By Peter Celauro
A&E Editor
I almost cried today.
I didn’t, mind you. Because my roommates were there, with “if the Bronco’s don’t cover the sweep I’m gonna crush a can on my forehead” looks on their faces, I managed to hold back the tears by squinting my eyes, stretching and faking a yawn like a lion. “Aaaaaah,” I said, trying to hide the quiver in my voice. “I’m one tired hombre.”
But I wasn’t tired. I was a wuss. And I was two sniffs and a blink from sobbing all over the Maxim magazines on our coffee table. The source of my sniveling? A TV commercial.
It wasn’t a sad commercial, like the ones that got Harry and Lloyd bawling in “Dumb and Dumber.” And it wasn’t that Disney ad where the little girl gives her grandpa a pair of Mickey ears so he can hear her better (though I’ll admit, that one gets me misty every time). No, this particular ad was for “The Matrix.”
“Everything that has a beginning has an end,” said the voice of the Oracle as “11/05” flashed across the screen in Matrix jujitsu green at the end of the ad. Her calm voice was a stark contrast to the mayhem and action of the preceding clips from the movie, and like the fat content of a Krispy Kreme donut, her words went straight to my heart.
“My gosh,” I thought, my mind suddenly racing. “‘The Matrix is ending!”
At that moment my reality collapsed around me. Ever since my senior year of high school, there had been two absolutes in my life, two safety nets of truth into which I could always fall: Jack in the Box is open all night, and the final chapter of “The Matrix” is coming. Seeing that commercial made me realize that one of my nets had broken. The final chapter wasn’t coming — it was here. And soon, it would be over.
To put the situation in perspective, remember, if you will, the words of those who saw “Star Wars” on opening night.
“Oh, it was incredible!” your father would say. “Like nothing I’d ever seen before! I got out of the theater and got right back in line to see it again.”
“‘Star Wars’ was fantastic,” your mother would agree. “It was the one movie I sat through in the theater without having to fend off your father’s wandering hands!”
No matter why they loved it, anyone who saw “Star Wars” in 1977 was flabbergasted; since its opening, no other movie has even come close.
For me, “The Matrix” was the “Star Wars” of the new millennium. Its visual effects were dazzling, its kung-fu scenes earth-shattering, its themes mind-bending. To my young, impressionable mind, “The Matrix” was everything I’d wished other movies could be, but weren’t.
For such a film to be released right at the peak of your movie-going career is lucky. But for its two sisters to be promised sometime during the next four years, and at the very SAME time that two other history-making trilogies are in theaters? Only once in a lifetime could the gods of Hollywood smile upon us so!
So you can imagine why I almost broke down this afternoon. Four years of Hollywood manna from Heaven really gives you something to be thankful for, and realizing it’s almost over is … well, a real bummer.
But the Oracle was right. Everything that has a beginning must indeed have an end, and this trilogy is no different. Though it seems like the end of the world for a movie nerd like me, life will go on after Nov. 5. And instead of the anticipation I’ve held onto so tightly for so long, we’ll have the memories and the lunchboxes.
And, of course, the stories to tell those not lucky enough to see it first-hand. Like our dorky parents, someday we’ll tell our children about how we waited in line to see “the best movie in the last 50 years.”
“The Matrix: Revolutions?’’ my wife will say. “Well, what I saw of it was good, though I didn’t see much. Your father was so distracting, he couldn’t keep his hands to himself!”
November 06, 2003