The Wachowskis – 2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!!

BOUND (1996)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: The Wachowskis
CAST: Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano, Christopher Meloni
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 89% Certified Fresh
Everyone’s a Critic Category: “Watch an Independent Film”

PLOT: A petty thief and a mobster’s girlfriend get romantically involved and plan to steal $2 million from the mobster, but, as with all simple plans, complications arise.

My girlfriend and I have found ourselves walking out of a lot of movies over the last 5 or 6 years talking animatedly with each other about how we would have done something differently. For example: At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, we came up with an amazing lost opportunity to have Black Widow be one of the characters who got “blipped.” Then, when Bruce Banner discovers her fate, his shock triggers him to finally “hulk out” again, but out of grief instead of anger. Now THAT would have been a tearjerker.

By contrast, Bound is one of those letter-perfect thrillers where the plot has been worked out so neatly, so thoroughly, and everything proceeds with such perfect logic, that it’s impossible to see how anything in the movie could have happened in any other way. I can see no way how this thriller shot on a shoestring with such exquisite creativity could have been improved by a bigger budget or bigger stars. It recalls the heyday of film noir – Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Pickup on South Street – but it also feels fresh and modern, due in no small part to the fact that the protagonist couple is composed of two women.

But before I get to the nuts and bolts of the movie, let’s talk about that same-sex plot device for a second. Corky (Gina Gershon) is a petty thief fresh out of the slammer. Violet (Jennifer Tilly) is arm candy for a mid-level Mafia hood named Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). I can vaguely remember when this movie came out in the mid-‘90s, and this lesbian relationship caused a minor sensation. It even included – gasp! – a sex scene. An explicit sex scene! Not pornographic, mind you, but nothing more or less explicit than the coitus featured in other notorious sexy potboiler/thrillers, like say, Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction or Jagged Edge.

One of the things that makes Bound so cool is that the whole lesbian angle, even though it’s a huge part of the plot, is never really…what’s the word I’m looking for…exploited in any kind of way that might now be described as progressive or, dare I say, woke. There are no melodramatic scenes showing anyone getting fired because they’re gay, or being bullied because she’s gay. Nor is the movie making any kind of statement that that kind of ugly behavior doesn’t exist. To me, Bound is simply saying, “Here is a great thriller, and the two romantic leads are women. We are showing people that it’s possible for a movie to be a superior genre film with two clearly gay characters as the leads. Let’s get on with it.” If the main couple had been a man and a woman, the overall effect of the movie might have been diminished to a degree, but the underlying story is so good, the movie might still have worked.

Then again, it probably wouldn’t have the notoriety that turned it into a cult classic, so what do I know.

Anyway, the movie. In a tale as old as noir itself, Corky and Violet hatch a scheme to steal $2 million from Caesar. How that plan leads to an astonishingly tense scene with a trio of corpses in a bathtub and two policemen in the living room standing on a blood-soaked carpet is only one of the delicious little joys on display in this film.

Take the little details. The $2 million in question gets unexpectedly splattered with some unlucky bastard’s blood. Caesar is forced to literally launder the money, then steam-dry every single $100 bill with an iron and hang them up throughout the apartment like the most expensive load of laundry in history, resulting in one of the coolest, most surreal shots in any neo-noir I’ve ever seen:

Then there are the wicked little visual innuendos scattered throughout the movie as subtle – and sometimes not-so-subtle – references to Corky and Violet’s sexual preferences. At one point, Corky visits a lesbian bar called…wait for it…The Watering Hole. That’s one of the not-so-subtle jokes, but one which I did not “get” until maybe the third or fourth time watching the movie. Sometimes I am not…smart. Or how Corky is unscrewing the pipe in the U-bend under a sink to retrieve an earring. As Violet, wearing a tight skirt, stands provocatively close to Corky while she works, we get a close-up of Corky’s hands as water from the sink suddenly splashes onto them. Or note the shot that slowly pulls out from inside the barrel of a revolver. (You know, maybe NONE of these visual jokes are subtle…I might just have been really dumb when I first saw the movie…)

And the dialogue…if there were a way for me to phoneticize a chef’s kiss in prose, I would. (<mwah>…that’ll have to do.) It puts a modern spin on the best of the old film-noir tough guy talk, that heightened kind of realism that really only exists in the movies. Take this bit when Corky is talking to Violet, formulating her plan to steal the money from Caesar:

“For me, stealing’s always been a lot like sex. Two people who want the same thing: they get in a room, they talk about it. They start to plan. It’s kind of like flirting. It’s kind of like…foreplay, ‘cause the more they talk about it, the wetter they get. The only difference is, I can f*** someone I’ve just met. But to steal? I need to know someone like I know myself.”

Nobody actually talks like that, but that’s one of the greatest passages in any crime movie, ever. I could cite example after example, but I don’t want to ruin any surprises.

Another beautiful example of how well this screenplay was constructed is how it plays with your expectations, especially if you’re a fan of the classic noir genre. In classic noir, a hero or heroine comes up with a plan, only to be betrayed by random chance or their own hubris. Sometimes someone who seemed trustworthy at first reveals themselves to be nothing but a conniving opportunist. Bound addresses that concept head-on in a conversation between Corky and Violet, where they talk about trust and ask each other very specific questions. “How do I know you won’t just run once you get the money?” “How do I know you didn’t just plan this whole thing to get me to do your dirty work for you?” In classic noir, these kinds of questions usually lead to mistrust, betrayal, and a very non-Hollywood ending, and so the Wachowskis almost seem to be telegraphing what’s going to ultimately happen. But believe me: nothing in this movie telegraphs anything. Not even those snatches of conversation we hear in Corky’s head at the very top of the film when we first discover her bound and gagged in a closet.

And even THAT’S not really giving anything away…that’s how inventive this screenplay is.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the sound design of Bound. Watching it the first time around, it’s subtle enough to be unnoticeable. Watch it again, though, and really listen, and you can hear the unmistakable way the Wachowskis manipulate sound effects to create a unique atmosphere in the same way they would go on to do in the Matrix trilogy. There are many instances where, for example, in the two or three seconds before a phone rings, you’ll hear the ring in a crescendo, quiet at first, then peaking at the exact second the phone rings. It’s a little hard to describe in a review but trust me. Watch it at least once while paying attention to the sound, and you’ll hear a lot of things that sound exactly like The Matrix.

(Which might mean that Bound actually takes place in the Matrix universe…? …nope, not pulling on that thread.)

There’s quite a bit more I could say about Bound, but I think I would start spoiling some of its real surprises if I did. Put it this way: I recently compiled a list of my 100 favorite movies of all time, as a “challenge” from one of my fellow cinemaniacs. Bound wound up at #73, ahead of movies like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Dark Knight, and Finding Nemo. I don’t know if that cuts any ice if you haven’t seen Bound yet, but if you haven’t, it’s my sincerest hope that I have encouraged you to seek out this movie on Amazon or Ebay and make it part of your collection. You won’t regret it.

QUESTIONS FROM EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

Why did you choose this particular film?
One, I’m not sure a lot of people realize this was an independent film (released through Gramercy Pictures, now defunct), and two, it’s a movie that doesn’t get mentioned enough, or at all, when folks list their favorite crime dramas. This movie deserves way more recognition than it currently gets, in my opinion.

Best line or memorable quote:
“You know what the difference is between you and me, Violet?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”

THE MATRIX FRANCHISE

By Marc S. Sanders

Miguel and I went to see the The Matrix Resurrections last night and honestly, when I woke up this morning, I had forgotten I’d even seen it. That’s because, other than the original Matrix film, the subsequent chapters are about as special as cheap food court Chinese food. When you get home from the mall, you recall what you may have window shopped, but you never reflect on what you had for lunch; well maybe your gut does later on, and that’s certainly not doing you any favors.

When The Wachowskis introduced the world to The Matrix way back in 1999, it was one of the biggest surprises in films. No one saw its uniqueness coming. Everyone was focused on the over hyped resurgence of Star Wars, or a kid who desecrated a pie, or a hand held video film that was seemingly terrorizing audiences. Yet The Matrix arguably may have had the best longevity that year. It seemed like a combo sci fi/super hero picture with the players looking ultra-cool in designer sunglasses and leather night club outfits. Guns and jiu jitsu flew off the screen, but it was done in a new visual kind of way. Bruce Lee would have likely been a part of this picture had he been alive. When someone took a kick to the face, it was edited super cool looking sloooooowwww motion. Bullet time became a thing with projectiles warping through the space between characters and these players, especially Keanu Reeves as the messianic Neo and Carrie Anne Moss as Trinity, would bend and twist and twirl acrobatically (again in slow motion style) to dodge machine gun fire and endless shrapnel. The look of the film remains absolutely superb. Nothing (other than maybe the film’s sequels) has duplicated what was accomplished here.

As well, the original Matrix stands apart from the other three because it actually told a story and developed its protagonist and his mentor (Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus) into fleshed out characters. It also went so far as to describe what the Matrix is, and what the world outside of that realm represents. Like all humans, Neo, also known as Thomas Anderson, was actually under the control of a machine-like community designed to sustain a world known as the Matrix, and…well…that’s just bad! There was solid storytelling here with setting and character development that was later accompanied by well-choregraphed action and pulse pounding club music. When the film ended, audiences couldn’t wait for more and Warner Bros happily greenlit two more films that were shot back-to-back. Only the train derailed from there.

Gearing up for the 2021 installment, directed by Lana Wachowski, I watched the first three films again. Other than the first film, I had forgotten much of what occurred in the 2^nd (The Matrix Reloaded) and 3^rd (The Matrix Revolutions) pictures. I realize now that I only forgot what really wasn’t there. Substance! Of the two films, Reloaded is likely better, thanks especially to an outstanding highway car chase involving sci fi effects of the characters bouncing off of big rig trucks, motorcycles and car roofs. A pair of characters dressed in evil white leather with dreadlocks morph in and out of the vehicles and concrete streets as well. The scene comes late in the film and only wakes you up from the meandering ahead of it. Truly, it’s hard to comprehend what the hell is being explained in this second film. The Wachowskis almost would prefer you be impressed with the monosyllabic vocabulary that’s exchanged with each character. Dialogue doesn’t advance the story any further from where the first film left off. All that I gathered was our band of rebels who successfully broke free from the slave-controlled Matrix are regrouping at the promised land of Zion, and the machines (squid like metal robots with countless red light bulbs) are advancing for an attack. Morpheus, Trinity and Neo take it upon themselves to reenter the Matrix (because they look so much cooler there) and do who knows what. Near the end of the film, Neo walks down a long hallway, opens a number of doorways and encounters the one supposedly responsible for the Matrix, an older gentleman known as The Architect. This moment was intended to be a highlight of the film and yet it was anything but. This architect spews out word diarrhea at an alarming rate that only clouds your mind further and further. The guy has a great radio voice and has an antithetic appearance against the heroic looking Neo, but what in the hell are we supposed to do with any of this? What’s the point?

On to Revolutions which begins exactly where Reloaded left off. This is a picture that could have had a running time of thirty minutes at best. The robots are finally attacking Zion. One character who seems like he should be important or necessary to the Matrix storyline saddles up in a robot suit equipped with massive machine guns and The Wachowskis make the poor choice of feeding their audience a good seven or eight minutes of this guy spraying endless amounts of bullets in an upwards direction towards the infinite swarm of octopi robotic armies. His guns never run out of ammo. He just bellows as he continues to fire. Where’s the story here? Where’s the innovation that the first film offered? Also, what goes up, must come down. Shouldn’t some of that ammunition have dropped down in a hail storm eventually? Reader, if I have to ask that last question then you know there’s not much to pay attention to in this film.

The wisest character of the Matrix films, Morpheus, is given very little to say or do in either film. Fishburne stands in the background and let’s everything happen around him. He’s not utilized to explain anything like he was in the first picture. His skill for teaching the audience has been completely diminished. Whatever he had to offer was exhausted following the first picture. With Revolutions, especially, the filmmakers rely on B characters that we’ve never really gotten a chance to know or remember or adore like Yoda or Jabba or even Boba Fett in the films that followed the original Star Wars. In fact, Revolutions seems more concerned with its extras than any other film I can recall. So much so that when a major character from the first film has a death scene, you hardly care for the loss. There wasn’t much to expound on the character after the original film. Revolutions only relies on the war nature of the human armies against the monochrome metallic squid race. Beyond shooting at one another, where’s the conflict? Ms. Pac Man and Frogger have more depth than any of this.

That’s the problem with these films. A discovery was made with the 1999 installment and the filmmakers opted to capitalize on the effects and not the challenge of story.

Furthermore, and this goes back to the original film when I first saw it in theatres, I was always of the mindset that I’d rather live in the Matrix. After all that Morpheus has revealed to me, the Matrix still seems like the better place to reside. The real world consists of living on a dirty, dreary ship and eating slop for food while wearing torn sweaters and having electrical plug orifices running down my spine. Who wants that? A Judas character from the first film turns on his crew by telling the evil Agent Smith that he will bring them Neo as long as in return he doesn’t know that he’s under the control of the Matrix and he can savor the taste of a juicy steak again. Now I’m with this guy. Aren’t The Wachowskis as well, though? More footage and highlights take place in the computer mainframe of the Matrix than outside of it. Thereby, more cool looking action sequences can happen and the cast appears more glamourized. The films want us to fear the horrors of the Matrix on the humans by showing them plugged into wires while drowning in a pod like puddle of KY jelly embryonic ectoplasm. You know what? What I don’t know won’t kill me. So, leave me be. Perhaps the argument would have been more convincing had the environments been reversed. Put the rebels as slave dilemma in the real-world areas and the utopian setting within the Matrix. Then I might buy the problem here.

The newest film, Resurrections, is nothing special and nothing new. It’s rather boring actually. Revolutions was boring too. It only kept me awake because it was two hours of headache inducing noise. With the new 2021 film, apparently a new Matrix has been developed and thus a new Neo and Trinity have been conceived. The antagonist is represented by Neil Patrick Harris and that’s about it. Miguel pondered much, following the picture as to what was going on. That’s not a good sign for a popcorn action flick, and it’s consistent with what was done with the 2^nd and 3^rd films. What the hell is anyone talking about. Once again, dialogue moves to a beat of answering questions with questions. Even the allies speak to one another that way, and if it is not a question, then it is a cliché of some sort. Don’t these people want to help one another? If so, then speak to each other like your four years old and get to the point. The action scenes drone on and on. A goal of the picture is to keep Neo from finding Trinity because if they do, then the Matrix crashes. Okay. That’s simple enough. Yet (spoiler alert), when they do find each other, somehow this new Matrix continues on. Huh?????? The movie just betrayed me, and I don’t like that.

Miguel attempted to conjure up the idea that Lana Wachowski was trying to demonstrate her transition from a man to a woman and this new picture was a representation of that. Could that be true? Maybe, but it never occurs to me while I’m watching the picture. Am I watching The Matrix Resurrections because it’s the newest Wachowski film? No. This isn’t a Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan piece. This is leather and gunfire and sunglasses and noise, all depicted in a green DOS computer hue lens.

The Matrix was always worthy of a sequel; a subsequent follow up that explored imagination and perhaps more background. What has Neo not yet uncovered. Yet, the series as a whole continues to deny those opportunities and simply settles for cool looking visuals that get overly exhausted and tired. No new skills are featured with each passing film. Over the course of the series, the big bang, so to speak, of the first Matrix never reveals itself. Instead, we are mind controlled viewers relegated to depend on overlong dialogue with no point and no where left to explore. We are simply gifted with Neo punching Agent Smith and/or infinite duplicates of Agent Smith with no one getting weakened or wounded or defeated. Look no further than an early fight scene in Reloaded. The scene goes on forever. The editing is amazing. So is the choreography but after four minutes of this, it’s time to show some progress. The Wachowskis limit their imagination to just having Neo fly away. Scenes like this only allow me ample time to exit the theatre for a bathroom break and return having not lost out on any storytelling. My friends, you can find plenty of bathroom breaks in this series of films.

The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections should never have been made. Producer Joel Silver and Warner Bros would argue otherwise though. Their wallets continue to get fatter, but at the cost of controlling moviegoers’ appetite for something more when all they really got was dry rice and overcooked orange chicken from the food court.

CLOUD ATLAS (2012)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, Tom Tykwer
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 66%

PLOT: An exploration of how individual lives impact one another in the past, present, and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

Okay, faithful readers, I hope you’re comfortable.

Cloud Atlas is one of those movies like Baraka that leaves me with the urgent need to tell people how amazing it is. It’s visually spectacular, thought-provoking, and hopelessly optimistic about love and the good side of human nature, even in the face of the worst humanity has to offer.

Based on a critically acclaimed novel by David Mitchell, the movie tells six separate stories, linked by the fact that a core group of actors plays all the principal roles in each story, and by the fact that at least one actor in each story carries a curious birthmark shaped a bit like a comet or a shooting star. Each story is separated from the others by decades or centuries, taking place in the years 1849, 1936, 1973, 2012, 2144, and an apparently post-apocalyptic 2321.

I cannot imagine the lengths to which the filmmakers, and the film editor in particular, went to make this movie work. The film jumps freely from one story to another, forward, back, forward, and back again, somehow maintaining a clean flow and keeping each storyline absolutely clear. Although the stories are unique, the editing keeps the idea of connection alive for nearly three hours. Just based on the editing alone, that makes Cloud Atlas kind of exhilarating to watch, especially when things heat up in the 2144 segment.

Let me see if I can quickly summarize each story, without giving too much away:

1849 – An American lawyer visits property holdings overseas and witnesses the brutal whipping of a slave, who stows away on the lawyer’s ship returning to San Francisco; meanwhile, an unscrupulous doctor has plans to steal the lawyer’s gold en route.
1936 – A struggling composer, Robert Frobisher, is hired as an amanuensis (a fancy word for a music stenographer) to another aging composer, which allows Frobisher to compose his own masterpiece, The Cloud Atlas Sextet. The aging composer demands credit for the piece and threatens to expose Frobisher’s bisexuality, including his deep, unconditional love for a gentleman named Rufus Sixsmith.
1973 – An investigative reporter stumbles onto a conspiracy at a nuclear power plant, thanks to a whistle-blowing report written by none other than Rufus Sixsmith, now in his sixties.
2012 – An author on the run from hooligan creditors takes refuge in what he thinks is a hotel, but is in fact a nursing home, to which he has inadvertently committed himself. He and three other residents plan a daring jailbreak.
2144 – Set in a vastly futuristic New Seoul, a renegade “fabricant” is brought in for questioning by the ruling government known as Unanimity. The fabricant, known only as Sonmi-451, spins a tale of oppression, liberation, and horrific realization as she becomes the voice of a revolution that will ripple across centuries.
2321 – In a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, peaceful Valleysmen live in constant fear of attacks from vicious cannibals, the Kona tribe. They also receive periodic visits from Prescients, a highly advanced society that apparently lives offshore. One day, a Prescient, Meronym, asks a Valleysmen leader to guide her to a remote mountain peak where she hopes to send an SOS signal to off-world colonies.

Confused yet? Don’t be. The editing keeps everything crystal clear.

But that’s just the clinical description of the movie. What catapults Cloud Atlas into the stratosphere is how the fancy editing and visual effects occasionally take a back seat to a really deep philosophical question that leaves me with a sense of awe. It’s really a what-if question, one of the greatest what-if questions of human existence.

What if…death isn’t the end?

I know that countless other movies have asked this question. We all have our own answers and beliefs. I am not suggesting that Cloud Atlas has somehow figured out THE answer to this question, or that the answer it provides somehow trumps your own beliefs. But of all the movies I’ve seen on this topic, Cloud Atlas is the only one that really, genuinely, truly left me in awe of the possibilities it proposes.

I mentioned earlier that key roles are played by the same actors over and over again in each of the stories. While that was initially distracting, I realized that the filmmakers were actually making a genius move. It was nothing more than a simple way of illustrating the concept that a life in one era is echoed in another, decades or centuries later. Heavy makeup is used to indicate how one person’s life as an Asian woman could, in theory, be echoed in the life of a Mexican woman in another era. Or perhaps the life of a British man might be echoed later as a British woman.

And then there’s the question of that recurring birthmark. One key character from each storyline bears a birthmark that resembles a shooting star. So many people (including me the first time around) wanted to attach some kind of conventional story-based meaning to that birthmark. Did it mean these characters were all somehow blood-related? Was it a prophecy of some kind? Something mentioned in the book, perhaps, that had to be left out of the film for pacing reasons, or some such thing? No. It’s just another visual reinforcement of the idea of recurrence, or reincarnation.

And that’s where I get awestruck by the movie. Reincarnation is not a new concept in films, but Cloud Atlas really got under my skin. Imagine. What if…the person you love, your soulmate, the one you’ll love until the day of your death…what if, centuries hence, you’ll meet each other again? Maybe you’ve walked down the street, or been eating in a restaurant, and for a fleeting second you lock eyes with a total stranger across the room, and you think, “I KNOW that person,” but the moment passes and life goes on. What if that happened because you have met in some past life?

Or maybe you go on a date, and it goes phenomenally well, as if you’ve known each other for ages? Well…maybe you have. It’s your destiny to meet and love this person because you’ve already done it before.

I know I’m getting a little woo-woo/touchy-feely here. It’s not a new idea. It’s just that Cloud Atlas presents the idea so well that my breath gets taken away when I think about its implications.

I just have to bring up the stunning visuals again. There’s a scene where the composer, Frobisher, is writing to his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, and there’s a passage where, in his mind, he meets Sixsmith in a china shop. In a wonderfully poetic moment, they start smashing the china in slow motion as Frobisher’s composition plays in the background. Then, just as the music reaches a crescendo, the two of them stop in place, and hundreds of china vases and plates rain down from the ceiling in slow motion, hanging in space, descending slowly to the ground like gigantic snowflakes.

I’m at a loss. I’ve come to the end of whatever I can discuss about this movie without repeating myself endlessly. I want to reiterate that I don’t believe this movie has THE answer to what lies beyond death. But it has a truly lovely hypothesis, one that leaves me awestruck with its implications.

So let me just end with a line from the movie that makes my heart swell every time I hear it.

“I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world…and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed.”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: