Naqoyqatsi (January 28 & 29 at 3:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

It took almost as long for the second set of Star Wars theatrical features to appear as it did for Godfrey Reggio to come up with the finale in the trilogy that KOYAANISQATSI started in 1983. The good news...No Jar Jar Binks.

But the insipid all-CGI space creature would fit right in, however.

The title of this non-narrative would-be mind blast translates as "war as a way of life," which made for great ad copy in the post-9/11 era but seems only tangentially related to the subject material, which is the rise of a digital age and a computer-linked world economy/culture, replacing the natural/physical world of the earlier two features.

Much of the film is, in fact, virtual, rendering pixel-created soldiers, pop idols, lovers, landscapes, and moving windows and frames of alternating elements. Corporate logos like Levi and Coca Cola and the symbols of the world's great religions alternate with each other (get it, huh, get it, huh?). 

The Matrix (September 29th at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium)

[THE MATRIX screens Saturday September 29th at 7:00 pm and 9:30 pm at the CWRU Film Society, Strosacker Auditorium.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Even though it shows up on lots of top-ten lists and was recently enshrined by the nerds at Entertainment Weekly magazine as one of the most influential movies of all time, THE MATRIX just didn’t impress me at the time of its 1999 release. Why? Was I too stupid to appreciate it, like all those critics who roasted Star Trek in 1966 or HALLOWEEN in 1978? Was I just a general curmudgeon over my bleak personal life and failed job search and not about to say anything good about anything? Was I not a teenage Aint-It-Cool-News reviewer most likely to be impressed by the movie’s comic-book-level brand of geekbait fantasy/philosophy? Or am I actually correct, in Emperor-Palpatine-Has-No-Clothes way, and THE MATRIX isn’t/wasn’t all that tremendous or original?