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Monday, May 19, 2003

“It looks like an animal in there...”
-eXistenZ

i’m sitting watching some Cronenberg and i’m flashing back to when the first reviews of eXistenZ came out and i remember one mag saying “doomed to be overshadowed by the other two virtual reality movies this month, The Matrix and The 13th Floor...” and then i started thinking about how my friend steve would make fun of my love for that film (because i dragged him, and my girlfriend at the time, to Ann Arbor to see it and then ended up trying to defend it all the way home) and how he would make this mongoloid voice and mock the last line of the movie: “are we still in the game?”

so then it hits me, (“like a diamond bullet” as Col. Kurtz would say): that bullshit in Matrix Redux where Ted held up his hand and the robot sentinels collapsed and exploded? that part when Smith comes into “the real world” and is running around Zion in another body? the two parts of the movie where logic and rules that have already been established in the first movie are tossed out like they just ran out of shit to do? maybe they do serve a purpose. i’m thinking those scenes are in there because Zion and all those potato-sack clad dullards who thought they were unplugged are “still in the game.” they thinks it’s reality and they’re actually just in another layer of the Matrix. that’s why Smith can jump on in, because it’s just another level. maybe for the last one they'll show what reality really looks like.
i hope it’s a lot more interesting than Zion.

you know, i’m thinking the Matrix brothers watched 13th Floor and eXistenZ to check out the competition all those years ago and something stuck. just like the shit they ripped from the comic book The Invisibles. eXistenZ's multi game world may not the most original idea (especially from Cronenberg who gave us the first beta-tape-playing-stomach-vagina and "TV-Hand-Cock" (a shout out to my friend nick who coined that phrase during Videodrome) but still it’s nice to know that my favorite crazy Canadian is still having an impact. even if he doesn’t get credit for it. he probably wouldn't want credit anyway. but i do yo!

so what do i win? if i solved this shit do i get a cookie from that stupid Oracle bitch? how about a shiny new copy of Tron instead? the place where all these bad ideas really started.

greatest car chases of all time coming soon...i got the perfect quote for that day.

p.s. you know why eXistenZ is great? i should have said this to steve on the car ride back from Ann Arbor all those years ago: it's great because they dissect something in it. any movie with an autopsy is twice as good as a movie without one. The Thing (remake), Sleepy Hollow, Cat People (remake), Blade 2, Way of the Gun (wait, sorry she was giving birth), The Thing (i say it again because it felt like there was ten fucking autopsys in there), Tremors (sort of, they stop to study it a couple times and it has the same effect), Prophecy, Day of the Dead. all perfect. when you start taking apart something up there in the movie, it’s as if someone finally turned the light on behind the screen. suddenly you’re much more interested. an autopsy is kind of like a bloody internal narration. literally getting inside the characters. imagine an autopsy in, say, Hope Floats. see what i’m saying? makes it a whole different movie! Maybe that's where my problems with the Matrix movies come from. Matrix + No Autopsy = ZZZ. hey, here's an autopsy that you may have missed: Nightmare Before Christmas. remember where?

notice how "autopsy" has the word "auto" in it? that's no accident. tommorrow. cars. the list. working on it all night.

::: david - 10:46 PM [+] :::
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