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Theaters enter season of blockbuster 'Almighty'
Although the biggest may be yet to come, Neo and Bruce have struck gold in box office figures
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, June 12, 2003
God (Morgan Freeman) and Bruce Nolan (Jim Carey) contemplate the meaning of life and the responsibilities that come with having celestial powers atop God�s earth-based headquaters. Carey�s role in Bruce Almighty is not his first attempt at combining comedy and drama.
Councillor Haman (Anthony Zerbe) and Neo (Keanu Reeves) contimplate their next move in the war against the machines. Reeves will appear in the highly anticipated Matrix Revolutions, the third film in the trilogy due in theaters November. The film series has pushed Reeves to the top of the list of in-demand actors in Hollywood.
Zee (Nona Gaye) and Link (Harold Perrineau) dance at a Zion celebration. After hopping around small time films Gaye and Perrineau hit the big time in The Matrix: Reloaded.
Nolan (Carey) and his �celestially enhanced� girlfriend, Grace, played by Jennifer Aniston, watch the news.
I am a total migraine train wreck staring at the potentially infinite white space of an empty Word document. In a digital age, writer's block is modified by the accessibility of infinity. A simple wordless document is potentially a thousand-mile stretch of virgin parchment, a bottomless pit of 1s and 0s. It's summer. I'm in St. Cloud and I'm about to extrapolate the summer blockbuster but first I'm serving a mind-numbing sentence in agonizing oblivion. In simpler words: I'm stuck.
It's not just me, a fellow critic tells me in a cellphone conversation I have while laboring in the library coffee shop after hours. He said other writers are experiencing the same thing. As I listen to him, black helicopters hover on my blank computer screen alongside black pots of coffee. On that note he told me that if I want to improve my standard of living I should buy better coffee, it worked for him. I contemplated this for a long time.
In a downtown coffee shop, a few hours later I'm in the same situation. Empty page, closed mind. What I need is summer incarnate.
I need to see the beginning of summer in all its bright Rockwell-esque grandeur. I need high schoolers stampeding from muggy 60s-style locker bays, casting books on the floor, papers fluttering in the air.
I need Alice Cooper blasting through the P.A., "Schools out Forever!" I need kids jacking open fire hydrants and playing slip and slide in the streets. I need stickball in sandlots. I need something to bring my mind to the proper place to begin this piece. So I consult the list of notable imagery I've made during my weeklong summer stay in St. Cloud.
1) Plymouth Reliant, late-80s, burgundy, sputters to a dead stop in front of me on Fifth Avenue. After a brief pause, engine turns over, car sputters off.
2) St. Cloud Superman back from his sabbatical, standing outside Caribou Coffee sporting sunglasses, trademark shirt, cape and American Flag. When cars honk he nods or offers a slight from-the-hip wave, a smug grin on his face exuding the pride of a local celebrity. Just doing my job, man.
And my favorite
3) A sad, unwarranted dance floor grope I was unfortunate enough to witness at a bar last week. Both parties expressionless, not even a reaction from the victim. Just business as usual, folks.
And now ladies and Gentleman, what you have all been waiting for, that brilliant crossover from this vignette to the summer blockbuster film:
That disgusting casual grope is, in it's essence, "The Matrix: Reloaded." I'm kidding.
But seriously now, let's talk about the Matrix.
THE MATRIX: RELOADED
Nearly as anticipated as the end of the school year, and only slightly more disappointing is the second installment of The Matrix series, a film that purports to carry off where the first film departed, yet really heads in a different direction. Call it The Matrix: Remarketed.
Neo, after flying up through the top of the frame in the final moments of The Matrix, has quietly set himself down somewhere in the real world. Aware of his God-like powers in the matrix, but for some reason still clueless on how to stop the machines and free the world from slavery, Neo has a problem. With all of the momentum from his film closing speech, now gone, Neo adopts the act of the bashful savior. Neo sulks, questioning his powers and his role in the rebellion, while letting Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) be his spokesperson. Any beauty rest our hero can wrestle from his insomnia is ruined by bad dreams revealing Trinity's (Carrie Ann-Moss) death. But wait...there's more.
Like all sequels, Reloaded has new characters, plot lines and complications. But from the sheer bulk of these additions, it appears the Wachowski brothers thought they were making The Matrix squared. As the scope of the film widens, the original's spirit is stretched thinner and thinner and eventually becomes something else entirely. Adding pebbles to a fishbowl can only improve aesthetics so much, at some point it's no longer a fishbowl, it's a bowl of rocks.
As my revised title, "The Matrix: Remarketed," suggests, this painful conversion from a successful sci-fi film to a franchise film badly reeks of fiscal motivation. This overfed amalgamation can only breed more action figures, more product tie-ins, and of course, another movie.
It sends me back to simpler times. The original Matrix exploded into theatres at about the same time George Lucas's Episode One was blowing its hype and pissing everyone off. It gave us a pale green world of mind-bending choreography, and hope for the sci-fi genre.
It was the Matrix, but it was a simpler Matrix - think of it as high school pre-calculus in the age of the graphing calculator Matrix. It was the small story of an insomniac cyberpunk, pedaling software to rave-crazy tweakers who discovered the rabbit hole leading to the truth about humanity. And for all the bullet dodging, wire-fu and mind expansion, it had a single prominent computer generated image: the camera sweeping away from an endless expanse of metal towers housing billions of pink fetal pouches, infested with clusters of black siphons. This one image is hard, if not impossible to shake and more effective than a whole film of Industrial Light and Magic's best work.
"Reloaded" has traded that image for what could pass for, well, Industrial Light and Magic's best work.
The computer-rendered city sanctuary of Zion is an over conventionalized eyesore, that during the films middle lull, just won't go away. Like any sequel, it can only get bigger. During a scene where Neo blabbers on in a plastic conversation about the symbiotic relationship between man and machine with Zion elder Councilor Hamann (Anthony Zerbe), Hamann interrupts with "Have you ever been to the engineering floor? It's truly amazing there." Translated this line really means. "Have you ever been to the engineering floor we've got some great special effects - er - I mean machines. (cough) Take that George Lucas, (cough) eat my shorts Peter Jackson."
The Wachowski brothers have adopted Lucas's weakness, draping fancy backdrops behind boring two-bit space-action-suspense-genre writing. Except the writing isn't exactly 2 bit. I'd give it about 8 bits for extensive philo-banter blasting from Cartesian philosophy to Gnosticism to who knows what. Where the Matrix gave you a full ninety minutes to stare at your hands and wonder "Am I in a vat somewhere? Am I in the Matrix?" Reloaded rapid fires lecture after lecture at a pace that feels like reading Cliff Notes off of freeway billboards at 90 miles an hour. And after taking some aspirin I pondered whether there was a strategy underlying. Could the sheer speed be a defensive tactic?
Is this cram session a form of bullet dodging? It could be a way to keep all questions until the end of class, to discourage active mapping of each postulate and corollary, a campaign of intellectual Shock and Awe. But when class is over, the instructor dives suddenly out the back window, leaving every puzzled member of the audience with a tentative hand in the air as the credits begin to roll.
And the Wachowski brothers know that only film critics take notes during movies.
Maybe Reloaded's furious metaphysical wire-fu is a stand in for plot? Could it be the age-old action strategy of glossing over plot holes with car chases, exploding heads and witty banter?
At any rate, the film's high speed Socratic method doesn't make up for it's excessive use of generic plot devices. The film milks a poorly developed love triangle, the dilemma between one's obligation to all of humanity and to his loved one and a weak struggle between the believer and the cynic. Sure, these themes exist in all movies, and Reloaded shouldn't be condemned for simply using them. The question is, did it have to use ALL of them?
With this ample load of intellectual banter, Reloaded isn't just an action movie, but if any movie should've been just an action movie Reloaded, by it�s title and by it's status as a sequel to a decent movie that in a perfect would wouldn't be made anyhow, should've been just an action movie.
Seriously what is implied by the title Reloaded? The only thing I can think of is taking the action scenes in Reloaded and playing them over and over, using scene reference and excising all the ungodly melodrama between them. Here is where the film is unlike anything by Lucas or Jackson.
The fight scenes exude a human grace, without any human restrictions flowing from blow to blow, each predetermined strike landing as it does in it's exact moment.
Choreographer Woo-ping Yen shows us the beauty in watching the impossible, accomplished effortlessly as Neo fights 50 clones of Agent Smith in waves of blurring action as the camera follows with the same precision as any blow landed. It's this visual excellence that makes the film stand up as an improvement to the original, if only in one way.
BRUCE ALMIGHTY
Bruce Almighty is this year's first big one man show, a film that asks the audience, "What would you do if you were God?" No, wait...it doesn't ask that. It really asks, "What would a down on his luck television reporter do if he could become God?" Wrong again. By this time everyone knows what this movie is really asking, "What would Jim Carey do if he was God?" (And you can already imagine someone sitting in a theater somewhere saying, "Oh man this is going to be sweet.")
Carey is thrust yet again into the role of the asshole with the heart of gold, but now the heart is much heavier and the ass is less talkative. Bruce Nolan (Carey) is the loveable lighter-side-of-the-news reporter who everyone treats as a novelty. But Nolan yearns to cover the hard news and his frustration over not getting there drives him into unemployment and atheism. By cursing God's name and asking him for a sign, Carey receives one. God (Morgan Freeman) summons Nolan and tells him, if you think it's so easy being God, you try it. So Jim Carey becomes God and a comedy is born.
For Mr. Carey's sake, I think one more revision should be made to earlier question. The most accurate description of the premise (and very likely the one uttered between studio execs long before the project took shape) for Bruce Almighty would read, "What would happen if Ace Ventura became God?" To get the older, more serious Carey back into his shtick, the film employs what could've been the cast of an intervention held for Carey after word got out that he was going to be in "The Majestic". Ace Ventura director/writer Tom Shadyac and Ace Ventura 2 writer Steve Oedekerk help Carey to come around to his old self along with David Letterman writer Mark O'Keefe and Saturday Night Live writer Steve Koran.
The collaboration results in a custom fit for Carey. In fact, it really is a film about Carey. It's the story of a funnyman who wants to be serious, but realizes his place is to be funny, and the world is better for it. Poor Mr. Carey.
Although Carey is back to his old game, no doubt answering a lot of prayers and sending others on a trip to the video store for Ace Ventura, it doesn't quite feel the same. Carey's act comes with the tenderness of a man playing with his son, even when he's using his Heavenly powers to make unneeded cosmetic enhancements on his live-in girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston). It's that pull in his punch and weak, warm smile on his face that holds Bruce Almighty back from reaching the high point of even "Liar Liar". Carey also plays too deeply into the film's handful of serious moments (but I bet Jim feels better about his $20 million paycheck because of it).
However, at the time this goes to print, the real paychecks will not have been written yet. Hollywood is ready for it's after school special: the expendable budgets of boys and girls nationwide. "Bruce Almighty" and "The Matrix: Reloaded" served only as the primer, as the appetizer. Forthcoming movies like "The Hulk," "Terminator 3" and "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" will provide the real character study into the mind of the summer blockbuster. If caffeine headaches permit, maybe I will dissect the summer movie entity, understand it and deconstruct it. Or maybe I'll just be another person stuck in the ticket line, addicted to the spectacle and staying in theaters, throughout the season's best weather.
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