The Matrix (M)
Writer/Director: Andy and Larry Wachowski
Bug rating: Two and a half out of five.
NOW let me see if I've got this Matrix business right.
Imagine if the existence we think we, ahh, exist in doesn't really,
ahh, exist at all.
That everything we see, feel and do is created for us by an artificial intelligence
that has long since taken us over for its own sinister ends.
An evil so evil that they even farm our foetuses - like cows in a herringbone
- to provide the very power to keep us subordinate to their will.
Spooky, right?
Governed by computer chips sneakily inserted into our brains, we think we
are eking out a pleasant enough day-to-day existence. It could be Brisbane.
A big country town somewhere. Maybe even Melbourne except during winter
and January-February.
But in reality, we barely exist in a hostile world of fume-filled subterranean
caverns. There is danger at every turn, nothing makes sense, strangers are
hell bent on taking us down and we face a seemingly hopeless battle for
survival against an alien force we can't even begin to understand. You guessed
it. Sydney.
That, as far as I can make out, is what the The Matrix is all about.
Getting through Martin Place unaccosted by a beggar - or for that matter
a sinister government agent that looks like Hugo Weaving with sunnies but
who sounds and acts like nothing on earth. That sort of thing. Finding a
seat on the 5.46 to Cronulla. A dream run on City Rail? Or nightmare reality?
That's the essence of The Matrix as it exists - or seems to exist.
Confused? Maybe this will help. In the movie of the same name, Morpheus,
Laurence Fishburne's character, further explains the concept to a bewildered
Neo (Keanu Reeves).
"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What
if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the
difference between the dream world and the real world?"
"I dreamt one night I went into Town Hall station busting for a leak
and found the toilets weren't closed for cleaning," Neo replies.
"Now that is dreaming!" Morpheus replies. "No. Something
a little more believable. Like finding Platform Six not closed for track
maintenance on the city circle line when you urgently need to get home quick."
"Whoa," says Neo, starting to get a handle on the whole Matrix
concept and sounding a lot like a character from Bill and Ted's Bogus
Journey in the process. "What, you dream Platform 6 is always open
and it stays that way? So you can get home on time instead of having to
run up to Platform 1 for a train that might leave 12 minutes later than
scheduled."
"Got it in one."
"Whoa. But no one's ever going to believe that!"
"We know. That's why we're using truckloads of special effects and
even an old-fashioned extended shoot 'em out to keep the patrons interested.
That, in essence, is what The Matrix is all about."
"I dreamed the other day that I could one day become a really great
actor," says Neo.
"You're dreaming!" replies Morpheus.
- Don Gordon-Brown
The Craic (M)
Director: Ted Emery
Bug rating: Two out of five.
This bloke called Jim Owen addressed the patrons before a preview
screening of The Craic in Brisbane the other day.
Told a good joke, too, about this fella who goes to his local doctor
and says: "Doc, I've got this strawberry stuck up my arse." And
the doctor says: "I've got some cream for that."
Sad to say, that was about the funniest moment on the night. The Craic,
about a couple of Irish lads who come Down Under, stars someone called Jimeoin
who must be related to Jim Owen because he looks much the same, only much
bigger.
Fergus (Jimeoin) and Wesley (Alan McKee) flee the Emerald Isle after an
SAS raid nets a bully boy, Barry, the bane of their lives.
Life in Bondi is going swimmingly until immigration officials get on their
trail. They end up on the Gold Coast, pursued not only by immigration but
ASIO spymeisters and British SAS operative Barry (Colin Hay, looking rather
bewildered about what he'd got himself into) who have been conned by the
bully boy into believing our two barely-understandable heroes are top-shelf
IRA.
Not without its share of forced chuckles, The Craic can't shake itself
free of a tired old storyline that hasn't been used for, gosh, probably
weeks. Strangers trying to survive in a strange land. How fresh is that!
The Craic resorts to being a road movie in the far outback to find
some its humour, with farmer Bud Tingwell providing some relief to the proceedings
with a neat cameo of loud swearing and shotgun blasts.
The Craic ends so abruptly and so unsatisfactorily that it is clear
Jimeoin found himself on a road to nowhere.
But he only has himself to blame; he wrote the script that took him there.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Analysis This (M)
Director: Harold Ramis
Bug rating: Four out of five.
SLAP a set of tits on me, doc, and I'm a woman!
This refreshingly-anti-politically correct line is how mobster Paul
Vitti (Robert De Niro) desribes his on-going emotional crisis to reluctant
psychiatrist Ben Sobol (Billy Crystal) in one of the better movies of the
past 12 months.
Vitti's other great line, when Sobol asks why he resorts to prostitutes
if he loves his wife, is one of shocked indignation: his wife kisses his
children with that mouth!
Those two lines tickled The Bug's feelers, if for no other
reason than to hear the gasps of disapproval from female patrons when the
penny finally drops – some seconds later because as you know the little
womenfolk can be a mite slow – about how naughty/inappropriate such
lines are in the late and nervous 90s.
Vitti might be a relic from the pre-Greer era, but you can sympathise with
him. He's got a big mob meeting coming up and it's going to prove fatal
if his rivals find out that he's gone all soft like a sheila: he's sobbing
uncontrollably at the drop of a hat over mushy TV commercials; he's cleaning
up after himself; he's remembering anniversaries; he's got spare tissues
in his pocket in case of an emergency; I mean, for Christ's sake, he can
even find the jar of whatever he's looking for as soon as he opens the fridge!
Can the reluctant Sobol restore Vitti's machismo before a rival mobster's
machinegun makes a slight mental disorder rather meaningless.
Luckily, director Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day) has experience at
knowing what to do with that Hollywood rarity – a script that's reasonably
novel, well-paced and fresh – after all, he's written a few, and De
Niro, Crystal and a good supporting staff don't let him down.
De Niro has fun taking the piss out of all his gangster roles of the past;
can anyone play a jittery Jewish professional better than Crystal?; Joseph
Vitereill is jowlishly thuggish as Jelly, Vitti's's trusted bodyguard; and
Lisa Kudrow seems to be know not to make too much of her small role as Sobol's
fiancee as Vitti and Sobol exchange insults centre stage.
Analysis This is one of those rare United States comedy offerings
of the past year: it's worthy of its admission price; it's just as enjoyable
at a second viewing; and not all the funny lines are in the trailer.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Baby Geniuses (G)
Director: Bob Clark
Bug rating: One out of five.
Know how some movies have No 1 box office hit written all over them?
Well, Baby Geniuses is much the same, only it's a No 2. A whole
heap of number twos.
The concept behind Baby Geniuses - apart from giving Kathleen Turner
and Christopher Lloyd what were obviously much-needed pay packets - is that
babies – for a wee while at least – have a grasp not only of the
meaning of life but quantum physics as well.
Courtesy of Babe-like animatronics, these Baby Geniuses get to say
all sorts of grown-up things which their sinister manipulators, Dr Elena
Kinder (Turner) and her equally wicked associate Heep ( Lloyd) hear only
as "goo goo" and "gar gar".
Expect to see both Turner and Lloyd any time now using those aforementioned
paycheques to visit video stores throughout the land trying to buy up all
stocks of this shocker before too many people see it.
Given a choice of seeing this movie again or burying my face deep into a
recently dumped-in diaper, the latter would be the preferred option.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Lolita (R)
Director: Adrian Lyne
Bug rating: three out of five
REMEMBER how a section of the gay community rightly took exception
to the way Philadelphia portrayed the life of a gay man dying of
AIDS?
While Tom Hanks' character might have suffered victimisation at work,
he had a solid support base of friends and, most importantly, supporting
and loving parents. Winning his case was additional compensation for discovering
that each and every one of his punched freckles was riddled with the deadly
virus.
Gosh, the way Tom played it, having AIDS was almost an astute career choice.
You got to change a black man's homophobia; listened to some really nice
opera along the way, stuck it right up some arrogant legal eagles and did
a lot of bonding with those closest to you.
Death made you a hero, just about. As the gay community pointed out, a lot
of AIDS victims at the time of Philadelphia's release weren't exactly
over-burdened with family support - and upper-class family support at that
- as they faced a long illness and a death about as unpleasant as any death
can be. And while all this is going on, being hated when you're not even
a lawyer couldn't have been much fun at all.
In the same way, people with strong views about paedophilia are going to
get very mixed signals from the latest remake of Vladimir Nabokov's 1958
book, Lolita.
Paedophilia is rightly condemned for the damage it inflicts on its innocent
and unwitting young victims, but what do we make of a depiction of this
crime where the perpertrator is almost more childlike than the victim and,
on the surface at least, suffers far more from their illegal liaison.
In director Adrian Lyne's beautifully-photographed version of carnal capers
in post World War 2 rural America, the dirty old man Humbert Humbert is
played by that dirty old English actor Jeremy Irons, and too bloody well,
too, in this reviewer's humble opinion. His victim is 12-year-old Lolita,
played by Dominique Swain, who I think outside reel life is actually 14.
Personally, I hope we'll be seeing much more of Swain, but not for two years,
naturally.
Humbert, his character twisted by a puppy love gone tragically wrong when
he was only 13, feels something stirring deep inside him when he first meets
Lolita when he becomes a boarder at her mother, Charlotte's (Melanie Griffith)
New England house.
Poor Professor Humbert! All he wants to do is sit in his room and plan his
French literature lectures for the nearby university. All Charlotte and
Lolita want to do, respectively but far from respectfully, is flash their
bossom at him and run their naked feet up his groin and play tootsies with
his tadger.
To be fair to the dirty old bugger, Humbert seems to know that Lolita, tempting
as she is to personify and maybe resolve an ancient heartbreak, is off-limits.
It's only after marriage to Charlotte and certain unforseen events that
Humbert finds himself in circumstances where he is no longer able to resist
Lolita's advances. He is, after all, only inhuman.
While not making excuses for Humbert letting his smaller brain take control,
it must be stressed that this Lolita is neither coy, immature, nor inexperienced.
While Lyne puts her in poneytails and makes her chew gum to emphasise her
youth, Swain's Lolita in some ways makes Christina Ricci look like a noviciate
at her first morning prayers.
Indeed, as our mis-matched lovers take to the backroads of a long-lost America,
Lolita seems to gain strength from the power gained over a man she knows
is doing wrong, while Humbert slowly unravels through a mixture of guilt
and jealousy.
The fate which awaits both would not be a typical text-book case of the
damage paedophila inflicts in our society.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Message in a Bottle (M)
Director: Luis Mandoki
Bug rating: Two out of five.
Director Luis Mandoki couldn't believe his luck when he secured the
rights to film Ebb Tide, the international best-seller depicting
three hours of the ebb tide at a sleepy village on the US east coast.
It was the first three hours of the outgoing tide too - not the last
half where the shallower water in estuaries and bays gives the impression
of things rushing by - so Mandoki knew he'd have to be on the top of his
game to keep his audience interested as the tide unfolded.
While this particular project is still in pre-production, Mandoki has gotten
in some excellent practice by shooting Message in a Bottle.
- Don Gordon-Brown
Hurly Burly (R)
Director: Anthony Drazan
Bug rating: One out of five.
For mine, Hurly Burly would easily take the Bugsie for worst movie
of the year.
Celebrated stage play or not, Hurly Burly is painful cinema;
a constant bombardment of the senses courtesy of a crude, meaingless talkfest
from a group of unpleasant, self-centred Hollywood-type arseholes.
Maybe some people like watching Sean Penn take drugs for two hours and then
ranting and sobbing endlessly through his paranoia and self-pity. Lots of
luck.
Hurly Burly gets one bug because at the very least we get to see
Meg Ryan wallowing in that sort of tart role she likes to do every other
year if for no other reason than to prove her forte is lightweight romantic
comedy.
Meg is supposed to be a hapless low-life hooker yet delivers lines like:
"You know, it your manner of speech is in anyway a reflection of what
goes on inside your head, you're lucky you can tie your shoes."
Unbelievable!
- Don Gordon-Brown
