Minute 15: “Oh, shit!” “YeeEEEees.”

Transcript

Transcribed automatically from the audio, and imperfect for it — names and punchlines suffer worst. Useful for finding a moment, not for quoting one.

0:00Welcome to the Matrix Minute! A podcast where we discuss the first film one minute at a time. Because this movie's great. Hi, I'm Phil. Hold on, give me a second. Give me a second. No, no seconds for you. It's over. Hi, I'm Tim. I'm Tim. It's over. My name is Jake. Fine, fine. No trivia from you. Shut up. That's my name. Cool. Our trivia's going so well. Come on, Philip. Where's yours? No, I'm done. I did mine. No, it's fine. We're done. Philip, we've given you more than one second. Welcome to this episode. Give me a trivia. Special and good. Give us the trivia. No! No, we're doing it later. Next time. No more.

0:41Now! No. We need it. Philip! We need it now. Okay. Come on. Morpheus wants it. And I want the two digital grades for The Matrix to finally come out on UHD Blu-ray. Good. That is a good one. I agree. That's a good one. Okay. Take it away, Philip. Take it away. Yeah, right. So, welcome to Minute 15. And without much further ado, this is what happens on Minute 15. Neo sees Agent Brown and Agent Smith with a gang of cops being directed to his cubicle. And Morpheus instructs him to invade the enforcers over the cell phone. How does this man do that? Neo crouches and is told to run to the cubicle across, successfully thwarting the two agents.

1:22The minute ends as Neo makes it to the office at the end of the hall as per Morpheus' instructions. Woo! Woo! So, in this shot, at the beginning, we see what Neo sees. So, it's a wonderful, you know, long lens shot, zooming in, kind of. Mm-hmm. Yes. It's not like a 16 mil. It's like a, you know, going into like a 50 or a 60 or 70. And it's looking all the way to the end of all those cubicles. And it's the agents and they're asking for Anderson, right? And with a bunch of cops as well. And the traitor's phone is like, he's right over there. You know, it's a big deal. Yeah, and the traitor. But it's another wonderful, excellent shot where the sense of threat comes from being far away.

2:05So, it's like zooming in and looking at something that's coming towards you. And they all turn. And it's both funny, but it's also very alarming as well. So, the lady, I wanted to talk about the lady because she's pointing in the Neo's cubicle. And so, for years and years, I always thought it was du jour. No way. I thought she was working there too. And then she just goes, you know, as a kid, I thought that because of the inferior resolutions of DVD and VHS, you couldn't really make out her name. She's the same kind of bun as well. But wait, which is the lady who's pointing? At the beginning. At the beginning. At the very beginning of this. Yeah, yeah, she's pointing. No one's pointing. Look. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. She does look like her. She's a filthy traitor. That's what she is. Where's her neck brace now?

2:46She probably went like, oh, over there's Neil. I think Neil. Yeah, and so. I met him last night. He's so amazing. But he was talking to this girl. Of Rob Zombie. Hey, by the way, is the Rob Zombie song on the mini disc? Is that like an un-ministred remix? Sure, why not? Why not? Is that what he bought? It's expensive. Not worth too grand. Well, the Metacortex font, way in the background, is the Spider-Man font. I noticed that as well. It is the Spider-Man font. Yeah, and most of the setups and angles in this scene are high angle for Neo, so he looks like a trapped mouse. So he looks, you know, this is the classic film vocabulary that they teach you all the time in film schools, like for the basics, right?

3:27If you're shooting something from above, looking down, you know, you're focusing on appear, smaller, insignificant, threatened, inferior. And when you're filming stuff where the camera is below looking up at a character, in this case, we have the agents walking around. Yeah, I was going to say. It makes them look scary and imposing, you know, with power, which is, you know, a classic thing. But the other thing is that I like thinking about the low angle looking up is that that's going to be Neo's perspective because we all have to lay low before the agents, so the agents don't find you, you know? So it's not coming from above, it's like looking below and that kind of perspective. That's pretty cool. All the extras in this are wonderful.

4:08I like extras when they kind of feel monotonous, like uninterested, you know? And specific. These cops are totally not interested. Like, no, no, the office workers, you know, they don't have any emotion. Those barring officers. They're just doing their daily job and then whenever they see Neo, they just kind of expressionlessly turn and it's like, oh. Yeah. And that's it. And I'm surprised she actually knew where Neo was. There's a little chart. It says Thomas A. Anderson cubicle A7. There you go. A7. A7 right there. It's the empty one with two C phone booths. So remember how we talked about a couple episodes back.

4:50Freaking wall all day. The agents are limited to human senses, i.e. human bodies. This is clear here. I think it's clear in this scene that they are, in fact. Because otherwise, the agents would find Neo. Because they could obviously scan the program, which is the Matrix. But yeah, that's really weird that the Matrix was programmed that way. That they're very limited to the... I mean, why wouldn't you program the AI just to have, you know, like no other vision? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But here's a funny thing. Because in this scene, you know, like he's in the cubicle and then he runs to the other cubicle. And then the agents are completely confused by this. I mean, now looking at it, I kind of make sense.

5:31Like they go to the cubicle and he's not there and then they leave. That's like completely fine. But when I was a kid, I could not comprehend the fact that he's just running around like on his knees. Like how is this happening? I don't know. It just feels very video gamey. Like I would imagine Morpheus sitting at his desk looking at the computer and like seeing like... Yes. Metal Gear Solid color view. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Nioh's running around and then you can have the vision of the agents and their vision is like... The little triangle that's moving around. The Soliton radar. And it's like, oh, they missed you just by a second. And then like that's how he's navigating it. Because it's weird. Like how do you know? He's definitely going Solid Snake. Yeah, they have that view that you see on the Soliton radar in Metal Gear Solid.

6:13Yeah, like from the top down. But to be honest, it's really simple. He just like goes to the next cubicle and it's totally fine. But to me, when I was a kid, it felt like really super like tight. Like, oh, let's just narrowly miss their like eyesight because they're robots. Can't see. Maybe they are. Well, look, the agents looking at each other at that one point where they were, you know, like Nioh tumbles into like one of the corners and it's dark in the corner. He's listening to Morpheus saying, stay here for just a second. How does he know that, by the way? Well, Morpheus has the Soliton radar. He has that. And he can see the Metal Gear Solid. That's what he's using. He's looking at Metal Gear Solid stuff. And he's like, stay here for a moment.

6:54And then you see the, then the camera, you know, moves up. You can see these two agents looking at each other and then they go, they synchronize. Right. They know what they're up to and it's great. And I remember seeing some behind the scenes footage where the directors were really trying to get that like correct, that interesting synchronization. That's really fun. Also, do you notice that when the agents walk down the hallway, you have a great bit of acting from Mr. Scanner Man. Yeah. Yeah. There's a guy scanning a document at the fax machine all the way at the back and he goes, what? I love it. I love that kind of stuff because we get to see that later on in the movie where he's going through all the buildings and he's running away from Agent Smith at the very end before he gets killed. Spoiler. Spoiler. And you see like the grandmas and you know, all the people and they all look shocked.

7:38Okay. Sorry. Yeah. I'm here. I'm just letting Phil talk. I don't want to be a jumpy and easy man. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. What else can you say about this? That Agent Smith is giving out wordless orders. So he's just pointing. We're establishing that the agents are superhuman, scary. Well. That they can control. At least they know what they're doing. Semi-superhuman. Yeah. Yeah. They're kind of stupid a bit. They're like, oh, a guy just ran into another cubicle. There's some guy on a phone breathing super loudly in their cubicle. Also, how confident do these agents seem to be if they can like get evaded by lazy Thomas Anderson. Mr. No, again, I have theories for anything guys. Probably in their entire life.

8:19I think the agents were really expecting this to be just a simple go in, go out. Yeah. How am I going to say Anderson's an idiot? Yeah. Just go in and they just get it. Agent Smith's brother, he calls him, I'm going to look for Mr. Anderson. Well, no. We established that Agent Smith's brother is Mr. Reinhardt. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking for my brother. Do you have a Mr. Anderson working? Is he slacking too much? Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh, brother, I am not in the agent business. The last thing I wanted to say was, this was actually a really fun level to play on a video game called The Matrix, The Path of Neo, which I thought was actually pretty good. It's kind of underrated, I have to say.

8:59Yeah, we actually played through the whole thing. We beat the thing. We beat the game, yeah. Wow. I never actually did that. This is a different game. I think this came out later than- This came out in 2005. What's the other one with Naomi? Enter the Matrix. Enter the Matrix. That was in conjunction with the second movie, I think. Yeah, it was weird, yeah. But this was later. This was after the movie. This was, I think, this was after Fan Demand, because everybody wanted to play as Neo. I don't know. I could be my memories wrong, but I remember it was pretty fun playing it. Very Metal Gear Solid. Because you could actually play these levels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you had to actually escape, and there was added things, like going to the crane and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. They kind of expanded it. Yeah. There's this unsuspecting cop just standing there, and Neo just right behind him, and he's just, ooh, gotta get out.

9:42Gotta get out. Gotta get out. Yeah. So these Agent guys, Agent Smith and Agent? Jones and Brown. Jones and Brown. No, no. There's only two of them. Brown. Brown. Wait, is Brown and Jones on the- Jones is not here. Yeah, I was going to say. It's just Brown. These guys are just- Ah, Jones is on a vacation. And, yeah, they thought it was going to be easy, but it's not. Hey, there's some- There's some- No, they're all- They're all- All three of them are there, by the way. Let me see. Check out- Check out the first- First shot. There's three agents. Oh, so it is. Yeah, yeah, okay. So Jones and the lady. Three heads turn. Crazy stuff. He just went to the bathroom. So do machines have to- Yeah, I think they have to do everything. Yes, I think so. Yeah. Why wouldn't they? That's the only explanation, reasonable explanation, given the fact they can't locate Neo.

10:22Yeah, they don't have no clip mode. And Morpheus can. Yeah. And Morpheus is miles away. Yeah, yeah. There's little differences with the script. Okay. There's a lot more F-words. Okay. It's pretty funny. Is Anthony here? No, Anthony's- Does Anthony come to visit? Give us a taste. Let's see if we can get that real quick. I'm looking for Neo. I think he owes me another job for the new Rob Zombie new record. It's not worth it. No cool cabin crunch. No. And that's about it. That seems to be minute 15 of The Matrix. We just tried to discuss as much as we can, and that's how much we got out of this shot.

11:04Yep. This minute, in fact. Yeah. This was another one of those day ones. Also, the policeman looks like the FedEx guy. Conspiracy. They're brothers all over the place. Yep. Well, isn't it like Matrix has like lots of twins? I think that was the construct that was seen. Guys, I found a little something to play on someone's computer screen. Yeah. You know. Yeah. At 26 seconds. What is that? Yeah, there's a little thing. Also, we get a little bit of insight, a little better look at the desk, and we see some sellotape. Oh, yes. Some envelopes. Very organized. Probably a little stationary. A city phone. But we also see something that gives a little insight on how work was distributed.

11:45Ah, back in the day. 1999. Or in this case, it's 1998. You see those three little piles? It's like one is like backlog. That's what you get. One is in progress. You're working on that. There's a little assignment, you know. Program the button to be more green, you know. And then the other one is done. Really? Yeah, that's an office. No, that's all digital. That's the old ways. Yeah. I mean, like, there's all sorts of, you know. Good old CRT. Kanban boards and all kinds of sorts of things. I noticed a little goof. By the way, did you notice? The sign at the end, at the very end of this minute, where Neo is escaping the cop, and he's just, you know, jolting back.

12:26Oh, yeah. Weird spelling. It says Meta Cortex. Why? And in the wide shot for the building, it was Meta Cortex with an X. They can't decide. We're working on a new name. We don't know. We don't know. What works with focus groups? Cortex with C, H, S, or with an X? Maybe they had a team building activity, and the team building activity was to name your team. And they were not very smart. They were like, what if we just name our team Meta Cortex with an, you know, with an H and an S? You know, we can get away with it. And we're the Meta Cortex. You know, the detects. That's right. Sweet. Okay. So, thank you once again for joining us for Minute 15.

13:0815. 15. Yeah. Thank you very much. And if you stick around, we'll catch you in the next minute. I'm Jake. And you can find me on Twitter at Jake Dragish. I'm Phil. You can find me on Twitter at Phil Dragish. And please go to our iTunes and, you know, do that cool stuff. Give us anything, anything. Yeah, reviews, but a one, two, three, or four. Yeah. Anything to those. Please. But a one, two, three, four. Yeah. Good. I am on Twitter as well. Sometimes. Sometimes I'm not. But if you look for Timo Majerski, you might find me. Another world. Fantastic. We'll see you later. Next time. And don't be late next time.

13:55Thanks.