Nirvana x Matrix x Akira Yamaoka

A week to see two movies and a show, will the narrator survive? Find out below.

Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie

A friend nicknamed Hoff (after David Hasselhoff) dragged us to see one of the most original pieces of cinema I have seen this year. The name is weird, but let me explain.

The story centers around two individuals forming the band Nirvana The Band. Perpetual losers, their only goal is to book a show at a local club in Toronto, something they haven’t succeeded at in the past 10 years. It started as a hip TV show on Viceland. This is the movie based on the show, hence The Show The Movie.

It is a very weird and original movie in every aspect. First of all, it is extremely derivative; you have pop-culture references everywhere. It feels a bit like a reimagining of Back To The Future, like, “What if Doc did X and not Y” set in Toronto, Canada.

One example: They try to sneak a pair of bolt cutters into the CN Tower. It is so stupid that they know they will be caught. But against all their planning, it actually works; the guard notices the cutters but lets them pass security anyway, creating an impromptu moment of comedy. They had to adapt their scenario by incorporating the cutters into the next scenes. Of course, the guards and security staff are real people. Those interactions are captured via hidden camera. It is extremely meta because they constantly blend these moments (fake & real). You never really know which is which, and you never know what’s going to happen. They also mix old footage (them when they were young) with new footage (them nowadays). It is just mind-blowing editing.

Pure brilliance, I recommend it. I’m going to watch the show now to get more of it. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time, and the cinema audience was very rowdy in the best way possible.

The Matrix

So green, so good

I do not remember if I saw The Matrix at the cinema. In 1999, I was 11 years old, so I’m not sure if my parents took me. I definitely remember having the DVD. Let’s just say I was a Matrix virgin. I am definitely not anymore. Such an incredible movie; I had forgotten how smart, well-written, and impressive it is. I am still thinking about it. It is also so quotable:

I know Kung Fu.

There is no spoon.

Being the One is just like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it, through and through.

Everyone in the room laughed every time AI was mentioned:

Never send a human to do a machine’s job.

We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

How I organize my desks to this day

Too cool (find yourself a Trinity… I did.)

We saw the screening at Cosm. It is heavily marketed for watching sports, and it is indeed very impressive. It offers an experience roughly equivalent to the Sphere in Vegas, but in a format that is more scalable. It is organized like a sports bar; we were sitting in a booth.

For The Matrix, let me show you a picture:

Obviously, none of the weapon racks on the side are from the original movie

The movie is projected in a virtual frame in the center so you get the original aspect ratio. However, it is enhanced on the sides by an additional 3D scene that covers the rest of the sphere. It feels a lot like Unreal Engine, particularly the little particle and smoke effects with some physics destruction. It would be easy to overdo, but it was done quite tastefully.

What completely changed the experience for me was the lighting. Usually, in a movie theater, everything is black and only the screen provides light. Here, you have a giant sphere radiating light around you. It creates a sort of HDRi effect. In the “Construct” scene, everything is white, making the transition between this virtual space and the ship (where everything is very dark) just awesome. It is extremely immersive.

Brits from Code Wizards, good friends now

I also had a revelation. The Matrix is the OG extraction shooter. You know I am right, we need a Matrix video-game more than ever.

Akira Yamaoka

I got influenced by friends to see this one. Two years ago, the same friends brought me to see a jazz reinterpretation of Elden Ring in a club. It was interesting (I am not cultured enough to be a jazzman). This time it was about Silent Hill.

The concert was held at The Belasco. I knew the place, having gone many years before to see a reading by NEIL GAIMAN (OOPS, that’s what I get for cosplaying as an intellectual, strictly speaking, karma is real). The sound for the openers was awful, but the main show was impeccable.

The opening band was Raj Ramayya. The guy lived half his life in Japan, as he told us multiple times. He worked on big projects like Shenmue and Cowboy Bebop. He is definitely a performer, but it was not my cup of tea. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed his covers of GoGo Power Rangers and Dragon Ball. It was just a guilty pleasure.

Akira Yamaoka is just super cool. I’ll let you picture the scene: the guy comes on stage with his Finnish Metal band and is here to play some metal for an hour and a half (I actually do not know if they are Finnish).

He also played a bit of Metal Gear. It was a great evening, riffs and feels.