Robots VS Kung Fu: The Matrix Grindhouse Edition

There be some funny shit in this here cake. Ain't gonna give surprises away, though.

Music adds and subtracts, entertainment-wise. At times, a goofy and well-timed tune will turbo-boost your smile, or undo your non-laugh. Fucking excellent.

However, some background music comes across as cheesier and cheaper-sounding than it needs to be—my personal preference favors grindhouse myujik that has a bit more funk, menace, or goofy testosterone. There's a fair degree of musical repetition as well as homogeneity, and some of the lesser tunes draw attention to themselves while making the dialogue sound dim. Such features could be credit toward grindhouseyness, but here they make the viewing challenging in parts—which is a shame, given the many hilarious moments in this soup, or dammit, was it cake we were metaphor-pimping?

Some scenes could do without any music at all. The sound effects and visual gags would have been humor enough.

Dude, with a little more attention to mixing sound and delving for some apropos songs, this edit could have been simply dangerous.

njoijoi: 7 pelvic aerothrusts.

This one was a little tough to review. I'm not a connoisseur of grindhouse films, and fanedits is what's introducing me to the genre.

It's gloriously, gleefully terrible. So, where is that deliberate, and where accidental (and not happy accident). I re-watched with the faneditor's commentary to put that into context.

With that context, the edit is great. The grain & scratch filters are obvious from the start, the liberal use of other movies (mostly Johnny Mnemonic--a guilty pleasure of mine) and unfinished footage jumps out and mostly works. There's a few cuts of behind the scenes that felt a bit over done. The bad audio jumps are just part of the fun, even though a good chunk of Morpheus' lines *really* stand out. The bad color grading, bad camera angles, screwed up continuity is giggle-inducing.

It was fun seeing how a different edit can change the thrust of the story and characters. It took the commentary viewing to really get where matrixgrindhouse was going with it though.

The fake trailers were great. Those really helped you get into the mindset. You could almost smell the burnt/stale popcorn and feel the stick floor by the time the movie started.

In the final assessment, I greatly enjoyed this edit. There were numerous laugh out loud moments. Now I want to see some of those previewed movies.

I loved the "cheap" feel of the footage, the use of behind the scenes was great! Seeing the wires and missed punches/kicks was genius. Overall i felt like it was a solid edit, and really felt like a shoestring budget version of the matrix. The only thing i really didn't like and why i gave the narrative a lower score was the fact i don't really think the Johnny Mnemonic scenes worked very well, it through the story flow off, and i had a little trouble understanding what was happening.

I really struggled writing this review.

The good news is that the editor succeeds in pulling off a grindhouse version of The Matrix. It's obvious that he worked very hard on this and the end result is commendable. Unfortunately, I didn't quite enjoy this as much as I thought I would. Perhaps it's because I'm not a fan of the grindhouse genre, and it's a bit more straightforward (from a comedic standpoint) than The War of the Stars.

Stuff I liked: The intro cast credits made me smile. I generally liked most of the music choices. There were some actual literal laughs out loud on my part. The Animatrix stuff. The ending(s) were fantastic and easily bumped my narrative rating up a few points. The DVD is really well done, and I'm definitely going to listen to the commentary (the parts I sampled were quite interesting).

Stuff I didn't care for: The intro trailers (again, this is more my disinterest in the whole genre more than anything). The melting film parts (seen it before). The Johnny Mnemonic stuff (I'm not sure why but it didn't engage me). The changes to the narrative (maybe my fault, but there was stuff I didn't get until I read the description on IFDb).

Overall, I'm glad I watched this, and I did enjoy it, but not as much as I expected. I do wonder if I had seen this before WOTS if I might have liked it better, because I couldn't help but compare the two. And it's no fault of the editor that my tastes skew more towards WOTS.

Cautiously recommended.

Im not familliar with grindhouse movies but basically this was The Matrix as a 70s kung fu movie. This made for a very entertaining edit. The only thing I am on the fence about is the liberal uses of Johnny Nemonic, because it became a bit confusing. But maybe thats just me.