Qalyn:If it really is such a "headbomb" for people, it's only because they've never looked under the hood of their favorite stories.
i don't think that's all that unusual. not many people think about that aspect of their favorite stories too deeply.
Thjatsi:I love you guys, but you can be really arrogant sometimes. Anyone who has gone through college and taken Intro to Philosophy has at least touched on all of these ideas.
that's not as many people as you might think. take the whole population. remove the portion who didn't go to college. remove the portion who never took Into to Philosophy or anything similar (which is a lot of contemporary college students). remove the portion who didn't pass the class. remove the portion who passed by rote reguritation without actually engaging with or understanding any of the issues involved. remove the portion of those who grokked the concepts initially, but never really dealt with them again and so lost them. remove everyone in that group who doesn't overlap with the target demographic for the movie. you're now dealing with a really small percentage of the overall population.
obviously, you don't have to have taken Intro. Phil. to "get" the movie (and we could all get into a nice donnybrook about class and access to college and etc etc etc), but that was where you set the bar. however, i don't think that the numbers that we're talking about are all that much different even if you throw out the college-level-philosophy requirement. just informally, most of the people i talk to on a regular basis are college graduates, and reasonably intelligent, well-paid professionals at that, and i can count on one hand the number of people i've talked to who were able to follow the Architect bit, for example. it's not that it's especially deep or that it's beyond what most people are necessarily capable of understanding, but it is rooted in a way of thinking that is really foreign to a lot of people, especially when compared to people on this board, who are generally more comfortable in this terrain.
i think it's also worth noting here that, R rating aside, teenagers consitute a major portion of the audience for this movie, and i think it's fair to say that most teenagers are going to be confronting a lot of these concepts for the first time.
people on this group are not being arrogant when they say that these concepts have real mindfuck potential for most people in the audience, because most people who see this movie are not going to be as comfortable bouncing around this sort of thinking as people on, say, this group, for lack of familiarity.
on that note:
i'm a little disturbed by the competing elitisms here. those people who like the movie seem to be implying that everyone who doesn't is some kind of mouth-breathing troglodyte who either doesn't have the intellectual capacity to "get it" or just isn't hip to the sexxxy mutlimedia-ness of it all. those who don't seem to be arguing from a fairly curmudgeonly Barbelithier-than-thou position, and are snickering at all the preening, pretentious black-clad adolescent boys who are buying into the shallow, derivative gloss of philosophy which is just prettying up the gun porn.
i think there's definitely some middle ground here. while i don't think the movie is anything earthshattering per se in terms of content, either in terms of philosophy or as an action movie, i think that it breaks new ground for such a high-profile mainstream action blockbuster. a lot of it is really cliched, and derivative, and heavy-handed, and in some cases just plain bad (the "i love you too damn much" scene had me on the verge of vomiting). a lot of it is also all too happy to function within the conventions of the action movie genre, which can be criticized from any number of perspectives, most significantly, i think, from a feminist one.
feminist critiques also apply, of course, to the observations above regarding the window-dressing status of the women in the movie, and, honestly, i couldn't agree more. i would hasten to extend the criticism to the character of the Oracle, who not only serves as a handmaiden/advisor to everyone important in the movie, but is also a perfect example of the way in which women of color, especially older women of color, are currently one of the foremost faces of the sort of condescending, romanticized treatment of the Other as a source of primitive, intuitive, uncomplicated folk wisdom. it's the whole "noble savage" thing, combined with tokenism, combined with shallow New Agey-appropriation of non-Western religions and cultures. them crazy old black women sho' do give good advice. every time she's been onscreen in either movie, i've expected her to tell Neo that he be gettin' too skinny, and offer to make him up some fine, mouth-watering chitlins. i mean, fuck.
sorry, got off track there.
that said, i think it's a really good vector for the spread of ideas to which a lot of people might not otherwise be exposed. i think it takes a lot of chances in terms of confounding audience expectations, not all of which worked IMHO, but that's almost besides the point. i think that, while it is not perfect by any means, it will most likely cause a few light bulbs to go off in the heads of a certain percentage of the audience, and since it has a huge audience, that percentage translates to a lot of people who might be compelled to think about a few things they might not have thought about otherwise, and so i like it and i'm excited about it and willing to forgive a lot of its shortcomings.
for me, it's a lot like Blue Man Group. back when i was a young dizfactor, i saw their show "Tubes" in high school with a theater class of mine, and we were all really excited by it and thought it was really creative and interesting and different. our teacher was much less impressed, and tried to show us that it was actually really derivative, and in some ways was a really watered-down form of performance art happening that was being made neat, safe, predictable, and accessible for a more mainstream audience. i understood what she was saying, and over time as i learned more and my appreciation of art and performance grew and changed accordingly, i began to share her view to a large extent and felt kind of embarassed that i had liked the show so much. over time, however, i've come to appreciate that while it wasn't at all new or challenging in any real way, it was new to me at that time. i mean, they pulled me up on stage and did weird things to me and sprayed flourescent paint everywhere and buried the audience in crepe paper to a flashing strobe light to the tune of "3AM Eternal" when nothing like that had ever happened to me before. i think that helped open some doors in my head, and i think that's good, and i think the Matrix movies can do the same for a lot of other teenage boys.
i can also understand why a lot of reasonable, intelligent people would think it's at best being hugely overblown or at worst, a horrible manifestation of everything wrong with our culture, and i respect that, but i definitely bristle at the blanket assumption i'm picking up on that everyone who likes the movie is a drooling Marilyn Manson-obsessed teenager who's jerking off on pretensions of intellectual superiority. i think it would be nice to assume that everyone on this board has some kind of intellectual credibility and reasonably decent taste in movies and credit them with that much respect.
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other random notes:
CameronStewart: First half? Total bullshit. Everything in Zion is terrible beyond belief... I'm amsued by the idea that even though there's only a few thousand humans left in the entire world, who face the constant threat of total extermination by scary, relentless killer squidbots, there's still a group of them who have the time to cobble together a drum kit out of pipes and sticks and rehearse a Stomp routine.
this was entirely believable to me. people in stressful situations can't stay on high alert all day, every day, forever. eventually, they just get on with their lives. they've been on the verge of extinction for longer than any of them have been alive. people are really resilient, and they will pretty much always just adapt.
honestly, i thought that the Zion stuff was much, much better overall and more consistently strong than what happened once they got back into the Matrix.
cusm:Its an example of really what they're all fighting for. Its a demonstration of freedom and joy, and what is real and distinctly human.
i think your choice of emphasis on "real" is interesting, since i'm pretty sure that Zion is still part of the Matrix.
ynhBack then, everyone was all, "Trinity is a strong female character; shut your whackett hole."
i don't know if everyone was like that back then, but i think it's also worth noting that whatever limited level of independent decision-making ability Trinity had in the original, she has less now. last time, she was the second-in-command with clear responsibilities and goals and such, and she was basically in charge in the sizeable portion of the movie that Morpheus is locked down by the Man. that is, as CatJerome points out, not a lot ("She shoots stuff and kicks ass. Wooooo."). this time, however, even that little bit is gone, and she's pretty much just Neo's trophy bitch. she functions primarily as a jealous girlfriend and a damsel in distress for Neo to rescue. he even tries to keep her barefoot and in the kitchen while he goes into the Matrix during the Most Crucial Mission Ever To Save All Mankind. ick.
The Architect tells Neo he will choose 23 males and 17 females to repopulate Zion, numbers easily pulled from the Barbelith hat.
actually, it's 16 males plus 7 females, for a total of 23 and the obligatory gratuitous 23 reference.
Flux: It's just such a shame that the Wachowski brothers didn't have the good taste to borrow liberally from one of Grant Morrison's better comics.
not that i think The Filth is better than The Invisibles, but i would fucking adore a Filth movie made by some kind of weird hybrid of Baz Luhrmann, Paul Verhoeven (sp?) and, like, Russ Meyer or something. someone completely ridiculous and pornographic and visual with no fucking taste or restraint at all. i would get so fucking high you wouldn't even believe it and go and have a fucking blast.
rakehell: e Ducati 996 has a very distinct and bass-heavy exhaust sound, the sound in the movie was a whiny, tinny two stroke affair. Completely unforgivable and nearly had me walking out of the cinema.
i don't know how serious you're being, but either way, i love you.
and my favorite:
fridge: Zion is Battlestar Galactica, isn't it?
i was so there with you. i started having a geekfit when the councilor showed up in those awful robes, saying "holy fuck! it's Adama! it's Adama!" i think i embarassed myself, but, then again, that's kind of par for the course... |
