"The Matrix" Remake/Reboot Rumors

Robert here with your daily "Wait, What?" news: it looks like iconic film franchise The Matrix will be getting a reboot, or a remake, or more sequels. No one is quite sure!

According to industry insiders Warner Bros. is in the beginning stages of revamping the series launched by the now legendary 1999 movie written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. There have been a lot of rumors since just last night surrounding the project, so let's dive into them after the jump...

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3 Days Until Oscar -- multiple wins without a Best Picture Nod

With the seismic shift of the expanded best picture field in 2009, certain forms of Oscar trivia seem dead or at least on life support. Foxcatcher proved you could still be a "lone director" nominee for a non Best Picture player, and Carol proved you could still get a big swath of nominations but miss out on placing in the top category. But nearly all the records involving films that weren't nominated for Best Picture will not be broken now; when Oscar notices you in a big way these days, you're also likely to achieve that highest distinction of being a Best Picture nominee.

But with 3 being the magic number today, let's take a look back at the rare cases of films that won 3 or more Oscars that were not nominated for Best Picture. The only film that could theoretically join this list this year is Jackie (the most nominated film that isn't up for Best Picture) but it would have to win all three of its bids! 

The 18 Biggest Oscar Winners That Were NOT
Nominated for Best Picture
(current titles for categories used in this list though some have changed) 

01 Five Oscar wins from six nominations
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design. It lost only Best Actor but mysteriously wasn't nominated for Picture or Director despite obvious widespread love for it. But then, 1952 was among the very strangest of Oscar years for multiple reasons. 

Curiously Kirk Douglas also leads one of the three films tied for runner up in this particular list...

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Posterized: The Wachowski Siblings

Lana and Andy WachowskiWe have an early contender for movie that's most fun to read about this year. Andy and Lana Wachowski's latest, their lucky (?) number seven,  Jupiter Ascending has arrived. It is apparently a doozy and your definition of that word will vary. Between insane costumes, insaner plot, insanest characters including Channing Tatum as a some sort of wolfish alien, and Eddie Redmayne as Glenn Close (?) with gigantic mouth and abs for days it promises to be memorable at least. Even if the memories are mostly of "What is Happening To My Eyes?"

But then the Wachowskis have been doing that since their blockbuster breakthrough The Matrix (1999). Indeed the only film of theirs that seems "controlled" in the classic sense of 'this movie is perfectly constructed, awesome, and insanely watchable without being actually insane' was their very first: the lesbian noir Bound  (1996). For my money it's still their very best and still criminally underappreciated possibly because it's so atypical in that the only visual effects are how impossibly sexy and clever Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly are.

How many of their seven oddities have you seen?

I've seen them all -- or rather I will since I'm hitting Jupiter tomorrow or Saturday. The Wachowskis have the singular dinstinction of being the only directors in history to earn both an "A" (Bound) and an "F" (Cloud Atlas) grade within their filmography from yours truly.

I'm kind of hoping that Jupiter Ascending earns both.

Curio: Movies By Color

Alexa here with your weekly fix of film art. I've always thought color impacts the mood of a film greatly: the pops of red in Pulp Fiction, the moody blue noir of Blade Runner, the dominant earth tones in The Big Lebowski. Along these lines, there has been a mini-trend lately of designers abstracting films according to their color palettes. My favorite is by designer Charlie Clark.  Clark's project, titled "The Colors of Motion," takes the average hue from each frame of a film and then presents the frames together as horizontal stripes or square tiles. Distilled down to their palettes, The Matrix becomes a sea of green and black, and Frozen becomes a patchwork of dark blues and browns.

more...

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Best Shot Season Finale: The Matrix (1999)

I'm not proud to say so but I'd probably take the blue pill. 

BEST SHOT

It's not that I reject reality so much as that I keep misplacing it. It's easy to forget about it you're drawn to the fantasy. My spirit animal is Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo, what can I say?

So here we are completing another season of Hit Me With Your Best Shot and again I've scheduled the final episode for the very moment I'm about to leave the country giving me no time whatsoever to produce anything like a suitable Season Finale with enough pomp and circumstance. [Note to self: Season Six must end before the suitcase has come down from the shelf for the Toronto International Film Festival.] So I'll make it up to you with a little look back at Season 5 in a couple of days.

But that image above, more than any other... apart from the cascading green symbols as visual motif (remember when that screensaver was all the rage?), is what I think of when I think of The Matrix. It needs us to embrace utter fabrication and complicated fantasy for the film to work and yet, as its narrative throughline it demands that Neo completely reject the same for cold hard wet and slimy truth. Is this what the dystopian genre is inherently for, to present dark truths about humanity and our future in the comforting garb of the unreal while screaming "REALITY!" as it pretzels itself back into fantasy like the greatest of contortionists?

I think so. 

Here's what the 12 other Best Shot Participants chose as their defining image. 

THE MATRIX (1999) BEST SHOTS
click on the image for the corresponding article 

The Film's The ThingAntagony & EcstasyFilm ActuallyEntertainment JunkieSorta That GuyLam Chop ChopPop Culture CrazyVideo ValhallaCinematic CornerDancin' Dan on Film
Allison TooeyBest Shot in the DarkTeo Bugbee

What image defines The Matrix for you? Do you see it here?