You'll be off the fence before soon. And onto our side.

I'm thinking alcohol will make it harder to stay on the fence, but less predictable which side you land on when you topple.

Y'all radically misunderestimate my mad fence sitting skillz.

I think the movies will do the shifting quite neatly. Jessica is obviously under the influence of something unnatural.

Jessica is obviously under the influence of something unnatural.

George Lucas.

Toy Story 2 was originally supposed to be a direct to DVD, but then TPTB decided (rightly, IMO) it was good enough to be a theatrical release.

Hell yeah. Better than the first one, in my estimation.

The Matrix sequels... I kinda enjoyed them, especially since I saw them for free with several hundred other Caltech people (talk about an ideal environment) but i could definitely qualify them as "pointless." The first movie stood perfectly well alone. Yeah, it was open-endedish, but in that closure sort of way. Like Lost in Translation. And if They (any They) ever try to make LiT 2, I will personally shoot Them for messing with it.

The Matrix sequels fell into the same trap as the Star Wars prequels - the creator read a bunch of reviews of their original works, and tried to reproduce it, not realizing that the good things about the original(s) were not necessarily things that would get specifically enumerated in reviews. (special effects, cool! Lightsaber duels, awesome! Philosophical take on sci-fi, neato keen! Magical martial arts, radical! Villains with cool costumes, fun!) But if you just take this stuff without something holding it together, and you mostly get crap. Entertaining crap, maybe (though not always), but still nothing to write home about.

Intererestingly (and painfully) enough, I saw one movie a year while at Tech, for free, with a bunch of Techers. And they were, of course: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Pain, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions, and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of George's Ego (well, okay, I actually skipped that one and got drunk instead, but I COULD have seen it for free.) I battled hard to get our free movie senior year to be something, ANYTHING else - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed a good bet - but I lost.

The Matrix sequels fell into the same trap as the Star Wars prequels - the creator read a bunch of reviews of their original works, and tried to reproduce it

Oh my no. Not at all. If anything, the Wachowskis deliberately ignored audiences and critics, and ended up making two movies that pissed 90% of everyone off in big big ways. They could have just remade The Matrix twice, make a ton of money, and ended up boring everyone to death, but they didn't. They took the first movie as it should have been -- a superhero origin story in a real and fully realized SF universe, not just the trippy GenX metaphor most everybody took it for -- and simply told the next two parts of the story.

[eta: What you're describing is PotC II, which for some reason everyone seems to love. I'll take my own brand of crazy, thanks.]

Or, otherwise interpreted, they upped the "totally cool" special effects to the point of silliness, added in a bunch of fight/chase scenes that were boring after the first 30 seconds, threw in some overwrought "philosophical" ideas/metaphors/whatever to make people who thought the first movie was some existential masterpiece try to figure out what THIS one Really Meant, and, in the meantime, made it way, WAY too long. And scripted/directed the single least moving Romantic Death Scene I've ever watched, but that's another story.

I haven't re-watched the movies at all because, you know, I didn't like them much, but I also seem to remember some discomfort in watching. When the universe becomes the important part, the fact that it makes no sense as a universe also becomes important. To make the Star Wars comparison again: When the Force is caused by bugs, and isn't some mystical, unexplainable, almost spiritual supernatural force, it stops being suspension-of-disbelief-science-fantasy and becomes, instead, laughably bad science.

Which all may just be a way of saying that I think the Matrix sequels are pointless because the universe is significanctly BETTER as a trippy GenX metaphor, rather than a superhero origin story in a (IMO poorly thought-out) SF universe, and now it's hard for me to even watch the first movie as that. They replaced my pleasure with indifference.

ETA: And I'm avoiding PotC II, as it definitely sounds like it fits the same mold.

I found PotC II very funny. Not the startling delight of the first one, but that wasn't possible. A bit self-indulgent towards spectacle, but still fun.

I loved the Matrix as a cyberpunk extravaganza.

Reloaded and Revolutions had me checking my watch frequently to see how much longer I had to stay awake.

I am willing to believe that my not being able to understand what the over all plot was supposed to be was because I wasn't paying close enough attention, but I blame the movies for not entertaining me enough to care.

Maybe I should try watching them with more fast-forwarding, I dn't know.