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Oscar Wrapup (American Beauty and The Matrix win)
RobertPearse noted that
the winners are on CNN. No surprise that American Beauty cleaned up (I watched it again on saturday: Wow). But The Matrix took Editing, Sound and FX (Edging out Phantom Menace). Sleepy Hollow took Art Direction. Update by nik: "Not a lot of people know that" many of the effects for The Matrix were generated on FreeBSD systems.
Throwing all karma to the wind, let me leap in here again and just point out what a poor and pathetic excuse for a movie The Matrix was. It was pretty to look at. It was loud. It thought brass shell casings falling on ceramic tile was friggin' ballet.
What it also was was inane: The notion that human beings can be an energy source is absolutely ludicrous. You could live only about a week on the liquified remains of another human being, so it would take 52 people dying a year to keep one human battery alive. Can you say diminishing returns?
Okay, even suspending the laws of thermodynamics, we are still left with the idea that an AI with capability to write anything it likes into everyone's brain can be overcome by Keanu Reeves because "he is the one." What the heck does that mean? Does this mean he can stop the AI from writing whatever it likes into his brain? Whoop-de-doo! It can still write whatever it likes into the brains of everyone else. Does it mean he can kill the virtual entities the AI has placed in the Matrix? How?
I am completely unsatisfied by the explanations the movie offers. They simply don't make sense. The hero wins in the end not because of what he does, how he grows, but merely by coming into his own. He wins because he had to win.
One of the most pernicious myths is that there is an indomitable human spirit. There is no such thing. Read "Night" by Eli Weisel (I may have misspelled his name) which recounts his experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. Anyone who believes in the indomitable human spirit has not read of the night train ride near the war's end where Eli sees a young man beat his father to death for a crust of bread while the father cries and says the son's name over and over again.
Now all of this bashing is not to say that there isn't something good in the Matrix. First off, it is eye candy. Second off, the one good thing it says basically is that the struggle for authenticity (a REAL life) is a struggle worth undertaking, even when the illusion is more comfortable. The problem is, there is nothing real about the solution. It ends because it must end. It ends with the triumph of the hero because the hero must triumph.
The truth is, given the situation posited, it makes much more sense for Keanu to be beaten to a pulp and turned into a good little zombie, because barring the Deus Ex Machina of "he's the chosen one" that's what the AI should be able to do.
Finally, I am really disappointed by the violence in the movie. I really and actually am made uncomfortable by beauty of the scenes of profligate gunfire. They are beautiful. The problem is that the effects of gunshots on human beings are not even remotely beautiful.
Real pain and suffering an death are not pleasant. Watching your father waste away from cancer is not pleasant. Believe me. I stood there and watched. I watched as his eyes popped open to take one last look at this world, to try to take it all in, to bring with him this world he loved but never fully knew how much. I watched as his eyes glazed over and his rattling breath ceased and all that he was was gone.
Death is not f-ing entertainment. Death is loss, permanent, searing, incosolable. Death is not an amusement park. And I am really, really tired of movies that make it into one.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make these movies. They can do whatever they damned well please. I just beg you to take a moment now and then to think about what goes through your eyes to your brain, and then think about the fact, the incontrovertable fact that one day your eyes will pop open to take one last look at this world that you never knew how much you loved, that they will glaze over and your last rattling breath will leave your body and everything that you are will be gone.
What did you do with that time?