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Thursday, May 15, 2003   |    What's Up with That?

The Matrix Reloaded

by Josh Abraham

Well, The Matrix Reloaded has finally arrived, and gosh durn it, it did not disappoint. You couldn’t ask for more breathtaking eye candy—truly inimitable, groundbreaking special effects, the stuff that really gets your blood pumping, your heart pounding, your sweat glands leaking. Of course, I’m referring to that peek up the skirt of a blonde chick with Spanish fly in her soup. Unless I had a momentary hallucinogenic episode, I saw a glowing, green, coded cooter. Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. Washowskis, you’ve done it again! First you stun your peers and fans alike with the invention of “bullet time,” now you present film’s first coded cooter. And if your last contribution to cinema is any indication, every summer action movie following will try to rip you guys off. They’ll put glowing digital naughty bits anywhere they can fit, even if the plot does not call for it. But still, no one will be able to match the shock and awe of seeing it for the first time in Reloaded. Sure, it was merely a swirly glowing ball of green, vaguely numeric, digital characters, but, hell, it was a lot more arousing than the fuzzy, staticky glimpses of body parts we got our childhood rocks off to by flipping between the scrambled porn channels.

While we’re on the subject of unexpected lewdity, what’s up with that lapse into ten minutes of soft-core porn as Neo and Trinity get it on, inter-cut with footage of dirty, tribal freaks dancing barefoot in the mud at Woodstock ‘94? You know, the name “Washowski” always sounded to me like it better fit a 70s-era Los Angeles smut director with a golden-brown tan, a pinky ring on each pinky, a Geraldo-style moustache, Brillo-y chest hair peeking out of his unbuttoned collar, and a skewed sense of self-righteous legitimacy. No, no, that’s my Uncle Raymond.

Either way, those Washowski brothers sure stepped in shit with this. I’m sure with ten seconds of Google research, I could find a picture of these wacky Washowskis, but I prefer to ignorantly imagine them as resembling that purple, two-headed Sesame Street monster that spoke in car-horn honks and goat bleats. You know what I’m talking about: that scary Siamese Muppet. I mean, now I realize that thing was simply two puppets sewn together, but in my innocent, otherwise blissful youth, that creepy demon puppet scared the crap outta me. How is that appropriate entertainment for a three-year-old? Well, after that unholy Muppet stole from me any chance of a decent night’s slumber, it was only a matter of time until I started flipping channels and discovered the aforementioned scrambled porn. Now, all these years later, I still cannot achieve true satisfaction with a woman unless I’m squinting, the bed is shaking, a radio is playing static, and I’ve taken three huffs of modeler’s glue. Even then, it sort of approximates scrambled porn, but not really.

Washowski!

Josh Abraham was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent his early years in North Africa, working various jobs—in the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. As a young journalist, his report on the unhappy state of Muslims in the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the Théâtre de l'Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, and Dostoevski. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an important underground newspaper. Abraham's fiction, his philosophical essays, and his plays have assured his preëminent position in modern French letters. In 1957 Abraham was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures of the Western world when he was at the very summit of his powers. No, wait. That was Albert Camus.