A common trope in stories of resurrection is that the body comes back to life, but the soul does not come back resulting in a moving but lifeless corpse, a zombie. The Matrix Resurrections attempts to revive a long dead franchise with imperfect results. It's not a bad film, the plot holds together, there's some neat effects and some good jokes, but it doesn't really have a pulse. There is no purpose or meaning. It moves, but it's not really alive.
While watching this movie I kept thinking about Isn't It Romantic, a rom-com parody starring Rebel Wilson. In that movie, Rebel plays a woman who hates rom-coms who finds herself living in a world that runs on rom-com rules. It's a delightfully meta movie that never forgets that as much as it pretend to hate the genre, it is very much a rom-com and ultimately a love letter to the genre. The Matrix Resurrections frequently parodies its own status as an overly late franchise revival, but unlike Isn't It Romantic, it thinks it's better than the glut of reboots that have taken over Hollywood in the past decade. But like the rest of these movies, there just doesn't feel like there is any reason for this movie to exist other than to sell movie tickets by capitalizing on established brand. The Forky Problem is taking over Hollywood and it shows no sign of relenting. In a moment of self-parody that does not feel intentional the movie devolves into a zombie movie with no acknowledgement that the movie itself is a zombie.
Philosophy has been an important part of the franchise from the beginning. The original film was an unabashed retelling of The Allegory of the Cave with touches of Simulacra and Simulation. Reloaded's philosophy could be summed up by that scene where the king of Zion looks straight into the camera and asks "What is control?" Revolutions was about learning that two side of a conflict often have more in common than they realize and there is more to be gained by cooperation than repeating the same fights again and again. There were multiple books and college courses about the philosophical depth of these films. Resurrections says that most people want to be controlled and it never actually debates the point. It just offers that some people are special and can make their own choices. There's no depth to the argument. It's just there to check the box that "this movie needs some philosophy." I don't think any professors are going to be putting this movie on their syllabus. If they really wanted to make that the theme, then they should have set the film at the start of the new matrix when the people were choosing between freedom and captivity. Give me Neo vs. Hobbes' Leviathan.
As I watch this sequel to a movie where the actor's names have changed, I can't help but to wonder when did we all become John Mayer whining about his lunchbox being thrown away and pining for 1983 (in this case, 1999)?
I just revived this blog after a long time to make a point I have more or less made twice before. Did I just Fork myself?
19. Turning Red 20. The Good Dinosaur
21. Ratatouille
22. Monsters, Inc.
23. Cars
24. Cars 2
In a previous version of this list, I made a comment that Cars will "bring about Pixar's inevitable demise" and I would like to take a moment to explain that position. It's not that Cars or any of its sequels are "bad". Pixar has to date never made a bad movie. The problem with Cars is how much money it made and how uncreative it is. Cars is Pixar's most profitable franchise and it's least challenging to write. Early Pixar reliably delivered great characters and original stories. Half of the post-Cars Pixar films have been sequels or prequels as they are clearly trying to capitalize on their established characters rather than creating new ones. Cars created the Forky problem at Pixar.
Forky is the new key character created for Toy Story 4. The character came about because the writers keep throwing partially completed scripts in the trash because they could not find a reason for Toy Story 4 to exist. (Toy Story 3 was a perfect end to the Toy Story story and the existence of Toy Story 4 makes the ending retroactively worse, even though it is a fine film on its own.) That is the central problem at modern Pixar. Pixar is financially motivated to make these meaningless sequels rather than tell new stories. So far, they have all come out okay, but they will eventually go downhill.
I know more about China than the average American. This began two years ago when I started dating and eventually married a Chinese citizen (legally) living in the United States. I have learned a number of Chinese folk tales and traditions. I can speak and read a non-zero amount of Mandarin. I have recently returned from more than a month in China, much of that time, in areas not frequented by Western tourists. I have seen a number of Chinese movies which have not attracted a Western audience. I eat most of my meals with chopsticks and since my mother-in-law came to visit Mandarin has become the primary language of my household. I have also seen most of Dragonball, and all of Dragonball Z, GT and Super. (That's an inside joke between me and 老婆.)
I
have also read The Three Body Problem Trilogy, a series of books
written by Cixin Liu, who also wrote the short story The Wandering Earth
is based on. (For the record, I actually started reading The Three Body
Problem before I met 老婆 and convinced her to start reading it. She has not yet finished them.) The Three Body Problem and this movie
share a number of similarities. They are good in both general quality
and that they follow the rules of sci-fi. They are epic space tales
involving enormous times scales. They lean heavily to the hard sci-fi
side of the scale. (The Wandering Earth is softer than The Three Body
Problem, but still much harder than the typical Hollywood fair.) They
have a huge cast of characters which barely get developed. Both feature
Alpha Centari and Jupiter, as well as, an AI which alternates between
ally and antagonist. (老婆, this is No Spoiler Tags. It's your fault for reading this.[Yes, I wrote this entire paragraph just to be a dick to my wife. I love you,老婆.] )
All of this is to say that what I have to say about China in this piece does not come from a place of total ignorance. My feelings about China are mixed. I have serious problems with the way the Chinese Communist Party suppresses free thought, abuses human rights, and uses their military to bully their neighbors. I do not see China as a threat to the United States, at least, not in anyway I care about. My interactions with the Chinese people have been overwhelmingly positive and collectively they seem to have only two major character flaws, which I will discuss later. The Wandering Earth is set about 50 years in the future (It is after the 2044 Shanghai Olympics. Presumably, China is the only country on Earth foolish enough to host the Olympics by then.) with the sun about to explode. So, humanity does the only logical thing and packs up their mobile home, the entire fucking planet, and starts moving to the next star over. On the way out of the solar system, Earth needs to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, which is when things go wrong and plot ensues. A core element of Vulcan and Chinese philosophy is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. (The downside of this collectivism is that the Chinese are completely intolerant of any criticism or humor directed towards them from the outside. This is character flaw number one.) With their lengthy history, the Chinese also seem to be able to think and plan on very long timelines. These ideas permeate this movie time and time again, as character after character sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission. An element of The Wandering Earth Project involves wiping out half of humanity before we even get our planet moving, something everyone on Earth, apparently, just accepts. #ThanosDidNothingWrong (Oddly, this is the first time this blog has recognized the MCU.) Two of the characters make plans for a fishing trip that their descendants will take in 2,500 years. If these elements of Chinese thought become universal, there's a chance humanity will be around long enough to take that fishing trip. One thing that impressed me about this movie is the budget: $48 million. That's a big budget in China, but it barely buys a rom-com in America. Justice League had six times the budget and it looked six times worse. There were places were the imperfect CGI showed through, but Hollywood would struggle to match the visual quality of The Wandering Earth at any price under $200 million. Prices in China are ridiculously cheep from an American prospective and this movie is just another example. I have seen some Chinese movies from the recent past with awful visual effects, but The Wandering Earth proves that China has closed the gap with Hollywood very well. There is one thing I absolutely hated about this movie: the subtitles. This isn't a complaint about subtitles in general. I prefer them to dubbing as it preserves the emotion of the original performance. I hate the actual physical subtitles used in this film. The subtitles were in both English and Chinese characters with more of the screen real estate devoted to the Chinese. The font size was tiny, apparently to make enough room for both languages without covering too much of the screen. I am a fast reader and I frequently struggled with how quickly the long lines of complicated text would flash by. Worst of all, they were in white with only the thinnest of black outlines. A horrible decision for a film which takes place primarily on an ice planet. It was like a picture of snowman in a blizzard with a tiny novel you have to read on it as you drive by at 40 MPH. They were easily the worst subtitles I have ever seen. Here's the part that might get me death threats. (Possibly, from my wife.) I am about to explain the second character flaw that seems so prevalent in China. The Chinese have no qualms about being openly racist to anyone who is not Han Chinese. And it shows in this movie. The movie centers around an international organization working together for the good of humanity. Hollywood would use this opportunity to build a diverse cast representing all of the G20. (Okay, yes, the Americans would be the most awesome heroes who would tell everyone else to steep aside while the white guy or Will Smith saves the day. But, that's not the point right now.) The Wandering Earth had exactly one and a half non-Chinese characters in non-background roles. This was especially noticeable given the size of the cast list. These two were a Russian and a half Australian. The Russian endangered the entire human race by building a sill on the space station humanity needed to survive. The Australian was a moron, comic relief character. It's also subtly implied that he is a rapist. Neither character does anything that could be considered important to the plot. In the fourth act of the movie, it appears that all hope is lost and the Earth will be destroyed, but luckily the Chinese are smart enough to make a new plan to save us all. We see Americans, French, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Indonesians, Russians, Brits and more giving into despair as their feeble minds and weak wills are crushed. (The Israelis also had the idea, but only the Chinese had the will, courage and determination to try.) Then, when all hope seems lost again, it is a middle school Chinese girl who proves that she has larger testicles than all of the non-Chinese men on the planet combined by delivering a speech that would make the President from Independence Day cry, rallying the rest of the planet to help the Chinese save the world. None of this is subtle or an accident. This is the subtext the film makers want you to see. Now, that I've told you how much I enjoyed this openly racist film with dreadful subtitles, as well as, express my love for China and my Chinese wife, here's an enjoyable openly racist song about loving a Chinese girl with could be better subtitles.
Happy Anniversary/Spring Festival/Valentine's Day, 老婆! I love you! Please don't murder me!
[Update] My wife has now read this and translated it to her mother. Based on their responses and having some more time to think about what I wrote, I want to make a few clarifications.
1. I am currently neither murdered nor divorced.
2. My wife and mother-in-law generally agree with what I wrote. Their biggest complaint is with the comment about Mandarin being the primary language at my house. But I talk less than the average man and they are two women, so you do the math. (Why not throw some sexism on top of all this racism?)
3. Hollywood has a very racist past and a somewhat racist present. The writing and casting choices in this movie with regard to race are more like Hollywood of thirty years ago than today. Making the one minority in film a rapist would not fly in modern Hollywood. 4. In the piece above, I attribute several personality traits to the Chinese people, some positive and some negative. Making sweeping generalizations about entire groups is the definition of racism. Their are 1.4 billion people in China, some of them will fit this description to a T, others will follow it loosely and some are the complete opposite. These traits are common, not universal. 5. Finally, a bonus song I think everyone should hear.
Update 2: I recently rewatched this movie with 老婆 and she pointed out some details I missed the first time through that changed my view of this movie a little. She noticed that throughout the movie there are subtle hints that many other people are also struggling to save humanity. There is a line about other astronauts breaking out on the space station, the engines around the world are re-ignited, and the aforementioned line about the Israilis having the idea to ignite Jupiter, as well as other hints. It's some pretty neat storytelling that adds a lot of depth to the world, but I still contend that the movie portarys the Chinese as the only ones with the abilites and bravey to get the job done.
Also, Netflix fixed the subtitle problem from the theatrical release.
I'll leave you with this Because Science video about what it would actually take to move the Earth with current rocket tech.
L. A. Confidential is a period piece. It is set in a time before we knew Kevin Spacey is a child rapist. This is one of those No Spoiler Tags posts that pretty much ignores the film and discusses something tangential to it. Today's topic: Can art be separated from the artist?
Other than the aforementioned Spacey, here is a short, off the top of my head list of men in the film industry who have committed sexual misconduct: Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, Woody Allan, Lewis C. K., Jeffrey Tambor and Morgan Freeman. (That's a lot of names I can think of without trying to think or research.) These names show up in the credits of a lot of good movies and TV. #Timesup for watching them? (I feel bad about that line, but it stays in.) Do I need to throw out my DVD of The Shawshank Redemption? I say no. I think the art speaks for itself separate from the artist, but the art can be tainted and changed by the artist.
The obvious first step with these men is to throw them out of Hollywood and that seems to be happening. I don't think I would watch a new movie staring Spacey, but I am watching the new season of Arrested Development where Tambor plays a role in the ensemble. (So, I guess I'm a hypocrite.) I don't think Arrested Development is hurt by Tambor's presence because he has a relatively small part in a large cast and he's playing basically the same character he does in real life.
L. A. Confidential is a great movie and Kevin Spacey was good in it. It may not have been his best work, but he also didn't have a very large or well-developed part. The accusations against Spacey do affect how I see the film. At the time it came out, his character's pursuit of justice for a homosexual (who wasn't actually homosexual) murder victim was supportive of gay rights. But, now it is a reminder of how Spacey attempted to use coming out of the closet as an excuse and distraction to try to get away with his crimes. Mostly, I found myself trying to find hints of the monster behind the mask. But, Spacey had a knack for playing slimy characters who weren't quite what they seemed, so his presence always had me searching for a twist.
To illustrate why I think these films are not irreparably ruined let's jump over to another form of entertainment: sports.
Joe Paterno won a lot of football games...or did he? As a quick refresher, Joe Paterno was the head coach at Penn State and he hired Jerry Sandusky as his defensive coordinator. During this time Jerry and Joe were winning football games, Jerry was also making the time to rape a lot of children. Paterno was at a minimum aware of Sandusky's crimes, if not actively protecting him. This makes the pair of them the worst sort of awful examples of humanity. Because he was such a dreadful person, the NCAA decided that Paterno's wins didn't count. (Eventually, a judge forced the NCAA to give the wins back because this decision had financial ramifications for people unrelated to the crimes or the cover-ups.) Penn State was right to smash Joe Paterno's statue, but the NCAA was wrong to erase his wins. The fact is the record books are full of the feats of rapists, drug addicts and some, I'm sure, are good people. There is no asterisk next to Roberto Clemente's 3000 hits saying "And he
was a great guy." Jameis Winston won the Heisman Trophy while leading
the league in rape allegations. Oscar Pistorius is the fastest murder on no legs. If the NFL kicked out all the domestic
abusers, could they even make one full team? The record book is not a place for moralizing. It exists to tell history. What is on film is our record book. What happens off screen is backstory for the commentary tracks.
Hey, this is random. But what do you think of this painting?
It's nice, right? Maybe it's not the best painting you've even seen, but it wouldn't seem out of place in your grandma's house, a doctor's waiting room or the lobby of a mid-priced hotel. If you see this in your doctor's office, you should really find a new doctor, because that's a Hitler original. It made me uncomfortable enough to instantly delete it from my hard drive, but it's still objectively a decent painting. Other men who made the transition from entertainment to Nazism and acts of barbarous cruelty include Charles Manson and Donald Trump.
In L. A. Confidential, Exley is introduced as the annoyingly and unerringly ethical cop. And yet, by the end of the film, he's shot a fleeing suspect, fucked a hooker, shot another suspect, with his hands up, in the back, and agreed to hide the extent of police corruption in order to get a promotion. The first act could be considered a heat-of-the-moment forgivable transgression and the last two were arguably necessary in the cause of justice and cleaning up the police force. (The fucking the hooker bit was not a crime, an obvious trap and incredibly stupid.) Do these dips into the moral grey grounds make him a villain? I don't think so. Do they make it harder to call him a hero? Absolutely. Should they build him a statue? No. If they built, him a statue to keep African-Americans in their place in the 1960s, should we tear them down today? No, I think that would be a reminder of a point in our history were we decide to build such a statue. (Needless shoehorn.) In my opinion, his ethically questionable choices do not wipe out the good he did. Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. Acknowledging that Hitler made some decent paintings does not mean you approve of everything he did.
Perhaps you draw these ethical lines in slightly different places. That's ok. There are no definitive answers to these questions. As long as we can agree that all of the non-fictional characters mentioned are dreadful people, who should not hold elected office, we can chose to watch or ignore their work as we see fit. (And have a friendly argument about the ethics of the fictional characters.)
To play us out, welcome Micheal Jackson singing about how he should really cut back on the pedophilia.
In conclusion, every man connected with the entertainment industry is probably some kind of monster.
Happy Death Day is a movie with a fun premise and a really dumb name. The central conceit is that a sorority girl is trapped in a time loop until she can stop her own murder and presumably become a better person. Along the way, the filmmakers make a series of interesting decisions, some good and some bad, that contribute to the uneven feel of the movie.
The smartest choice of the movie was making it more of a comedy than a horror film. We knew from the trailer that the protagonist was functionally immortal. This killed any sense of suspense throughout the film, so trying to make it scarier was never going to work. However, they should have taken this farther. As it was, Happy Death Day couldn't quite decide whether it wanted you laughing or screaming.They probably should have made it a bit funnier and done a better job
marketing the funny side of the film. And a lot of horror fans could
have come away disappointed by the lack of good scares.
For a mystery, it was pretty predictable. I made a suspect list on the first time loop. Number one on my list was the roommate. (I was right.) Resting bitch face was a big clue. The other clue was the immediate attitude she gave Tree when she entered the room but then ended the conversation with sugar, both literal and figurative. For the record, suspect two was the dad. (Posited theory: He also killed mom and was coming back for his daughter. Evidence: Father/daughter estrangement and the amount of anger about her skipping dinner.) This would have been a much darker film. Suspect three was Carter, the guy she woke up with. (No real reason. Just sets up a potential twist.) Every suspect Tree listed was an obvious decoy.
The movie did fool me at one point. In the fourth act, Tree decides that the serial killer is her killer. Throughout the movie, we see that the Babyface is slightly larger than Tree and not very muscular or agile. The serial killer was noticeably more capable at killing. Babyface was also focused on keeping her identity concealed, while the serial killer did not care. The biggest clue to this decoy was that Babyface clearly knew her personally,
but I thought the movie might be dumber than I was giving it credit for and I fell for the eating the cupcake fake happy ending. This twist and the ultimate revel of the killer was the best part of the movie.
It's a little unrealistic that Tree took so many loops to beat Babyface. After all, as noted above, Babyface wasn't that physically intimidating or skilled and Tree had the advantage of foresight. This could be explained if Babyface was also looping through time, especially if she was somehow causing the loops. It would also explain the seemingly supernatural nature of some of her kills. But, by the end, they make it clear that Tree is the only one looping through time.
I liked the feminist prospective to the film. The damsel wasn't in distress. She went full on commando. Whenever a guy was in a position to potentially help, they were quickly offed. Tree once even sacrifices herself to save Carter. Carter is possibly the only prize boy I have ever seen in a movie, as I can think of nothing he ever does to earn Tree's affection other than not being a rapist or a thief. (Or at least he lied about not being a rapist. He did apparently remove her pants.) There was an overt jab a campus rape culture and the movie passed the Bachdel Test.
Why did Bayfield college pick the baby as its mascot? What college would chose a mascot that does nothing but cry and shit their pants? Are all of the other B nouns taken? These questions were extremely distracting and totally took me out of the movie at times. Presumably, the filmmakers picked the creepy baby mask first and then needed some reason why other characters would have the same mask to set up some fake outs, but the mask makes no sense in universe.
Going in, I was not looking forward to listing to that annoying 50 cent song from the trailer on repeat. Unfortunately, they used even more annoying jingle to be the I Got You Babe of this Groundhog Day. Presumably because they could not afford the royalties to play In Da Club on repeat in the movie. (Apparently, Happy Birthday To You is public domain now and Warner Brothers spent years collecting millions of dollars on an invalid copyright claim. I learned something while trying to find out how much they paid up for the music box gag.) Tree is avoiding her birthday and her dad because of the painful memories they bring up about her mom, so illogically she changed her father's ringtone on her phone to "It's your birthday. You know you gotta pick up the phone." (Also, when? When did she have a chance to do this?)
If I ever wake up to this song, I'm just going to assume that my actions have no lasting consequences and go from there.
This is my fourth post on Disney/Pixar princesses. I like to compare these two sister studios. I did it with my very third post on Tangled. In that post, I argued that Disney should stick to traditional animation and let Pixar handle the computers. Since then, Disney has produced Zootopia, Wreck-It-Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Frozen, while Pixar has made mostly unoriginal plots and sequels. (I still say Pixar has never made a bad movie, but Cars 3 is coming.) But Disney is still a rocky road. I loved Moana (the character) and the plot, but not the movie.
Back when I wrote about Brave, I criticized Disney for building up an action-adventure princess and then having her save the day through sewing. Moana also uses sewing skills at a key moment in the movie, but she uses them to repair her boat and kick off a badass sailing sequence past a raging lava monster. I am officially crowning Moana the best role-model Disney princess of all-time. She sails. She does parkour. She has engineering and leadership skills and realistic body proportions. She defies male role-models, in choosing the path which is best for her, all while remaining respectful. She doesn't even has a romantic sub-plot. Now Disney must play the challenge round, put all of Moana's traits into a character with a healthy romantic relationship. Bonus points: lesbianism.
My main problem with this movie is that it was a movie musical when it should have been a movie and a musical. I am sucker for soaring operatics, but the songs were too slow and they didn't fit with the action driven plot. The final battle features Moana singing the anger out of the lava monster. It would have been a great stage moment, but I wanted to see Moana use her kickass parkour to win the movie. It's also how boy Moana would have done it and that's a small deduction from the movie's feminism scoreboard. (She also figured out the mystery and then called the rampaging lava monster over to her and stared it down, so still she's still a badass.) I wish for a re-cut of this movie without the songs and a Lion King on Broadway style stage play.
Moana also seemed uncertain if it was a comedy or not. It certainly wasn't funny. The best joke was an after the credits Little Mermaid reference. A few rewrites either way could have produced something much funnier and sillier or something more serious. I would have liked to see the serious version, the funny version would be an easier sell, but either would have been better.
Today, I took a break from catching Pokemon on a fictional version of
Hawaii to watch an animated movie set in a fictional version of Hawaii.
I am a tropical themed man child.
Moana features a character from Hawaiian mythology called Maui. If you're unfamiliar with him, here's a primer in song from.
(That
song is by that sumo Hawaiian man you saw in the video. His name is
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Listen to his cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow
sometime and picture that tenor voice coming out of that giant man.
It's an uplifting and confusing experience.)
Independence Day: Resurgence is a movie which depends heavily on hoping you will care about the child characters from a twenty year old movie without giving you a reason to care about their adult versions. As you might expect, this doesn't really work. At a key point in the movie, fear caused the President to make a bad decision which nearly doomed us all. This reminded me of my favorite modern philosopher, Dante Shepard of Surviving the World, and one of his favorite themes, that fear and nostalgia are two of the most destructive forces in the world today.
The destructive power of fear is easy to understand. Fear is why we have so many guns because we fear all the other people with guns. Fear is why we demonize immigrants and Muslims giving them more reasons to hate us leading us to more reasons to hate them. It's part of the reason why the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union which will lead to Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom. Fear is what gave us Candidate Trump and all the destruction that comes with him.
The first alien spaceship to appear in Independence Day: Resurgence came to make friends. They had good reason to be afraid. After all, the last time aliens came, it did not go well. But, there were signs everywhere that the ship was a potential ally. The experts encouraged patience and negotiation. The President took the path of fear instead of the path of thought.
Fear is easy. Fear is natural. Courage is hard. Thought is hard. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is being afraid and doing the right thing anyway.
The danger of nostalgia is less evident. Nostalgia is about remembering what is good about the past while forgetting what sucked. Classic rock radio stations are awesome, but it's not really that music was better in the past, they just don't play the bad stuff. A lot of those bad songs were more popular than the good ones, but they have gone to the dustbin of history leaving the good behind. It's hard to believe sometimes because we are listening terrible pop songs of current events, but for the vast majority of humanity, there has never been a better time to be alive. War, crime, addiction, poverty, hunger, and disease are all at or near all time lows. We have everyday technology that was in the realm of science fiction when the first Independence Day was released. We are at full employment and the stock market is hovering around all-time highs. There are certainly many ways things could be better, but any objective look at the world says it's actually really good. And yet, there are forces around the world encouraging us to go back to a past which never existed. I am afraid if we do not stop fearing the future, we will wind up with a future worth being afraid of.
I have previously argued on this site that the 90's represented the peak of American civilization and I'm not sure I'm wrong about that, but I also understand that what made the 90's great was that they occupied a unique moment in history and that there were also many things about the 90's that were worse than today. I expect to vote for another President Clinton in a few months, but I would be naive to believe that would bring back the good parts of the 90's. We must make a better future through a new future.
Speaking of things that were better in the past, this speech from the first movie...
Easily, one of the best monologues in movie history, but I don't remember much else from this movie which is kind of my point.
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