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Shiroc posted:I know because I had to tell them to gently caress off with calling the Wachowskis "brothers" a couple years ago. That didn’t happen. I quoted an article about The Matrix, written in 2005, and failed to edit the text or include a disclaimer saying that the siblings had since changed their names. After I was told that this was impolite, I asked about the proper etiquette in that situation, and haven’t repeated that since. I remember because it was important to me. (It was probably in this very thread, if you’d like to confirm.) Transphobia is like racism: it would be foolish for me (or anyone) to say “I’m not transphobic” when the ideology is so pervasive that everyone has to actively think and act against it. I am certainly guilty of a great many things, in that way. All I can say is that I openly invite criticism and strive to improve. However, this seems to have gotten entangled in some resentment over my commentary on the Disney Star Wars franchise(?) - and demands that I stop writing altogether because you don’t like “my tone” are uncalled for. If you’ve genuinely had negative thoughts about “SMG’s gimmick” for years, that’s something you gotta get a better handle on. I invite criticism and critique, not this familiar online harassment stuff.
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Jan 2, 2022 09:16
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:All I can say is that I openly invite criticism finally, a good post
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Jan 2, 2022 09:29
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SMG, you have not taken a single polite piece of feedback that you shouldn't keep trying to discuss what the trans experience should mean relative to the Matrix movies from multiple people in this thread. I brought up the Denny's Placemat stuff because you are intimately familiar with online harassment given how you treated Jivjov, you just dress it up in more words. I found the original bit that I had referenced, and the bit that had gotten this in my head SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right, no hostility here. It’s just a tricky situation because deadnaming and misgendering are obviously bad, but those terms refer to actions in the present. The directors might have always been nonbinary, but the deaths of their old names and births of their new names are a more recent event. (When I think of ‘deadnaming’, I picture a little tombstone.) Which I'll accept the overall series of posts isn't as negative overall as I remembered, gets back to the point that you don't seem to understand trans experience at all.
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Jan 2, 2022 09:33
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re-watching movies seen in youth after trans realization is a WILD ride :D that said, these movies seemingly constructing a Necker cube of sacrosanct Trans allegory and a hypernormalized 'anti'-capitalism boxed up under "Love Story" does not make the tummies feel well at all! D:
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Jan 2, 2022 11:55
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What was the meaning of "Tiffany" alluded to at the end?
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Jan 2, 2022 13:09
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Zesty posted:What was the meaning of "Tiffany" alluded to at the end? I assumed that just as the Analyst put Neo back in his deadname, Tiffany was Trinity's name in the old matrix and so she had a backstory of hating it.
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Jan 2, 2022 13:19
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I figured that was it.
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Jan 2, 2022 14:09
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Ferrinus posted:If she hadn't met Neo, and Neo hadn't made a concerted effort to wake her up, it's entirely possible that Trinity would've lived out the rest of her days as "Tiffany" either with some vague dissatisfaction she could never place or resolve i mean, going right here to the trans narrative, there are so many people that never come out or never realize what's wrong because they haven't quite met another trans person who gives them the confidence to be authentically themselves.
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Jan 2, 2022 15:22
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unlimited shrimp posted:In contrast, there's never any doubt that Neo will take it. Ignoring the fact that they offer him the red pill at his office, and he doesn't take it, and runs away from it.
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Jan 2, 2022 15:34
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I think honestly the new Matrixes make a lot of sense to me. Neo is essentially put into a situation where we gets to have his cake and eat it too. He gets all the memories and adventure of The Matrix, gets to still be seen as a revolutionary figure in a way, but without giving up an ounce of privilege. Meanwhile, Trinity's cuts even deeper. The notion that the film is anti-family is ignoring that Trinity is actually someone who cares about family and loves the people around her. It's just her chosen family in the original. So, The Matrix casts her in a family she didn't choose, trapping her in her own sense of loyalty and responsibility to others.
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Jan 2, 2022 15:54
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Seedge posted:Ignoring the fact that they offer him the red pill at his office, and he doesn't take it, and runs away from it. e. It's a shame the movie wasn't centered around Trinity like Shiroc suggested. Neo was cool when I was a teenage dork but I'm now a spouse and a parent and I am way more interested in a full treatment of Trinity's story than I am in Neo's. unlimited shrimp fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jan 2, 2022 |
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Jan 2, 2022 15:54
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Shiroc posted:Trinity is obviously unhappy and unsettled, even if less clearly so than Neo. The movie probably would have been stronger to give more time to her or to have entirely shifted to her as the primary character. I wish they'd filmed this movie instead. Trinity as the focal character restores her agency, and opens up some more opportunities to flesh out any narrative. (Audiences would have been mad that Keanu was played by a schlubby dork for the first two acts.) George Miller's Fury Road intentionally avoided depicting Max as rescuing the wives. All the power would still be male. Joe's wives would still be property, now in the care of a benevolent character. And that wasn't the story Miller wanted to tell. In Matrix Resurrections, Trinity is literally bargained for by two men. Men fight over her while she is paralyzed by bullet time. She's given a "choice" to either become Neo's sidekick girlfriend or stay with Chad and the kids. Dead or alive her body is getting taken in the real world; in practice Neo only gives her the "choice" of surviving the heist by agreeing to see things his way. She's still property. This was an extremely squandered opportunity to film a story about identity. As it stands, the rest of the messaging is muddy and dangerous. Neo and Trinity are depicted with vague but extremely relatable malaise - which is resolved by going off-meds or abandoning their support network. That's imitable self-harm, which the narrative glorifies by turning them into superheroes. It'd be like if Rosemary's Baby were cured of evil by shaking it hard enough.
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Jan 2, 2022 16:35
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moths posted:In Matrix Resurrections, Trinity is literally bargained for by two men. Men fight over her while she is paralyzed by bullet time. She's given a "choice" to either become Neo's sidekick girlfriend or stay with Chad and the kids. Dead or alive her body is getting taken in the real world; in practice Neo only gives her the "choice" of surviving the heist by agreeing to see things his way. She's still property. It's a stretch to say the Analyst is a man, NPH is more like an avatar of a friendly and relatable tyranny conceived to fool one's emotions into believing they are an ally and source of comfort. Basically a top level insidious form of emotionally abusive control. Main story points of the movie that I find too unclear and detracting are character motivations for everyone but Neo and Trinity. Why are Bugs and her crew willing to risk so much, including the populace of Io on a wild goose chase for the chance to find and then free Neo? Though Io isn't fully explored, it came off as a place where freed humans at least found an equilibrium of security and freedom. The subsequent plan to free Trinity made sense for Neo's motivation, but there's not much to be said for why Io residents are so willing to risk the peace and safety of their city, not to mention any thought to the ramifications of a successful mission as far as what the antagonistic machines might do in response. Mostly seems like selfish motivations to meet a living legend and rock out with him, which actually wouldn't be the worst idea for a movie, but it seems pretty undeveloped as a driving force to make a movie. I find it somewhat ironic that the ending is a callback to the end of the 1st movie, where it's heavily implied that Neo has god-like debug mode control over the Matrix code and can alter things on the fly, as opposed to retconning him into merely an MCU superhero in 2, 3 and most of 4. Part 1 really is a perfect standalone movie and it took 3 sequels to bring it back to that point with the difference being that it's two people in love.
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Jan 2, 2022 17:37
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Timeless Appeal posted:The notion that the film is anti-family is ignoring that Trinity is actually someone who cares about family and loves the people around her. It's just her chosen family in the original. So, The Matrix casts her in a family she didn't choose, trapping her in her own sense of loyalty and responsibility to others. I like the positioning of family and found family in Resurrections vs the original. Trinity beats the Analyst to pieces "for using children," whether that means playing on Trinity's affection for children or having children in tubes play a role in her imprisonment at all. Her waking up to the truth involves rejecting a nuclear family, particularly as soon as her husband starts ordering her around. In the first movie, the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar are a found family, with Cypher as the conservative/regressive revolutionary. We don't get to see Cypher's exact moment of realization, but he does explain over steak dinner that life with the found family isn't satisfying to him. If only the Council had dangled hope of better food, Zion might have retained more talent... moths posted:In Matrix Resurrections, Trinity is literally bargained for by two men. Men fight over her while she is paralyzed by bullet time. She's given a "choice" to either become Neo's sidekick girlfriend or stay with Chad and the kids. Dead or alive her body is getting taken in the real world; in practice Neo only gives her the "choice" of surviving the heist by agreeing to see things his way. She's still property. Not disagreeing with this observation, just adding that Trinity's gift of flight saves her and Neo. If she depended entirely on men, she'd be dead. Once her powers are fully awakened, she has all the control. Plus there's the fact that Neo was prepared to lose her if she truly wanted to stay plugged in, while Chad and the Analyst used more manipulation and began physically pulling her toward their side while minimizing Neo.
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Jan 2, 2022 17:42
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Echoing everyone saying that Trinity's POV was sorely missing, so when she finally makes the choice, it doesn't nearly have as much weight as say, when Neo confronts Smith in the original. Nobody in this movie really has an arc, even though there are so many interesting avenues to explore.
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Jan 2, 2022 17:57
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Shiroc posted:SMG, you have not taken a single polite piece of feedback that you shouldn't keep trying to discuss what the trans experience should mean relative to the Matrix movies from multiple people in this thread. I am not, and have not been, "trying to discuss what the trans experience should mean." Going back over the thread, you have said that images in the films resonate with you very strongly because of your experiences, to which I've said that is cool and great. However, this has been accompanied by an insistence that the resonance is so strong that that you view it as the text of the film, and there's been a repeated insistence that I cannot view the text of the film because I don't care enough about you. We're talking, like, on a personal level - "messy, human", etc. And, y'know, it's true: I don't have that relationship with you. I feel it would be presumptuous to talk about you even if I were so inclined. So, instead, I've been writing about the film itself and the varying interpretations of it. But, in the few instances I've asked for clarification on your take, you've made recourse to that aforementioned 'messiness'. For example, you've asserted that the villain's specific motivations cannot be interpreted because the film is a reflection of 'human messiness' - implicitly pain and rage, etc. Consequently, attempts at reading the film at all constitute an attack on the core of your being. Things have obviously gotten very hostile as a result, and it's tough to respond in a way that doesn't come across as condescending. Some of what you wrote is interesting, and some's a bit shaky. I wish you well.
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Jan 2, 2022 18:18
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moths posted:She's given a "choice" to either become Neo's sidekick girlfriend or stay with Chad and the kids. Dead or alive her body is getting taken in the real world; in practice Neo only gives her the "choice" of surviving the heist by agreeing to see things his way. She's still property. If Trinity had chosen to stay, they would have put her back in her pod and left her, then pulled the plug on Neo to stop him getting trapped again. They wouldn't have stolen her if she chose to stay: Sati states outright it would kill her.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:14
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Seedge posted:If Trinity had chosen to stay, they would have put her back in her pod and left her, then pulled the plug on Neo to stop him getting trapped again. Yeah the whole 'we don't need phone booths to get out of the Matrix, we just need a suitable mirror and those are everywhere' thing felt like the film consciously moving away from the peril of the previous trilogy where just getting to an Exit was a major source of tension and refocusing on the tension being about the choice to stay or leave.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:20
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ImpAtom posted:The dude is explicitly taking delight in deadnaming a character. You're not going to win this. Just try to ignore them.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:28
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Alchenar posted:Yeah the whole 'we don't need phone booths to get out of the Matrix, we just need a suitable mirror and those are everywhere' thing felt like the film consciously moving away from the peril of the previous trilogy where just getting to an Exit was a major source of tension and refocusing on the tension being about the choice to stay or leave. Feels like it moved to “lol, phone booths, what?”
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Jan 2, 2022 19:41
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Was there any talk about the original Sati actress coming back? Obviously there wasn’t much to the role (at least in the final cut), could have been neat.
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Jan 2, 2022 19:53
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Seedge posted:If Trinity had chosen to stay, they would have put her back in her pod and left her, then pulled the plug on Neo to stop him getting trapped again. I don't think "Oops we'll put her back" was actually an option in the film though. I got a sense that if she chose "wrong" she'd die, and they started the removal process before she had decided. (The tension in the scene came from "oh no she's going to stay and die," not "that's sad but she's made her decision.") I could be misremembering, there was a lot happening at once, but it didn't feel at all like sneaking her back in was ever on the table. Also, it's weird how much Trinity spends her life-threatening scenes the film unconscious and lifeless or frozen in bullet time. Not that the "sexy lamp test" is a nuanced tool for detecting feminism, but those shots were pretty bad.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:19
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aBagorn posted:i mean, going right here to the trans narrative, there are so many people that never come out or never realize what's wrong because they haven't quite met another trans person who gives them the confidence to be authentically themselves. Yeah, absolutely. Resurrections almost made it too easy, since we in the audience knew that Trinity's entire new life was a fabrication, her husband and kids were fake, etc. On the other hand, a repeating theme of the movie is that nominal choices aren't real choices - when you know what you want or have to do, or when some status quo isn't tolerable, actually picking a pill is an after-the-fact formality.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:25
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Feels like it moved to “lol, phone booths, what?” New exits should have been 5G towers. Push that conspiracy forward a bit more.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:30
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I've just watched it again and there's something wrong with the way the edit has worked out. I'm a person that's presented like the oracle for the last 20 years so the themes behind the first matrix film are kinda important to me, at the same time this wasn't all that great, it's okay but not something I feel like I can tell my friends, "hey, watch this!". I'm just riffing off my head so apologies if this just sounds like nonsense, first bit of the film cops are walking up to faux trinity, cop's boot hits the water, the sound hits and it's way too.. splosh, it's meant to be a beat. Door gets kicked in, music starts kicking up, faux trinity, cut to the outside, all good. Faux morpheus, faux agents - this is interesting but the sound stage sounds like a TV show, all okay.. Then "no lieutenant, your men are already dead" And the sound beat just drops in the middle of a bar. The first 3 films were a synesthetic beauty of sound and motion, this just drops it lazily. I liked it but it isn't 10% as good as the first film. e: new morpheus is loving awesome though, and even though I don't like presenting a a man I'd totally do those suits. Hexyflexy fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 00:15
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The Matrix Resurrections feels like the Wachowski sisters are wielding a solid two-by-four, and beating you round the head with it repeatedly. And honestly, I'm fine with it. What was special to me about the effects of the first movie is that they were unique for their time, and that they were made using Renderman using FreeBSD on 32 Dell systems with two Pentium 2 processors at 450MHz running what was essentially a beowulf cluster in the same way you might see in other cyberpunk fiction. But the subsequent movies, and especially this one, felt like the effects were just run-of-the-mill stuff that you could see in every other movie; case in point, the movie really loves displaying soft-particle effects but that's been seen in a bunch of movies and is even played for laughs in Space Jam 2 - and if you're being out-done by Space Jam 2, then you're probably not breaking new ground. On the other hand, I quite like that the movie tries to approach a bunch of different subjects like mental health, trans awareness, the subjectivity of media literacy, meta-commentary and others - but I think it does so even more shallowly than the first movie tried to approach the issues that it was trying to speak on. I guess I would've liked it to maybe focus a bit more on one or two issues than try to speak to everything at once? That might be kinda nit-picky though. Ultimately I didn't walk away with the same feeling of "holy poo poo I just watched something groundbreaking", but I don't think anyone involved in the production is to blame for that - it's just that it's not very easy to make something groundbreaking, and even if they didn't succeed I don't feel like it wasn't worth it wasn't worth the attempt. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 01:14
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that's a vastly better explanation than I could do, also BSD 
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Jan 3, 2022 01:21
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:Ultimately I didn't walk away with the same feeling of "holy poo poo I just watched something groundbreaking", but I don't think anyone involved in the production is to blame for that - it's just that it's not very easy to make something groundbreaking, and even if they didn't succeed I don't feel like it wasn't worth it wasn't worth the attempt. I think the whole convo about "this needs a bullet time!" is the movie saying that there's no way they can achieve that. Doesn't justify the mediocre action but it does soften the hit of not having anything groundbreaking.
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Jan 3, 2022 01:26
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Hexyflexy posted:that's a vastly better explanation than I could do, also BSD  Also hilo! lunar detritus posted:I think the whole convo about "this needs a bullet time!" is the movie saying that there's no way they can achieve that. Doesn't justify the mediocre action but it does soften the hit of not having anything groundbreaking. On the other hand, it's not like they couldn't not acknowledge it - so that sort of leaves them in a tough spot. Though again, two-by-four - and sometimes you just need a good whacking, I guess.
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Jan 3, 2022 01:33
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ruddiger posted:This movie makes for a good double feature with Don’t Look Up. This movie makes for a good double feature with Don't Look Up.
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Jan 3, 2022 03:15
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I feel like Matrix Revelations is like a writer's workshop or a really good DM. There interesting ideas both literally and thematically, but it just doesn't feel cohesive. I actually think the idea of Neo being trapped in bullet time for example is pretty brilliant, but is also not that great in the movie.
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Jan 3, 2022 03:39
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I feel like Matrix Resurrections was fanfiction written by Ice King. And I mean that in an endearing way. Sorta.
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Jan 3, 2022 04:42
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Feast of Burden posted:I feel like Matrix Resurrections was fanfiction written by Ice King. And I mean that in an endearing way. Sorta. What nobody seems to have noted is that the ‘resurrection’ thing is an extension of Cloud Atlas. The film presents a fairly straightforward depiction of Otherkin religious belief. Neo and Trinity, on this film, are fictionkin. They are literally the reincarnation of videogame characters from the literal alternate universe where fiction is real.
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Jan 3, 2022 05:35
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I had read that Lana was going to give up on the production entirely during the covid shutdown but the cast convinced her to keep going on it. As a creative effort, I can see it feeling like a largely no win situation. Extremely hard to be as groundbreaking as the originals. Going too far out of expectations, like switching the main viewpoint to Trinity, would be constrained by studio mandates and commercial pressures. So many conflicting views on what the main point of the previous movies was that people would want to see doubled down on. Sincere personal experiences as a trans woman would be completely illegible to the audience unless they fit into the expected tropes. Ending up with an epilogue love story to give Neo and Trinity a happier ending gets called fascist because it doesn't provide an acceptable resolution to mechanocapitalism. I'm curious what she ends up doing next.
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Jan 3, 2022 05:43
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Timeless Appeal posted:I feel like Matrix Resurrections is like a writer's workshop or a really good DM. FWIW the behind the scenes stuff indicates this is basically what it was. Lana Wachowski has talked about how her early movies were meticulously storyboarded, filmed behind monitors etc, all pre-planned lighting set ups. Now she talks about how she and her team work in a writer's group called "The Pit", which is inclusive of Aleskander Hemon and David Mitchell who were directly credited, but sounds like other people contributed from the Sense8 team and Tom Tykwer (credited only as music). This movie was also codirected by James McTeigue who could only get a producer credit since he and Lana aren't an established duo. The interviews all talk about how they love the Pit as this magical creative space and now Lana doesn't like rehearsing or storyboards and loves natural light etc etc So in short, yes this movie is basically Lana Wachowski being given a budget of millions by Warner Bros to gently caress around with her friends and riff on something she did two decades ago
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Jan 3, 2022 06:45
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That’s cool
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Jan 3, 2022 06:47
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It'd be cooler if the movie was good.
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Jan 3, 2022 07:10
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It was
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Jan 3, 2022 07:12
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I liked the part where the robot swallow swooped around to visit her loving grace on pod people.
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Jan 3, 2022 07:38
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Well Kujaku is legit, so that checks out. I like seeing directors try new methods at least. I enjoyed what David Mitchell books I have read so cool seeing him get some film influence. And agreed, i will be excited for whatever Lana does next.
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Jan 3, 2022 08:10
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