Oh COME ON, MTA (Oh, and the 30 Day Movie Challenge)

[trinityvixen]

It doesn't fucking matter when I leave, I cannot seem to get to work before 9:30. I left fully half an hour before I usually do, with my usual departure usually getting me to work at 9:40. I got here between 9:25-9:30. I had fully intended to be here early to clean more of the lab before I had to leave for class. But the buses were stuffed and some just plain didn't stop to pick anyone up. Did they suddenly stop running as many buses because of cut backs, or what?

As for lab cleaning, I had wiped down counters and tucked things away all day yesterday only to be told the floors were being mopped/waxed and we had to pull everything out and off the floor. I just went around re-tucking things when I finally sat down to find an e-mail about floors being mopped in an hour. If the e-mail is not literally true--i.e. that its subject "hallways being mopped in one hour" doesn't mean that it's just the hallways being mopped and I have to go through all this bullshit again, I'll kill someone. For real. I am dressed up at work, in a shirt I didn't realize had a stain on it until just now (thank god for my sweater), and I'm tired and cranky and it's only 10 am. Help me, Jeebus, I might kill someone before day's end for looking at me funny. Time to meme before that becomes not just murderous thought but murderous reality.

30 Day Movie Challenge
Day 22 - The most underrated movie

I can't remember if I saw this before I saw The Matrix. I'm pretty sure I did. I know I saw eXistenZ before The Matrix. Those two movies and The Thirteenth Floor all came out around the same time, so it must have been something in the air in the late 1990s. Perhaps fear of the millennium?

It felt like, to me, The Thirteenth Floor got lost when The Matrix hit it big. eXistenZ was a quirky movie by a famously weird dude, so it got its minimal but art-movie approved props. The Thirteenth Floor came and went with almost no fanfare. I happen to love it. It's a wonderfully rendered (har har) techno noir. The pastiches and archetypes of the 1930s noir literally exist in the digital world that the characters have created to resemble that era. This is combined with futuristic technology that is at once both accessible--it's sort of like virtual reality--and mind-blowing--the idea that the avatar you inhabit when you "play" is actually able to think, live, and act independently of you when you're not around.

But, really, it's a noir at heart, right down to the hero who cannot trust anyone, even himself (he may have murdered his mentor but he has no memory of it); the mysterious femme fatale who emerges to claim rights as the victim's daughter (heretofore unheard of by the hero, who knew the victim well); and the grizzled detective dogging the hero, willing to consider any possibility because he believes the truth is never necessarily simple (and he would be right). I'm not the biggest fan of Gretchen Mol, but she's serviceable. Really, the movie hangs on Craig Bierko and Vincent D'onofrio's performances, and both are good as themselves and their avatars--the former's being rather clueless, the latter's...less so.

It's totally worth a rental's worth of your time.

Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21

Comments

[six-demon-bag.livejournal.com]

I HATE traveling by bus. Hate it. My babysitter used to drag me around town with her by bus when I was a little kid and it would take two hours to get to the movie theater on the other side of town while it was normally about a ten to fifteen minute drive by car. Oh and to get from the local shopping mall back home -- a five minute drive by dar? 45 minutes by bus. Just because of all the stops along the way and whatnot. For a little kid with no patience, that was the most brutal of tortures.

Ah, I love The Matrix (the first one, anyway) and 13th Floor but I'm not sure if I've ever been familiar with eXistenZ. I'm intrigued. Have you seen Dark City?

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I think eXistenZ and 13th Floor are all jumbled up in my head.

[saturn-shumba.livejournal.com]

LOVE The 13th Floor.

I think the other movie that gets talked about as Matrix-y like movie is Dark City--which I've never seen. I feel like that movie, The 13th Floor and eXistenZ (which I also haven't seen) also get a lot of "They did it before The Matrix did it!" praise and nerd appreciation.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I got stuck in the tunnel due to "car equipment failure" this morning. That was fun. Only not. Each time this happens I remind myself that it's still better than a traffic jam. I can't read in a traffic jam.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's no joke to say that I can bike the same distance in less time that the bus and subway combo I have to take to get to work takes me. It's all the bus, too. The subway takes me forty blocks in five-seven minutes, max. The bus takes the other twenty. (Plus walking to and from.) And it's a miserable, time, too, as lately they're crowded, it's cold, and there's construction that funnels down one of the busiest cross-town routes to one lane.

The Thirteenth Floor is a fun little thriller. eXistenZ is more a commentary on the morality of virtual reality. It's bizarre and a little gross. Worth seeing, in my opinion, which is more than I can for just about any other Cronenberg movie to which I've subjected myself. (Maybe The Fly.)

Dark City was something I was dying to see in theaters when it came out, and it lasted precisely six seconds in that venue and only in places that teenage me couldn't get to easily. I rented it later and loved it. The ending isn't as strong as it could have been, but it's another great story of who is ultimately responsible for your actions--you or your environment? Loved it, loved it. You might like The Thirteenth Floor for the same reason, as the people manipulating the avatar characters--and the avatars themselves--have to deal with the consequences of each other's actions.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

eXistenZ is the one that's really gross at times. (Remember the gun made of chicken bones that shot teeth?) The Thirteenth Floor is the one that's literally dark all the time.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor have a lot in common (see my above comment). There's a lot of question about how to respond to manipulation and how best to be manipulative, and whether any of that can be done without its being completely unethical. Both movies seem to suggest that uprisings by the manipulated are unavoidable and necessary to lash back against the manipulators, they just have different views about whether manipulation itself is inherently evil (versus the manipulators being individually evil). Dark City is fantastic in design, so it's a definite recommended watch, especially if you like The Thirteenth Floor.

eXistenZ I go back and forth on. Sometimes, I think it's cleverer than the other movies in the pack with it; sometimes it's trying too hard at being edgy and making a statement. It's definitely weird and definitely deals with the squishy biology of the cyborg-like lives people plugged into virtual reality experience.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I can't hard read on the bus, or it wouldn't be as much of a problem. (Still annoying, yes, but I would have more of a distraction.) It's just too crowded, and people begrudge you every inch of space you have that they don't.

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to buy The Thirteenth Floor. I actually saw that one in theaters, and it seemed like the poor man's Dark City/Matrix, but interesting in its own right. Either way, I'm long overdue to re-watch it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Personally, I like it about as well as I do Dark City, in that I like them both perhaps more than they deserve, but that I can see how they do enough things right to be objectively good. Dark City has more style, The Thirteenth Floor has a better, less Deus ex machina ending. I wouldn't ever fight with anyone over which is better. I enjoy them for different reasons despite the fact--which I'm just now realizing--they deal with a lot of the same subtextual (and textual) subjects.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that didn't help much. Sorry. (Apparently I've managed to block out the teeth gun entirely.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

One of them has Jude Law in it. The other...doesn't?

[six-demon-bag.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, the L in Chicago is fantastic, taking no more than ten minutes to get you anywhere in the city. And you never have to wait more than ten minutes for one to come around to any given loading dock or station. A good friend of mine in Chicago takes uses it to get to work every day and it only takes ten minutes, counting the walk to and from the train. I don't envy you.

Sold. I'll add eXistenZ to my Netflix queue and move it to the top. Thanks for the info.

I haven't seen Dark City or The Thirteenth Floor in years and my friend has both on blu-ray -- I think it's time for a movie night. : )

P.S. How did you get that pic on the side of the entry like that?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Holy God, I know nothing about this LJ posting pictures stuff. Yesterday, I hotlinked something and it called me a content thief. Here's what I know: when you use the LJ website to form your post, you can click on an image to paste in a URL for a picture. There's a drop-down box that lets you pick how to align the picture. You can align it center or left or right. If you do nothing, your text will just be above and below.

[six-demon-bag.livejournal.com]

I never knew that, so thank you! I'm very excited to try this out later. : D

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I loved The Thirteenth Floor! I actually saw it before I saw The Matrix and thought it was very cool.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the Thirteenth Floor when we saw it. And of course I love and own Dark City.

Most underrated movie? For me I think that has to be The Keep. Even the book's author, F. Paul Wilson (one of my fave authors, btw, and the movie is what made me find him in the first place) has since said he isn't enamored of it. And sure, it has its problems. But it also has Ian McKellan, Gabriel Byrne, Scott Glenn, and Jurgen Prochnow! Plus Nazis, ancient evils, and a really cool keep! How can you go wrong?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It is very cool. It's just twisted enough to work, and it works very well.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Hmm, The Keep sounds interesting. Might have to give it a Netflix trial.