they quite know how to write the characters or the jokes.
For instance the black girl gets dropped in the mosh pit and asks if it’s because she’s a woman or she’s black. The joke doesn’t work because it doesn’t make sense that the mosh pit would drop someone for being a women, if anything they’d grope her. Maybe it makes more sense if they didn’t think she was attractive enough but that’s a touchy joke to make.
The movies will get better as they learn to write them but they’ll still figuring out the archetypes.
Actually I thought the 1984 trailer was way better (once you account for 80’s trailers being terrible). The jokes hit and they knew how to let Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd play comedic characters they were great at.
In the new trailer I know Melissa McCarthy is a hilarious actress but I barely recognized her in this role and I’m not sure her crass style would fit the movie.
I think “fantastic” is stretching it a bit, the best I can give it is a “meh”.
The Matrix was important for a lot of reasons.
It’s blend of Hong Kong action cinema with anime inspired sci-fi aesthetics was not comprised of new elements, but it was composed in a new way, and whilst the wire work and kung fu were lifted directly from their source material, the camerawork was revolutionary.
More importantly, it was the movie that introduced these elements of Asian TV and cinema to Western audiences. It changed the face of 20th Century cinema as a result, and it pushed the bar on what action in films could look like.
Beyond that, however, I think you have to respect that The Matrix is more than just an action film. It would have been easy to just string a bunch of fights together, but The Matrix chooses to have more meaning than that. There’s a philosophical core to the film that drives the action and invests us in the story. No one’s saying you have to respect that philosophical core, but it’s there, and it has value and meaning. The idea of human beings as batteries might be total nonsense scientifically, but from an idealogical standpoint it’s probably one of the most subtly brilliant metaphors for consumer capitalism in recent cinema history. Notice how when Smith talks about which part of human history the machines chose to replicate, he describes this as our “golden age”, but also notes that trying to replicate a perfect world caused us to see right through it? The implication is clear; the machines see this as the perfect time in history to place us in, because the way we exploited ourselves so perfectly mirrors the way we later exploited them, and were then exploited in turn.
It’s not perfect by any stretch, and as a revolutionary screed it was functional, but entirely outstripped by V For Vendetta, which did much of the same but better. On the other hand for a generation of young people it was genuinely the first time they’d been given the means to put such thoughts in perspective, and I think that matters. Its easy to roll your eyes at The Matrix because it’s aesthetic was so intensely designed as to become an easily replicable but ultimately bland uniform for affected outsider status, but if you look past the generation of teens wearing black trenchcoats and the generation of films that all decided “bullet time” was the thing then you’ll find what remains a smart, well directed and well constructed science fiction action movie with some real ideas and something to say. That’s a rare enough thing these days (Fury Road or Snowpiercer come close, but not much else does) and worth celebrating.
When I was leaving the second matrix movie the whippersnapper who opened the door to the theater said to me “Did you like it? This is the Star Wars of my generation.”
It was adorable.
And, yea, I absolutely could not argue with him.
Man, giving away the whole movie in the trailer has been around forever…
I feel like this is taking the extended universe/gender bending of Fanfiction to film. Most reboots aren’t. And it’s a hell of a lot more positive than the last big hit with its roots in Fanfiction (i.e. 50 shades).
There were two big movies in 1999 that I remember. The first was The Matrix, and the second was The Phantom Menace. TPM did well, imho, because it had a bunch of built-in hype. I think The Matrix blindsided a bunch of us. Nobody expected a big hit in March, imho.
Totally agree with the whippersnapper. I tried to watch it again recently, expecting it to have aged poorly. I don’t think it aged all that poorly, even if it does seem funny to see 1999 as the peak of human civilization now.
Well, except for all the people who watched kung-fu movies on TV for several decades prior to the Matrix or who watched shows that had strong kung-fu inspired elements (David Carradine in Kung-fu much)… I’m not sure that Asian film/TV needed American directors to “introduce” western audiences to anything by that time. It maybe moved some of the themes into the mainstream a bit more, but it’s not like no one had seen Asian films by the late 90s at all. Plenty of people who made up the core audience for the Matrix were already familiar with the genre.
But, I do agree it’s a great film and probably the Wachowski’s best work.
Bingo. I will give props to the camera work but well Keanu so bland as an actor to start with ‘oh wow Ted I found out that everything is like a total bogus lie piped into our heads by a robots, this is so lame’. The whole this reality isn’t real isn’t new and has been done a lot already. I found it a lot of style with a pretty bog standard substance underneath and the style was not much of anything new for me at the time as well so I dunno I just could not see how ‘great’ it was.
Agreed and let’s not forget the strong influence of Asian cinema on American/Italian Westerns and on Star Wars. It’s kind of like saying that Harry Potter (as good as it is and as much as I like it) is somehow broke new ground on the genre of fantasy. It was building on decades of fantasy tropes that had long existed.
And vice versa. Kurosawa was influenced by Hollywood westerns in his early samurai films. Yojimbo is a western with swords instead of guns.
Yep. True enough. We could also pick apart the back and forth influence of animation as well, which has gone both ways (between here and Japan, specifically). The occupation led to the more fluid sharing of cultures between here and Japan.
But yeah, I like the Matrix, but it’s a long line of influences that led to the film in the first place.
Obviously you haven’t seen Jupiter Ascending.
I have not. I heard it’s terrible. I’m sure I’ll get around to it one day.
On the other hand, I’ve heard great things about Sense8… haven’t got around to watching that yet, though.
I watched the first episode, wasn’t really in the right frame of mind/distracted with a toddler. I think it needs me to pay more attention to it. Might go back.
JA is gloriously awful.
Speed Racer I just didn’t get. Cloud Atlas was an interesting failure. I probably like Bound best though.
I missed in the theater and never thought much about it till listening the GME podcast about it. I quite liked the film. The thing about it is what it is NOT. It is not a live action Speed Racer movie which I think is what everyone was expecting. It IS a Speed Racer cartoon with live actors and it really works with that perspective. Everyone is great and Roger Allam is so perfectly smarmy as the corporate CEO bad guy that he almost steals the movie.
I think we discussed it before. I never saw the tv series so I have no frame of reference. I’ve read the opinion of critics like FilmCritHULK whose opinion I value and I really wanted to like it. I just… didn’t.
“Introduced” was probably the wrong choice of wording. It’s an undeniable fact that The Matrix changed the look and feel of action cinema; you can watch any movie from around that time and see a clear transition.
What was revolutionary about the Wachowski’s approach was not what they took from Hong Kong; it was what they added from Tokyo. It’s actually well known that The Matrix got funded because they sat down with Joel Silver (who was a legendary maverick in Hollywood) and a copy of Ghost in The Shell and said “We can produce that in live action.” Martial arts and John Woo’s hyper-kinetic gunplay had been invading Hollywood throughout the eighties, but no one had really tried to replicate the sense of flow and movement that had become a staple of Japanese Animation. The most important influences on The Matrix weren’t The Killer or A Better Tomorrow; it was Akira, Ghost in The Shell, Bubblegum Crisis and Cowboy Bebop.
That look and feel - essentially the presentation rather than the elements being presented - was absolutely groundbreaking.
As an aside, it’s not their best work, because their best work wasn’t on the big screen (though if you’re thinking specifically in terms of film then it’s a coin toss between V For Vendetta and Cloud Atlas), but rather on the small one. Sense8 is not just the best thing the Wachowskis have ever done; it’s quite literally one of the best TV shows I have ever seen, and it basically makes an open and shut case for the unique value of television as a medium.
