The Matrix Resurrections

 

Regular viewers of this blog will have no surprise that I caught this as soon as possible on release. The hype surrounding it's release was huge and the wall of uncertainty that had been constructed to obscure it's story and plot was both immense and effective. This all added to a growing pile of questions that I formed in anticipation of seeing The Matrix IV.

• Would I like it?
• Would I understand it?
• How many of the old characters would be in it and how would they interface with new ones?
• How would they explain Neo's resurrection.
• Would it be more overtly about transgender issues?
• How would the makers advance groundbreaking cinematography and would it represent another step change?
• Would it leave the door open for Matrix V?

I did like it and watching it was like putting on a familiar and well-loved top coat - it felt comfortable as the digital and real worlds were presented in accessible ways. I will need to watch it again - more than once - to gain a fuller understanding of the plot which is both a reflection on my limitations and the cleverness with which it was conceived and presented. 

The film continues to be situated in the centre ground of Postmodern philosophy and Baudrillard's questions and concepts are its anchor points. It explores concepts of what is real and what is not, as well as how do we know truth from untruth. It wouldn't be a Matrix film without blue and red pills and the consequences of the choices we make coming to define our identity. As I said, all very Postmodern. I liked it as it offers questions and not necessarily answers.

The blending of old with new was handled particularly well I thought. It was cleverly done and offered just enough of the old to make the plot development believable. There was enough that was familiar and enough that was new that required analysis and exploration. I feel it would be difficult to watch this film passively - it requires engagement and work. The start of the film is particularly clever and it's resonances will warm the hearts of die hard Matrix fans. I found myself joining in the dialogue in places as it stayed close to the tried and trusted Matrix formula.

The whole point of fiction is that it can go anywhere you want to as long as it is to some extent convincing. The utopian explanation for Neo's resurrection is pleasing and no more far fetched than any other part of the narrative. I was anticipating more fetish costumes and allusions to trans allegories but I found neither present.

The cinematography whilst eye popping at times, doesn't present any innovations on the scale of bullet time or circular slow motion sweeping camera movements, but there some interesting slow-mo sequences. The ever-present green cast of life in the Matrix is a helpful identifier - there is even a black cat called deja-vu! There are of course many fight scenes - featuring one-to-one, group and crowd scenes. Rather than presenting much that is innovative, they are a rehash of scenes from I-III with the volume turned up - and yes, there are helicopter gunships 😊!

As familiar as the beginning was, I did not anticipate the ending - and I'm certainly not going to spoil it for you. Does it leave the door open for Matrix V? In terms of plot, I'll leave you to decide. In terms of box office reception, perhaps not - but then the original Matrix back in 1999 was a sleeper for a long time before achieving cult status. I would happily watch it again - probably more than once! I'll give it 7/10.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I am a huge fan of the way Tarantino tells stories. I don't think there is anyone quite like him making films. This is a masterpiece. Growing up in the 1960s was the era when Westerns and American TV programmes were the staple on both TV channels. The visual texture of this film feels so spot on and the way the cinematography is lit and captured make it a feast for the eyes. Anyone who has been along Sunset Strip, driven past the iconic Capitol Records Tower or toured the Hollywood Hills will have recognised many of the famous sites. 

The fact that this film is a realist fairy-tale referencing and featuring many of the characters of the period only adds to, the at times, almost documentary feel of the film. Tarantino takes facts and real Hollywood characters, puts them in a bag and shakes them up, and then empties the bag, representing them in a jumbled retelling of the final years of Hollywood's golden era. It is literally as though Tarantino makes a memory dump onto the screen and arranges the images with a connecting narrative. Simply amazing.

Whilst the film captures the excesses of the times in its portrayal of drugs, sex and the rock and roll lifestyle, even featuring a scene at the Playboy Mansion, it also contains characters and acts which demonstrate great virtue. Whilst most of the characters in the film seem to be out to get whatever they can, Brad Pitt's Oscar winning character Cliff Booth oozes a cool strength and courage whilst being loyal to his friend and employer Rick Dalton played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Booth is however also capable of great violence - a not so virtuous trait. In the film Cliff Booth is rumoured to have killed his wife although he was never charged with her murder - surely more than a passing reference to Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner?

The innocent beauty of Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate wafts through the film punctuating it with a feeling akin to walking into a air-conditioned building when it's hot outside. The menace of the Manson gang holed up at the Spahn Ranch foreshadows the soon to pass Tate murders. After a six month spell in Italy shooting Spaghetti Westerns, Dalton returns to Hollywood with an Italian wife who is a conflation of Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and other Italian sirens of the period. The way in which this film interweaves fiction and reality, and then presents each as the other is extremely clever.

The fickle nature of celebrity which is an integral part of Hollywood is explored from many different angles. The whole premise of the film is that Dalton's career is waning and Booth's work as a stuntman has all but dried up. They feel disconnected from a Hollywood they no longer recognise. We see an emerging Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) at the height of his game and even Mama Cass (Rachel Redleaf) and Michelle Phillips (Rebecca Rittenhouse) from the Mamas and the Papas. 

This film offers a unique portrait of Hollywood in 1969. It is very cleverly conceived and Tarantino's screenplay and Direction are phenomenal. The casting is spot on even if many of the first choices either didn't pass audition or were unavailable through other projects. There is a huge and interesting exploration of the film on Wikipedia - well worth a look. As you may have gathered, I enjoyed this trip back to my childhood. Thank you Quenten. I'll give it 8/10.

Nomadland

I watched this film with a group of friends at church as part of our discipleship programme exploring themes of 'home' this term. I found the film to be very depressing but I'm glad I saw it as its multiple messages are important and need to be heard and seen. Others found the film uplifting. It's just as well not everybody is like me! I guess it's a 'Marmite" film - as it appears was the score of plinky piano and a cello being sawed in half - yep, I didn't like that much either!

For me this was a film whose story was primarily about two things: remembering and relationships. To remember literally means to put back together. For me, the film pivoted around a scene where a helpful friend had accidentally dropped a box containing some crockery that Fern (Frances McDormand) had very strong sentimental attachment to - and for good reason. A plate was broken that was part of a dinner service given to her by her now dead father - the design was Fall Leaves. As Fern painstakingly glued the pieces back together, she remembered her strong bond with her father and felt again the pain of loss.

The pain of loss lies at the heart of this film - yet there is hope for Fern and those she shares her nomadic lifestyle with. The town in which Fern and her husband lived and worked was a one employer town and everybody worked at the factory or in one of the businesses supporting the community. When the factory closed the town became a ghost town and everybody became jobless and houseless as the company also provided housing. Not long afterwards, her husband died. Fern had lost her job, her husband and now her home. All she had left was a van. The van became more than just a home for Fern. It contained many of her memories and she had customised the interior with things from her previous home and life and possessions of her husband. Although houseless, Fern never considers herself to be homeless, as home is somewhere deep within.

Other characters in the film - many of them real life nomads, have also experienced loss. With a social security system unable to provide a living pension, many of these people could not afford to live in a house or flat despite a lifetime of paying tax. A rent free van or RV and the empty desert was all they had. With monochromatic landscapes and shot almost exclusively with hand-held cameras (not even steadycams) and often in extreme facial close-up, the characters offer an openness and honesty which allies with the integrity of their way of life. Not once in the 103 minute run time did we see a law enforcement officer - there was no need of them. Often it is clear that the dialogue is improvised but it works so well.

What we did see plenty of was community. Relationships were the second key theme for me. Fern was widowed and childless. Later in the film we discover she has a sister. She forms attachments to a number of characters such as Linda (Linda May) and Swankie (Charlene Swankie) and is torn about her feelings for Dave (David Strathairn) with whom the prospect of a romance develops throughout the film. The group of nomads rally around Bob (Bob Wells) who delivers quasi-philosophical witterings that find an a welcoming home amongst the semi hippy nomads. His rhetoric helps them to find an identity as a group.

The starkness of the nomadic lifestyle forces each nomad to face up to the reality of death at some point. There is a lot tree-hugging New Age type communing with nature with a strong 'everything in the universe is connected' feel. We could learn much from this. The way the narrative plays out, sets up a dichotomy between a settled life with a job and a mortgage, family responsibilities and social engagements against the freedoms of being a nomad. Twice in the film, Fern is offered permanent accommodation, first with her sister and later with Dave's son's family. She rejects both offers and returns to the open road.

Whilst some of the nomads appeared to be fairly static or stayed within one locale, others were clearly on a never-ending road trip and others like Fern, followed seasonal work around the country. We see Fern joining the Christmas recruits at an anonymous Amazon Fulfillment Centre picking and packing goods for Christmas. She then moves on to working in a restaurant and then being an attendant at a  camping and RV ground and in the autumn works the sugar beet harvest. Throughout she demonstrates that she is no shirker, Fern is a hard worker with a strong moral code and a predisposition to always be looking out for others in her community. She is generous and loving - at least as far as her own limitations allow.

If ever a script had Frances McDormand's name on it, this is it - she also co-Produced the film. She not so much acts but feels like one of the real life nomads in the film (therefore is an excellent actor!). Her character Fern commands attention. With Chloë Zhao's sensitive and detailed Direction and the hand-held camera work, this film offers an intimate portrait of an important and growing slice of American society. Has the American Dream simply been illusory for them or are they living it? As I said above, this film has much that is important to say and its three Oscars testify to that. If you've not seen the film, do see it. I'll give it 7/10.

No Time to Die

At 25 has James Bond finally come of age? In Daniel Craig's last outing as 007 in the 25th film in the franchise, we find a more mature Bond and for that matter a more mature Bond movie. In many ways it's the same as its predecessors but at the same time there are welcome differences.

I was wondering if the 2:43 runtime would drag. It doesn't. The narrative maintains a steady march towards its conclusion. There are many strands to the narrative arc of this film's story. They intertwine and play with each other trading emotions as they do so. On more than one occasion we see Bond paralysed by confliction where the old and new Bonds battle for a decision. 

The exotic locations are there - stunning light in Puglia, lush vegetation in the Caribbean, frozen Norway with spectacular bridges and coastline, The Faroe Islands and of course Scotland. In the London scene above, I used to work in the building on the left in 1979! 

What is not there is the serial abuser of women. His harsh and brutal career has seemingly taught  Commander Bond what really matters in life. This is a film about love, truth, integrity, sacrifice and loss. Of course greed, revenge and megalomania all feature too, but these are left for others to inhabit.

There are plenty of wild and exciting chases using a wide variety of vehicles, death defying jumps and the ever present product placement - mainly of brands identified as British even if their owners these days reside in other territories. There are very strong acting performances from a great ensemble cast. Christoph Waltz emanates a power that transcends the confinement of his character, Léa Seydoux displays a vulnerability alongside steeliness,  Rami Malek is flesh-creepingly sinister and Ana de Armas will, I am sure, reappear to beautifully support the British Secret Service once again.

This film is sensitive to many of the things that increasingly matter in our evolving world. Dealing with a potential world-wide pandemic, showing greater respect to women, calling out a lack of integrity, two black women in lead roles and changing world order.

This is my first visit to the cinema in 21 months. It felt good. The sound and visual treats of this film demand the largest screen you can find to watch it on. Pay the extra if you can. This film does deserve the hype and I am sure it will go down in the canon of Bond films as one of the best.  I'm going to give it 8/10.

How are you?

 Dear Friends,

I hope that this finds you well and that wherever you are in the world, you are feeling more hopeful than you were in recent months. The painful reality of a global pandemic has brought the large screen jarringly into our lives and homes. We have been invaded by a fiction made all too real by the cleverness of globalisation.

We have all lost so much during these past 18 months. So many freedoms, so many ways to spend leisure time and find recreation and sadly too many loved ones.  We have had to find new ways of keeping ourselves entertained or distracted through enforced 'house arrest'.

I have continued to find it impossible to commit to sitting down to watch a movie all the way through - I hate watching in installments! I have kept up my subscription of Sight and Sound and have avidly read it each month (do you like the refreshed format? I do.) I have continued to buy DVDs but only to add to the pile of 'bought and not yet watched'. Just as well retirement is on the horizon. I have not been into a cinema in these Covid infested months either, neither have I been engaging in binging on boxed-sets of this that or the other. I continue to find myself watching as many food programmes as possible and endless recordings of medical emergency programmes of one type or another. 

I do however feel the stirrings of a desire to begin watching films afresh. In the autumn I am actually looking forward to restarting a monthly movie in the parish to watch with friends and reflect on together. I have amassed a growing collection to unleash on them!

The pandemic appears to have accelerated  a trend that was already underway which has led to many column inches of debate in the online and printed movie media. That is the developing of small screen streaming services for film and that some projects which previously would have been cinematic are now produced and shot for the small screen - although the average size of new flat screen TVs being sold in the UK is 65" - not such a small screen. This has led to much fretting about the long-term viability of cinemas and reflections on the funding that now comes from the streaming giants of Netflix, Amazon and Disney et. al.

In this month's Sight and Sound there is an in depth exploration of the future of cinema and film with many top film-makers contributing their spin on things. I was particularly taken by this from Director  Guillermo Del Toro in response to the question 'How do you see the relationship between cinema and the small screen developing' (p47)?

"Access is trumping 'eventising', of course - that's evident. You may like it or not, but we don't live in a monoculture any more and we are fused - in a transhuman istic way - to our portable screens. Those screens are a bio-extension of our 'self' (almost our id) so they serve a very different function than the big screen, which is collective. The small screen is with us almost 24/7. Therefore it 'wins' by virtue of that alone. But the big screen and its collective, almost humbling proportion soothes the soul."

Discuss!

Thank you for reading this and not giving up on my blog. I hope that before too long some new movie reflections will appear.

Please take care and stay safe.