Tag Archives: the matrix

Recent bubul movies part 2

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I lassoed out the kid’s hair in the photoshop title but then I smudge brushed it, oh well can’t be bothered fixing. Maybe I should photoshop a title image for Davey’s posts? Anyway March is my least favorite month of the year by far so I spent it watching mad movies:

Recommended

Babylon (1980)
Upbeat reggae buddies movie becomes “walls slowing closing in” tragedy for a young british jamaican as he and his friends prepare for the big sound clash. a grand tour of male power dynamics and painfully resonant race/immigration/class stuff, skillfully and empathetically observed, and with at least three incredible nowhere-else scenes. the ending soundclash scene is absolutely bonkers and got me shook. strong recommendation.

Worth watching

Beach bum (2019)
I think we’re gonna be writing more about this one soon.

Elle (2016)
a conflicted, slippery late-era Paul Verhoeven movie where a woman gets into a rape-fetish relationship with her actual rapist en route to getting revenge on him for raping her 😬. with Verhoeven’s characteristic pitch-black humor fully on deck, and an amazing Isabelle Huppert performance. great movie if you want to think abt how consent can transform the monstrous into the beautiful, but jeez, be warned, the kind of movie that’s infuriating because you just know there’re nincompoops watching it and getting a very wrong idea.

Killer Joe (2011)
Pretty fucked up movie adaptation of a play abt a family of bad, desperate people who sex-trade their on-spectrum teen daughter to the devil, here played by hot cop/killer for hire Matthew McConaughey, and the devil ends up taking everything. a “make yourself feel bad and gross” movie (cf. Todd Solondz) par excellence with tons of capital-t Theatre capital-A Acting. with Juno Temple (Kaboom (2010)) once again in the nude.

Mr rogers documentary (2018)
wow mr rogers neighborhood really was a pretty crazy project when you think about it

Yaji & kita the midnight pilgrims (2005)
episodic wacky/surrealist/cartoon-body-horror roadtrip romp nominally “about” two gay Edo men (one with a wife problem, the other with a drug problem) on a pilgrimage to a shrine, with all manner of cra-a-azy diversions and characters, including a testicles gag so gonzo they show it twice. lots of good stuff in here comedically, visually, and regarding love/hate relationships. shoutout Jacob for the rec, on the basis of my loving Funky Forest (2005)!

The rest

24 Hour Party People (2002)
a cute & tragic coogan movie abt having your time and that time passing, that’s also a rave-adjacent movie. didn’t appreciate the glib & jokey way it depicts ian curtis’s suicide but otherwise felt that it aged very well. pairs with fiorucci made me hardcore (1999).

But I’m a cheerleader (1999)
Teen sex comedy set in a dictatorial conversion therapy retreat house, with a color palate out of the Ranaldo and the Loaf “Songs for Swinging Larvae” video, that reads overall like a PG-13 Gregg Araki movie; definitely worth checking if you like those. at one point the teens sneak out to a nearby gay bar called straight-up “Cocksuckers” to slow dance together; insane to think this came out the same year as American Pie. With Dante Basco, Hook‘s (1991) Rufio.

Apocalypto (2006)
We wrote abt this.

Shallow Grave (1994)
The first Danny Boyle movie, a misfire of a corpse-disposal caper(?!) starring a long-haired young Ewan McGregor, managing somehow not to be a hottie at all. Pretty cool that these two got the recipe completely sorted out for Trainspotting just a couple years later.

The lavender hill mob (1951)
Jovial British caper abt smuggling gold to Paris as miniature Eiffel Towers, featuring an almost realtime dizzying descent from the actual Eiffel Tower on a windy spiral staircase (i.e. my actual worst nightmare), as well as a scene where a cop oinks along to “Old MacDonald had a farm.”

Monty python holy grail (1975)
Never been a big Python head and kinda generally dislike John Cleese’s macho creep vibe but I feel doomed to rewatch this one every so often anyway. I enjoyed it this time, the horse riding gag especially grew on me, and I love the mic drop ending. Pairs well with Yaji and Kita as a zany episodic roadtrip movie.

Candyman (1992)
We wrote abt this.

The midnight meat train (2008)
What’s with “agents of the world behind the world” being dapper besuited old-timey guys? I hate this. Here youngish Bradley Cooper is an art world-striving photographer trying to take pics of a besuited madman serial killer who bonks ppl with a hammer in a fake NYC subway, in order, it turns out, to feed the corpses to demonic CHUDs. Bradley Cooper becomes the besuited old timey guy who serves the CHUDs in the end – that’s art world success for ya! A Clive Barker adaptation I watched to prep for writing abt Candyman; it’s bad.

austin powers 1 (1997)
Wild that this dominated culture for what felt like an eternity and is now pretty much completely gone. It’s not good but it’s VERY dated; kind of the best part is how low-budget and underproduced it looks. With Will Farrell in a bit part before his own movie career took off. Austin powers 3 (2002) costars no less than Beyonce, which feels Mandela Effect to me.

Frances Ha (2012)
I completely cannot stand Noah Baumbach or any aspect of his cornball Woody Allen-worship career or his extraordinarily wienery “mediocrity struggle” characters, but I do kinda like Gretta Gerwig, so I watched this back to back with Meyerowitz Stories, the latter on Davey’s rec, to troll myself. NYC portraiture just does not get any more annoying than these goddamn motherfucking Baumbach movies, period. Even within this very specific category-within-a-category you can save time and cover both movies’ bases by just watching relatively-much-better movie Tiny Furniture (2010) instead.

Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
Supremely cloying just like every other Baumbach I’ve hate-watched, tho it has to be said that Adam Sandler is great in it.

Ideal Home (2018)
We put this on cold because we like Paul Rudd & Coogan but it turned out to be a feature length unfunny taco bell commercial.

The trip to spain (2017)
We’d just watched Gavin & Stacey s01-s03, with Rob Brydon as Uncle Bryn, which I found very cute and funny, so figured it’d be good to check back in with him and Coog in the The Trip movies. This one is funnier and less dark than The trip to Italy.

The thirteenth floor (1999)
If you google “movies like the matrix” this is like, the main one, from the same year, but it’s really more like Westworld or Inception. Here, computer nerds have an MRI machine that they use to login to the Matrix for like, two hours, so they can have sex with prohibition-era simulation call girls. Things get nuts when a prohibition-era simulation bartender realizes he’s in the simulation, then even more nuts when the computer nerds realize they’re also in a simulation. It’s not great but it’s funny and crazy to think about this movie being the “primary text” for these concepts in an alternative reality.

The beguiled (2017)
Watched in the bathtub. For “tragedy & shenanigans afoot at the repressed girls boarding school” movies this just doesn’t come even close to the incredible Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), tho it shares a lot of similar costuming, light, and big trees. For “poisoned by a deliciously-prepared mushroom dish” go with Phantom Thread (2017).

Wuthering Heights (1992)
Pure-plot rendition of the classic, with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliffe, here remorselessly and relentlessly a dickhead to absolutely everyone. I’m not necessarily saying it’s good, but ppl who know it mainly as a Kate Bush song might be well-served; it’s got both the gothic “bad romance on the moors” vibe and the “histrionic billowing dress” energy both on deck.

Us (2019)
Peele is a national treasure and the complete Key & Peele should be required reading but tbh I just didn’t think this movie was that good. We wrote abt it.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

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This is 3. a “Keanu in the matrix” movie, 2. a Linklater “friends partying and riding around” movie, and 1. a Philip K Dick adaptation:

1. I was 23 when A Scanner Darkly (2006) came out, and remember being disappointed by it, not having any idea what it was supposed to have been about. How could partying with your friends be ugly, unromantic, and desperate? Where do good times ever ride a precarious death-wave of paranoia and addiction? That certainly wasn’t how things were in my dilapidated punk house.

But damn, rewatching this, it felt clear that I didn’t get it because I just hadn’t experienced adult doldrums yet, or seen my reflection in the desperation, powerlessness, and chaos that flow beneath it, or understood the temptation to withdraw from the world into something small, selfish, and strange. This haunted, lonely “my shitty dream is real”-quality is, for me, the main characteristic of Dick’s writing, and Linklater “nails it.”

2. I like Linklater’s “friends partying and riding around” movies – Dazed and Confused (1993), Slacker (1990), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – because I too like partying with my friends and riding around. These movies remind me how my friends make me feel more like myself.

A Scanner Darkly is unique in this group because nobody’s having fun and the situation’s bad. Keanu’s depressed; his drug friends are trollish, unpleasant, en route to the bottom. The movie opens with Rory Cochrane (the stoner dude in Dazed & Confused) with hallucinated bugs pouring out of his hair, furiously itching. Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior (both annoying “bad boy” actors, both here as annoying wastoids) are in drug-bender dangerous behavior/conspiracy mode, and Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder claims to be too coked-out to bear human contact. Prescient Alex Jones cameo too… woof.

All of Linklater’s buddy movies (including this one) are regional, of a time, and zoomed into a small group of people, and they all do the same trick of flipping that, to be from anywhere, timeless, “archetypical.” Whether anyone “likes” Linklater, I think, has to do mainly with whether his “archetypes” are relevant to their experience, and the extent to which they “agree” with what he ascribes to them. Mostly he does this for sunshine-y stuff, but here’s an absolutely bleak and negative one to think about. What if he’d made more movies in this tonal range?

3. There’s an early scene I found surprisingly moving where Keanu narrates the situation so far. It shows him remembering an earlier point in the house with his wife and daughters, in which he hits his head on a cabinet, and says:

“How’d I get here? The pain – so unexpected and undeserved – had cleared away the cobwebs… I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… nothing would ever change, nothing new could ever be expected, it had to end. And it did…”

It cuts to the present, cluttered, dingy state of the house, and he continues:

“Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

I love the vibration between “I got bored and decided to give up my family, and here’s where it got me” (into a hell zone), and the broader PKD setup, where Keanu is doomed, has no agency, and never sees the full picture anyway. He’s a cop, tasked with surveilling himself and his friends (unbeknownst to them), but his boss is pretending to be his girlfriend (unbeknownst to him), and the entire operation is made to feed his addiction and paranoia intentionally, grooming him for sacrifice to some other purpose entirely beyond his awareness. You don’t get a darker “Keanu in the matrix” movie than that.

Richard Linklater is someone who I’ve grown to admire more and more as a filmmaker as I’ve gotten older.  He has a curious ability to zero in on the mundane spaces where you wouldn’t find the traditional story beats in a movie, expanding them to bring in realities you don’t often see represented in film.  This is especially pronounced today, where it seems like entire film types have been “perfected:” notice the easy-going structural, tonal homogeneity in Marvel films, or any time you’re watching a film that has the same lines from so many other films in the past, like an echo of an echo of a movie.  Linklater’s able to sidestep all of that, opting instead to give attention to and elevate moments that are typically mundane and neglected, though hyper-shared. Playing to this strength, A Scanner Darkly could have been really interesting, but unfortunately Linklater uses it as an excuse to experiment by trying to adopt some of PKD’s strengths instead.  The results lead me to believe, that Linklater is lacking in Fake Fake energy.

It’s been a while since I read A Scanner Darkly but I remember thinking it was good but not one of his best.  But if there’s one area where the book has an advantage it’s that the whole thing wasn’t ding dang rotoscoped. There’s a specific feeling you get from Phillip K Dick’s novels, where you feel like you’re way too deep in whatever plot or system he’s got you trapped in – Linklater might have thought that filtering the whole film would have stuck you in this valley of mysterious structure, with the unusual technology doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The issue is that for a film to really get into your head, you should never see the hand that’s crafting it, and the rotoscoping is a heavy hand spread across the entire film.

The movie wouldn’t have worked without the rotoscoping either, unfortunately.  Way too much time is spent with Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson’s characters, both of whom seem to sense that this is their opportunity to experiment as well. They’re seemingly locked in a contest to see who can torpedo this film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, each blasting off acting solos completely disconnected from what’s going on.  They also highlight the limitations in the tech by using lots of “big faces” (shades of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where the unreality was used to much better ends). Winona Ryder fares better, but is cursed with an extremely thin character. Keanu Reeves ends up being the most watchable and compelling, his minimalist acting style clashing the least frequently with the animation, occasionally even cutting through the fog and connecting emotionally, but with no one to play off.  I’m a huge booster of Keanu’s work but I’ll readily admit that that’s really not where you want him to be; he excels in creating connections and servicing the story, but isn’t a real “carry the movie” kind of actor. It should be noted that in his band Dogstar, he’s the bassist, which is his pocket in acting as well – creating structure and form, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a movie about a nationwide drug crisis that’s slowly killing the US, A Scanner Darkly felt weirdly non-relevant.  The carefree attitude it uses to portray crippling addiction b/w the driving creative force of the film being experimentation (and not addiction) doesn’t really play as well in a time that in some aspects closely reflects the world it depicts.  Nevertheless the movie weirdly comes together in the last ten minutes or so. It begins to quote from the book’s more memorable passages while Reeves’s character’s life falls apart, trained into addiction by one system of control and then sent off to work creating the root of his addiction, in a ruse of being cured. The rotoscoping gets more interesting and ends up creating a somewhat mind-out-of-body experience here, by subtly tweaking the effect we’ve gotten used to, causing deep confusion in the mind’s eye.  The movie ends with the afterword from the book where Dick lists all the names of the people he loved that were addicts coupled with what they lost, both an extremely sad and beautiful moment. Then the screen fades to black, jaunty music plays, and cast and crew are shown in font that wouldn’t look out of place in a show on Nickelodeon.