From Cineplex: In celebration of Keanu Reeves’ milestone 60th birthday this September, Cineplex will honour the legendary actor with special screenings of his most timeless films. From his roles as the reluctant hero Neo to the lovable and clueless Ted to the vengeful and intense John Wick, Reeves is one the most beloved Hollywood stars to come out of Canada. Cineplex invites audiences to celebrate his remarkable career by screening six indisputable classics at ‘Keanu-Fest’. Cineplex will commemorate the 35th anniversary of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the 25th anniversary of The Matrix, and the 10th anniversary of John Wickby bringing these essential films back to the big screen for a limited time. There will also be VIP one-night-only screenings of his unforgettable supporting roles in Parenthood,Something’s Gotta Give, a fun screening of Point Break with RiffTrax, providing comedic live commentary on this 90’s classic, and a Saturday matinee of his hilarious appearance in the family favourite The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run.
Screening from August 30 throughout September in select theatres nationwide, the special screenings are part of Cineplex’s year-round programming.
Celebrate Keanu’s birthday month and the 25th anniversary of “The Matrix” with a special introduction from Richard Crouse during select showings from Sept. 6 – 19, 2024. Check cineplex.com for more details.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Lois Lee to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the virtual reality of “The Martrix Resurrection,” the coming of age dramedy “Licorice Pizza” and Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and the jukebox musical “Sing 2.”
These days movies are regularly remade, rebooted, reimagined and regurgitated. But none of those terms capture how Warner Bros has brought back one of their most famous and ground breaking franchises.
The new Keanu Reeves movie isn’t simply a return to the Matrix, the simulated reality created by intelligent machines to pacify humans and steal their energy, it’s a resurrection. After eighteen years, Neo has been raised from the dead by Lana Wachowski in “The Matrix: Resurrections,” now playing in theatres.
The last time we saw Neo (Reeves) he made the ultimate sacrifice, giving himself to create peace between machines and mankind. His death would allow people to finally be free of the virtual world of the Matrix.
In “Resurrections” it’s twenty years later. Neo now goes by his real name, Thomas A. Anderson. He is the “greatest videogame designer of his generation,” with an ordinary life, save for the visions that plague him. “I’ve had dreams,” he says, “that weren’t just dreams.” His analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) has him on a steady diet of heavy therapy and blue pills, meant to quell the strange delusions.
Anderson’s regular life is turned upside down when his business partner Smith (Jonathan Groff) announces that their company will be making a sequel to their most popular game, “The Matrix.” As his team works on the new game—“It’s a mindbomb!”—his memories become more intense and soon he has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction.
Or is it all real?
When people from his past, like computer programmer and hacker Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an alternate reality version of the heroic Matrix hovercraft captain who first believed Neo was “The One,” appear, Thomas fears he is losing his mind.
Things become clearer—Or do they?—when the new Morpheus offers Thomas/Neo a choice of pills. The blue ones will keep Thomas’ state of mind status quo. The red ones, however, will take him down the rabbit hole, into the heart of the Matrix. “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” says Morpheus.
Pill popped, the simulated world opens up to reveal a dangerous place in need of a hero. Teaming with a group of rebels, Neo battles a new enemy and secrets are revealed. “The Matrix is the same or worse,” says Neo, “and I’m back where I started. It feels like none of it mattered.”
“The Matrix: Resurrections” may be the most self-aware movie of the year. No instalment of “The Matrix” will ever match the whiz bang excitement of the first film, and “Resurrections” knows it. It comments on itself and consistently winks at its legacy.
“This cannot be a retread, reboot or regurgitation,” says one of the “Matrix” videogame designers.
“Why not?” says another. “Reboots sell.”
Like the movie’s story, the film itself attempts to blur the line between the reality of the story and the very act of watching the movie. It is simultaneously self-depreciating and cynical. It’s OK to have a bit of good fun with the story, especially given the oh-so-serious tone of the previous “Matrix” movies, but by the time Thomas meets Trinity at the Simulatte Café, the jokes have worn thin.
The meat of the story, a search for truth, is the engine that keeps the movie motoring along, but the endless exposition, a torrent of words, seems to be the fuel that keeps things running. When a character says, “That’s the thing about stories, they never end,” it’s hard to disagree as the movie gets mired in mythology and world building.
It becomes a slog, without enough of the trademarked Wachowski action scenes to help pick up the pace. When the movie does dip into bullet time and the action that made the original so memorable, it feels like a pale comparison. There is nothing much new—“I still know Kung Fu,” says Neo—just frenetic action and nostalgia for a time when a slow-motion bullet made our eyeballs dance.
“The Matrix: Resurrections” does try to recontextualize the existing mythology. This time around the all-you-need-is-love-story between Neo and Trinity is amped up and there is some timely social commentary about control, whether it’s from the government or a virtual reality machine, but, and there is a big “but,” as much as I wanted to enjoy another trip to the Matrix, I found it too meta, too long and yet, not ambitious enough.
Who’s to blame for Hollywood’s lack of originality? Are the suits too eager to greenlight reboots and sequels? Are screenwriters so uninspired they can’t think past remaking their favourite 1980s TV shows? Do actors only consider characters based on video games?
Of course not.
The people responsible for the movie doldrums these days live in your mirrors and selfies. That’s right, if you go to the cinema and didn’t check out Birdman, Whiplash or Obvious Child but did go see Guardians of the Galaxy twenty-five times, you forced Hollywood’s hand, guaranteeing another ten years of the big screen exploits of comic book characters Rocket Racoon and company.
Guardians is a fun movie that people liked and Hollywood is in the business of giving moviegoers what they want, but the fear is that a constant stream of familiar feeling films could create a less discerning audience. If you are fed a steady diet of dog food eventually you’ll get used to the taste.
Birdman is an accessible and entertaining movie but with a total gross less than one weekend’s business for Guardians it’s unlikely to inspire a Birdman 2: No Plucking Way but bigger box office could inspire more adventurous films as an antidote to the slew of movies with numbers in their titles.
Big budget Hollywood doesn’t often take the path less trodden. People went to see Inception but I would argue that the reference point for that movie was the director Christopher Nolan, hot off the Batman streak and not the unique story. Less successful were originals like Edge of Tomorrow, despite the usually winning mix of great reviews and Tom Cruise and Transcendence, the computer hard drive horror that brought Johnny Depp’s box office average way down.
Despite those high profile failures this weekend Warner Brothers has gone off the map to show support for an original story from The Matrix directors, the Wachowskis. Jupiter Ascending is a space opera about genetically engineered warrior Caine (Channing Tatum) who helps human janitor Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) take her place as heir to the galaxy.
Big stars, name directors and a new story should appeal but already the knives are out. “Jupiter Ascending looks like a great movie,” wrote @RickIngraham on twitter, “to never see.”
Jupiter Ascending will rise or fall based on audience interest, but if it tanks it’ll be harder for other unusual stories to get made. There are already at least thirty sequels, reboots and spin-offs scheduled for 2015—everything from Star Wars: The Force Awakens to Paul Blart: Mall Cop II—so unless you want another Daddy Day Care reboot in 2016 get out of your comfort zone and see something new and original today.
“Lucy” is a different style of movie–the philosophical action movie. Imagine a mix of “Limitless,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Matrix” and a Philosophy 101 textbook with half the pages torn out and you’ll get an idea of the film’s loopy feel.
Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) begins the story “just like you, vulnerable, uncertain, frightened of death,” but when the bag of drugs some very bad people “slipped into her lower tummy” bursts her life is changed forever. She doesn’t overdose, instead the drug expands her mind to ten times the usual capacity. She becomes a turbo-charged human who can “do things I’ve never done before, and can control the elements around me,” change her appearance and move objects with her mind. With great power comes great responsibility, so she contacts a world famous neuroscientist (Morgan Freeman) to pass along her newfound knowledge, but not before unleashing the power of her mind on the drug dealing baddies who got her into this mess.
The metaphysical aspects of the story are about as deep as a lunch tray, but director Luc Besson sure knows how to weave enough action through his absurd stories to keep things entertaining. If you can wade through the silly scientific theories there are some great scenes that are more fun than a barrel of neuroscientists. In one fight scene all the bad guys have knives and guns while Johansson taps into her inner Jedi Knight to defeat them without raising her hand. That sequence alone is worth sitting through the entire 80 minute running time.
Morgan Freeman fans might find less to be enthused about. He is a lot device, a character who provides some much needed context and scientific gravitas–does anyone have more gravitas than Freeman?–and while he is one of two top billed stars in this movie, his part could’ve been played by almost anyone. The movie really belongs to Johansson who starts off as a bubbly party girl and ends the movie as the keeper of the secrets of the universe. It’s a bit of a stretch but her performance shifts as she becomes less and less human–“All the things that make me human are fading away,” she says–and more and more a flesh computer, capable of understanding the very essence of life.
That’s right, this is an action film with a higher purpose. It even comes with its own Terrence-Malick-by-way-of-Stanley-Kubrick tribute. I don’t want to give away anything, but with a movie as loopy as is one, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there is some wild time travel back to the beginning of time. I guess it’s an attempt to add some profundity to the story but it plays more like a Philosophy 101 student on an acid trip.
“Lucy” isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, but it is a cleverly made summer diversion.
Fight fans will salivate at the re-teaming of Keanu Reeves and the man who created some of the most memorable fight scenes ever. Choreographer Yuen Woo-ping brings the same physical pyrotechnics to “The Man of Tai Chi” as he did to “The Matrix,” but this time there’s no blue or red pills or metaphysical mumbo jumbo, just fist-to-the-face action wrapped around a story about honor and bloodlust.
Linhu (Tiger Chen) is a Bejing courier and practitioner of a form of tai chi called Ling Kong, which means “Empty your spirit.” He is a keen but impatient student whose master is constantly instructing to slow down.
Tai Chi is not usually used for fighting but Tiger Chen wants to prove it can be useful for more than just exercise. He gets the chance to showoff his skills when he is recruited by high rolling businessman Donaka Mark (Reeves) to fight in his underground (and illegal) fight club.
“No referees, no rules, real fighting, man to man,” says Mark. Linhu justifies the increasingly brutal nature of the fights by giving the money he earns to his master to pay for badly needed renovations to his ancient and crumbling temple.
Soon though, Linhu fights his biggest battle yet, an internal struggle between his pacifist teachings and his newly developed violent impulses.
With “The Man of Tai Chi” director Reeves has made an entertaining genre movie that pays tribute to the past with a traditional story about honor and the discipline of martial arts. He’s thrown in a curveball or two, but it is essentially possible to draw a straight line between this story–in Chinese with subtitles–and the great kung fu movies of Bruce Lee and the Shaw Brothers.
Not that it kicks as high as Lee’s movies. The fight scenes are fun, particularly a wild strobe lit sequence, but, agile as Tiger Chen is, he’s nit nearly as charismatic as many if those who have come before him. He’s a fearsome but slightly dull presence.
Reeves can’t be called dull, but he hands in a performance so stoic he’s just a step or two removed from statue status. It’s a strange performance, but nonetheless, he’s effectively evil.
“The Man of Tai Chi” is a good martial arts film, probably best seen on a grindhouse theatre screen as a double bill with “Game of Death.”
From Cineplex: In celebration of Keanu Reeves’ milestone 60th birthday this September, Cineplex will honour the legendary actor with special screenings of his most timeless films. From his roles as the reluctant hero Neo to the lovable and clueless Ted to the vengeful and intense John Wick, Reeves is one the most beloved Hollywood stars to come out of Canada. Cineplex invites audiences to celebrate his remarkable career by screening six indisputable classics at ‘Keanu-Fest’. Cineplex will commemorate the 35th anniversary of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the 25th anniversary of The Matrix, and the 10th anniversary of John Wickby bringing these essential films back to the big screen for a limited time. There will also be VIP one-night-only screenings of his unforgettable supporting roles in Parenthood, Something’s Gotta Give, a fun screening of Point Break with RiffTrax, providing comedic live commentary on this 90’s classic, and a Saturday matinee of his hilarious appearance in the family favourite The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run.
