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PHILOSOPHY SECTION ON OFFICIAL SITE
Source: <TheMatrix.com>
Thanks to: Chris

The official site TheMatrix.com opened a new section that deals with the philosophy behind the Matrix. Here's the introduction:

The Matrix is a film that astounds not only with action and special effects but also with ideas. These pages are dedicated to exploring some of the many philosophical ideas that arise in both the original film and the sequels. In the upcoming months we will be continually expanding this section, offering essays from some of the brightest minds in philosophy and cognitive science. We are kicking things off with essays from eight different contributors on various philosophical, technological, and religious aspects of the film.

Though this collection of essays is part of the official web site for the Matrix films, the views expressed in these essays are solely those of the individual authors. The Wachowski brothers have remained relatively tight-lipped regarding the religious symbolism and philosophical themes that permeate the film, preferring that the movie speak for itself. Accordingly, you will not find anyone here claiming to offer the definitive analysis of the film, its symbols, message, etc. What you will find instead are essays that both elucidate the philosophical problems raised by the film and explore possible avenues for solving these problems. Some of these essays are more pedagogical in nature – instructing the reader in the various ways in which The Matrix raises questions that have been tackled throughout history by prominent philosophers. Other contributors use the film as a springboard for discussing their own original philosophical views. As you will see, the authors don't always agree with each other regarding how best to interpret the film. However, all of the essays share the aim of giving the reader a sense of how this remarkable film offers more than the standard Hollywood fare. In other words, their common goal is to help show you just "how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

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ENTER THE MATRIX GAME-SCREENS
Source: Game Informer
Thanks to: <MatrixFans.net>

GAME INFORMER used 10 pages of this months issue to give the world some information on the 'Enter the Matrix' videogame. Infogrames showed the game to lots of journalists last month so expect lots of info in the magazines this month. You can click on the thumbnails below to view the scans. They're pretty big so you can still read the article. Special thanks to MatrixFans.net for the scans.





A clip from the interview:

So what type of game is Enter the Matrix?

This is actually a difficult question to answer. We will say this, though: As the quest unfolds, you'll find yourself leaning against walls and peering around a corner, flipping through the air in slow motion, wielding a sniper rifle, driving in a car across crowded city streets, soaring in a hovercraft beneath the Earth's surface, and hacking into the Matrix itself. There's a lot to this project, but as you probably hoped, the main bulk of gameplay centers around combat.

The game will be released on May 15th 2003 on Playstation 2, XBox, GameCube and PC. According to Dave Perry (president of Shiny), the game will not simply follow the plot of the movie. You'll definitely recognize sections, but you can also discover the rest of the environment which you didn't see in the movie.


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JOHN GAETA ON BULLET TIME
Source: <The Matrix Online>

John Gaeta has (apparently) been on the Zion Switchboard, and has left this message:

This an email message from John Gaeta, VFX Supervisor for the Matrix Trilogy. For real. Every now and then I cruise the Matrix chat rooms to hear what you guys are interested in and how people are looking at the previous and future films. I decided to respond to this question because I see so many discussions which wonder what and who came first and all that stuff.

Firstly...There has never been a visual effect created which has been as isolated, sudden and definative in it's first clear moment as say the invention of the telephone or the light bulb. Within digital film history there was no moment when the acid hit the wires and suddenly a voice could be heard and it was understood to be "Bullet Time". Rather, like other creative outlets such as painting or photography, discoveries and advancements usually come as part of a collective consciousness or movement; like the advent of dada or surrealism. Many people around the globe were reaching a similar place in there own personal explorations within a similar time period. The reason things seem to happen as movements usually has to do with the fact that people in the same fields or artistic communities can choose paths based on the same or similar influences and combine fragmented ideas techniques or technologies in new ways without concern for the lack of the look in question as reference. Thusly, it is a basic truth that in different places through the 90's that new and experimental combinations of emerging computer and photograhic elements led to a variety or frozen time techniques.

I have mentioned numerous times that:

Bullet Time *My sole influence to any understanding of these emmerging looks was the Rolling Stones video in 1996 which utilized "view morphing" techniques deployed by a company named BUF in Paris. It may be a Micheal Gondry video, I'm not sure. At any rate I love Mr. Gondry's other works and consider 'City of the Lost Children' one of the coolest effects heavy films ever made. I in so many ways connect to the risk taking aesthetics of some of the smaller european visual effects firms then I ever did the behemoth commercial ventures pouring out of California.

*I and my digital associates were only doing what we thought was the most straightforward method for capturing ultra slow motion. WHICH WAS DESCRIBED IN A WRITTEN DESCRIPTION CONTAINED WITHIN THE MATRIX SCRIPT AND CALLED "BULLET TIME". Bullet time is a concept created by Larry and Andy W. which basically means Mind Over Matrix and is not the name of a technique which uses still cameras to make virtual camera paths. There were other names for that. Do some digging and you will see that all that I have mentioned is documented in articles. It has been mentioned before hundreds of people during lectures etc. Neither I nor my associates have ever claimed to have "invented" Bullet time. However, our method was NOT frozen and DID incorporate some heavy 3D computer planning and virtual all-cgi backgrounds.

*The next films will blow your minds. We'll show all the faithful that the concept of Bullet time still rules. We have trashed all the previous methods, they are ancient history. And once again the victory will be for the movement in digital film circles which have devoted themselves to visualizing virtual cameras and virtual reality for the first time on the big screen. Many ideas and influences are in the mix BUT ONLY ONE FILM WILL PRESENT THEM WITH MEANING AND PURPOSE WHICH SERVES THE STORY OF A SUPERHUMAN MESSIAH NAMED NEO.

Please enjoy them and understand that it's not about being first, it's about being part of evolution. Every contribution is a factor for the future of images.

All the best to you die hards,

John Gaeta"

If you want to join the discussion, click on the source-link.

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YOUR OWN NEO TRENCHCOAT
Source: <Abbyshot>

Abbyshot specializes in the design and creation of film-inspired and orginal clothing. They've recreated the trenchcoats of Morpheus and Neo and are selling them online. Here's a press release:

New Company Offers Movie-Inspired Clothing Online
(Mount Pearl, NF - October 29, 2002)

Recently, it's become harder than ever to find movie-related clothing, especially clothes from movies like The Matrix. But now there's a company out there called AbbyShot Clothiers Limited (www.abbyshot.com) and they're offering Matrix styled trenchcoats along with other movie-inspired clothing. Already, they've released a Neo trenchcoat and a Morpheus trenchcoat from the first Matrix film, a Neo Reloaded trenchcoat from the upcoming sequel, and several other Matrix and Matrix Reloaded items are planned for the future.

AbbyShot Clothiers is run by two partners with substantial experience in making movie-related clothing. Bonnie Cook and Adam Bragg, the President and Vice-President of AbbyShot respectively, were two of the three founding members of "TrenchCo Clothing Company Inc", a company that in its day pioneered the activity of manufacturing and selling movie-inspired clothing online.

"We were sad to see TrenchCo shut its doors," stated AbbyShot VP Adam Bragg, "near the end we tried everything we could to keep it going, but there were just too many issues between the partners." After the closure of TrenchCo in July 2002, Adam and Bonnie were drawn to the idea of continuing on where TrenchCo left off. "Even a month after TrenchCo closed, no one was offering a similar product anywhere." said AbbyShot President Bonnie Cook, "We saw that the opportunity to continue doing what we loved, so we decided to go for it!"

Before you think that it was an easy undertaking, think again! The startup requirements for AbbyShot were as high for them as for any person starting such a business. Adam explains, "Our previous experience with TrenchCo, while useful to be sure, didn't make things any easier. We had to start from square one again. No one knew about AbbyShot. We had to develop all new clothing patterns and a totally new web site. And that's not even counting all the standard technical things that come with starting any kind of business!"

After nearly three months of operating, AbbyShot is still working to develop their market and expand their product line. "I'll be honest, it's been a lot of hard work," admits Bonnie, "but we're getting there. Our site is under constant development & expansion, and we're even scheduling a professional fashion photo shoot to further improve the presentation of our products! The fans are finding out about us, we get a lot of questions about TrenchCo and about our products. We're confident in the quality of our clothing, every customer we've sold a trenchcoat to has come back with rave reviews, which we feel says a lot. A lot of people are excited about where we plan to take AbbyShot, and everyone has suggestions for new products! The word is out that we can deliver the goods people want."

Visit <Abbyshot>.

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PLOT CONFUSION
Source: <Sydney Morning Herald>
Thanks to: <The Matrix Online>

Did you have to watch the Matrix more than once in order to figure out the plot? You're not alone... Yes, it's a big article, but well worth reading it.

Honey, I lost the plot
by Jane Mills
November 8 2002

Most critics have decreed that Richard Kelly's recent film, Donnie Darko, is incomprehensible. Their reviews are peppered with phrases like "I'm not sure I quite understand it", "storytelling troubles", and "a discombobulating muddle". But you'd be wrong if you thought this makes its first-time director/writer want to hide at the bottom of the garden and eat worms. What may seem even more difficult to grasp than its plot, Donnie Darko is one of an increasing number of movies that glory in unresolved plot confusion - and give pleasure to millions.

This isn't a totally new phenomenon. The Big Sleep has long been loved and known for its incomprehensibility. Not simply hard to follow for the plot-impaired: it has an utterly convoluted, confusing, illogical, inexplicable plot. And it's not as if its screenwriters, the novelist William Faulkner among them, didn't know. While adapting Raymond Chandler's novel, they telegraphed the novelist to ask how one of the characters was killed. Chandler irascibly replied that he didn't know either. Some film academics have subsequently claimed that if you look hard enough you can discover who killed who. Tell that to its director, Howard Hawks, who confessed, "I never could figure the story out."

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive recently provoked the same question. The Guardian newspaper felt compelled to get to the bottom of the mystery, albeit tongue-in-cheek. It invited six critics who had championed the film to explain the plot. Each gave a different explanation but not one of them thought it was necessary to actually understand it, with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times seriously maintaining, "There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery."

No mystery? This is a film that has audiences still talking about what it was or wasn't about, months after its release. But the real mystery may be why audiences are divided between those who need to understand the plot in order to enjoy a movie, and those for whom a coherent plot is irrelevant to their pleasure.

Solving this puzzle involves a flashback to the early days of Hollywood when the studios determined to make sure that the widest possible audience the world over could understand the narratives. By the late 1920s, Hollywood had developed a repertoire of devices that audiences became adept at using to make sense of complex plots. These included narrative logic in the form of coherent chains of cause and effect, clear motivation, and no unanswered questions or incomplete storylines: everything had its purpose which was integrated into the plot. Clarity, verisimilitude, plausibility and, above all, comprehensibility were the key features.

Today, however, some Hollywood plots echo the ringside announcer in the recent plot-perplexing Rollerball remake, who after starting to explain things gives up, saying: "Well, the rest of the rules are in Russian and complicated, so there you go." This appreciation of form over narrative has been annoying critics for decades. In 1964, the doyen of US film writers, Pauline Kael, railed: "Audiences used to have an almost rational passion for getting the story straight. They might prefer bad movies to good ones ... but although the movies might be banal or vulgar, they were rarely incoherent. A movie had to tell some kind of story that held together: a plot had to parse ...

"How is it that the immense audience for The Bridge on the River Kwai, after all those hours of watching a story unfold, didn't express discomfort or outrage or even plain curiosity about what exactly happened at the end ..." Was it possible that audiences no longer cared if a film was so untidily put together that information crucial to the plot or characterisations was obscure or omitted altogether?

Kael wasn't scared of ambiguity or complexity. Rather, she was sad at the phenomenon of audiences who had lost all narrative sense in the following terms: "Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down." Actor Sarah Miles was less diplomatic. When she asked director Michelangelo Antonioni the meaning of the incomprehensible ending of the 1960s classic Blow Up, in which a tennis match is played without a ball against a backdrop of painted trees, she was told, "Is for the critics." This she dismissed scornfully as an example of the emperor's new clothes.

Actors are inevitably going to be alert to plots that don't make sense because the conventions of the influential classic Hollywood cinema insist upon the integration of characterisation, motivation, and meaning. Actors in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H reportedly tried to get the director fired because he gave them no indication that a plot existed. The narrative device, a PA system, which just holds the film together, wasn't decided upon until the edit. It's hard to imagine that the plot flaws in these movies would present problems to audiences today. In fact, such is the leap in cineliteracy that the term "incomprehensible" is actually seen by some film publicity departments as a selling point, as this blurb for the Wong Kar-wai film Ashes of Time reveals:

"Prepare to be confused. Prepare to be astounded. Prepare to be exhilarated by rapid blurred scenes. Prepare to be challenged because this movie steadfastly refuses to present a linear narrative. Characters come and go; viewpoints and narrators change without notice; time is distorted with no signal to the viewer as to when events have transpired or will transpire. Most of all, prepare to watch it again." I can hear Pauline Kael screaming from beyond her grave.

There's no doubt that many movie-goers do get angry about a movie that they can't understand, as reactions to recent films, such as Mission: Impossible, The Matrix, Memento and, of course, Mulholland Drive, testify. It's as if they feel they've been left out of the great culture plot. The greatest abuse is reserved for movies that are unintentionally incomprehensible rather than those that deliberately make no sense - although these by no means lack for fans.

But audiences are highly adept at making sense of new terms in film language and many clearly derive pleasure from movies that challenge the old codes and conventions. It's no longer possible to think of the cinema in terms of a unified set of "rules" that combines style and content: what one person finds hopelessly incoherent, another will either find perfectly comprehensible or not care whether it makes sense.

When confronted by the opacities of films such as The Velvet Goldmine, Donnie Darko and Gummo, an increasing number of cineliterate viewers finds new ways to make sense of them. Maybe not literal, narrative sense, but meaning derived from image, sound, structure and "texture". Narratives with "plot holes", once dismissed as incomprehensible, are understood as revealing the holes in our own reality.

Audiences today distinguish between different types of incomprehensible plots, just as they might opt for one genre rather than another, or choose to see a movie because of a preference for a particular star or director. Neither the movies nor their audiences can be described usefully as "plot-challenged". Sophisticated film reading skills are needed to work out which category of incomprehensibility a movie falls into and, as the following list shows, cinema is ingenious when it comes to not making sense:

The surrealist narrative. It's said of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or) that if either one included an image or incident open to rational explanation or interpretation, the other would cut it out. Generations of avant-garde movie buffs, however, have found meaning in even their wildest surreal images - reading a castration complex, for example, in the image of a woman's eyeball being slit by a razor on a moonlit balcony. David Lynch, perhaps, succeeds where the surrealist maestros failed. In Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive he created perfectly senseless, if not meaningless, movies.

The fractured narrative (Pulp Fiction, Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors). These may have a beginning, middle and ending but not necessarily in that order. A sub-genre of this category is the "splintered narrative" of a film like Slackers, where the plot follows one character until another more interesting character enters the screen. The structure is like that of a number of open windows that the computer user can click on to at random.

The genre-bending movies such as Dark City and Mission: Impossible offer a mix of frequently confounded expectations, with the latter taking audiences through a maze of the confused, confusing, illogical, irresolute, incoherent, impossible and, at times, the too possible.

The shifting narrative. The flashback has been understood since the silent movies but in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles extended film grammar to flashback to events where the narrator could not have been. The Australian film The Boys confused audiences with its unusual flashforward device. Audiences were more generous towards Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, which negotiated switches between the before, the now, and the after. Memento garnered even more support with fans insisting that on the second or third viewing, everything made perfect sense - even though its director confessed that in the edit, some key plot elements did get left out.

The twist (aka the "cheat") narrative. Audiences are seduced into what they believe to be the "real" world of the movie, only to be told by an unreliable narrator close to the end that what they thought was real was fantasy (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects). This is a newish version of Hollywood's old standby, "It was all a dream" (The Woman in the Window).

The narrative of absence. In this plot structure you never find out whether something happened but your belief - or wish - that it has happened is so strong that, at some level, it has actually happened. Or not. Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love, in which he edited out the scene of the central couple making love, makes audiences ache with the pain of seeing and not seeing something that isn't in the script.

The great whatsit plot aims to tease. In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino employed this device (borrowed from the film noir Kiss Me Deadly) in the form of the glowing contents of a suitcase we never see inside. What was in it is anyone's guess.

The multi-stranded, multi-plotline structure relies upon a cinematic version of fractal theory, that is, big consequences from small, briefly glimpsed and apparently unconnected and coincidental mundane events. This reached perfection in the hands of Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player). Recent examples include The Royal Tenenbaums, Wonderland, Traffic and the pallid Australian version, Lantana. Magnolia uses "vertical narration", a device that "tells everything at once" and which director P.T. Anderson also used in the wonderfully confusing Boogie Nights.

The oops! narrative (Twister, Rollerball, The Lost World, Spy Game) comes from filmmakers who are too incompetent, ignorant or lazy, or a combination of all three, to make sense. These can be upgraded to the "so bad they're good" school of appreciation.

We've reached a moment in cinematic history where audiences are angered by some films because they are incomprehensible, but are attracted to others precisely because they make no sense. Making sense is no longer the point. In fact, the passion for incomprehension has given cinema a boost, one which may be responsible for attracting audiences rather than shedding them.

More and more often, viewers see a movie twice, three, four, or more times - at the cinema, on video and DVD - for the fun of looking for plot sense or of creating their own meaning. Yet again this demonstrates Hollywood's skill in absorbing and refining ideas that challenge its powerful position.

The new wave of incomprehensible movies has also spawned a new dimension to screen culture: enter any combination of the words cinema, plot, incomprehensible, incoherent, goofs and bloopers, in a search engine and you'll find thousands of sites and discussion lists devoted to vicious vitriol and passionate defences of movies that someone, somewhere, could make neither head nor tail of - and enjoyed.

Jane Mills is an honorary associate at Sydney University and at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School. '

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NO MORE TRAINING FOR CARRIE-ANNE
Source: <CountingDown>

Fitness expert Siri Dharma is a favorite with stars who need to shape up for a film role. She recently spent 15 months training Carrie-Anne Moss for her part as Trinity in the Matrix sequels. The Sunday Mirror reports: Carrie-Anne's training for the original film was denial with a capital D. It was all, "Don't eat this, don't eat that," the star explains, and killing myself with exercise and being sore all the time.'

Not keen to repeat the experience, Carrie-Anne enlisted Siri Dharma's help to lose just over a stone in 18 months. 'Carrie-Anne's beautiful, but she had a normal body as opposed to the tight body you need to get into a PVC outfit,' Siri Dharma explains. 'So the goal was a more natural lifestyle she could stick with. She cut out wheat, sugar, dairy, coffee and alcohol on weekdays, opting for fruit and vegetables, and she was allowed to take weekends off.'

Carrie-Anne fractured her tibia during rehearsals and had to spend six weeks in a brace, so Siri Dharma focused on strengthening the knee. 'I rehabilitated her and made sure she didn't put on any weight or let the muscles atrophy,' she explains. 'It was certainly a challenge, but we did it with a combination of Pilates, yoga and diet. She did free weights to buff up her shoulders, as Trinity is a warrior, and Pilates to make her long and lean and to give her the strength to do the action stuff for all those fight scenes.'

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MOVIE-POSTER WAR
Source: <The Globe and Mail>
Thanks to: Sub7

An interesting article on the ever-growing use of promotion material in the movie industry.

Olympian marketing: faster, higher, stronger
By JOHANNA SCHNELLER
Friday, November 8, 2002

Walking down any multiplex corridor now feels like running a gauntlet of glaring monster heads, thanks to the newest trend in movie-poster design. Suddenly every film has two or three or five different posters, each featuring a separate character/star.

There are three posters for the long-awaited Scorsese historical drama Gangs of New York: dark-hued, gritty-looking, extreme close-ups; one featuring Cameron Diaz, one of Leonardo DiCaprio, and one of Daniel Day-Lewis. There are three for the musical Chicago,one each for Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere, all in the same splayed-legged, full-body pose, in 1930s dress against a black background.

There are five posters for the new James Bond film Die Another Day,separate, glowering, head-and-shoulders shots set against a white background for Bond (Pierce Brosnan), Jinx (Halle Berry), Zao, Gustav Graves and Miranda Frost. There are five for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry, Hermione, Ron, Dumbledore and Hagrid), five for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,and five for the animated Wild Thornberrys Movie,for crying out loud.
There were even two separate posters for the bomb Formula 51:one of Robert Carlyle and one of Samuel L. Jackson in a kilt, both standing with their arms crossed wearing tough-guy expressions, trying desperately to look as if someone somewhere might want to see their movie.

What's with all the pricey wallpaper? The weeks between now and New Year's will see a record number of movies released, many of them big-budget, multicharacter franchise pictures. Every studio wants to distinguish its films from the competition. In Hollywood's imitable style, each is doing so by employing . . . exactly the same techniques as the rest. Not only are there more images per film than ever, the posters themselves are bigger, bus-shelter-sized prints, wall-to-wall banners, standup displays. By the time patrons make it to an individual screening room, they feel they've walked through a movie, surrounded by larger-than-life characters they already know -- or better get to know quick if they want to be where it's at.

"In-theatre displays have become incredibly competitive in the last two years, as the movie marketing business has exploded," says Brian Ware, the manager of Canadian exhibition services for Warner Bros. "Posters are aimed at a built-in audience: people who are already at the movies, who have movies on their mind. And with multiple posters, you can show more of a film, different looks."

"Multiple posters have an impact on the consumer," agrees Frank Mendicino, vice-president of marketing for Alliance Atlantis. "They feel more personal. The large, individual faces make people feel closer in contact to the movie. They also say, 'This is a really big picture you don't want to miss.' It gets the public excited. Cameron Diaz in a period piece, Samuel Jackson in a kilt, those are fun images to play with." As well, a range of oversized posters perfectly complement the architecture of today's 20-plus screen multiplexes -- cavernous boxes with acres of wall space to fill.

"Patrons often come to see what's playing at 7 p.m., rather than coming for a specific movie," Mendicino says. "The poster campaigns help them decide." Exhibitors don't have to have their arms twisted to display the new posters -- it's in their best interest to put bottoms into seats, after all. Still, studios will often hold contests and award prizes for elaborate theatre displays. "If you can get the public to hang out in the theatre lobby [and] make it a fun place to be, you can tell them a lot about your films," Mendicino says. "Especially during the crowded months -- summer and Christmas."

Of course, studios still make posters in smaller sizes to accommodate smaller -- relatively speaking -- theatres. "When we noticed that everyone was doing 4-by-8-foot banners, we decided to make the Harry Potter banners 3-by-8," Ware says. "That way, theatres could still hang them side by side, but they only needed 15 feet instead of 20."

"Moviegoing has changed dramatically over the last few years, and so has movie marketing," says Nuria Bronfman, the vice-president of corporate affairs for Famous Players. "The Web, our branded theatres -- everyone's always looking for the new angle. People want to be immersed in a film, they want to be part of the experience. These multiple posters draw you into a film on a deeper level." And let's not forget posters' most attractive attribute: They're far cheaper than TV ads. They can't be turned off, they play to a captive audience, and once they're hung, they can remain for a long, long time.

"They can go up months in advance, creating pre-awareness, which is half the battle," Ware says. In the next two weeks, Warner Bros. will unfurl a seven-poster campaign for the sequel to The Matrix, due in May -- seven! May! -- as well as posters for Terminator 3, due next summer.

But what do theatre patrons say? Do they ever complain about feeling overwhelmed? Do they ever say, "We just want to see a movie, we don't want to be sold something every minute?" Do they say, "No matter how large their images are, I can't be fooled into thinking that actors are my personal friends?" Do they ever cry, "Too much?" "No," Bronfman replies, laughing. "They say, 'Can we have those posters when you're done with them?'"

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THE MATRIX AND PHILOSOPHY
Source: <Amazon.com>

Another Matrix inspired book available at your local bookstore: "The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real" by William Irwin (Editor). A review from Publishers Weekly:

The many faces of Keanu Reeves as hero Neo-Christ, Buddha, Socrates-are explored in these essays on the philosophical implications of the sci-fi martial arts blockbuster The Matrix, collected by the editor of Seinfeld and Philosophy and The Simpsons and Philosophy. According to the academics assembled here, when messianic hacker Neo kick-boxes the Matrix's virtual-reality dream-prison, he is really struggling with some of mankind's biggest conundrums: the nature of truth and reality, the possibility of free will, the mind-body problem and the alienation of labor in late-capitalist society.

The tacit goal here is to make philosophy fun for the general reader by orienting it to pop-culture reference points, so while some articles contain rather dense philosophical jargon, most are pitched at the level of a freshman intro course. But only a few chapters delve into the movie's aesthetics; the rest seem to use The Matrix as a peg on which to hang a canned philosophy lecture. The results are occasionally engaging, as with David Mitsuo Nixon's nifty refutation of the "reality is just an illusion" conceit, but they're too often dryly academic and liable to elicit no more than a drowsy "whoa" from the movie's legions of fans. (Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Paperback or Hardcover (320 pages)
Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company
ISBN: 081269502X (available from October 2002)

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MORE ROB D ON SOUNDTRACK
Source: <iDougan.com>
Thanks to: <The Matrix Online>

Rob Dougan (who as you all know wrote 'Clubbed To Death', which appeared on the first soundtrack and in the "woman in the red dress" scene) has informed me that he has been working with Don Davis (composer of the score for the first Matrix film), and they have written a small score for 'The Final Flight of Osiris', which is part of the Animatrix project. (Animatrix episode #9, by Square USA - Code 808)

This small 10-minute feature is to be shown before The Matrix Reloaded in cinemas. We also know (but have few details) that Rob is working on more material for the either the soundtrack or the original score. More details are sure to come, I'm sure Rob will keep in touch with us. Rob Dougan released his debut album 'Furious Angels' in the UK earlier this year (US/Germany/Australia and more releases are coming early 2003), which features "Clubbed To Death" and a collection of other, groundbreaking songs he has written over the past six years.

Be sure to check out my site, iDougan.com (http://www.idougan.com) for more information. Thanks, Ed Roberts.

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© 2002 Code 808