Chris May

I just went to download the song "Mad World", which is featured in a really cool commerical for Gears of War.

When I went to download it, I found that the song, along with a remix, were part of the Donnie Darko sound track.

Donnie Darko was one of those movies that almost no one saw, and somehow I ended up renting it, and it was fantastic.

I guess I am really attracted to movies like Darko.  The Butterfly Effect was another movie that the critics, and most people I guess, didn't like, but I also throught it was really cool.

Both feature people who are experiencing things that shouldn't be happening...  I guess you could throw the Matrix movies in with this group too, but they were really popular.

Another one like these is The Forgotten, where a Mother wakes up and finds that no one can remember that she had a child at one point.  She questions her own sanity, as does Darko and so does the Aston Kutcher character in Butterfly.

The Mothman Prophecies is also a pretty similar film, although, not quite as good. 

But all of these movies kept me very interested, and really left a creepy feeling after they were over.

 

I just finished watching Over the Years and Through The Woods which I first blogged about here.

It was pretty cool!  If you like Queens of the Stone Age, then you should really get it.

The performances reminded me of the one thing that they do live that I don't like, and that is take an adlib section too far.  It's like, oh cool, normally this part only goes on 4 times but they are doing it more, ok, thats 12, 16, ...  ok 24 times ... ok... this is getting stupid, I lost track of the count, are they ever going to jump back into the song?

But the DVD is pretty cool.  There are some cool bonus footage of a bunch of the songs I really like with their old bass player that they don't play live anymore, which sucks.  I think they were a lot better w/ him in 2003 than w/o.  But whatever.

I found this other CD by them that I might end up getting called The Desert Sessions. 

Cool stuff.

I need to remeber to order this.

As I'm sure you are aware... I had been predicting the flop that is now called Gigli for some before the movie trailers even came out.

Gigli, now in its 3rd week, has dropped to 63rd at the box office, taking in less money than than an IMAX film that is only showing at 3 theaters on the entire planet.

I was saying this months ago, before anything with this movie came out.

It seemed so clear to me.

Take two "superstars" that can't act, and that people really *don't* like, put them in a movie together, and then force feed the public daily reports about their love affair and pending marriage. It was clear from day 1 that this movie was doomed.

The people have spoken, the Internet Movie Database currently lists Gigli as THE WORST MOVIE IN THE HISTORY OF FILMS.

I told everyone that I could that the movie "Gigli" was going to suck like crazy, and NO ONE was going to go see it. This was even before any previews for the movie were available.

Was I right?

'I was shocked," says "Good Morning America'''s Joel Siegel.

"It's horrible," moans Roger Friedman of Foxnews.com. "The worst movie ever made."

As payment for "making" Kathleen "see" (sleep through would be more accurate) the new Matrix movie, I told her I would let her pick out a movie at Blockbuster that she wanted to see.

Her selection was Far From Heaven. As this movie received an 88/100 at MetaCritic I figured it would be ok. Also, Ebert gave it a 100 (4 stars), and I have come to find that my taste in movies usually is very closly related to Eberts. What I mean is, if most critics hate a movie, but he really likes it, I usually end up liking it too, and vice versa.

So much for that. This is going to be the worst movie I will see this year, I am sure. It was SOOOO boring, I was trying to escape during the movie as Kathleen would dose off, but she kept waking up to catch me. I guess from an artistic point of view, or if viewed as a piece on the culture of racism and homophobia, it was really good, with it's weird camera angles, and it's black/gay hating characters. But in terms of watching the movie, it couldn't have been worse. I didn't care about any of the characters at all, and I thought the acting by Moore, who was nominated for Best Actress I believe, was terrible. Her character was so fake. How hard is it to act fake? Whatever.

Maybe "real" movie critics would say I'm an idiot, but if you want to see a movie that will make you wish you hadn't, this is the one.

I saw The Matrix Reloaded again last night. On opening night I saw it with my brother, so last night I went with my wife, who couldn't stay awake for any of it. I must have had to wake her up, literally 20 times. We went to a 6:35 showing for christ's sake! I don't understand it.

Anyway, I was hoping that, after seeing it the first time, I would pick up some more on what is really going on.

There is a really interesting story on the Matrix, and its relation to different philosophies here, worth a read.

I have to say that, all the people that said that some scenes were too long, who I disagreed with at first, might have been on to something. I was definitely longing for a fast foward button during a few scenes (the dance scene for sure).

Unfortuntaly, I didn't really leave the theater with any extra insight. I noticed that the Merovingian frequently says something to Neo about his "predecessors". I didn't pick up on that the first time.

I also tried to pay extra attention to Neo's conversation with The Architect.

A couple of things...

If 99% of people accept The Matrix, and only 1% reject it, then if there are 10 Billion people on earth, wouldn't there be 1% of 10B = 100M people in Zion? Or maybe because they keep killing them off every now and then, they keep Zion to under 250k. What is with Smith copying himself over everyone? In the next Matrix, will everyone on earth be Smith? Just an idea.

Someone suggested that the Merovingian, was one of the earlier "Ones", and I noticed that his wife tells Neo "he used to be like you." But I don't think that is the case.

The Oracle is guarded by that chinese guy, who says he protects "what matters most". That seemed odd, so I wonder if we will discover some more meaning to that later.

The architect should want Neo to take the door back to the core, so that the Matrix can be updated, so that the process can start over, but he seems pleased that Neo's love for Trinity is going to force him into making the other decision. Why? According to him, that would send a shock wave through the matrix killing everyone. First, why would that happen? If Neo doesn't submit to the "restarting" of the process, why does the Matrix go offline? Doesn't make any sense. Second, if Neo's decision means that the machines are going to lose their most important power source, then why does the Architect seem to push Neo in that direction? Again it doesn't make sense.

The architect tells Neo that "Trinity is going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it", but Neo does in fact save Trinity, so what does that mean?

If Smith is against the machines as much as he is against Neo, then why did he sabotage the humans attack in the real work?

Is the "real" world just another level of the Matrix? When Neo realizes he has powers in the "real" world, that was my first though.

I really hope that the finaly move, which is going to be out in a few months (great idea by the way), doesn't kill this momentum with a stupid ending, like it turns out that Neo is the only human alive, or that the whole thing was some kind of experiment by some scientists on Neo, or whatever. Basically if the final movie ends with a "gotcha", or one of those "it's over but it's not really over" endings, then I will be seriously pissed.