Watched this one in the bath. If like me you found Mandy (2018) to be insufficiently and insincerely engaged with real darkness, then consider this harrowing piece of “young street people addicted to heroine in midtown” vérité, starring/written by Arielle Holmes for the Safdies, who met Holmes during early work on Uncut Gems in midtown, where she was spanging, and they correctly decided she “should be in movies.” A no-way-out nightmare movie that operates in the borderlands between “fiction” and “documentary,” matching “actors” with “non-actors playing themselves,” crossing the immediate, direct anti-logic/anti-meaning of addiction and on-the-street desperation with the insular privacy and psychodrama of abuse, loneliness, and doomed/dooming love. Typically great Safdie sound design, and with everything shot at high zoom levels from a distance, to ultra-claustrophobic, wobbling effect. Imo an incredible NYC movie, and roughly the evil opposite of Skate Kitchen (2018), which I’d recommend as a palate cleanser. For abyss-starers only.
Bubul’s corner
Only Bubul on these ones.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
1: No gods no franchises / The Matrix yet again
Welp, due to the vast influence of me and Davey’s movie blog, they’re putting Keanu Reeves in The Matrix 4, John Wick 4, Bill & Ted’s 3, Point Break 2, Bram’s Stoker Drac2la, Devil’s Ad2cate, and many, many other continuations of stories everyone thought were done.
Unfortunately this is a gross misreading of at least my half of the blog; I thought I was being pretty clear about my distaste for both nostalgia and the cultural hegemony of preexisting stuff. I like when a narrative’s core is still unknown, when actors are transforming into new characters, and the surprise and adventure of image and sound describing the unfamiliar for the first time. If familiarity and continuity were my thing I’d be blogging about TV.
Why more Matrix in 2020? I’ve certainly seen plenty of “we’re in The Matrix today, so a new The Matrix is R E L E V A N T”-type posting… but I dunno. Sure, we live in a world with 2.41 billion facebook accounts, and a burgeoning global surveillance industry, but The Matrix doesn’t seem like an apt or mature metaphor for either of those things. My guess is that it’ll be “about” social media, but that we’re getting it now because the Matrix has always been about “conspiracy theories,” “deep fakes,” and “fake news.” My basic prediction is that it’s gonna be a terrible movie.
The silver lining to the endless maelstrom of franchised-out new-old-stuff is that every new-old thing immediately offers a reason to poke around in the archive. For example, even though thinking about M Night Shyamalan’s movies makes me grind my teeth, Glass (2019) could at least be viewed as an occasion to dig into the last 30 years of Bruce Willis, or for exploring a caffeinated hypothesis about how Shyamalan’s particular middlebrow fake-serious mode prefigures the A24 era – how The Monster (2016), The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), The \\\///\\\///itch (2015), It Follows (2014), Midsommar (2019), and A Ghost Story (2017) (all A24) all seem to have been made by people who saw his movies when they were young. Which is all to say, I used the news of the new Matrix to do some re-watching.
2. A cinema of big wild failures
The Wachowskis haven’t written/directed a movie with the influence or popular success of The Matrix since. Their work in the intervening years includes The Matrix‘s sequels (both 2003), Speed Racer (2008), Cloud Atlas (2012), and Jupiter Ascending (2015). All of these movies are ridiculously grand, frequently ridiculous world-building projects, where the purpose of each world is threefold: as a stage for inventive action sequences; as a place to worship genre aesthetics; and as bargain-basement Philip K Dick thought experiments, that register at about the level of Keanu saying “whoa.” The Wachowskis make big, wild failures. I’ll add that I’m not hating here: I love all of these movies specifically because that’s what they are. Speed Racer and especially Cloud Atlas are Moulin Rouge-level bonkers – they’re not “good movies” at all, but the jaggedly stylized ways they’re great make them more urgently view-wanting than most other movies made this century. If you’re watching a Disney Star Wars movie this year, do yourself a favor and wash it down with a Wachowskis movie.
The Matrix is the only regular-successful “good movie” entry in this filmography because it’s the only one that shows any kind of restraint. That’s only because it’s the only one made with a sub-hundred million dollar budget ($64 million) – enough cash to finish the project, but not enough to overwork it into oblivion. The sequels are a mess precisely because they recede into the byzantiums that giant budgets ($150 million apiece) have allowed the Wachowskis to generate since. They’re like black midi movies: virtuosically and even astonishingly overwrought at the production level, but murky (and even corny) at the level of “being a movie.”
3: Case study: Jupiter Ascending
Consider Jupiter Ascending (2015; ~$200 million budget), a painfully pointless The Matrix-style movie the Wachowskis made sixteen years after making The Matrix. This time, the people of earth don’t realize that they’re being harvested by rich interstellar vampires, and that cosmic capitalism and politics are raging invisibly around them with maximum stakes. The situation on the ground is managed by alien repair crews who keep regular humans doing earth stuff through the assistance of Men in Black-brand memory wipers and Dark City/deus ex machina-brand tech for fixing damage to cities incurred during action sequences. Okay, sure.
Somewhere on a microscope slide in the cosmic milieu is Mila Kunis, playing a janitor named Jupiter in the earth city of Chicago, where her work is shown to suck and be boring. But then she gets drawn into an inheritance plot where she (100% coincidentally) has to go to the planet Jupiter, because she’s a reincarnated interstellar oil baron or something. Channing Tatum plays a supporting role as the disgraced angel soldier werewolf bodyguard, doubling as a romantic interest on the apparent basis of his being dutiful and muscular; his half of the movie is repeatedly having to prevent Mila Kunis from falling to her death, being assassinated in a doctor’s office, marrying a creep, and so forth.
The piled-on Wachowski approach and its many billable hours are evident from the moment the production company logos appear on screen: Even these have little gilded curlicues of After Effects flair. The best part of the movie is a jutting aside when Mila Kunis needs to go to the space DMV, where the Wachowskis switch from the movie’s default “cyberpunk/space opera/glam court intrigue” modes right on over to “steampunk/hell-bureaucracy/Santa’s Workshop.” Sure this is a really bad movie at the plot level, and at points is a CGI mess, but I have to emphatically underline that it includes at least those six style modes as it proceeds through its brutal paces. Even though it’s all completely insubstantial there’s so much going on here.
Eventually Mila Kunis wins a climactic victory in a fire-themed boss battle and goes back to hanging with her family in Chicago, but there’s no indication as to whether she was able to dismantle the system of interstellar vampirism that threatens the planet, beyond the immediate matter of disrupting that system’s main family’s inheritance game. But that’s a The Matrix movie for you: The Matrix doesn’t end with any big conclusive resolutions, it just ends with Keanu flying around. And that’s exactly what Mila Kunis does here too.