Media Diet on Thursday

Movies You Can Watch With Your Dad

Dec 23, 2021

Shownotes

Happy Carol Season! This week’s edition is a Holiday Special, with a selection that will appeal to almost everyone in the family.

Media Diet is off next week for free users, but there will be an “end of year” special for premium subscribers.

Don’t forget you can still sign up for the Holiday Special to become a premium subscriber - including access to Plex - for 20 € per year.

Get 50% off for 1 year

The Matrix (1999) & Matrix Resurrections (2021)

I watched the Matrix in a very weird, transitionary phase of my life. Other children were on the cusp of adolescence, but I had just discovered that I was in fact a middle-aged father stuck in a young girl’s body. I was 13 going on 53, and balding.

And I was a nerd. Like - I catfished people on ICQ. I burned illegally downloaded movies and songs on DVDs and sold them to my normie classmates. My Livejournal’s name was CYPH3R (I’m not even lying).

I was truly the original neckbeard.

That’s important context, because The Matrix validated my otherness. I honest-to-God and without any irony went ahead and literally said to people, including my teachers, “There Is No Spoon”. I listened to “Clubbed To Death” on repeat and thought I had reached a higher level of enlightenment because it’s a full-instrumental track, like, it has no lyrics??? So you have to “get it”.

Anyway. The Matrix is a miracle! The drip! The stunts! BULLET TIME!

Stir some shit up with your family by telling them that The Matrix, as confirmed by the directors, is the quintessentially Transgender experience. Talking points:

Neo feels that something isn’t right with them and their physical surrounding, constantly looking for answers.
Neo takes a pill to change their perception of the world and themselves.
Proceeds to find friends and community as they transition into the real world, and coming to terms with who they are and who they are supposed to be
Is continuously deadnamed by Agent Smith until Neo finds the means and powers inherent to their new identity to defeat him

Of course, this is all very much in time for the new Matrix Resurrections, which was shot mostly in Berlin and is now out in theaters (and on Plex).

Don’t Look Up (2021) by Adam McKay
Out On Netflix 24th December

Two low-level astronomers, upon discovering that a meteor will strike the Earth in six months, go on a media tour to try to warn the world but find an unreceptive and unbelieving populace.

Adam McKay is known for his sharp and witty, cameo-laden satire-style blockbusters. I loved The Big Short and Vice, so I’m going into this biased. This also marks the return of Jennifer Lawrence to acting and I heard Timothee Chalamet and Cate Blanchett share a sex scene, so what’s not to like?!

Tell your mom Leonardo DiCaprio is in this, too.