What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

Each Matrix film has moments worth seeing, but beyond the first film and the Animatrix, you are definitely good skipping them.

Black Barney wrote: yeah, exactly what chalest said. There's much better movies to see.

The 2nd Matrix is pretty decent and probably worth watching, but yeah the 3rd one really is just shit. It's not good at all.

It would be better to watch that collection of short-films (most of them animated I think) on The Matrix. I forget what it was called but I did enjoy that quite a bit.

THE ANIMATRIX. It's on Netflix. Or was. LMK if you can't track it down, I ripped it years ago.

I can't speak to the third Matrix movie. Money was tight when that came out, and the reviews convinced me to skip it. Since then, the Internet has retroactively decided that the second Matrix movie was bad. IMO, it depends on what you enjoyed about the first movie. If you are in for the action and stunning visuals, you really should see the second Matrix movie. It has a good action scene midway through, and they built an actual highway for the excellent chase scene. If you enjoyed the novel ideas brought up in the first movie, you might want to skip the sequels altogether, because the cosmology is problematic.

The Animatrix is a prequel, and I have reluctantly come around to the local idea here that prequels made for the purpose of explaining stuff are generally disappointing. I watched The Animatrix once and found it tolerable but forgettable.

I think that Reloaded and Revolutions are interesting to see if you're willing to follow the Wachowskis down the murkier paths of basic questions of existence. Unlike the Matrix, which posed questions about perception and a few about free will, Reloaded is centered around free will and that's always a drier basic premise because it lacks the essential conspiracy notes of the perception question (i.e. What if what I'm seeing isn't the truth? becomes instead What IS the truth?) In order to cloak that more basic premise, they had to build a lot of story and largely superfluous action on top of it to keep people from being bored. Most of the action in the original film centers around the mysteries of the Matrix and of Neo. Most of the action in the sequels basically kills time and keeps people distracted while Neo struggles with more fundamental issues, including those of being the equivalent of a messiah, empowered in more ways than one to answer that "truth" question FOR other people; some because they want him to and some without their knowledge (or, presumably, desire.)

Part of the problem is that the Wachowskis had never imagined the Matrix story as a broader question. They had the idea for the first film which applies directly to modern consumerist existence and misdirected politics and they made it. And it blew up! So they had to carry it forward into sequels that the studio threw money at them for. Success! Except that it's tough to encapsulate those bigger issues into something so grandiose. You end up losing the forest for the foliage and that's kinda what happened.

I think the Animatrix is worth viewing because more than one of the vignettes lowers the scale of the story into the more personal experience and that's where I think those philosophical questions are often best displayed. So, I don't think you're missing anything by not watching the sequels, but I think the Animatrix is worth the effort and time.

I am one of the few that prefers The Matrix Reloaded to The Matrix. While the first is good, apart from the action sequences I felt that it mainly went down a path well trodden. The second one starts to get into more interesting territory, but unfortunately ends on a cliffhanger, and the only decent thing in the third is a mech battle as philosophically it sucks the plot is just a mess.

The Animatrix came out during the height of my lsd and mushroom days. . . I enjoyed it immensely.

Spoilers? You should have seen it by now.

I have a tough time swallowing the whole notion that humanity is being used for power. You're losing a ton of power converting foodstuffs to energy. They should have used the humans as biological computing hardware. The eight hours a day you think you sleep gets devoted to the machine world as a processor.

/not my idea, stolen from a really good SF series.

RobertB wrote:
I have a tough time swallowing the whole notion that humanity is being used for power..

huh? but thats exactly how the World is. what is it thats tough to swallow?

I took my son to see his first ever movie in a Theater (he's six now).. he loved it so I guess I'll be taking him to kids movies on occasion now. We saw Captain Underpants... he's a big fan of the comics (oh hell, I like them too) and the movie did a great job. It wasn't quite the same as the comic but it was close and just different enough to make it worth your while. I really enjoyed it... so much more than things like Frozen (which I don't mind) or Moana.. it's was pure fun and silliness. Made for kids.. Dreamworks isn't my favourite animation house by far but I do like how they try to embrace the more wacky Bob Clampett kind of sensibility that is entirely missing from everything in the Disney/Pixar line up. Due to the chaotic nature of that kind of method I usually don't like their work but I think it fit perfectly with the source material in this case. It worked in the first The film is ridiculous but the potty humour and wackiness suits the subject matter really well and the boys friendship still comes off as sincere and real even in this context. It'll be tough to top this as a fun summer movie for a Dad and his six year old.

It Comes at Night is great for what it is. What it is, though, may not be what it seems or is advertised to be. The title is probably a bit misleading, and the trailer makes it seem like a supernatural horror film. It is a horror film, I'd say, but more of the survival/psychological type.

A family is holed up in a house in the woods during some kind of global pandemic, and has to decide whether to let someone else stay with them. What transpires from there is real, raw and intense (same filmmaker as the excellent Krisha), and has some very powerful moments, especially as it builds near the end.

It also doesn't explain everything, and when I first got out of the theater I was kind of scratching my head about a few things, but then I realized I was interpreting something a certain way, and that may not have been the case. I'll have to watch it again to see if it works the way I'm thinking now, but assuming so, then it's brilliant.

If you see this, let me know, as I'd like to discuss some aspects of it.

The trailer freaks me out with that black goo stuff

RobertB wrote: Spoilers? You should have seen it by now.

I have a tough time swallowing the whole notion that humanity is being used for power. You're losing a ton of power converting foodstuffs to energy. They should have used the humans as biological computing hardware. The eight hours a day you think you sleep gets devoted to the machine world as a processor.

/not my idea, stolen from a really good SF series.

I just tell myself that they're being used for psychic power too, to generate the consensual illusion that is reality.

Been watching quite a few films this weekend:
Split - well it had been ruined a bit for me here, so I spent the whole film waiting for the quasi-twist, which isn't really that relevant and could have been left out. It was OK, not as good as I hoped it could be and in the end was probably a bit too much on the torture-porn side of things when it would have been better if it was more psychological without the gore.

The Great Wall - it gets bad reviews but it was what I wanted, crazy fighting techniques with a few fun set pieces. I didn't care about the weak plot and bad acting, as it was just like watching a B movie from the 70s or 80s, and I love that style so much. I probably enjoyed this one the most even though it was the lowest rated of the 4.

Lion - this is a great story, but knowing the basics of it beforehand, there wasn't much to the movie that made me think it was worth watching it for 90 minutes rather than spending 5 minutes just reading the plot. I think the best bit is his youth in India, and once the film moves to Australia it just stagnates until it gets back to India again.

Moana - an ok kids film, not up there with the best like The Lego Movie or Big Hero 6, but definitely nowhere near the terrible ones like Cars 2. I may forget that I have seen this in 6 months time.

Went to see Wonder Woman at the weekend. Very good, although perhaps not quite up to the critical hype it's enjoying. Really liked the way it made most of the origin story interesting and fun rather than the plodding exposition of most first-in-franchise films. The action scenes were well paced and well spaced, with decent character stuff in between: was particularly impressed by the re-creation of no-man's land. And it's pretty smart for a superhero flick, touching on some interesting issues.

Gadot and Pine were both great, but a some of the supporting cast were mediocre at best. David Thewlis, who's normally a shoe-in for a great performance, seemed wooden and unconvincing. And what was the whole thing with the "team" that they took into France with them? A Scotsman and Arab and an American Indian, none of whom added anything to the film at all: I can't ever remember their character's names. There was some odd thing with the sharpshooter not being able to shoot that looked like it was going to become a sub-plot and then didn't. Their entire roles could have been cut and it would have improved the film for being marginally shorter.

The best thing, though, was being able to take my daughters to see a film that celebrated a female hero with absolutely no concessions at all. She was the boss, the whole way through. Beautiful without being sexualised, kind without being vulnerable, strong without being hard. It bought a tear to my eye that I could take my girls to see something so positive for their gender. Wonder Woman won't bring down the patriarchy. But some of the girls that go to see it might.