OK, so why did she have to do it? Her 1st two albums were seminal, now she's trying to be an older version of avril lavigne why? I was reading GQ on the plane back from Seattle (1st time i ever read GQ, and i think it will be the last) and they had an interview with Liz. Basically it looks like Liz is making this album to make some more money, because she doesn't have much left and she has a kid to support. Man that sucks.
She's having somebody at Capitol manage her image. She's getting matrix, the people who produced Avril lavigne, to produce and cowrite her songs (removing anything too sophisticated for the average 12 year old). She's royally selling out.
I was thinking over the state of the liz phair situation and decided that all hope is not lost. I'm hoping that Liz just needs a paycheck and once this album does enough volume, she'll be sufficiently financially secure that she can do some real music again.
But I'm worried that she'll continue to dumber herself down.....
Expectations were high on this one. Trainspotting is in my canon of "the shit" movies and I had heard good stuff from a bunch of people in this one. After seeing it, i'd have to say i was a tad disspointed, but still thought it was a pretty strong showing.
Sure, it's not widely innovative. The movie was basically a cross between Omega Man and Night of the Living Dead, still both of those films are not within the mass's awareness, so to most people this story will seem pretty fresh. Ultimately, I don't mind that much if it's been done before. Originality is a modern myth anyway.
Good stuff: the infected (essentially zombie types) were well done. The motion, with the sped up stutter shots was scary and pretty. The red contacts were great. I think I liked the priest the most at the beginning.
The DV look was well done. Lot of shots looked beautiful if low resultion. The film was shot really well and edited well.
Bad Stuff: the ending was lame. Rumor is that this ending was not Boyle's and they're trying to re-release the movie with Boyle's ending because the ending is so obviously out of place with the movie. I would be fine with letting Jim and Celine and the girl get away and hole up in a cottage somewhere, but the jet plane coming to their rescue was a bit much.
Also, after all's said and done, i don't think this movie has that much intellectual stuff to give. Sure "RAGE" is a metaphor for the antipathy of your typical guy on the street, and it's interesting watching the recreation of society in the soldiers base (which acts as a microcosm of the larger structure of the RAGE infected world), but i think we could have gone further here.
The real interesting shit was the soldiers. That should have had more time and development. This should have gone into Lord of the Flies territory, make the main character Jim more complicit in the blurring of right and wrong. As is, Jim is too easily righteous. It would have been better if he had more to choose between -- death at the hand of the bad guys and killig the bad guys. what if he needed to commit evil acts in order to stay alive. What if he were forced to rape the black girl. What if his moral compass was lost?
When he gets put in the position of the bad guys wanting to kill him, the moral right action and the actions nesc for his immediate survial too easily align. jim faces no choice. Choices are good. Choices = drama.
Instead we get a straw dogs sort of thing where Jim, who had been consistently portrayed as a weak good guy, is tranformed into a strong good guy (who doesn't mind poking the bad guys eyes out). Something rings false about this transition. jim is never hurt badly enough by his inability to act. what made straw dogs work is dustin hoffman lets the girl get raped and then transforms. jim transforms because he is put in the position where it would be expediant to do so. This works on a certain plot level, but does not dramatically pay off as well as if jim had gone through a bit more hell. hell is good. Maybe Jim is unable to kill an infected which ends up attacking the father of the girl. That might have worked too.
Ultimately, this movie was well done and accomplished all it set out to do (except the ending which i'm sure was a studio decision and not an artistic decision). Unfortunately though, I think it could have done a lot more. There was more potential than was actually paid off.
Still, this movie was much better than 99% of the crap out there.
First off, not as bad as I expected. The critics and people I had talked to had slammed this movie, so i was expecting some pretty lame shit, but i found it both flawed and innovative.
The good: the scene transition and multi-panel stuff looked pretty cool. A lot of places it was very subtley done in a way that added to the comic book tone of the movie. I did find it distracting in some places though. The fight/chase scenes were too hectic to really allow for multi panel split screen stuff. My eye couldn't figure out what to watch. But if you want to do stuff like this in film, i definitely think Ang Lee did a great job at it.
I would be more interested in seeing this sort of stuff in soemthign like a trainspotting sort of movie, where it's a bit edgier.
I also liked the scene with Nolte and Bana on the stage with the two lights coming down. I can't figure out whether Nolte has Parkinson or is suffereing from herion withdrawal but he sure does a lot of shaking. But anyway, he still knocks off a solid performance in that scene as does bana. The sparseness of the set really adds impact to their performances.
The Bad: why go CG? It's all about the inner torment of the hulk and the CG just can't convey it. Especially in a character design that is supposed to be derived from Bana's real face and expressions. The hulk ends up looking like the green relative of the Marshmellow man from Ghostbusters.
There were brief points where i coudl suspend my disbelief and go wow, he's jumping and flying across America. But the rest of the time i felt like i was in a video game. Plus half of the scenes where he's the big green machine he's doing dramatic stuff, which i couldn't get into.
I was thinking to myself what separates this from Crouching Tiger where people are flying and running across rooftops with swords. I think it's just the CG really. It just reminds you that someone built this in a computer. It's not a consistent world, the CG looks out of place. He seems to be animated on top of the real world, not in it.
Overall: I would have to recommend the Hulk, as i think it has some interesting stuff going for it. Plus it's a long movie and i didn't really notice that all the way through. I was pretty caught up in the story, so i think that says something in itself.
on heavy rotation: j5 - power in numbers (groovy groovy groovy), beck - sea changes ... sad sad, david holmes - let's get killed (film music funked and squared).. just a sampling from the 160 gigs of mx horde
Ok, so i actually saw the matrix reloaded a couple of weeks ago, but i thought if i was to kick of this blog thinger ma jammer a movie review would be a good way to go.
So, to cut to the chase: i liked the matrix. Wait wait don't get me wrong, sure the pacing was flat (as in no arcs or real dynamics), certain scenes were sort of superfluous (the mass of human bodies writhing about was a little like silly, pointless and sensationalist - not to mention way to early in the movie to really have much impact) - but i still think the film as a whole had some redeeming aspects.
So what did i like then? Well I liked the philosophical thrust to the whole thing. Being a fan of Nietzsche (who else could write Ecce Home? the dude's the shit) i liked the whole "hope is a mechanism to convice the humans to accept the matrix". Humans minds reject the program where they are merely subjugated. They need the illusion of hope to enable the program to take -- (though this doesn't really make too much sense when you think about it closely - if the humans who are still asleep don't realize they're in the matrix, how can they hope to get out of it. the only people who hope to be free of the matrix are the one who already are - but maybe that's how they exited the matrix in the first place - hope?).
This stuff reminds me of the Nietzschean reading of Christianity. The problem with hope and destiny is that you're relying on something outside of yourself to make a change in your life. The humans are waiting for the Oracle to help them....
When NEo goes to the Oracle they discuss whether he can trust her or not. She tells him there is no "logical" reason to presume so, but Neo, as an irrational human, just believes. Like Kierkagaards Leep of Faith, he assumes the best and trusts in the other. But of course, the fundamentally undecided nature of this trust is revealed, in that the Oracle is, contrary to Neo's hope, a malignant force created to guile him into a fruitless quest thereby enabling the subjugation of the humans. ROCK ON!
I also liked the iterative nature of the story. This really harnesses mathematics and science and brings an extra level of "epicness" to the story. Neo's journey is the 7th time they have gone through the story, but he chooses unlike the other previous neo's to assume the tragedy of love.
This drives at the difference between computers and humans. the humans are at a root level irrational, which makes them more difficult to control. They may not be free, but they are unpredictable. Or is being unpredictable the same thing as being free? What is predictable is what can be determined by exterior causes.
The old philosophical notion of free will doesn't make any sense in the context of the Matrix. I don't fully rememmber the conversation about free will in the movie. I'll need to see it again to fill in that discussion, But nevertheless, it seems like the humans are determined but at the same time free. I think the discussion in the matrix was more sophistacted than that though, will have to revisit.
And also, casting Cornell West in a token role gets the movie extra points. "councilor west..." how cool is that.
Dspite what i think are some pretty cool ideas, the Matrix suffers from bad story telling. The story is heavy, too monotonous and lacks humor. I think of the matrix in the context of the star wars films (before Lucas completely fucked them all up, eg the first 3 films), and when compared to those films, the matrix falls pretty flat. Whereas Empire was the best of the 3, Reloaded seems much weaker than the first film.
I also have been thinking a lot about mythic stories and the whole Cambell stuff. The matrix 1 is essentially the story of the hero resopnding to his calling. He initially doubts he is the one, but then, through the quest in the movie, assumes his true powers hidden underneath him. This gives a clear structure ot the story, a certain type of humor deriving from Neo discovering his powers (download kungfu) and the suspense of revealing who Neo really is and what role he has in the world of the Matrix. This all works fine.
But in Reloaded, we already know (and as the movie makes clear so does eveyrone else) that Neo is special. There are no humorous charcters in the whole story and the love story gets more time on screen but doesn't do enough. We get more of an explanation of how it's difficult for them to find time to have sex now that Neo is the one, than an exploration of what the mean to each other (though, to be fair, there is some of that, eg Neo's dream of trinity and his choice to try and save Trinity rather than save the world).
Biggest probelm i think is the movie has so little humor to provide a contrast to the action. The action becomes monotonous and looses impact because it's like we're getting punched in the stomach over and over. There are no funny characters, they need some C3p0 and R2d2 characters to provide the comic relief. Those characters, though they may seem silly, actually provide a lot of depth to the story by providing a contrast to the seriousness of the mythic journey. In Reloaded, the tone of hte journey is stiff and self consumed.
We have some of the supsense of revealing a more fundamental understanding of hte matrix in the revelation that the oracle is in fact a means of constraining the humans, but unfortunately this is mostly revealed in the Architects speech which is obscured in language too complex for 99.9% of Americans. While this may have been consistent with the life world of the Matrix, it doesn't work as a dramatic tactic. The architect's speech should have been counterbalanced by a chracter who could dumb it down suufficinetly so the rest of us coudl get it. As is, we run into a wall of language.
Neo has no arc. In Empire we discover that Luke's father is Darth Vader who opens up the question of whether Luke will follow his father's path and what is truly inside him. In Reloaded, Neo's path is clear he's trying to beat the Matrix and it is revealed that his hope was misplaced, but we get no sense of how this impacts him. We don't see him doubting himself, as Luke doubts himself in Empire, we get from Keanu