Preview Buzz on The Cat in the Hat....

... in RHYME, no less! Pyul MacTackle posted a Seuss-book-length poem decrying the Cat in the Hat adaption that's due out in the theaters this Friday. Let's just say he wasn't enchanted.

I would cut-and-paste it, but it really is long, and contains some swear words. You can read it for yourself here."

Something Wicked COOLLLL! This way Comes....

I don't know how long this link will last but I'm going to jump on the fanboy bandwagon. Someone leaked the teaser trailer to the next Harry Potter film to the Net, and if you want to see it, you can try here while the link lasts.

Looks like they're shooting for a June 4th release. If you don't want to download a 14mg Quicktime version, there are others floating around out there. Alltogether too wicked cool-looking for words.

The Matrix: Revolutions
Hardly revolutionary, but still awfully cool
Theatrical Release

Well, I'm both happy and disappointed. Some of the weakest points of the second film have been fixed here, and the way they were fixed actually helps shore them up in the second film. It got better, and it's getting better actually makes the second film better. And anything that does that has totally got my vote.

In the second film, the fight scenes completely lacked anything like urgency or impact. You watched Neo face off with Seraph or a flock of Smiths and you couldn't feel anything for it. You knew that they were just pixels rubbing up against each other, both in story and behind the camera. There was never a question of who was going to win - you could see every frame as they wallowed in all the details like some sort of geeky foreplay. It took all the teeth out of it. The end of each fight was as inevitable as the outcome of dropping an egg, but the poor thing never actually hit the floor.

Well, this film is the splat. The detachment and wallowing are gone, now. Yes, there are those moments when you are watching them and you think, "Hmmmm - same fight from first film, but the other side is hanging off the ceiling. Interesting but silly." But to balance that there are also real, urgent battles where you honestly feel like they are fighting and not dancing. There is effort in the moves, and impact in their results. The gun is really held to someone's head and you believe that the trigger might be pulled. The blood spilt is not just seen but felt.

The characters learn to feel again. In the second film, the fights and chases and various things just happened. It was all so incredibly cool, but no one acted like they were in any danger, and any feeling of danger never got communicated to the audience. That whole "once you go into the Matrix you're a Vulcan" crap is gone. It's been replaced with real people, who grimmace when they are hurt, and cry out when they are in pain. And we get to feel it again, too. I know I felt the losses, and my sons were either having very selective allergy attacks or that sniffing showed they felt it too.

There are moments of real uncertainty, where you watch the events and you honestly don't know if the good guys are going to win or not. The fights between Smith and Neo are the usual bash-fests, but it is only used to underscore the real fight to come. And when they really go at it for all the marbles, you just don't know.

The Wachowski's have learned one thing from mainlining all that anime - sometimes the right thing to do for a story is to kill a character. That John Wayne belief that all the good guys will stand up out of the rubble or if they died they have been sacrificed for some great good is carefully kept in doubt. They didn't decimate the cast list, but the choices they made really added a lot. Not all stories have happy endings, and people die for reasons that don't save the universe. Cinema, meet real life. Real life, meet cinema.

What's incredibly frustrating about this review is I can't talk about the actual events without soaking this thing in spoilers. There are only so many vague ways to say, "It's pretty good. Definately better than the last one." And this film has to be talked about to be really appreciated. The events and the philosophy behind them are sort of solipsist training wheels for the uninitated. But that seems empty on it's own. What the film does do is give a new structure for looking at these ideas, and that begs to be explored with others.

But in the end, you can see seeds of what could have been drop-dead amazing like the first film that sort of sprouted, but just didn't flower. The Trainman was a great setup for something that was squandered in a that club. The denoument with the Merovingian gave us an echo of the Trinity from the first film, but they cheated us out of how he explained himself out of giving into it (and incidentally how he's going to keep his position with the rest of the programs afterward, which has huge implications for the "what happens next" type of viewer).

Did it expand my horizons? No. But the first one wasn't some great ephiphanic moment for me either - it was just a great film. It gave us a new look at some very old ideas. This one continued in that vein. It was hardly revolutionary, but this story is retold so often for a reason. "The Once and Future King" is a story that resonates through people's lives and thoughts. It gives us hope in a way that few others do. Taken with it's mates, this film did it's heritage proud.

For all you Anime freaks out there....

.... the Ghost in the Shell was a seminal work in the art of Anime and I am happy to report that after all these years, a sequel is currently in production. It's called The Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, and it hits big screens in Japan in 2004. No hints as to when it's going to hit our shores yet.

If you are like me and just can't wait, you can view a teaser trailer here. The site and the trailer are both in Japanese, so you're going to have to trust me on this one, but this is the place. Just pick your player (pick the "large" option if you have a serious pipe into your hardware - their servers can stream 2293K per second!).

It isn't localized, so unless you've been studying your hirigana, you aren't going to know what it says.

Just LOOK at it, though....