In Contention

Tag: The Matrix

  • The kids are NOT all right (or alright, for that matter)

    This post is so unnecessary because it is an obvious lost cause. It really shouldn’t even be enough to get a rise, but in me, it just…does.

    You know, once upon a time the MTV Movie Awards (which are voted on publicly) actually seemed to reflect an edge in America’s youth. Think about it. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” won the MTV award for Best Picture. “Menace II Society” won the MTV award for Best Picture. “Pulp Fiction,” “Seven,” “Scream,” “There’s Something About Mary,” “The Matrix,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” etc.  Room was even made here and there for prestige pics that tapped a pop culture vein.  “A Few Good Men,” for instance, or “Titanic,” “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Gladiator,” one of only two times the award matched the Academy’s choice.

    And in the last five years?  Scary.  “Wedding Crashers,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” “Transformers” and far and away the two worst films to win a popcorn statue: “Twilight” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” (Why, Bill, why?)  What the hell happened to the MTV audience?  What happened to the kids’ edge?  Who are these people?

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  • Remembering 1999, the movie year that was

    Brad Pitt in Fight ClubLast year I dedicated one of the first formal installments of The Lists to the films of 1999, one of the most electrifying slate of films to come along since Hollywood’s epic 1939 peak 60 years prior.  There was an embarrassment of riches, truly, great work from the classic masters, eye-opening new work from future masters and everything in between.

    There was exceptional independent filmmaking on display as well as impressive studio offerings.  Envelope-pushing was the norm while formulaic studies also seemed curiously refined.  As the century drew to a close, it seemed, in some ways, that 1999 would come to represent everything that made the medium so special for its first 100 hundred years.

    Over at Movie City News, Noah Forrest has dedicated a new column to the discussion.  He can be forgiven, I think, for twisting in the winds of indecision when it comes to pegging a personal best film from 1999, but he also offers a number of other superlatives to honor the films and performances from the year.

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  • POLL: the most influential films of all time, round one, part four

    I decided to bump today’s poll an hour to give some extra lead time to the sad news of director Marc Rocco’s passing, but I don’t think it ultimately mattered much.  The three survivors of last week’s slate were “Casablanca,” “The Matrix” and “Star Wars.”  On to a new set of 10.

    Again, the groupings in these polls are decided at random.  So no yelling at your humble servant.  But I expect more than a few to be dismayed at having to choose three from the sterling collective you’ll find in the left sidebar.  C’est la vie.

    Choose your trio and be heard!  Two more weeks of round one after this and we’ll be moving on.  Once again, for background on this series, click here.

  • Get your votes in!

    This week’s “Most Influential” poll closes up shop at 2:00pm PST, so get your votes in if you haven’t already.  The film leading the pack should come as no surprise, but I’m surprised to see “Casablanca” so high.  “The Matrix” is just barely ahead of “Taxi Driver” for the third and final slot, while truly influential staples like “It Happened One Night” and “The Great Train Robbery” are apparently down for the count.

  • ‘The Matrix,’ 10 years later

    The MatrixLots of reminiscing going on this year.  After all, it was 10 years ago that Hollywood unleashed its most creatively exciting batch of domestic product in, some would say, 60 years.  A master filmmaker, some might call him the greatest to ever try his hand at the cinema, passed away just before leaving us his swan song.  Soon enough, those “best of the decade” lists will be unveiled.

    And once upon a time, “The Matrix” was a brilliant accomplishment unphased by hackneyed revisitation and bloated sequelitis.  Things change, I guess.

    Anyway, Shawn Levy, film critic for The Oregonian, has blogged the occassion of the film’s tenth anniversary (it first bowed on screens April 2, 1999).  Here’s what he has to say:

    I remember the press screening of the film — or, rather, the screening that would’ve been the press screening had much of the Portland film press bothered to show up. It was held at the (then new) Eastport multiplex on a Monday or Tuesday night and it was nearly empty of both critics and the usual horrifying screening rats. It was, after all, a science-fiction film starring Keanu Reeves — his first since “Johnny Mnemonic”! — and written and directed by a pair of brothers whose debut, “Bound,” was a terrifically good noirish chamber drama that did little business. If ever a movie had a pedigree that said, ‘you can catch it in three weeks at a brewpub,’ this was it.

    “But walking out of that theater after that screening in the thrall of the wire-fu, the stop-motion FX, the mind-blowing script, the wicked-cool look-and-feel and breakneck pace, well, I was abuzz. It was the edge of Y2K, remember, and even if you knew enough not to fear the computer changeover that was approaching, there was an electric sense of possibility — and not entirely positive — in the air. Somehow “The Matrix” crystallized that energy, packaged it in superb visuals and a crackerjack story, and turned angst and giddiness and trepidation and exultation into brilliantly entertaining popcorn art.”

    I still remember the trailer hooking me immediately:

    Warner Bros. recently released the film as a stand alone on Blu-ray (though it has that lame-ass book style packaging because Warner Home Video, as usual, has to be so different form the standard). And there’s always The Ultimate Matrix Collection for the die hards.

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 films of 1999

    (from left) Joe Pantoliano, Laurence Fishburne, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in The MatrixRemember that Entertainment Weekly cover from November of 1999?  The headline boldly proclaimed: “The year that changed movies.”  Indeed, it has become nearly a cliche to harp on and on about those 12 months of solid product as a time not equaled since the glory year that was, 1939, but to many, the truth was the truth.  1999 was the best year for films in a long, long time.

    And it wasn’t a microscopic view of “quality” either.  A broad net was cast, from genre successes aplenty to art house sensations, both finding equal play in the film awards circuit that year.  And so it is that hammering out a list of the 10 best constitutes to be a pastime of sorts for the movie lover, especially those like me who were experiencing an awakening of sorts around that time.

    1999 was my first year of film school — the dark ages, as I like to call them (because I’ve come to know film school as a fool’s errand of sorts, an education not easily passed from one person to the next but better learned through trial and tribulation).  But I was still an eager, unjaded soul and took a trip to the local theater one day with a troupe of friends for our own double feature: Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty” and David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.”  It was our first real understanding of the year that had been unfolding right before our eyes.

    “American Beauty” has, of course, aged quite poorly, though Russell’s Iraq war film remains a staple of sorts, a unique blip in a consistently uneven genre.  This was already the year that had seen the release of the first “Star Wars” installment in over 20 years (however disappointing), the last great exhibit from the portfolio of the cinema’s greatest artist (Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”) and a science fiction masterpiece that owed as much to William Gibson as anything else (at least those ideas were making it to the screen).

    Moreover, this was a cinematic year that would see releases from more top-tier directors than any other year: Kubrick, Scorsese, Lucas, Lynch, Allen, Fincher, Burton, Leigh, Minghella, Anderson, Almodóvar, Mann, Lee, Stone, Jordan, Sayles, Soderbergh, Forman, Burton, Pollack, Darabont and Howard, while simultaneously launching the exciting careers of untold newbies.  The range of quality, as expected, was certainly wide, but that all of these guys were in neck deep in their work during the same stretch of time had plenty to do with the perception of 1999, then and now.

    So with that, I felt that this week’s top 10 list (a Tuesday regularity now, if you haven’t been keeping score) would address 1999, the year that was.  Here are my picks:

    (from left) Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube in Three Kings10. “Three Kings” (David O. Russell)
    David O. Russell is a visionary of sorts, but he seems to always be right at the surface, just about to break through with an unyielding brilliance, never fully harnessing the wicked talent he clearly has.  But for a brief moment in the fall of 1999, he discovered an outlet in this Iraq War dramedy that became more famous for its off-screen drama than what unfolded on-screen.  Pity, because I would rank “Three Kings” in a list of the 10 greatest war films ever made without flinching.  George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze and Ice Cube headlined a sprawling cast that probably deserved some ensemble attention.

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