Has it really been twenty years since The Wachowskis released, more like unleashed actually, “The Matrix” to astonished audiences worldwide? The effect that this movie had was damn-near cathartic for, not just audiences, but producers, writers, directors, choreographers all around the industry. I wrote this about “The Matrix” for Awards Daily in article dated 05.30.16:
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There will, no doubt, be a lot of heated discussions in regards to the Cannes Film Festival, which officially begins on May 14th. These write-ups will come mostly from American media hounds in the film industry, most of which seem to have a very narrow-minded way of looking at cinema.
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Brian Raftery‘s “Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen” is making the rounds at bookstores, it came out two days ago. The film media have been hyping it up, including Vulture, which ran an entire chapter from the book on “Eyes Wide Shut.”
And so, the inevitable question one must ask is this: Are we heavily overhyping 1999?
Being John Malkovich, Election, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, The Limey, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia, The Straight Story, Eyes Wide Shut, Three Kings, The Insider, The Blair Witch Project, Bringing Out the Dead, Boy’s Don’t Cry, Go, The Iron Giant, Toy Story 2, South Park, Office Space, The Talented Mr. Ripley, American Pie, Bowfinger, Dick, 10 Things I Hate About You, Arlington Road, Man on the Moon, The Dreamlife of Angels, Romance, Payback.
So, no, we are not overhyping 1999. It truly is the bees knees. Best movie year ever? Probably not. But best movie year of the last two decades, no doubt about it. Is there any other year that comes remotely close? Maybe 2007 or 2011.
You will read people raving about the importance of a movie like “Rafiki“ even existing and I can understand and agree with that. This is an openly pro-LGBTQ movie financed in a country that is a vehemently homophobic and, for that, a movie such as this one should no doubt exist. However, the meandering plot and contrived romance at the heart of this film does the film’s outer importance a major disservice.
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As I researched the films that will be splattered on-screen nationwide between late April and August, I found major hope, a real grab-bag of potential big-studio treats. Surprising? Yes, especially considering that I have been critical of the summer movie season the last few years, at least ever since superhero movies changed the way studios greenlit their films. However, this year, there’s actually hope for artistic breakthroughs.
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The Cannes Film Festival will be unveiling their lineup tomorrow morning (EST). It feels like Christmas eve for us down here at WoR. The boxes of gifts will be unwrapped tomorrow and we will, hopefully, be very excited by what will be selected. I do not expect the likes of Aster, Zhao, Reichardt, Eggers and Schultz making it into official competition but I would love to see these directors appear in the sidebars like Un Certain Regard.
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The critical and commercial thud that “Hellboy” received from critics and audiences alike isn’t anything new for Milla Jovovich, she’s the queen of duds; Off the top of my head I can think of “Joan of Arc,” “Ultraviolent” and all of those “Resident Evil” movies as prime examples of past, and quite infamous, Jovovich bombs.
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Jar Jar Binks became the laughingstock of not just many "Star Wars" fans, but the cinematic world as well in the summer of 1999. Binks is considered to be the most hated character in "Star Wars" history. Not even those damn Ewoks can dethrone the Gungan from "The Phantom Menace". In fact, the hatred directed at the character had such a negative effect on its portrayer, actor Ahmed Best, that he contemplated suicide, “I faced a media backlash that really made me feel like my life was over” the actor said in a recently released video interview, adding, “There was just so much hate and anger and venom directed at me, and I took it personally…I put a lot of me into that work, and if you talk to any artist who really cares about their work, you’re talking about them,” Best says.
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A new interview with Terry Gilliam [via the WSJ} basically expounds upon something we’ve been tackling here at WoR: Political correctness is killing comedy. I wrote an article last year, "The 2010s: A Decade When Comedy Lost Its Mojo, which laid the ground for a potential comedic doomsday, which we're quite clearly headed at, if the "era of outrage" continues:.
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The just-released Cannes ’19 poster has the late Agnes Varda shooting her first film, La Pointe Courte, sometime in the summer of ’54. Well done, Cannes.
Actress Bibi Andersson (Persona, The Seventh Seal) has died at the age of 83. Muse of late director Ingmar Bergman, for close to 4 decades, one cannot fathom the immensity of this loss. She represented a free-spirited hope and innocence that cannot be matched by any of today's actresses.
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I’m not anti-abortion, I believe a woman has the right to choose. It’s not something that needs to even be debated — However, I respect that the other side’s point of view is indeed based on religious and spiritual beliefs, I wouldn’t call myself an atheist but I do believe there is something out there greater than us that cannot be explained by a mere scripture written some thousands of years ago. And so, a society that follows the morals the bible gives us isn’t all that bad, because it presents us values that have become the go-to rules for a just and sustaining society. With the exception of a few bogus commandments, which I will not get into here, there is a moral and ethical code from the people that follow it that makes them good, earnest and slightly naive individuals — I don’t mind living in a society filled with these kinds of people.
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There were rumors, months ago, that George Lucas had been consulted for Episode 9 to help make it a satisfying conclusion for all fans, including the ones that were turned off by “The Last Jedi,” and there were many of those.
That, my friends, is no longer a rumor. Director JJ Abrams has confirmed [via IGN] that he spoke to Lucas during the creative process and hinting that it was Lucas who came up with the idea to have Palpatine return in “The Rise of Skywalker.” Abrams claims that Lucas was the person who came up with the idea to put Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, but given that Abrams brought up Lucas while discussing the fallen Emperor, it may well have been him.
“This movie had a very, very specific challenge, which was to take eight films and give an ending to three trilogies, and so we had to look at, what is the bigger story? We had conversations amongst ourselves, we met with George Lucas before writing the script,” Abrams revealed. “These were things that were in real, not debate, but looking at the vastness of the story and trying to figure out, what is the way to conclude this? But it has to work on its own as a movie, it has to be its own thing, it has to be surprising and funny and you have to understand it.”
