🎬 "What is the Matrix?"

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The Matrix should be any screenwriter’s bible for effective world-building.

In just over two hours, it sets up an insanely convoluted techno-fantasy world (or is it?), and pays off everything in the most entertaining fashion. Today, it seems the movie’s legacies are black leather coats, “bullet time,” and validating Keanu Reeves as a bona fide action star — which is plenty more than most movies get.

However, I absolutely love the fact that this movie is about more than action, even though the final act is driven more by guns than philosophy. That, for me, is what has ensured its cultural relevance over the past 21 years, and not the then-groundbreaking special effects.

Now I just need to decide when I’m going to watch the much-maligned sequels, which I own but have never seen. Don’t try to talk me out of it; it’ll happen. Eventually. Anyway, the first movie is recommended. ★★★★½

I watched The Matrix on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on HBO Max.

Beautifully filmed in shining colors, directed with the skill of a great artist, and plotted with the insanity of a serial killer, Vertigo is a brain-noodling masterpiece.

The plot is best appreciated by first-time viewers without any prompting whatsoever, so I’ll encourage you all to go in cold and focus on the aesthetics: The way Alfred Hitchcock uses lighting and camera moves in this movie is next-level, certainly by 1958 standards and even compared to many contemporary movies. Combined with Bernard Herrmann’s famously eerie score, Hitch’s work is a case study in what a director does and why it matters.

He famously repudiated Jimmy Stewart as the star of the film in hindsight, declaring him “too old” — and there are several scenes where Stewart’s age at first seems to be a liability, whether for physical or ethical reasons. However, by the end of the film I can’t imagine anyone else in the starring role, and the same could be said of Stewart’s costar, the eerily distant Kim Novak.

As a bonus, this movie is a gorgeous travelogue of San Francisco neighborhoods and landmarks, which was a special treat for me as an SF resident. Both on a local-knowledge level and (more importantly) a plot/thematic level, Vertigo resonated so much more on this viewing than it did when I was a teenager. Recommended. ★★★★½

I watched Vertigo at a drive-in movie theater (!), but it’s currently streaming on Peacock Premium.

It Follows is a suspenseful, well-shot, thematically rich, awesomely-scored horror movie where the characters mostly make smart decisions. And as if that weren’t enough, it has a killer premise.

The “it” in question is a shape-shifting monster that is slowly walking towards you at all hours of the day, and the only way to make it stop following you is to have sex with someone; if it catches and kills them, though, it will come back to you, and on and on down the line.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell plays the audience like a fiddle, training our hearts to start beating when we hear footsteps and our paranoid eyes to scan the out-of-focus horizon in every scene, looking for the approaching walker.

The final 15 minutes of the film are unfortunately a letdown, as the teenage protagonists attempt to lay a cartoonishly farfetched climactic trap. The film is much stronger in the mostly-quiet moments, in which its young characters are suddenly and unfairly facing the prospect of their doom.

I watched It Follows on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on fuboTV, Peacock, Peacock Premium, The Roku Channel, SyFy, and DirecTV.

(new additions in bold)