If the original Matrix trilogy is about revelation and discovering your true purpose, The Matrix Resurrections is about the malaise of middle-age, of knowing you still have something to offer the world even though you’ve forgotten what the vitality of youth feels like. It also explores the idea that humanity will only reach its true potential when we build and nurture a pluralistic society. There’s also the idea that our love for one another gives us our true power; it motivates us to be our best selves.
The Matrix Resurrections is all that and much more. It possesses all of the hallmarks I’ve come to expect from any fantastical tale crafted by the Wachowski sisters, although one of the sisters, Lilly, wasn’t involved in this fourth installment of the Matrix franchise. Resurrections is raucously larger-than-life and messy in that uniquely human way that comes when our passions, emotions, and intellect swirl together.
Read more…
Gather round for the latter-day tales of the Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, aka Wyld Stallyns. As we all know, these prophets saved our society from being totally bogus and instead insured our most excellent future.
Ok, we probably don’t all know that.
In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re under the age of about thirty, you had never heard of these two sweet-natured lunkheads and the perplexing cult status of the late 80s/early 90s movies that featured them: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.
As someone on the margins of Bill and Ted fandom – I watched both the earlier films around the time of their original release (when I was twelve or so) and liked them, but I didn’t think about them much after that – I was more bemused than anything else when I heard about this newest sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music.
After revisiting the first two entries in preparation for the new Bill and Ted, I found them both as affable and goofy as I had remembered. They’re the movie equivalent of junk food, to be sure, but guileless and silly enough to be harmless – except for those few dated homophobic slurs that are played for laughs.
I can happily report that Bill and Ted Face the Music is in the exact same vein as its predecessors.
Read more…
I was 15 in 1995 when the first Toy Story was released. That’s a bit older than the target audience for Pixar’s inaugural feature film, but I vividly remember seeing it and being dazzled by both the story and the groundbreaking animation. I’ll be 40 next year. I’ve been wowed by each successive Toy Story installment released over the last quarter century. Both the astonishing leap in digital animation technology and the touching stories involving old pals Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of the gang – Toy Story 2 and 3 consistently bring me to tears with every revisit – get better with each new film.
That’s definitely the case with the seemingly impossible jump in animation quality between Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. The plot, however, isn’t quite up to the level of the earlier films, especially Toy Story 3, probably the strongest of the series. While “cash grab” is too strong a phrase, this is the first entry in the franchise that feels like the artistic vision got a little fuzzy.
Read more…
The Neon Demon is an odious and hateful movie. It traffics in a base misogyny that masquerades as high art. Director Nicolas Winding Refn has tried to complicate the issue of that misogyny by populating his movie with an almost exclusively female cast. The fact that the women who are punished and degraded in The Neon Demon suffer their fate mostly at the hands of other women doesn’t make it any less troubling.
To counter this baseness, Refn collaborated with two women on the script, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham. In an interview with The Evening Standard, Refn intimates that he wanted to work with a woman on this new script because of his perceived issues with writing female characters. “I always set out wanting to make films about women but it always ends up being about men. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to write them.”
In the same interview, Stenham acknowledges Refn’s reputation for treating the women in his movies poorly. “He’s got a lot of stick for doing films some people think are violently misogynistic. So he approached me with the idea of doing something different.” His choice of collaborators on this project doesn’t give the impression that he’s trying to grow as an artist when it comes to his female characters, though, which I think was the intended effect. Instead, it feels like cover for Refn to indulge in an even more extreme misogyny than what’s been found in his previous work.
Read more...
Because the creative minds behind Keanu previously worked on MadTV before getting their own series, Key and Peele, it seems lazy to say that the movie feels like a five-minute sketch extended for 95 more. If the tired and worn out premise fits, though…
In the grand tradition of movies like A Night at the Roxbury and Superstar, Keanu sustains genuinely funny material for sixty whole seconds at a time before reminding you that the movie’s concept wore out its welcome after about twenty minutes.
The plot is set in motion by a kitten who escapes a grizzly shootout between rival drug gangs and finds his way to the doorstep of loser Rell Williams. Rell (Jordan Peele) is suffering a recent break-up with his girlfriend. She left because he’s basically a slob who is going nowhere in life. When Rell’s cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) learns of the devastating break-up, he rushes over for consolation, but finds Rell is already taking solace in caring for the kitten, whom he’s named Keanu.
In an early example of one of the bits that genuinely made me laugh, Rell’s obsession with Keanu leads him to make the kitten the centerpiece of a series of photographs that he plans on making into a calendar. Each picture is a scene from a different movie (e.g., The Shining, Beetlejuice) with Keanu as the star. It’s as adorable and hilarious as you might imagine. I thought the pop culture influenced comedy would be something I could latch onto, but moments like these are too few and far between to sustain laughter throughout the picture.
Read more...
