The Wachowski Brothers deserve credit for building a whole universe. Same unsettling feeling: This is just a better Johnny Mnemonic. Which s not exactly praise.
Watching this is like riding in a car with someone who’s learning how to drive stick: Go fast, stop dead, talk, go fast again, talk more, go fast, stop cold.
Kind of like The Truman Show, except only a few dozen rebels are in on the gag. It’s not a complete paradise. It seems we need a certain amount of misery.
Feeling Minnesota doesn’t really go anywhere unexpected. Worse, the characters are said to have interesting backgrounds, but you never find out what they are.
The murdered girl is as resonant a portrait of femininity fragility as Ophelia, except she didn’t drown and Ophelia didn’t spend all of Hamlet lying naked.
Gus Van Sant took the story of Henry IV to the streets of Portland, Oregon, where the trashy flesh-peddlers and addicts roam on a pilgrimage into the void.