New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In my third column I discovered to my sadness that Scream 2 did not hold up as glowingly as my memory said otherwise. The thrill of seeing it on opening night and being in a sold-out auditorium with a group of friends and a crowd eager to be scared silly had imparted a warm sunrise glow around the whole experience. (Despite that, and feeling burned by Scream 3, I am excited for next year’s Scream 4.)

This time around I reverse course and extend an apology to The Matrix Reloaded, a film I had seen only once prior, and have tended to reduce to these epithetical talking points: “pseudo-intellectual”; “needlessly complicated “; “underground eve-of-the-apocalypse techno-rave” (what were The Wachowski Brothers smoking!); and “over-hyped freeway chase sequence.” Coincidentally, those were some of the same critical opinions I carried into the theater with me. Time has mellowed me out on all those points, and a few others to boot (but not so fast Matrix Revolutions, I still find you crushingly disappointing)

So what’s my excuse? Where was my head the first time around? Well, 2003 was a modern-day annus horribilis for me on a personal level. As an indicator of (or is it symptom of?) such, I did not see any movies from mid-February until early August. None. No movies in the theater, on DVD, through pay-per-view or On Demand. Nothing made-for-cable, made-for-television, or filmed by some friends and shot on digital. I didn’t give up on media entirely. After all, I had the final episodes of Buffy to think about.

This wasn’t the first time I had done this, either. There was a brief spell in early 1998 where I mostly sat out movie going - Firestorm, The Replacement Killers, and City of Angels excepted. I am often fond of quoting the cliché, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.” This doesn’t mean I always follow my own advice. Considered from the other side of the coin, once you do something you never thought you were capable of, simply because it was something that “could be done,” you have taken the red pill as it were, and there is no going back for the blue.

I am striving for some philosophical underpinnings here, as a way of acknowledging my shift in opinion on the second Matrix film, but I fear I am simply handing out vagaries. To couch this in less mystic terms, when The Matrix came out, I had yet to be married. In fact, I wasn’t quite along to the status of engaged. Between the May 2003 release of The Matrix Reloaded and the November 2003 release of The Matrix Revolutions, I became divorced.

I didn’t truly get back into the groove of watching films until September (when I watched The Matrix Reloaded and Terminator 3 back to back at a second-run theater). The first film I viewed after five-and-a-half-months of celluloid silence was American Wedding and I recall it to be a singularly disorienting experience for several reasons. For someone who loved the first two slices of Pie, this installment felt lackluster. On top of this, I truly had trouble focusing on the screen because the act of sitting in a theater and watching something being projected seemed weird. My brain couldn’t maintain and sustain the illusion.

The primary reason for disorientation had something to do with the fact that I was watching the third feature in the American Pie saga with a married woman who was not my wife. The surreality of that situation specifically and the preceding weeks in general was not simply compounded, but made exponential later that evening when our affair was uncovered by her husband. There’s a lot more that could be said about that, and it most likely will be down the road as I don’t consider anything in my life off limits for discussion here, but I find I am drifting ever further away from my reconsideration of Reloaded in an attempt to too specifically set the scene.

Continued:       1       2       3       4