Recently Watched: Reloaded Edition

I’ve watched for the first time and rewatched some genuine classic films this month. I watched the original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Marnie (1964), two Hitchcocks I hadn’t seen, both excellent. I checked out The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s “remake” (of the same source material), Sorcerer (1977), both of which stand up mightily today. I rewatched Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), one of those movies for which the critically-minded viewer must invent new categories of superlatives.

I also finished watching my collection of BBS productions, with The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), a pretty good Bob Rafelson picture, and the excoriating gut-punch of Hearts and Minds, one of the all-time great documentaries, as infuriating and sobering a film as I’ve ever seen. And I revisited some youthful favorites, the two original Ghostbusters films and Teen Wolf (1985; a really, really terrible movie), as well as a couple of mediocre Marvel movies, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and Iron Man 3 (2013). The former is mostly worthwhile at this point for reminding viewers about Quicksilver, for his interesting connection to WandaVision.

I picked up a 4K Matrix trilogy set recently, believing that surely these are movies that deserve the upgrade. The Matrix (1999) is much as I remember it, but less so. It doesn’t really hold up that well—more an issue of production design than the still very cool ideas the Wachowski’s were playing with. The look of the movie is incredibly tired at this point, though the action is still pretty thrilling. Then, yesterday, I rewatched The Matrix Reloaded (2003). The line about that movie now is it’s “not that good, except for the action scenes,” and that’s nominally true—except I would say it’s “fucking terrible, and even many of the action scenes are not great.” The ideas continue to be somewhat interesting, as long as you don’t have to endure hearing the characters explain them. When they do—such as the "Oracle” and the “Merovingian” and the “Architect,” not to mention Morpheus—it’s practically unwatchable. It’s sadistic, really, to watch these actors trying to plow through some of the most indecipherable dialogue ever written. Even some of the action, particularly the scene where Keanu fights a hundred Hugo Weavings, is cartoonishly silly in ways that are pleasurable (like when Reeves throws one Weaving into twenty, knocking them all down and the sound designers add the sound of a bowling strike) but degrade the overall experience. The freeway chase—narratively pointless as it seems—is still fairly awesome, though.

I rewatched Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (1999), a funny and harrowing and somewhat underrated film with strong performances. I also rewatched his The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which has scenes among the funniest Scorsese has ever shot, but which, like the mediocre Bombshell (2019, directed by Jay Roach), which I saw for the first time this month, is populated by such objectively awful real-life humans (played by very talented actors) it’s difficult to suss out the point or feel properly entertained without needing a long hot shower afterwards.