It’s such a completely unnecessary reboot. I’m not even sure the movie works today like it did then. It was a really cool movie then. Now? It just looks like some QAnon shit.
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Well for one thing there aren’t any landlines now so that kinda blows a hole in things
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Apologies for the People link but this is a pretty amazing transformation
I’ve got the original Matrix as a borderline 9/10 10/10 movie
I’ve got Matrix Revolutions as a borderline 1/10 2/10 movie
Don’t bring Matrix back please, you fucked it up so hard I try to forget Matrix 2 and 3 exist
I used to describe the series like this:
Matrix 2 was half as good as The Matrix
Matrix 3 was half as good as The Matrix 2
Accurate, right?
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I remember when Reloaded came out I was like well… that was shit but I don’t think it’s unredeemable. Like if the third one brings it home strong it could salvage the trilogy.
Then Revolutions came out and I was like… welp.
Bonus Matrix memory: seeing the original for the first time at a cinema, there was a trailer for The Last Samurai. The start of the trailer is just wide shots of Japanese soldiers, landscapes, you know, nice visual stuff. The audience are into it. Then it cuts to Tom Cruise and probably half the theatre, en masse, lets out this disappointed groan, then everyone cracks up laughing at that.
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Matrix 4 is a weird reboot/sequel but I guess why not if John Wick got 3 movies. The only reboot I care about atm is Dune.
quarter is more accurate than half
The freeway scene is literally all I remember from Matrix 2/3.
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Then all you needed to do was watch the trailer basically.
Finally watched First Man last night, it had been sitting on my DVR for a few months. Definitely worth a watch but not nearly as good as I was expecting. Both Armstrong and especially Buzz Aldrin were portrayed as jerks, essentially
Was greed play by Disney. Sony has a license to make Spider-Man as long as they keep making movies and give marvel (Disney 5% of first gross).
Disney was like “we will pay half the costs for half the profits.” Sony was “lol no.” Spidermen is sony’s Most successful franchise. Disney’s leverage is they can block mcu characters from spidermen movies. Sony’s leverage is “haha we got spidermen bitches”.
Disney’s eventual leverage will be ‘We own Sony’.
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They would probably happily buy Sony’s entertainment business. It’s paying any money at all for the other parts that is probably holding that up.
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Sony’s movie arm has been legit terrible for coming up on 20 years right now. I’m amazed Sony hasn’t just outright sold it off already.
Most of Sony in 2019 is legit terrible to be fair. It’s in the last stage of the corporate lifecycle where some day soon it’s going to get chopped up and sold for parts.
Yeah, but that could be said for almost any studio right now. It’s a scary time in my industry. Not anything like 1999 or 2009 (yet), but the 10 year cycle is for real.
For context, 1999 was when movie studios were freaking out about costs and how they were going to stay relevant (solution=DVD saving them). TV stations (cable, etc.) were trying to pull a huge amount of content in house, and were trying to have editors mix when the documentary/reality explosion happened (this all changed in about 2 years or less of this and created the next boom though with a cannibalization of rates at mid-major post houses).
At the mid-major (might have been considered a major) I was at in 1997, I had a shot at mixing a show that ultimately became ‘iconic’. I was mixing the pilot of another show for the company, and it was running long (the show I was on was intended to be the flagship). We saw that it was about to butt up into the other show, and we contacted the company to see which one was a priority. They were unequivocal that the one I was on was a priority, and that they would come back the following week for the other show. I remember my boss saying, ‘there’s no way we’re doing this show for under $200 an hour’, which was an absolute squeeze at that point. So, he was rooting for it to go away. And it did.
About 7 or 8 months into the run, we had another shot to take it, but they wouldn’t go for the rates again. All the while I’m thinking, oh man, great show I would love to do and $175 per hour or whatever they were wanting was a lot better than $0 for a show that was block booking months at a time. So the squeeze was on and coming, and the companies that weren’t willing to take this volume work went under.
Another aspect is that an evil company in post-production bought nearly every major company to try to set rates, bust unions, and fix wages. It backfired spectacularly leading to the rise of boutique houses and the shuttering of gems like Glen/Glenn Sound. Most companies don’t realize that the talent is what makes a company successful, not the owners. They found that out then.
2009 was basically a perfect storm where there was a national recession and a threatened SAG/AFTRA strike that was boiling over in 2008. This was not that long after the WGA strike caused a massive amount of pain in the industry (to the benefit of Breaking Bad ultimately I guess). Studios were not going to be caught with their guards down this time, and moved all their slates forward from the strike plan to 2008.
2008 was one of my busiest years, and 2009 was absolutely dead for most of it even though the strike didn’t happen (SAG/AFTRA split over it). The business capitalized by turning just about anyone without a full time job into a career freelancer, and that’s been the cycle for the last 10 years. That’s what forced me and several of my clients independent, but what we hoped would happen out of this still hasn’t happened yet coming up on 9 years since I started my business. The idea was that they would be getting top notch talent at a fraction of the price of where we came from. The studios really loved the idea but were too scared to capitalize fully on it, plus all their deals with the major houses practically prevented our rises to their full potential.
I figured it would take something like 3 times as long to get back to where we got inside the company system, but it’s still not there yet (I’ve done work with every major studio except Disney, thanks Disney, and it’s still nowhere near where I want it to be). The additional problem is that our budgets have been squeezed into oblivion, which has just absolutely crushed the people in between companies like mine and the majors (in a way these suffering companies would probably be called mid-majors, but they’re not quite that big). When people that work inside large-ish companies are coming to me with the smallest budgets, because they can’t afford to work with me, that gives you an idea of how bad things are.
What’s the solution to 2019’s ills? Streaming, like I’ve been saying forever, but none of the studios know what they really want to do at this point, and it will probably be at least another 2 years before they shake out what’s going on as each studio releases their own streaming platform. We’re at the highest amount of content ever, and yet it’s still easily the scariest time the industry has seen since I’ve been it because there’s so much uncertainty and budgets are so in the toilet (again, it’s not 2009, or even 1999 levels yet, but I am at least somewhat concerned for some of my clients). I feel like a lot of the studios are trying to get to the refusal point on budget, and then things will re-adjust. It’s just felt like they were at the bottom for about 3 years, and that’s obviously still not the case.
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I Am Mother was just ok. Watchable but nothing great imo.
Got a couple recommendations that might have passed people by. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Don’t ask questions, just watch it. It has Frances McDormand in it. Also Sword of Trust. Not as strong a recommendation as Three Billboards but I liked it. It’s a talky, dry, improv-y comedy featuring a masterclass performance from Marc Maron. Doing the opposite of mailing it in and really knocking it out of the park in a film that didn’t really require that level of craft. It’s a good time.
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Sorry to get political up in here, but I have to unload. American Factory on Netflix is honestly the most horrifying, dystopian thriller I’ve ever seen, and a good part of what scares me are the movie reviews. I get that professional movie reviewers are far removed from manual labor on a factory line, but by god:
Safety does not appear to be high among Fuyao’s priorities. During filming, the company is hit with fines stemming from 11 safety violations. One worker says he has worked factory jobs all his life, including 15 years at GM, and never had a workplace injury. Shortly after beginning work at Fuyao, he was in a walking cast.
[…]
Safety concerns, pay issues, management changes and constant pressure to increase production take a toll on morale. Soon there is a groundswell movement among the workers to unionize. Cao hires a “union avoidance consultant” and says if workers unionize he’ll close the plant.
But despite all this, Cao and management are not made out to be the villains in “American Factory.” Although clearly the sympathies of Bognar and Reichert are with the workers, their film raises many legitimate issues on both sides: How do companies remain competitive in a global economy? Is it worth it to give taxpayer breaks for companies that relocate?
So people are getting straight-up sliced open in these factories (the movie gets unflinchingly graphic, to its credit), but also management isn’t made out to be the villain? Bad folks on all sides, you guys, many legitimate issues.
American Factory is intriguing in that it is both blunt and not, political and not. It seems aware of and diligently willing to avoid the danger of lapsing into stereotypes about East and West—but it also demonstrates Fuyao’s difficulties so plainly that the many fault lines that arise in the film can’t help but fall neatly along those grounds. It is also, to my surprise even the second time I saw it, not a particularly angry film.
“Not a particularly angry film.” Yo, uh, somehow you missed the worker walking around in a cast, dipshit.Or the Chinese worker sorting through broken glass with flimsy gloves. It made me just a tad angry. You can tell by the length of this post.
Here’s another reviewer:
But the results don’t meet that utopian ideal. The culture divide seems insurmountable. To start with, the Chinese workers have no problem working long hours and overtime, while the Americans are used to eight-hour shifts.
Are you absolutely fucking with me? Some of the most wrenching parts in the movie are interviews with the Chinese workers, where they describe their lives and how they haven’t seen their children in a year. I really don’t know how you watched that movie and concluded that the imported Chinese laborers are A-OK with their working conditions. “The Chinaman has no problem working overtime” is some straight-up 19th-centruy racism in a 2019 movie review.
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