Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Grace Duffy and Alex Towers, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.
This time, continuing our Summer of ’99 season, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix.
1999 was a great year for movies, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that would define cinema for a next generation: 10 Things I Hate About You, The Virgin Suicides, Run Lola Run, Election, Cruel Intentions, Fight Club. The Summer of ’99 season offers a trip through the year in film on the IMDb‘s 250.
Thomas Anderson lives a fairly ordinary life; an office drone by day, a computer hacker by night. However, Anderson’s life quickly begins to fall apart when he finds himself drawn to a mysterious hacker named Trinity. It soon becomes clear that Anderson’s life (and his very reality) is not at all what it appears to be.
At time of recording, it was ranked 18th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.
Show Notes:
- Recorded 15th June 2019.
- The Matrix at The Internet Movie Database.
- The IMDB 250 as it appeared at time of recording.
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- Kurt Andersen argues that fashion and art design are still stuck in the nineties at Vanity Fair, January 2012.
- Jason Farago at BBC argues that the nineties never ended in terms of art, February 2015.
- Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com on the creative freedom and adventurous studio filmmaking that powered The Matrix, November 2018.
- Yohana Desta at Vanity Fair discusses the Matrix reunions underpinning John Wick, October 2016.
- Chad Stahelski talks to Vulture about how The Matrix changed action movies forever, February 2019.
- Angelica Jade Bastien at Vulture discusses how The Matrix created a new type of action star, February 2019.
- Adam Sternbergh at Vulture on how The Matrix laid a template for the modern blockbuster, February 2019.
- Tom Breihan at The A.V. Club on how The Matrix changed the face of big budget blockbuster filmmaking, April 2017.
- Brian Raftery at Wired on the legacy of The Matrix, March 2019.
- Bilge Ebiri at Vulture on the strange diminished pop cultural impact of The Matrix, March 2014.
- Will Smith discusses turning down The Matrix on YouTube, February 2019.
- Keanu Reeves assures Simon Mayo that “it’s all quantum, baby” on Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, May 2019.
- Patrick Williams at Polygon argues that The Matrix Reloaded was an early ambitious attempt at building a shared universe, June 2019.
- Abraham Riesman at Vulture on the failure of The Matrix to become a franchise staple, March 2017.
- Mark Harris at Vulture on how The Matrix created the modern reality-denying world, February 2019.
- Billboard quotes Kanye West describing The Matrix as “the bible of the post-information age”, March 2015.
- Jason Concepcion at The Ringer argues that Cypher got rebooted as Pitbull, August 2017.
- Elon Musk tells Space that mankind is probably living in a computer simulation, September 2018.
- Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker discusses whether it’s possible that mankind is living in a computer simulation, June 2016.
- Tad Friend at The New Yorker profiles Sam Altman, October 2016.
- Andrew Masterson at Cosmos argues that quantum physics demonstrate that we are not living in a computer simulation, October 2017.
- David Gritten at The Telegraph on Warner Brothers’ history of working with auteur film makers, April 2013.
- Emily Yoshida at Vulture on the complicated legacy of the Wachowskis and their relationship to the mainstream, February 2019.
- David Sims at The Atlantic on the strangeness (and perhaps reappraisal of) Speed Racer, May 2018.
- Simon Whiteley talks to CNet about the sushi recipes buried within the green computer code in The Matrix, October 2017.
- David Edelstein at Vulture on the brief popularity of “bullet time”, February 2019.
- Michel Gondry’s Smirnoff commercial “Smarienberg”, 1996.
- “Khaki Swing” commercial for Gap, 1998.
- Mike D’Angelo at The A.V. Club on the skill with which The Matrix handles exposition, May 2013.
- Tasha Robinson at The Dissolve on “Trinity Syndrome”, June 2014.
- Violet LeVoit at RogerEbert.com on femininity in The Matrix, March 2019.
- Andrea Long Chu at Vulture on what The Matrix has to say about gender, February 2019.
- Adam Pilfold-Bagwell at birth.movies.death on The Matrix as a transgender metaphor, April 2017.
- Lana Wachowski accepts the Visibility Award from the Human Rights Commission, October 2012.
- Max Read at Vulture on how “red pill” was co-opted by the alt-right, February 2017.
- Kurt Anderson at The Atlantic on how America lost its mind, September 2017.
- Alan Scherstill at Vulture on the fetishisation of gun violence in The Matrix, February 2019.
- April Glaser at Slate on how hateful online rhetoric is a part of modern mass shootings, August 2019.
- Samuel Gibbs at The Guardian on the format war between VHS and Betamax, November 2015.
- Jessica Brown at The New Statesman on how porn is pushing virtual reality forward, May 2015.
- Mike McMahon jokes with Trek Movie about having to clean the holodecks on Star Trek, August 2019.
- Chief O’Brien at Work, August 2015.
- Ingoo Kang discusses how the real world ruined The X-Files at Vulture, September 2013.
- Fawnia Soo Hoo at Fashionista on the costuming of The Matrix, March 2019.
- Andy Culpepper at CNN discusses the use of the Gospel of Thomas in Stigmata, September 1999.
- A.W. Hill discusses Los Angeles’ late nineties flirtation with gnosticism in L.A. Weekly, May 2005.
- Keanu Reeves talks to GQ about his recent renaissance, April 2019.
- Lawrence Fishburne talks to The Guardian about his career, April 2014.
- Francis Ford Coppola talks to Entertainment Weekly about working with Keanu Reeves on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, October 2015.
- Daniel Oberhaus at Vice explains the concept of Roko’s Basilisk, May 2018.
- David Auerbach at Slate offers an introduction to Roko’s Basilisk, July 2014.
- Zack Sharf at IndieWire reports on the Wachowskis closing their Chicago production offices, October 2018.
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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: 1999, action movies, alex towers, existence, film, grace duffy, hugo weaving, Keanu Reeves, Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, Movie, philosophy, reality, simulationism, stunts, the matrix |
the m0vie blog 
ten things i hate about you was just on freeform yesterday,and everytime i see that 1.5 stars rating i wanna punch the tv. i think it is one of the funniest and well written teen movies ever and thats up against my all time favs 3 oclock high and some kind of wonderful.also american pie lol.
Yep, it’s really frustrating how aggressively movies like that get up- or down-voted.