A Cynical Bastard's look at this season's special effects bonanzas |
| -by Elfpants |
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The most interesting thing about The Matrix is not, in my opinion, the matrix itself. It's the deep philosophical readings that all of the critics, stunned by the fact that it's made a buttload of money, have been trying to slather all over the flick. A prime example is in the latest Entertainment Weekly, wherein a sidebar proclaims the religious connotations of Zion, Morpheus, Neo and the like. Now, I hate being a cynical bastard — well, all right, I love being a cynical bastard — but I find myself laughing myself sick over this. Sure, you can go to the ends of the earth to learn that Morpheus was the god of dreams and craft a deep and meaningful framework from that, but here's another potential explanation:
...and so on. In other words, this movie is geek heaven, baby. It's about as deep as a wading pool in the Gobi, as religious as a bacon cheeseburger at yeshiva. It's a smorgasbord of all of the hip nerdigentsia references of the last decade, done up with pretty effects to fool the mainstream (which presumably hasn't bothered to check out Season of Mists, Neuromancer or "The Long Twilight Struggle"). Of course, as soon as the critics figure out that the sources are Gaiman and Gibson, not Sinai and Hesiod, the backlash will be swift and furious, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the spectacle. In truth, The Matrix is the perfect, Platonic ideal of geek wish fulfillment. Visually, it's arresting, taking the best elements of Hong Kong cinema, anime and noir and blending them for a look that is truly astonishing. For those of us who know our Wicked City from our Hard Boiled, it's a brilliantly baited lure. Just the sight of Keanu dodging those bullets in the trailer was enough to get anyone who'd ever attended a con slavering. But wait, there's more. Consider what the film really says. Strip away the pseudo-science explanations, the scenery chewing by Guido the Killer Pimp Pantoliano, the neat CGI, and you get a very special message for anyone who has ever posted six times to a single UseNET thread. You are special, it hints, even though you do nothing but work at a computer all day and sit at your computer all night. You can learn martial arts and kick butt with them, without bothering to do any of that boring practice or discipline stuff. You will get sexually experienced, gorgeous, talented women to fall for you because you are special, never mind that you're mumblingly incoherent most of the time. It really is alright to break the law and do nasty things to police officers, because they really are tools of a monolithic conspiracy to crush your freedom. (And don't think they don't know what directory your MP3s are in, kiddo.) You really are immortal, because let's face it, you're too cool to die regardless of what sort of stupid shit you pull. And yes, you really are the only real person out there, and you are privy to the truth, unlike everyone else who's posted to that same thread. Seductive, ain't it? That is the real secret of the film's success, not the relentless, drawn-out fight scenes, not Lawrence Fishburne's eloquently understated performance, not the excellent dialogue. (A side note: God bless the Wachowski brothers for finally figuring out how to use Keanu properly. His character spends most of the movie either not speaking, being confused or being incoherently angry. It plays to Reeves' strengths, which are as a physical actor and not a vocal one. It's a pleasant exorcism of the "I want room service!" speech from Keanu's last foray into cyberpunk, though audience members can be excused for answering "Johnny Mnemonic!" every time Keanu's character asks "What have I done to deserve this?") Is it a good flick? No doubt. It looks good, it sounds good when they remember to let the dialogue be louder than the soundtrack and we get to watch Fishburne beat up Keanu a lot. What more could you ask for, save perhaps an end to pointless romantic subplots that make no character sense. But that's just me, and I'm a cynical bastard, after all. And in the meantime, it's nice to see that a couple of hard-core comic, anime and SF geeks have managed to hornswoggle Hollywood completely. |
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The Mummy can best be considered "Big Trouble In Little Cairo," as all it's really missing is Kurt Russell's butcherblock of a lower jaw and Al Leong dying messily in the background. (Then again, considering the makeup effects in the zombie jamboree throwdown at the end of the flick, I may just have missed him.) Otherwise, it's got everything you want from a dumb actioner: Big scenery, big effects, infinite mooks, messy deaths and the requisite heaving bosom. (I look forward to the first gay-themed period actioner, simply to see what a screenwriter will do without being able to rely on long panning shots of the heroine's chest, scenes of her mooning over the hero while in her nightie and other time-wasters directed at the members of the audience who haven't figured out how to log onto persiankitty.com yet.) The premise of The Mummy is one of Hollywood's time-honored traditions: No matter how badly the hero and his massively-bosomed female lead screw up by unleashing eternal evil on the world, the fact that they manage to bottle it up at the end means that all the quaint natives who knew not to fuck with the thing in the first place shower them with eternal gratitude. In this case, the naive watchdogs over ancient malice are the "Magi," who've gotten themselves transformed from a brotherhood of Persian mystics to Pharaoh's multicultural bodyguards by the script. More on them in a moment. The film opens with an extended narration of the setup done by someone whose vocal inspirations seem to be David Attenborough and the lead singer of the Wallflowers. Apparently, the priest Imhotep (who looks like Telly Savalas after an extensive Tae-Bo workout regimen) makes a small judgement error, namely, nailing the Pharaoh's girlfriend and then hacking Pharoah himself into chutney. There's a lot of running about and yammering about resurrection, but when the dust clears, the situation is as follows:
Now, if that were all there were to it, we wouldn't have a movie. But those wacky Magi make the sort of tactical error only made by mystical brotherhoods in big-budget B-flicks; namely, they level a curse on Imhotep that means that he's going to be uncomfortable for a very long time, but that if he ever gets out, he'll be a walking god. How exactly the latter is a curse doesn't quite make sense to me, but hey, I'm not a member of any mystic brotherhoods, so what do I know? I mean, I'd settle for just killing the guy and maybe taking his stuff, but then again, if anyone at all in this flick acted sensibly, we'd have a four minute short feature to discuss instead of an $80M blockbuster. Time and the credits then scroll past, bringing us to the 1920s and another cliché: If you speak a foreign language in a film like this, you're toast. Why? Because the next ten minutes consist of Arabs and French foreign legionnaires blowing the hell out of each other for no good reason in the middle of the desert. The only survivors? Our good old ‘murrican hero (who gets saved when the mummy burps in his general vicinity) and the Slimy Comic Relief. We're never quite sure what nationality he is, but it ain't American, so you can be sure he gets his in the end. >From there we spin forward to assorted hijinks that end up with Fraser, the female lead (a borderline psychotic librarian played by Rachel Weisz; she can handle neither her booze nor her basic archaeological techniques, but she looks good in a soggy nightgown and that, presumably, is why she was cast. Join me in a moment of silence for the thinking heroine, if you'd be so kind) and her slimy brother (who unfortunately does not get his in the end, presumably to set him up as comic relief for the inevitable sequel) trundling off into the desert to find the city of the dead with yet more quaint native comic relief. He's corrupt, he smells funny, he constantly gets outwitted and yep, he dies messily. Along the way, Fraser manages to blow away approximately two-thirds of the Magi, who are sensibly trying to keep him from returning to the scene of the crime and waking up the mummy. But they're trying to stop Our Hero and they say mean things to the female lead, and thus we are entirely justified in cheering as they blow up, keel over or catch on fire. >From this point on, everything goes on autopilot. The mummy gets woken up because everyone acts like an imbecile, havoc and CGI ensues, and eventually the good guys win at the cost of only a few supporting characters. Needless to say, when it's all over the one surviving Magus (who is apparently dynamite-proof, but that's another story) tells our three surviving adventurers that he and his people (assuming there are any left) owe them a great debt, and that we should all leave Jack Burton alone, and, well, you get the idea. Never mind that Fraser has spent most of the movie bumping off this guy's extended family, never mind that if Fraser hadn't been such a nincompoop the mummy never would have gotten loose in the first place, and so on; what it boils down to is that the Magi are grateful that Imhotep is gone forever and they can get their asses out of East Bumblefuck, the Sahara once and for all. The mummy's dealt with, and everyone lives happily ever after until the sequel (which, no doubt, will presumably feature a new female lead because Weisz may actually ask for a raise between pictures, and because let's face it, heroic adventurers never have stable long-term relationships). As for the mummy, well, he's a neat effect. Most of his screen time is spent dropping his jaw about two feet and allowing various creepy crawlies to emerge from it, which may in fact explain why Pharaoh's snugglebunny went for him in the first place. All of his lines are in presumably ancient Egyptian, which is a refreshing touch but means that we're not exactly treated to a nuanced performance. I mean, how nuanced can single-sentence subtitles be? Is The Mummy fun? Sure, especially if you leave your brain in a canopic jar outside the theater before watching it. Otherwise, you run the risk of asking why certain characters insist on getting themselves killed when there's clearly no need, why the car that's wrecked in one scene shows up in the next, why... Well, you might risk writing something like this. And no one wants that, do they? |
