Pinkerton's Weblog

The Matrix Revolutions Post That Doesn't Actually Talk About Matrix Revolutions

What you're about to read will blow your fucking mind -- your world will turn upside down, everything you cherish as true and good will be questioned openly, and a golden apple will launch itself out of your rectum.

That's a bold-faced lie, of course. I'm just trying to adopt Pete's theories on a catchy opening sentence. You just fell for my sneaky advanced marketing tricks, which I pulled on you so fast you all you saw was a blur. I'm that psychotically good. McDonalds could hire me to market McPoopshit Sandwiches, and after ten seconds' worth of my action-packed opening sentences, people'd be lining up around the block to shove poop into their mouths.

I'm an unstoppable marketing force.

I'm also getting very sidetracked. Okay. So last night I got invited along to a baseball game. Now, I’ve been invited to baseball games before, and after foolishly accepting the first couple of times, I’ve since learned to fake either a limp or a devastating and sudden brain injury, since baseball is the dullest thing ever invented to be played by men in embarrassingly snug pants on mounds of dirt.

I recognize it’s America’s national pastime, so I’m sure the Americans who read this blog (I’m Canadian, by the way) are doing a spit-take onto their computer monitors before running to the gun rack in their baby’s crib and then hauling ass to the airport with shotgun in hand to buy tickets “to Canadaland, USA – and step on it!”

But the fact remains that it takes a certain kind of commitment to enjoy baseball in a country where it’s not perceived as unpatriotic if you don’t. Once you unwrap baseball from the American flag and untie the eagle baked in an apple pie you tied around it, it turns out baseball’s so staggeringly fucking boring you could get hit in the temple with a foul ball and be grateful. There are occasional moments during the few games I’ve seen where it briefly stopped being as dull as watching caulk dry and became as exciting as watching moist caulk that hasn’t dried yet.

Luckily baseball’s considered this eventuality, and so makes the games seventeen hours long while putting up arcane statistics on large screens all around you in a concentrated effort to help you avoid accidental enjoyment. If you can think of two things more excruciatingly dull than sitting still for six hours watching screens flip through mathematics while snug-panted men occasionally interrupt long stretches of standing around to hit a ball from one end of the stadium to the other, then you’re from England and have watched cricket, and my condolences.

Last night I decided to break my no-baseball stance, however, since I was invited to a box to view the game, and I’ve never had box seats before. How it works is this: instead of sitting in a cramped seat next to fat shirtless people doing the wave while painting letters on their chests, you get escorted up to a spacious room with large bucket seats and a ridiculously good view of the game. While there, whichever corporation has bought the box for the night ensures that you don’t pay for anything while there, meaning it’s an endless cascade of free food and an open bar tended by an attractive bartender. There’s probably also something to do with baseball in all of this – presumably, if I’d bothered to stop shoveling pizza into my mouth and draining entire bottles of expensive imported lager into same, I might have bothered to look to my immediate left and be reminded why I despise baseball. I wisely did this as little as possible, and in the process had a fantastic night.

Sadly, the sheer amount of fantasticness enjoyed the previous night carried over into a profound sense of un-fantasticness this morning, and I staggered lamely into work feeling like I’d drank far too much free alcohol, as was remarkably the case. So it was perhaps with a rather dim and preoccupied sensibility at my desk this morning that I discovered the theatrical trailer for Matrix Revolutions was now online – available for download here, if you feel like right-clicking (I think it’s about twelve megs, so if you're on dial-up, it's your funeral, you goddamn Mennonite).

(I also managed to learn how to make word and thought balloons in Photoshop on my lunchbreak -- hence all the snappy graphics decorating this post. Note the cool Matrix Revolutions theme. See how I combined something fun with learning? I should be a fucking teacher, I swear. I'd have five year olds doing long division by the end of the day. "The first one of you to successfully learn algebra gets to fire off a couple rounds from this Magnum. There's a little kick on this bad dog, make no mistake. This sugar's got some spice.")

Anyway, so check out the Revolutions trailer when you get the chance. This post was originally going to be filled with my thoughts on the trailer, but as soon as I sat down with the intent of getting some serious finger-to-keyboard action going, I realized I've already written like 700,000 words about The Matrix and its sequels over the last year, and I really don't have anything left to say about it. Not counting the many posts to various groups and forums on the minute details of the trailers, films and video games, I've also put up something like five separate articles on my Trailer Trash site. When we got out first taste of Reloaded and Revolutions at the Superbowl, I dutifully recorded my thoughts. When the first full-length trailer for Reloaded popped up online, I gave it a thorough going-over. When all the TV spots were made available at the official site, I ignored the dangers of overkill and flapped my gums about those too. When the first teaser trailer for Revolutions came out, I wrote a frame-by-frame breakdown of it.

In other words, I'm a Matrix whore, and the films are three cocks that have been swirling around my eager mouth for the last three goddamn years. I'm Matrixed out.

Revolutions looks pretty cool, I guess, and I'll most likely see it. Will it erase all the ill will the last one managed to garner among the non-hardcore fans? No, probably not. Like Reloaded, Revolutions looks like the sort of film that the Matrix fanboys of the world will be able to absorb and puzzle over for decades, but also a film that, just as a film, will be as enjoyable to the casual fan as watching caulk dry. If this ends up being the case for you, I heartily recommend getting box seats when you see it, then just avoid looking at the screen.

The Rundown

...starts tomorrow, and yes, I'm a retard, because I think it looks funny and totally kick-ass and I want to see it. This is the first movie I've watched the trailer for and actually thought, "I gots to see me some of that" since Matrix Reloaded last May (and whatever your thoughts on that film might have been, admit it -- a lot of folks were interested in seeing it).

I count pretty much every movie that came out this summer among the films I suppose I could have seen, but wasn't terribly interested in (honestly, whether you saw it or didn't, was anyone really beating a path to the door for Hulk or Charlie's Angels 2?). T3 came out and I barely batted an eyelash. I loved T2. But I just didn't care this time around. Just looking at it, I remember thinking, "What the hell else do they have to say with this series? It's over." Judging by the opinions of everyone else I know who did see it, that seems to be the case. Ditto Tomb Raider 2 and all the other "big" Hollywood movies. I didn't give a shit about any of these, and I say this as a man who freely admits to having to hold myself back from the phone when I see Pizza Hut commercials.

Rundown seems to be playing really well at Rotten Tomatoes, too, with some solid initial reviews. So what I wanna know is, why didn't they release this in the summer? I can understand the Hollywood executive logic here -- all these huge movies are coming out, it'll get lost in the shuffle -- but did no one do a little audience tracking and realize nobody really wanted to SEE any of the huge movies? If Rundown had come out two months ago, I bet it could have been Pirates of the Caribbean big; Pirates caught us off-guard by being just entertaining and new enough, while having a ton of fierce competition for a lot of blockbusters that nobody gave a shit about.

Anyway, I'll post a quickie review of it after I see it.

Orphan Blood Cures Cancer!

The following is evidence of the sort of photoshopped blasphemy I get up to when I'm really bored, which goes a long way to explaining why the government funds regular shipments of video games and porn to my house to ensure that's never the case. Sadly, however, sometimes even the pornographic arts aren't enough to keep my mind from wandering. And when my mind wanders, it's usually to wonder who I could offend a gigantic amount, and what the quickest way to do that might be.

Anyway.

My British Tourism Campaign