CDR: Re: Re: Gort in granny-shades (was Re: Al Gore goes cypherpunk?)

[Tim May]

At 1:53 PM -0500 10/24/00, Roy Silvernail wrote:
>From: Tim May <tcmay at got.net>
>
>
>>No accounting for taste, of course, but I _loved_ "The Matrix."
>
>So did I.
>
>>Overall, it's up there in my Top 5 of SF films, with "2001,"
>>"Terminator 2," and "Blade Runner." Not necessarily in that order.
>
>Our tastes seem curiously close.  What's number 5 on your list?
>

Well, many consider these the classics. Usually "Aliens" is on the 
list. And "Star Wars." I should've have included that one, especially 
for its time. If "Dr. Strangelove" is considered SF (in involved 
science, of the bomb, and was fiction, mostly), then add it.

There seems to be a new genre-defining SF film every several years. 
"2001" in 1967-8, "Star Wars" in 1977, "Blade Runner" in 1982, 
"Aliens" in 1987, "Terminator 2" in 1992-3, "The Matrix" in 1998.

(If fantasy/horror is included, the pattern continues. "Rosemary's 
Baby," "The Exorcist," etc. Many great movies show their age. I 
recently saw the re-release of "The Exorcist" and it seemed 
slow-moving and tame by today's standards.)

Interesting that Bob Hettinga is so offended by the ideology/outlook 
of "The Matrix." I thought it was mostly consistent with our main 
outlooks, albeit set in a world unlike our own. Some film ideologies 
_do_ offend me. The world of "Star Trek" is a good example: the 
Federation, Starfleet, Prime Directive, aliens speaking English, too 
many aliens by Fermi's Principle, affirmative action quotas for races 
and species, and goody-two-shoes namby-pamby simp-wimps.

By the way, I didn't take seriously the view that _we_ are living in 
a Matrix world. The film was ambivalent on the claim that _this_ 
world is a Matrix world: it was more plausible to buy the timeline 
Morpheus gives of how _our_ world becomes the "Matrix" world. That 
is, the events taking place are "really" a few hundred years from 
now, with the machines having set the "environment bit" to "late 20th 
century." I thought this was obvious. Maybe not. Normally I don't 
worry ovemuch about such subtleties, but it seemed to me some 
fraction of Bob Hettinga's hate-rant had something to do with the 
supposed conceit that _our_ world is the "Matrix" world. I didn't 
take it this way. Rather, I took it as a classic SF story, describing 
some _possible future_.

It's fun for a few seconds to think about the implications of _this_ 
world being a simulation in the Matrix, but it doesn't hold up, even 
in the context of the film's conceits. (I mean "conceit" in the 
lit-crit sense, not in the common sense.)

Anyway, no accounting for tastes, as I said.


--Tim May

-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
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