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It’s Saturday, December 25, 2021
Welcome to the 1,307th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Matrix Resurrections
A great review of the film by Tucker Johnson just below in the Short Essay setion.
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Commentary
If ever there was a ‘Nuclear Family” day, Christmas Day is it.
Keeping it simple makes everything easier, including the cooking.
Spend all day together playing games, eating, watching television, going sledding.
After a blizzard of family events, including Christmas Eve, I will be alone on Christmas.
My day will begin in lovely fashion: I will take my daily winter three-mile walk to Newbury St for an elegant and robust breakfast at the Street Bar at Newbury. After that I will write. There will be lots of welcome holiday interruptions, some TV, a nap or two, a bit of eating, but mostly, I will write.
Happy Christmas and I hope it was, for some of you, a Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa! And if none of the above apply, Don’t Worry. Be Happy.
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Reading and Writing
Yippee! Finished the rewrite of Part Four. Later today I’ll enjoy incorporating it into the rest of the manuscript. Leaving me only to write the Epilogue. January 15 is my goal to complete that. At that point I’ll have a date for the completion of the manuscript in sight.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
~Dr. Seuss
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This from my favorite movie reviewer: Tucker J:
I went to the movies late last night for the premiere and simply can’t stop thinking about it!
Blog meister responds: Well, let’s hear it, my friend. (See below in Short Essay.)
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Thursday night I had a chef’s dinner: the ribs from a rib roast.
Delicious.
Looks good enough to eat.
I cooked that.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Rib Roast from Dom’s Kitchen
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Short Essay*
written by Tucker Johnson
What more can we wring out of the idea of the blockbuster? At the best of times, it offers mindless escapism to the masses. Its characters are defined quickly and are easy to swallow allowing the actors portraying them to swing for the fences and match the size of their performance to the dizzying visual landscapes around them. Bombast and awe on all fronts. These days it’s hard to pick an ideal blockbuster out of the lineup of contemporary Hollywood output. Studios are drawn to weak craft, characters with little interior dimension, and an understanding of representation that reduces, gender, race, and sexuality to items on a focus group questionnaire rather than world or story building elements. This is the cinematic house that The Matrix Resurrections has come home to, over 20 years after it first introduced itself to us in 1999. It’s a house filled with sequels and reboots and constantly updated intellectual properly. A house in which imagination has been whittled into what can most easily be bought and sold. And yet at the helm of this new Matrix project is Lana Wachowski, pushing back against the tired form and offering audiences something fresh, curious, and beautiful.
Walking a tightrope between a meta-reckoning with the legacy of the first three Matrix films and a sincere blooming of a whole new story that feels boldly romantic, Lana Wachowski’s first solo feature is triumphant. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of the Matrix trilogy – particularly the original – on American culture. The term “red pill” has been coopted first as a means to connect with similarly maligned people on the fringes of the internet and more recently, sadly, it has become a tool of the most recent flood of conspiracy theorists. The Matrix also set a precedent that couldn’t be denied forcing action films of its time to desperately reach in the direction of the Wachowski sister’s cyberpunk-inflected aesthetic, which itself pulled from a wild array of influences. The world has changed dramatically since Neo first bent backwards to dodge a hail of gunfire while the camera swirled around him and the bullets alike, and yet The Matrix Resurrections arrives to save us all and does so while definitively proving that we very much need more movies like this. Audiences have spent the last 22 years attempting to slot the franchise into different categories of interpretation, but Resurrections argues against these black and white definitions to show instead that beauty exists and flourishes between such extremes.
Playing with ideas of memory and nostalgia could have led Resurrections to have a self-satisfied, anemic quality. Instead, it feels emotionally expansive and intellectually sly. Much of the first act works to actively critique nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, and how it is exploited by those in control, whether machine overlords or Hollywood studios. “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Morpheus says. Resurrections is messy and imperfect, too, often tabling easily digestible plotting in favor of an ambitious eccentricity, a reminder that bombastic storytelling is best translated by artists who are willing to fail. From the revelatory production and set design to the warmth of the cinematography by John Toll and Daniele Massaccesi to the updated action scenes, Lana Wachowski proves how powerful a blockbuster can be in the hands of those with vision and ambition.
Early in the film, inside a slick high-rise office overlooking the nearly too-perfect San Francisco skyline, a gaggle of video game developers argue about what the Matrix is an allegory for. Is it trans rights and politics? Is it capitalist exploitation? The scene is rhythmically edited, as the developers volley forth opinion after opinion. It’s meant to be hilarious, and it is. Among the developers is Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who in this new world is a famous video-game designer who created a game called The Matrix to much acclaim. He’s a suicide survivor, having once leapt from a building on a clear sunny day believing he could fly. When his business partner (Jonathan Groff) says he must design a new Matrix game despite his vowing not to, his reality starts to slip. Is he losing his mind or is the Matrix he supposedly created something more than a game?
Wachowski and co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon play out this anxiety with a consistent intrusion of clips from the previous films, a strategy that ranges from smirk inducing recognition to tear jerking-ly sublime. Like in the scene where Thomas Anderson slips from this therapist’s (Neil Patrick Harris) grasp and realizes he is indeed the Neo of his video game. His memory of meeting Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne then, Abdul-Mateen II now) is projected onto a ripped projector screen that acts as a doorway, figuratively and literally. Freed from a prison once again, Neo learns it has been 60 years since he and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) traveled to the machine city, sacrificing their lives for their cause at the end of The Matrix Revolutions. He must determine: Can he free Trinity, too, or is she happy in this false new world where she is a married mother of two with a penchant for motorcycles? Neo never truly believed in himself as the One, but Trinity did. How can he be what everyone believes him to be without her?
Resurrections might be the 4th entry in a franchise laden with supplemental material ranging from short films to video games, but it manages to chart a stunningly divergent path, philosophically and cinematically. The first trilogy were committed to a green-dominated, cool toned color palette but Resurrections is wonderfully warm and blisteringly colorful. The fight choreography, from John Wick’s Chad Stahelski (Reeves’s Matrix stunt double, who plays Trinity’s husband in the new film), is more chaotic and rough-hewn; bodies crash into one another haphazardly, lacking the grace and fluidity Yuen Woo-ping brought to the original movies. The costume design led by Lindsay Pugh brings back gothic sensibilities with restraint, forgoing fetish wear but remaining committed to the epic-ness of flowing silhouettes. The sets are littered once again with mirrors that glisten with thematic resonance. The film commits to granting audiences joy by providing both a pure visual feast but also an earnestness not often seen in films today. Much like the original trilogy Resurrections brims with a core belief in hope and community building.
That joy emanates through the cast. Harris’s naturally haughty, self-satisfied miasma works perfectly. Groff is cheeky and charismatic as a rebooted version of Agent Smith, his fight scene with Neo in an abandoned building being one of the highlights of the film. Decked in finely tailored suits the color of marigolds and deep ocean waters, Abdul-Mateen II slinks and struts with the grace of a true movie star, winking at Morpheus’s love of theatrics. Jessica Henwick exudes hope, grounding the unexpected coalition that pins the movie together. The new actors, even when they’re playing old characters, are so much more than energetic doppelgängers of the Matrix heroes and villains who came before them, absorbing well the aesthetic differences between this reboot and the trilogy.
But for all its strengths — retreading and remixing the franchise while charting a bold new course — The Matrix Resurrections would fail if it wasn’t for the chemistry of Reeves and Moss. The former has by now solidified his place as a major movie and action star several times over, seamlessly moving from tickled bewilderment to sincere fear to absolute control on screen. Watching Moss, with her cutting gaze and sharp physicality, I can’t help but mourn for the career she deserved. Together, there is an inherent optimism — about the human spirit, about the will to overcome a harrowing force — that flits open when they share a scene. It’s along the arc of Neo and Trinity’s romance that Resurrections separates itself from its recent blockbuster brethren. Behind a meta-narrative storytelling approach and all that stylistic gleam, The Matrix Resurrections is ultimately a love story — a hymn to the community necessary for that romance to blossom into resistance. Wachowski is bold enough to argue that in a world, where boundaries break and the limits of the human body are rejected, choosing love is still a radical decision.
Tucker Johnson
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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It’s Friday, December 24, 2021
Welcome to the 1,306th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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Lead Picture*
Irish Civil War secret destination
National Army troops on board a ship bound for a secret destination during the Irish Civil War NLI Ref: HOG79
National Library of Ireland on The Commons - Secret Destination
Permission details
National Library of Ireland on The Commons @ Flickr Commons
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Commentary
Omicron is here to stay for long enough that we must adapt to it.
Make intelligent decisions.
Avoid crowded places and when you can’t, be very careful.
Above all, get vaccinated.
Masks. Thinking the Omicron is spreading so rapidly masks may not be as effective as against other viruses. But I notice that most people are wearing less expensive masks that do not offer the same protection as N95 masks. Perhaps a campaign that illustrates why we should use these would be helpful. Of course, maybe supplies of these masks are low and public health authorities might be afraid that an increased demand might negatively impact the supply of N95 to the medical profession. Until we’re told otherwise, switch to the more expensive N95 masks. They are more effective and are one of the steps we can take to protect ourselves.
I’m hoping that Joe Manchin won a victory against Biden that will stand him in good stead in his re-election.
I’m hoping that this is one shoe dropping in a two-shoe strategy that sees the second shoe drop when Manchin votes for the bill next year.
Hoping.
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Reading and Writing
Working hard on my manuscript.
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Chuckles and Thoughts
Life is either a daring adventure or
nothing at all.
~Helen Keller
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
Jim Pasto and I spent a bunch of time talking about taking a manuscript from our laptops to bookstores.
It was a great conversation.
Blog meister responds: I hope both of us are successful.
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Dinner/Food/Recipes
Tuesday night I shared a lima bean casserole with Jim Pasto.
We also had a bit of roasted duck.
All delicious.
We both dove in for seconds.
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Pictures with Captions from our community**
Howard’s mushroom ragout
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Short Essay*
The Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 – 24 May 1923) was a conflict that followed the Irish War of Independence and accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State, an entity independent from the United Kingdom but within the British Empire.
The civil war was waged between two opposing groups, the pro-treaty Provisional Government and the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA), over the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The forces of the Provisional Government (which became the Free State in December 1922) supported the Treaty, while the anti-treaty opposition saw it as a betrayal of the Irish Republic (which had been proclaimed during the Easter Rising). Many of those who fought on both sides in the conflict had been members of the IRA during the War of Independence.
The Civil War was won by the pro-treaty Free State forces, who benefited from substantial quantities of weapons provided by the British Government. The conflict may have claimed more lives than the War of Independence that preceded it, and left Irish society divided and embittered for generations. Today, two of the main political parties in the Republic of Ireland, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are direct descendants of the opposing sides of the war.
* The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily or exclusively on Wikipedia to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Pictures with Captions from our community are photos sent in by our blog followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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