“I don’t get mad about anything anymore.”

In the twenty-four months since October of 2023, there has I think, at the center of America’s soul, erupted a schism the likes of which I have not yet seen in my lifetime— a spiritual dissonance which the average person has yet to reconcile, much less begin to process in earnest. It’s a product of compounding interest, after all: across many, many generations preceding my own; simmering evils and simmering anxieties and simmering…

not the first auteurist sequel/reboot to contemptuously interrogate the legacy of its predecessors (re: The Return, You Can [Not] Redo), but certainly the first of its magnitude. more than the red pill, the self-liberation of thought or simulated fantasia, The Matrix is about neo and trinity. a yearning so strong it can power the entire world—a love strong enough to liberate it, too. lana so patently articulates the anguish felt by an artist when their work is misappropriated by the…

so often are these movies estimated by their “accuracy” to the source material instead of the merit of its formalism; it’s how we get colorless romps like The Avengers and its eventual cousin Civil War, catalyzing feige’s eureka that it was possible to do away with stylization so long as captain america’s mask had the wings on it. to prove i’m not singling out the MCU for the sake of picking low-hanging fruit, i’ve long believed that nolan’s batman trilogy is…