I think I saw
The Matrix in theaters when it first came out. I sort of thought so at the time, and am now convinced years later, that it was one of those rare products that is culturally popular, and justifiably should be culturally popular. Even if you thought the movie was lame, you have to admit the bullet time filming was revolutionary and no one had done anything like that before. And even if you thought the bullet time filming was lame, you’ve got to at least admit that since
The Matrix came out in 1999, the use of bullet time filming, or similar post-modern filming techniques, has grown exponentially.
The Matrix is an action movie that can be enjoyed even by people that don’t really like action movies. It’s like what Mastadon is to metal. Along with the groundbreaking cinematography and kung fu action sequences,
The Matrix had an exceedingly well developed backstory. Science Fiction movies are rarely as thoroughly realized as this. There’s a complex preamble that encompasses a calculated smattering of eastern religion, philosophy, and technology, that surpasses Star Wars, without coming off wooly.
In the future, human beings have been subversively enslaved by sentient robots that harvest people in pods as a bioelectric energy source. An alternative reality has been cultivated by these robots to control the minds of the humans in order to keep them in their submissive state of inertia. This alternative reality is a computer programmed cyber world (like the Sims) that all people are involuntarily locked into at birth. The name of this cyber world program is “The Matrix.”
Therefore, the essential dilemma presented in
The Matrix is The Matrix. People aren’t actually living their lives and are plugged into this alterna-reality while their bodies are fed off of like livestock. The protagonist of the story, Neo, is the One who’s objective is to defeat the robots in their cyber world and restore humanity to true reality. Neo completes ½ this objective in
The Matrix when he ascends to the level of supreme Oneness and defeats the primary bodily manifestation of The Matrix: Agent Smith.
If
The Matrix was the only movie ever made about The Matrix, it would be presumed by viewers that Neo goes on to liberate the rest of humanity after defeating Smith in battle. However, after the success of
The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers decided to extend the series into
The Matrix Reloaded and
The Matrix Revolution.
In
The Matrix Reloaded we discover that there is still a long way to go before the objective goal of the first film (human liberation from The Matrix) can be accomplished. There’s still an army of machinery set on defeating the Neo-led human uprising against their robot overlords. This alone would have made for an ideal plotline for the trilogy: humanity’s overcoming of their technological oppressors. That’s essentially where
The Matrix Reloaded begins, and where you think the trilogy’s going to end, but the story becomes muddled in the third film,
The Matrix Revolutions, when we learn that Agent Smith has evolved into a rogue virus that threatens both humanity and the machines. Initially, I thought this would just be the C or maybe B subplot to the A plot (human liberation from The Matrix), but in the final act of the final film, the Agent Smith virus subplot becomes the main plot, that the story ultimately concludes when Neo, rather than striking the death knell to his mechanical tormentors, strikes a truce with them to focus on eliminating the Agent Smith virus threat.
This is extremely frustrating, because the principal predicament established in the first act of the first film is never resolved. The Neo/machine truce allows for the robots to presumably continue to enslave humanity in their façade cocoons indefinitely. Eight/ninths of the movie is focused on the struggle between humans and machines, but in the last hour, a new struggle materializes and quickly resolved, and the filmmakers play it off like that resolution was the one we’d all been waiting for.
Look, it’s science-FICTION. That means the plot of
The Matrix could’ve been about anything. Anything. But the primary constraining condition is that it needs to be a story, i.e. a beginning, middle, end. You could’ve gone Pulp Fiction and shown the beginning, middle, and end out of lineal order. But you still MUST have the beginning, the middle, and the end somewhere in the movie to fulfill the story requirement. The Wachowski brothers failed this fundamental prerequisite by totally changing direction shortly after the middle part, leaving the viewer sorely unsatisfied. THUMBS DOWN.
We made french fries
And Isa's "Beer-Battered Tofu" which coincidentally was taken from a Christmas present I got for Ashley.
The beer used in the batter (and then later to accompany the meal) was Wolaver's organic Brown Ale.
I visited the Otter Creek Brewery where Wolaver's is made last semester. It was a splendid brewery visit and I left with a mix n' match sixer. All of which were great. I like Wolaver's and I liked this Brown Ale for two reasons: (1) It's from Vermont, and when in Rome...; and (2) As a vegan, I, without seeking it out, come into contact with a lot of organic products. I suppose marketers presume the vegan consumer is the same as the organic consumer. That's fine with me. I'll take organic if they got it, but I'm really just at the health food store/co-op/farmer's market for the vegan goods. The one gripe I would lob at organic products, if I was pressed to do so, would be that organic products seldomly are comfortable with just being conventional products that just happen to be organic. You'll often find ingredients in organic products that you wouldn't find in conventional products like flaxseed, or spelt, or nutritional yeast, or brown rice. I know as a vegan, I'm viewed as just another hippie. I'm not. But it's like explaining to a 50-year old that you're not gutter punk, or death punk, you're hardcore. Hippies, health nuts, tree huggers, vegans, and raw foodist all sort of get lumped together. What I like about Wolaver's is that they don't try to appeal to all of these people. I imagine their organic beer is just as unhealthy for you as Budweiser, maybe even worse. They're not trying to re-invent the beer wheel. I think they're just old-fashioned brew enthusiasts that simply want to make organic versions of the beer they already love. Their Brown Ale didn't blow my mind. It was just really good. A really familiar traditional English ale, that probably tastes a lot like the English ale brewed by the English farmers that inhabited this part of New England a century ago. Both versions just happen to be organic.
