22nd Hall of Fame

Man, I know it's only been about a week but I feel like I've fallen way behind. I turned in my Westerns ballot so I'll try to get something watched and written up for this soon.

__________________

I haven't even started yet. I will soon though.

Same, I've been watching lots of Westerns but I will definitely be getting on this soon, once I turn in my ballot.

__________________
Lists and Projects
Letterboxd

I just finished rewatching The Matrix. I probably didn't need to since I know it so well, but I wanted to anyway for my own amusement. I still remember how I felt about the film when I first saw it in theatres, and now 21 years later it's nice to know that my opinion hasn't changed very much.

I wanted to see if I still had a copy of the paper I wrote on it some years back, but then I checked the calendar and realized that it was over a decade ago, since I took that class (Philosophy in Film) sometime around 2007. Maybe after I write my review I'll pull out my old laptop and see if it's there, and then probably cringe at whatever I wrote. Maybe I can even post an excerpt and we can all laugh together haha.

__________________

Blue Ruin



I can often be a fan of film of revenge, Man on Fire being the perfect example. For me in my revenge flicks I often look toward nice action scenes, interesting dialogues, or a really kick-ass story.

None of this applied for me at least with this watch unfortunately. I think my biggest problem was I didn't care for the main characters performance. Macon Blair just didn't do it for me at all. It strangely reminded me of my reaction to Being There with Peter Sellers. Actually his emotions kind of reminded me of Sellers and it just didn't work at all.

I also didn't really care for the violence scenes. Not that they were too gross for me but they just seemed style over substance, kind of like how I feel with Tarantino sometimes. I feel I'm making what could be strange comparisons for some people but oh well.

On the bright side the film looked really crisp and I thought that the director had flashes of potential with some of his scenes. I'd like to still see more of his work.

I'm going to aim to get to The Last Picture Show tomorrow.

I really liked Blue Ruin on first watch but have no idea if I’ll like it just as much this time around. I hope so.

The Last Picture Show



I had only seen this film one time prior actually. On this second watch I came away super impressed and very happy I nominated it. Although not sure how well it will fare as I can see some people not really caring for it.

The idea of the story is really cool. A town that feels like there's nothing there for everyone filled with a bunch of people who seem to be at crossroads in life. Just the idea of it is super appealing to me.

The cast is magnificent. The star for me of it all is Cybill Shepard. This is one of those films that is so iconic for me just based off of her screen presence, she looks amazing. But she has acting talent too and played the role very well. She just looked lovely and I'd be lying to say if I wouldn't want to have caught a girl like her back in high school. It was cool to see Bogdanovich (SP) find her for this role. It was cool how he pieced the entire cast together actually.

Jeff Bridges was great too, this was probably one of his first roles and he really showed us the talent that he would bring is for years to come. Had really solid chemistry in the scenes with Jacy, and the bro friend scenes with Bottoms. Bottoms was real good too, kind of shocked he didn't get any award recognition for this. The ones that got award recognition, Ben Johnson I thought made the most of her little role and Leachman which I really really liked. I suppose some could find the character relationship of Bottoms and Leachmans characters strange but I thought it fit the film well. And Burstyn was great too.

I loved how the Hank Williams songs were incorporated into the film too. Hank Williams rules. The use of black and white I also thought suited the film perfectly.

This one bumps up to an all-timer for me.

Hmmm. Apparently I seem to have been confusing State of Siege With some other French film I watched previously. Reading about it doesn’t sound familiar. So this will be a first.
I wonder what I could have been confusing it with? 🤔
Army of Shadows perhaps? This is going to bother me. Didn’t help it’s been around 10 years now.

Since I haven't been able to write more than a few sentence fragments about The Matrix, I decided to go ahead and see if I could find that old paper, since maybe it could give me inspiration or something.

I copied over the folders where I stored all my old school work, but I regret to inform anyone who was looking forward to reading an excerpt from said essay that it no longer exists. The only paper I have from that class is the one I wrote on eXistenZ (coincidentally for the same unit on Simulacra and Simulation).

Going through the old files wasn't a complete waste of time however, because I discovered a lot of amusing things I'd completely forgotten about. For example: I had to write a short assignment on the misrepresentation of underwater archaeology in the 2005 film Sahara.

Attachments

 

What do you remember about the movie you're thinking of? Z from the same director is awesome.

I remember something about the resistance against the Germans. My memory is really hazy since it’s been about a decade since I have seen this film. I was going through a French new wave phase (Bob Le Flambeaur, Rififi, Day for Night and a Few others)
I looked it up and I’m pretty sure I’m confusing the 2 of them.
Either way, I’m actually pretty excited to see this now. Ashamed to say I haven’t seen any films from Costa-Gavras yet

It doesn't fit perfectly but perhaps The Battle of Algiers?

I haven’t seen Battle of Algiers yet.
I’m pretty sure I’m confusing it with Army of Shadows. But even then, my memory of it is very hazy.
I’m going to have to do a rewatch of French films from the new wave era regardless, sometime, so hopefully I’ll figure it out eventually.

Either have I, why doesn't somebody nominate that for an HoF?

The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
Imdb

Date Watched: 05/13/2020
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: 22nd MoFo Hall of Fame
Rewatch: Yes.


This film was released in theaters in the spring of my senior year of high school. My friends and classmates absolutely raved about it. So I watched it.

With its slick costumes, Sci-Fi premise, slow-motion stunts, characters with names like "Neo," "Trinity," "Cypher," and "Morpheus," and a soundtrack that features the likes of Prodigy, Rage Against the Machine, Massive Attack, and Rob Zombie, The Matrix came off to me then as tryhard "hey, look how edgy I am!" bulls***. I could not understand what the hell everyone else loved about it. Twenty-one years later, it has left me with that same impression.

There is nothing that I liked about this. Not one damn thing. It's too slick. It's too stylized. It's too cold. It's got so much expositional dialogue it might as well have had a narrator. And all that green tint just made me think of the scum I had to clean out of my family's fish ponds every summer. I didn't give a rat's ass about any of these characters, I didn't give a rat's ass about the story, and the closest thing to emotion it brought out in me was boredom. Absolute, utter boredom.

I don't expect you to like The Last Picture Show, but I hope to God you think it's better than how you feel about The Matrix

I was seventeen when I first saw The Matrix, and it was pretty much love at first sight. Sci-fi, action, a dash of romance – what more could a girl want? There was also something about it that spoke to me, the music, the look, the idea of this beyond-world. I watched it many times in the following few years, but despite considering it one of my favourite films, not for some time now. I almost watched it on the big screen last year; a cinema in London was showing it for the 20th anniversary. I decided to go and watch The Dead Don’t Die instead. Wrong decision.

So the question is, would it still hold up all this time later?

The answer – yes, absolutely. The Matrix is a stone cold classic.

This needs to be addressed, so I’ll get it out of the way – I lost a bit of respect for The Matrix when I saw Ghost in the Shell. Not only because it wasn’t quite as clever and original as I’d previously thought, but for the shamelessness of the idea-stealing. So that probably deserves to knock off half a star.

But that aside, this is still a great film. The dialogue is smart with much of it taking on a double meaning, the more you find out about the world. I like that it touches on a lot of different ideas without latching on to one of them and doing the metaphor to death – simulation theory (if it could happen, it almost certainly already has…), Morpheus the god of sleep, determinism, religion (the Christ-like prophesised man who can change things and work miracles). It can even be read as a They Live style ‘he puts on the sunglasses and sees the evil structures of capitalism’ story. Is any of it even real, or is it just Neo’s drug-induced hallucination from the first time he follows the white rabbit… after all, the man at the door says mescaline is the only way to fly, and Neo flies at the end… But at the same time this is all done with a sense of fun.

It’s also a really good action film, from I know kung-fu to guns, lots of guns, and the special effects work well and don’t look dated like a lot of 2000s cgi. The cast is spot-on. Keanu Reeves isn’t Oscar material, but what he does, he does well. The Matrix requires him to be, in the Oracle’s words, “cute…not too bright though”, look generally a bit confused for most of the movie, and do some kung fu. The stand-out is Hugo Weaving’s villainous Agent Smith, his disgusted drawl as he declares that human beings are a disease is brilliant.

I still love the aesthetic of the film, the retro phones, the set design – the stairway, the room where Neo meets Morpheus, the subway station, the tech-noir type club. There are some really well done shots – reflections in buildings and sunglasses, the noir-esque rain as Neo is under the bridge.

Oh, and the music is good, too.

Neo under the bridge in the rain was the image I first wanted to use for my write-up, but I couldn't seem to get a good capture of it.