I was lucky enough to see this film at a museum film festival, and was quite impressed with its spiritual power. It is an authentic experience of a traditional religious service in the Appalachian hills circa 1968. It is not at all extreme or exploitive. The snakes are just the climax of an otherwise worshipful service of heartfelt singing and confession. The singing is quite moving, as well as the testimonial of a woman describing her spiritual dream and how it made her feel blessed. If one has had any experience of the Holy Ghost at all, one will get a contact high from this film. There is also a lesson at the end of the film as well, regarding trying to artificially extend the experience of the Holy Ghost and the consequences of such a lapse in reverence, where the leader of the service gets bitten by a snake when they are not put back in time. Unfortunately, we do not get to see the fate of the snakebite victim, but are left to wonder whether or not he survived.
Reviews
2 Reviews
The Matrix Revolutions
(2003)
Action-Packed Tedium
28 August 2004
It is hard to believe that the original Matrix's philosophical subtlety came from the same authors of the two sequels.
It seems the brothers must have cribbed the original story for the first Matrix, since the last 2 show none of the original's subtlety or interest, just rehashing and CGI multiplication.
One evil robot, two evil robots, many many evil robots. Wow, what an idea, what creativity!
Viewing the behind-the-scenes on DVD disc 2, you can see the reasons for the incoherence of story and scenes - the huge fractured design team, numerous 'senior this' 'senior that', all contributing to some corporate creation lacking any inspiration. Maybe the corporate cube-farm culture works for making cars, but it doesn't seem to work for films.
I would have liked to have seen another level of reality exposed behind the mindless machines, and why are they so mindlessly evil when they can think up such a subtle ruse to enslave the humans? It isn't consistent. Why not introduce an alien ET culture who is really the master culture enslaving the machine culture by some similar hallucinatory ruse. Or, have the humans escape by transcending their bodies, as in all the traditional gnostic spiritualities.
All in all, the Matrix is just a retread of the movie TRON. TRON at least had some insight into what the machine mindset and motivation for domination might be, e.g. tyrannical game addiction, much like the decadent Roman emperors. The Matrix, after the first film, gives no thought to any subtle motivations of the machine culture, preferring the tired cliché of 'alien villain = mindless unrelenting violence'.
It seems the brothers must have cribbed the original story for the first Matrix, since the last 2 show none of the original's subtlety or interest, just rehashing and CGI multiplication.
One evil robot, two evil robots, many many evil robots. Wow, what an idea, what creativity!
Viewing the behind-the-scenes on DVD disc 2, you can see the reasons for the incoherence of story and scenes - the huge fractured design team, numerous 'senior this' 'senior that', all contributing to some corporate creation lacking any inspiration. Maybe the corporate cube-farm culture works for making cars, but it doesn't seem to work for films.
I would have liked to have seen another level of reality exposed behind the mindless machines, and why are they so mindlessly evil when they can think up such a subtle ruse to enslave the humans? It isn't consistent. Why not introduce an alien ET culture who is really the master culture enslaving the machine culture by some similar hallucinatory ruse. Or, have the humans escape by transcending their bodies, as in all the traditional gnostic spiritualities.
All in all, the Matrix is just a retread of the movie TRON. TRON at least had some insight into what the machine mindset and motivation for domination might be, e.g. tyrannical game addiction, much like the decadent Roman emperors. The Matrix, after the first film, gives no thought to any subtle motivations of the machine culture, preferring the tired cliché of 'alien villain = mindless unrelenting violence'.
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