Peter's Blog

Just commenting on things that interest me

Month: January 2022

The Matrix Resurrections

I mentioned in my last post that I have been disappointed by movie sequels before.

Franchises like Star Wars and Terminator come to mind right away.

The Matrix already had two disappointing sequels back in 2003. The original movie has an IMDB score of  8.7 while the sequels dropped to 7.2 and 6.8 in that order.

But I couldn’t avoid a little excitement when I heard that a new sequel was coming in 2021 and that one of the two directors was involved along with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss (back from the dead somehow?) Perhaps Lana Wachowski could make amends for past mistakes?

Well nothing could be further from the truth – this movie is a complete disaster.  The IMDB rating has dropped to 5.7.

Here are the worst things that I can remember:

  • The movie does not move things forward – instead it is a rehash. Unbelievably both Neo and Trinity are back in the pods and have to be freed once again!
  • Instead of Neo being “the one”, it turns out that Neo and Trinity are actually the two. And at the end Trinity is able to fly in the Matrix too and is able to save Neo!
  • There were replacement actors for Morpheus and Smith. I have seen some articles about “scheduling conflicts” but this article in Newsweek says that Lana did not ask them to be in the movie!
  • Neo has some new “force push” power which he uses again and again in the action sequences instead of something more interesting (like Kung Fu)

Very, very disappointing

Scott Adkins Recent Movies

I mentioned in my last post that Scott Adkins must be busy with other things as he hasn’t made any “Art of Action” videos recently.

Well IMDB tells me that he has released seven (!) movies since he released Ip Man 4 in 2019.

And that he has another five in some stage production.

Busy man indeed!

The most recent movie of his which I saw was “One Shot”.  I really enjoyed it. It has a decent story, loads of action, and it looks as if it was all filmed in “one shot”. Quite an achievement!

The other exciting news for Scott Adkins fans like myself is that he has a role in “John Wick: Chapter 4” along with Donnie Yen.

Now I have experienced a lot of disappointment over the years with looking forward to sequels. But I am hoping that this one will work out, given the quality of chapters 1-3.

Scott Adkins – more “Art of Action”

I mentioned previously that Scott Adkins had done 21 episodes of his excellent “Art of Action” series on YouTube.

I mentioned hoping that he would do people like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chuck Norris and Keanu Reeves.

Well he hasn’t (so far) but here are the people he has added since my last post:

  • 22 Gary Daniels
  • 23 Alain Moussi
  • 24 Bobby Holland Hanton
  • 25 Joe Taslim
  • 26 Joey Ansah
  • 27 Kurt McKinney
  • 28 Iko Uwais
  • 29 John Hyams
  • 30 Lateef Crowder
  • 31 Keith Cooke
  • 32 Tiger Chen
  • 33 Johnny Tri Nguyen
  • 34 Louis Mandylor
  • 35 Heidi Moneymaker
  • 36 Lewis Tan

This last one was 7 months ago so I guess Scott is busy with other things.

The one thing that impresses me about these people is how nice and how humble they all seem to be. It’s a pleasure to listen to them.

I hope he will make many more, when time permits

Bloody Sunday Anniversary

It’s hard to believe that it is 50 years today since the British army opened fire on innocent people in Derry city, killing 13 on the day and 1 some weeks later. Six of those men were only 17 years of age.

And in the intervening 50 years there have been two inquiries and even an apology from the British Prime Minister but not a single soldier has been jailed for those killings.

The families of the victims still demand justice.

When we were on holiday in Donegal a few years ago we joined the Bloody Sunday walking tour.  It was very good good and helped us to understand the events of the day and the repercussions. I took the photo below of one of the murals.

I know it has been 50 years but I still hope that the perpetrators of these killings will be bought to justice one day.

Mural

Derry Mural

Comments

While I have been neglecting my blog, others have not.

I see that one of my posts (Predestination) has garnered over 64,000 comments!

I can’t check all of them, of course, but I’m pretty sure they are all spam.

Some of my posts permit comments, while others do not. I’m not sure why, TBH.

Now I could do a series of “Move to Bin” operations but that would take forever to do by hand. So I did it from the database using this:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` where `comment_post_ID` = 84

I could have done something with the wp_commentmeta table too but there were only a small number of rows there so I didn’t bother.

I also disabled comments for the post.

Hiatus

I can’t believe that the last post I added here was in October of 2020.

That means that I did not add a single new post in all of 2021!

I can’t understand it, so I can’t explain it!

I thought blogging was one of the things that people were doing more of during the pandemic!

Not me for some reason. I’m back now though. Onwards and upwards.

P.S. Isn’t “hiatus” a strange word!

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