Whoo hoo! A whole day without blogging. Or, more correctly, so what? Other things happen in life, things outside of this small screen, this virtual world. Today I did my bills : i went through them, sorted them, totted them up. There are so many : each individually small, together a mountain. I have set up direct debits for all my bills : I don't even see the money, the vast majority of my money disappears before I even see it, at least 80% of it.

In the meantime, a small pile of discarded letters and envelopes sits on my living room floor. On screen, Neo fights several thousand Agent Smiths in Matrix Rehashed, though I can't for the life of me imagine why there's this fight scene. The more I watch movies the more it becomes apparent to me that some films are far too long, and often, too often, utterly illogical. For example, the infamous "Burly Man" sequence in Matrix Reloaded where there's a gazillion agents. Why is that scene even in the movie? What purpose does it serve? Is just another fight scene to give people a cheap thrill, and overall, it cheapens the movie. Some movies it's almost as if there's a clockwatch saying "every 27 minutes get fighting".

The purpose is to tell a story : for it to work it must be logical. To have extraneous unnecessary scenes that don't tell the story? That's what a "Directors Cut DVD" is for, no matter how flashy it is. So why then, is there the Burly Man sequence? Lowest Common Denominator then, I presume. I can think of no other reason that makes any sense.

Of course, the action scenes are fab, if you like CGI and semi A-Team style fight scenes. But it's lazily storytelling : the embarassing "rave" scene, for example. Handy that there's a FFWD button on the DVD player. Whilst watching the underrated Terminator 3 yesterday I also thought, in a wild moment, hang on, why's this happen? When T-X is walking towards Claire Stiles, whyl, when it has adopted the guise of her fiance, why then would it change to the female Terminatrix body, when all it had to do was walk right up to her, hug herm and kill her? What a crap Terminator. I'd be so much better. Same with the scene where The Governator fights with his conflicting programming after being re-programmed by the T-X. Thanks God for the skip button. It's crap, crap, crap. The reprogramming is a good idea : the rest is bullshit.

Oh, We're on the Matrix Revoltions coatcheck shootout : a pointless remix of the scene at the end of the first Matrix movie. For all it's pretensi0ojns to be intelelctual super sci-fi, these films would do a whole let better without the sprinklings of utterly superflous violence you can practically set your watch by.

Modern films. All suface, no feeling. All special effects, no thinking. This is the "2 Fast 2 Furious" generation. Generation X-tinct more like.

- posted by Mark @ 1:29 pm