I remember the first time The Matrix made sense to me. It was a sunny afternoon at a Seattle multiplex in 1999; I was about thirty minutes into watching the discombobulated world of existential musings and wacky technological discontent when suddenly the whole thing clicked: The red/blue pill polarity that divided truth and illusion, how the advent of thinking machines threatens our individuality, the epic battle between those willing to break down and understand the world in all its true colors and others willing to blindly accept it. A few months later, The Sixth Sense would leave me scratching my head for several days before I made peace with the final act twist, but The Matrix offered instant satisfaction. I left the theater energized, ready to challenge my own notions of reality and match Neo’s heroic ambitions as the One. Then I went home and played a video game in quiet solitude.

And so we arrive at the central paradox of The Matrix paradigm: Technology can set us free, but it also threatens to bind us from the real world. Today marks the tenth anniversary of The Matrix’s triumphant theatrical release (a special edition Blu-ray DVD hits shelves on the same day). A decade after directors Larry and Andy Wachowski established their fictional timeline for humanity’s enslavement at the hands of artificial intelligence, several of the movie’s predictions about our relationship to new media have started to come true.

At the time of its release, the dot com bubble was on the brink of bursting, the inventors of Facebook and Twitter were in high school, and some people thought the world faced imminent destruction from the Y2K virus. With The Matrix, the Wachowskis suggested that technology would indeed precipitate our downfall — although not quite so soon. Still, many of its imaginary conceits proved strikingly prescient. Take the following detailing of its accuracy as an exciting testament to modern progress, a harbinger of the apocalypse, or some unseemly combination of both.

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“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Prodigy chat service into an internet TV network, complete with themed channels and on-air personalities. The company –– and Harris –– became best known for throwing wild parties, which by the late 90s had formed the core of the Silicon Alley social scene. For a brief, heady moment in time, celebrities mingled with nerds, and nerds became celebrities — just because, as Silicon Alley Reporter & Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis puts it, “you knew how to set up a modem.”

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Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has turned into a powerful tool in the hands of not only consumers but marketers of all stripes as well. Comcast, Paramount Pictures and a handful of others have all latched on to it as a way to communicate with customers, acting not only as a distribution platform but a conversation hub and customer service hub as well. Some of the biggest names in the social media marketing world are spending serious time brainstorming how to use Twitter for marketing, debating its usefulness and otherwise hashing out a series of best practices for utilizing the service.

Media outlets have also turned to Twitter for many of the same reasons. TV Guide, Fox News and even Spout have a presence there to, again, promote their content and, in some cases, even engage in a back-and-forth with readers.

But did you know that Darth Vader is twittering? How about Cobra Commander?

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NewTeeVee, the web video journal that I freelance for, has just launched a sub page called NewTeeVee Station, which pulls editorial reviews from the main site, as well as reviews written specifically for NewTeeVee Station, into an IMDb-like database with cast and crew information, user comments, and more.

Yes, some of my reviews are included on the site, but I’m not posting this here on Spout purely as self-promotion. Obviously, there’s more overlap every day between the world of web video and what’s going on in indie film/film blog land, and I think a project like this does more to emphasize and strengthen those connections than diminish them. Plus, there are review on the site of work that should be familiar to Spouties, like Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies and Rob Parrish’s Next to Heaven and Micahel Cera’s Clark and Michael. Yes, I wrote those reviews, but I had absolutely nothing to do with these entires on Ze Frank and Star Wars Kid and Lazy Sunday, the latter of which contains Liz Shannon Miller’s immortal reminder that “2005 wasn’t that long ago. And it’s important to remember that back then, Hollywood had no idea what it was doing.”

In this New York Times story (cleverly topped with a 600px wide still featuring Greta Gerwig in a bikini), Michael Cieply reports on Sony Pictures Classics’ plan to premiere the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead first in Austin, and then spread the film out to strategically-selected cities throughout the country before opening the film in New York or Los Angeles. Why do it this way? The implication is that Sony is hoping to benefit from positive word of mouth and blog coverage in college towns, hipster meccas and smaller cities where a recommendation from a friend carries more weight than a film review. But in order to convey that message, Cieply has to implicitly diss the publication in which his story is published. An excerpt:

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Apple has reportedly struck a deal with several major studios to release downloads of their films on the same date the titles are released on DVD, and I can’t tell whether or not Jeff Wells is being facetious when he says that this plan will “obviously…really hurt DVD retail, which will in turn diminish the sense of community we all get from going to DVD stores and poking around the aisles and talking with the checkout guys.”

This is not a facetious question, I actually want to know: Is that an experience that anyone has had recently? Assuming you don’t live in New York and frequent Kim’s? It’s been my understanding that for awhile now, most people get DVDs from a) Netflix; B) a chain store like Best Buy, Virgin or Borders; or C) any number of online retail sites. So the idea that this could damage an existing sense of DVD store community seems wrongheaded, because that hasn’t that “community” already long ceased to exist?

As for the idea that this will hurt DVD sales considerably, the Apple downloads will carry Apple DRM, meaning they’ll only be playable on iPods, Mac computers, and AppleTVs. There are an awful lot of home theater junkies who will refuse to watch movies on computer screens, and I’m just not convinced that most of those guys own AppleTVs. I am the only person I know who owns an AppleTV.

So Wells had to be joking, right? To quote Chris Matthews, as Wells himself has been known to do: “Ha!”

I know I should be able to pull off some kind of stunning analysis of this morning’s New York Times story, in which Tom Cruise’s producing partner Paula Wagner defends United Artists against the bad buzz swirling around Valkyrie, but I’m not feeling it. The story just adheres to such a tired formula: “The Internet says there’s trouble, but I talked to a studio exec for an hour and a half and she said everything was okay! And Bram Stoker’s Dracula made $83 million! So take that, Internet!” Yawn. Plus, the timing of the piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009. Cruise is getting good press for his cameo in Tropic Thunder. Why would UA jump to defend themselves now? Why not just let Bryan Singer shoot (or reshoot) whatever he needs to shoot, and project confidence about the film and the release date through non-defensive silence?

Whatever. I’ll just point you towards David Poland’s piece on the piece, which begins as a clarification of the statement “Valkyrie is dead,” which was quoted from Poland’s blog in the second sentence of the NYT piece without much context. Mostly, he’s annoyed at being lumped into a story in which Roger Friedman is heavily quoted. “I just wanted to say, I would never make any of the silly, lazy reaches that The Inhuman Stain would. They are unfair and uninformed. But then again, what do you expect from a gossip columinst who works for a right-wing organization that stands against much of what he stands for and who “reports” what he is told to report?”

But it could be worse. “At least [NYT's Michael] Cieply didn’t call me ‘a blogger,’” Poland writes. On his blog.

• Do adults actually take President’s Day off? The studios, assuming *someone* isn’t going to work or school today, opened their movies on Thursday night and are going to keep tabulating grosses through the end of today. This means Jumper will easily cross $40 million in its first frame, all but guaranteeing its franchise potential. Also, I was barely aware that it had even opened, but 27 Dresses is currently grossing about three times as much per weekend as Cloverfield, and it may even gross $100 million before it fades from theaters.
• Yawn. Variety launches their latest anti-internet screed, as Brian Lowry uses a post-strike think piece as the venue to rail against the “sometimes ugly, insular and semi-delusional worlds the Net can perpetuate.”
• Will Arnett and Woody Harrelson are joining Will Ferrell on the Funny or Die comedy tour, to promote their upcoming Semi-Pro. Too bad for you, it’s been sold out for ages.

The Underwire spots the strike-assisted irony in that story from last week about the online release of the next installment of the Jackass franchise:

The studios are locked in a death grip with the Writers Guild of America over the future of digital entertainment. When negotiations began, the studios claimed there wasn’t yet enough money being made online for them to keep track of such new-fangled bangs and whistles. So, to prove their point that they’re not making any money online, Viacom is releasing a major feature film through the internet. Doh!

I don’t know if we can really classify a glorified blooper reel that would have gone direct to DVD anyway as “a major feature film,” but the argument’s still pretty solid. And Jackass is a particularly interesting example of the contested territory that the writers are striking over––although, I’m afraid that if I were to think too hard about someone “writing” something like the above, my brain might explode. In any case, can’t wait for the YouTube dramatization of this little twist in the saga to pop up on United Hollywood.

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On the eve of the release of the documentary shortlist, the Academy’s list of semi-finalists for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination, AJ Schnack does the math to rank the 30 best reviewed documentaries of the year. His findings might surprise you. Although the race’s obvious heavyweights (particularly Michael Moore’s Sicko, and the two Iraq docs produced by Alex Gibney No End in Sight and Taxi to the Dark Side), do make the cut, data provided by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic reveals that the most critically beloved documentary of the year is none other than The King of Kong, directed by Seth Gordon, who we interviewed back in August.

Gordon’s video game rivalry doc certainly has come a long way since opening at Slamdance, where it competed for the attention of Park City with Chasing Ghosts, a Sundance entry covering some of the same ground and featuring some of the arcade all-stars. But Kong’s eventual dominance over that film by way of critical reception (99% on Rotten Tomatoes) and relative box office success ($678,000 so far, making it the eighth highest grossing doc of the year and one of the Top 100 docs of all time) may just have to be victory enough. With so many semi-high-profile non fiction films out this year about serious global crises, AJ implies that AMPAS might decide that Kong is too fluffy to make the shortlist.

This might be the perfect example to reveal the growing chasm between film critics and the Academy.

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Indie video blog superstar Ze Frank has issued a clip in which he weighs in on the Writers Strike. Through this, we learn that Ze watches The Hills to pick up slang terms for female genitalia, has several deeply held opinions about Grey’s Anatomy, and has apparently been spending a lot of time in the offices of studio executives, “kissing ass.” Watch it here.

Kent Nichols is the creator of Ask a Ninja, a web series produced independently by a crew of three that has become so popular that you can buy a DVD of its first 30 episodes at Urban Outfitters. Nichols is not in the WGA or any other guild, so he’ll be able to continue to work regardless of what happens with a strike. He’s written an interesting post about this at Metroblogging Los Angeles:

The current studio system is based on work for hire — which is fine since it gives predictable income in exchange for ownership of your work. But you end up losing out if you create a hit. Talk to Mike Judge about Beavis and Butthead.

I’ve successfully crafted a show that lives in it’s own channel that I create with a small team (my writing/producing partner and a freelance editor) that is not only popular on the net, but is also financially successful.

I did this by applying principles of Indie Film financing and creating a show that was easy and fun to produce with only two people.

Sure, my site AskANinja.com, doesn’t pull in the sweet dough of Pirates of the Caribbean, but I’ll probably make as much cash over its lifetime as the writers and director on that film did.

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A couple of blogs and pseudo news sources have picked up a story from WENN (the World Entertainment News Network, kind of a Reuters for gossip, except, as far as I can tell, WENN does very little original reporting and mostly culls news items from magazine interviews) claiming that Natalie Portman “regres” her “nude scene” (it seems imprecise to call a single pose, shot in slow motion, a “scene”) in Hotel Chevalier.

I say we can safely take this with a grain a salt. The WENN story doesn’t site a source, and just three days ago, Portman was quoted in a Hollywood Reporter story as saying the nudity “felt right.” But more importantly: Natalie’s not stupid–she went to Harvard. She’s gotta know that if she’s really serious about launching an online startup which may or may not involve lifecasting, then she couldn’t have engineered a better early promotion than getting naked on the internet.

Previous coverage of Natalie Nudegate^TM
:

• Chevalier Goes Theatrical, Fox Seeks Oscar Loophole
• Review of The Darjeeling Limited from the New York Film Festival
• Hotel Chevalier is not porn