No Spoon
For the Queen’s Birthday, a public holiday here, we went to see the Matrix Reloaded, which was just as disappointing as everyone has said it would be, and just as entertaining, although the fact that Buffy, which we watched late last night, was just a full of extended fight sequences, leaving us a little overdone on the kung fu stuff. Never mind, the point is, really, that the Matrix movies constitute an entirely self-referential narrative, with occasional touches to keep the brighter audience members happy, such as naming one character Persephone and having her aid the humans in their quest to free a character from its exile in “hell.” Nice, that, even if it is ultimately pointless, just as all the internet and systems architecture bits are just a clever use of computer jargon in service to Vedic cosmology. The effects are nice, but. We also attended the screening of See What Happens, a biopic of D. A. Pennebaker, the documentarian who produced Don’t Look Back and The War Room, among other features. This was part of the Sydney Film Festival, for which we’ll also go see George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, being the filmic biography of Chuck Barris, best known in my generation for The Gong Show, one of the most incredibly tasteless pieces of pre-Survivor television programming ever. In any event, See What Happens is a good enough movie, and I’m inclined to be very open indeed to picking up on any of Pennebaker’s work I can locate, Monterey Pop included. I also happened on a bathroom scale, and it even displayed pounds: must get out running very soon.